You will have smirked. Shame on you, but you will. Yet reluctantly, and out of respect for the recently deceased, I intend to tread lightly over the story of the Australian pet collector killed earlier this week by her own overamorous camel.
I shall note, with a restrained interest, the use of the word ‘humped’ in several tabloid headlines. I may, coyly, draw your attention to the victim’s reported ‘love of exotic animals’. There, however, I shall rest. I am no ghoul.
Instead, I am going to talk about a different sort of camel. G. camelopardis, to be precise, the South African giraffe. To be even more precise, I am going to talk about a particular South African giraffe. A giraffe that liked to spend its days, apparently, hiding behind a very big bush in the Kgalagadi National Park, just to the south of the Botswana border. For a very short time the paths of this giraffe and I quite literally crossed. But look, there was no humping. This absolutely isn’t to be that sort of column.
Some hours earlier, on a dirt road and not far from lions, I had broken down. An unpleasant burning rubbery smell which my girlfriend and I had decided, with some wonder, must be the smell of an antelope on heat, had turned out, in fact, to be the smell of burning rubber. A bolt had come lose, and a tire had rubbed itself through and exploded.
By the time we came to a grinding halt, the front right wheel of my rickety Mazda had folded itself up under the car. Night was falling. We couldn’t fix it, and we didn’t particularly want to try. Like I said, there were lions.
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