Tag Archives: lions

CHEEKO TIME

December 30, 2011 By in PICTURES, WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

During a recent trip to Poundland, I bought a pack of six Mini Bags of Cadbury Mini Animals1:

I am aware of my limitations as a writer, and would struggle to do these biscuits justice by attempting to describe them. Instead, I will direct you to the Animals product page on the Cadbury website:

Such poetry! You can almost taste the Half Coated Mini Animal Biscuits reading that, can’t you? Delicious.

The back of the packet invites you to meet the “gang of crazy jungle animals, determined to do their best at every activity they try, always together and ready for some fun!”:

The gang consists of a lion, an elephant, a crocodile, a monkey and some sort of bird:

Firstly, Leroy the lion:

Leroy

This cool cat is always the first to volunteer and tries his best at everything. He often gets things wrong but makes up for this with loads of confidence!

This is Leroy in biscuit form:

Next there is Ella Funky, the elephant:

Ella Funky

The biggest of our gang with a heart and voice to match, she can be a bit loud, but she sings so beautifully that her friends don’t really mind.

And here is Ella Funky as a biscuit:

Then there is Rockodile, the crocodile:

This bright croc is a bit of a scaredy cat and needs loads of encouragement, but when things get a bit tricky he always comes up with good ideas.

Rockodile as a biscuit:

Next is Cheeko the monkey:

Cheeko

is a funny little prankster, always up to mischief and playing tricks on his friends. Sometimes his jokes go a bit too far but luckily his friends forgive him in the end.

This is Cheeko as a biscuit:

Finally, there is Swoop who is some sort of bird:

Swoop

This zippy bird has the jungle record for aerial acrobatics, but zooming around so quickly means he doesn’t pay attention and ends up missing out on things.

And here is Swoop in his biscuit form:

Apart from Rockodile, they all sound unbearable. Leroy sounds like the sort of unsufferable prick who would go on The Apprentice, mess up the task but then bluster his way through by saying that at least he “stepped up to the plate” and put himself forward as project manager. Fuck off Leroy. Cheeko sounds like he’s only interested in keeping himself amused and doesn’t give a shit about anyone else, and Swoop and Ella Funky both sound equally self-obsessed as well. Ella Funky just about gets away with it because she sings so well that her friends “don’t really mind”, but all of them sound like awful creatures.

Poor old Rockodile. I bet he’s not a “scaredy cat” at all, he’s just a nice bloke who constantly gets talked over by everyone else, even though he’s clearly the only one with any intelligence, and he always has to get the others out of trouble (although that wanker Leroy would probably take all the credit). Leave the jungle, Rockodile. Come and live in London. I’ll be your friend, you don’t need those guys. It’ll be great. We can go to Madame Tussauds and the London Dungeons and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not2 and Namco Funscape3 and then we can go on the London Eye, and we could go to Pizza Hut and then we could go to the pub and drink beer and it would be great. Come to London, Rockodile. Be my friend. Please be my friend.

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NOTES

1. The Cadbury Mini Animals cost £1

2. From the looks of it, a few of the exhibits at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in Piccadilly Circus seem to have been recycled from the old Guiness World Of Records attraction at the Trocadero, so, unless Rockodile really wanted to go, we could just skip that and go straight to Namco Funscape.

3. According to the Namco Funscape website, “Namco offer fun bowling at the great value price of £3 per person per game with extra discounts for parties of 3 or more. What’s more, you can play in your own shoes!” As a child, I always thought it would be cool to wear bowling shoes as regular shoes. I formulated a plan to steal some from Charrington Bowl in Tolworth by going to a charity shop and buying a cheap pair of shoes and handing one of these over to the man behind the counter when I went to collect my bowling shoes. That way, I could abandon my “deposit” (to prevent theft, you had to hand over one of your own shoes in exchange for a pair of theirs) and run away with my prize. This was before I realised you could buy bowling shoes. It never even occurred to me that you could buy them. I’m not sure where I thought Charrington Bowl got theirs from. Perhaps I thought they made them themselves. Still, the bowling shoes you can buy, from Merc or wherever, don’t seem authentic for some reason. It’s as if they’re just shoes in the style of bowling shoes rather than proper bowling shoes. I want the real thing, with a number written on the back in blue permanent marker and the legacy of a thousand amateur bowlers soaked into the soles.

LONDON ZOO

January 3, 2011 By in PICTURES, WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , 14 Comments

Yesterday, I went to London Zoo.

As I sat on the train, a small boy sitting opposite me ate a hollow chocolate Santa. Just two weeks ago, this chocolate would have been almost impossibly exciting, but now, it seemed tinged with disappointment, just like the Advent Calendars marked down to 99p in Costcutters. The small boy and his family were going to the London Eye. I’ve never been on the London Eye. Maybe I’ll go at some point.

I got the tube at Waterloo and noticed that the two blonde twins from Hollyoaks were sitting nearby. They hadn’t died in that fire at the Dog In The Pond, after all. Unless they were ghosts. They got off at Tottenham Court Road, and I noticed a teenage girl take off her headphones and whisper something in her dad’s ear. He looked around and I could see him mouth the word “Who?”

I got to the zoo. It was cold. There weren’t many people around. There weren’t many animals either.

I watched a sacred ibis eating a dead mouse:

Actually, it didn’t really seem interested in eating it. It just kind of flicked it around a bit, ensuring the mouse lost whatever dignity it had in life. There was a shit stained information board telling visitors about the sacred ibis:

I saw a giraffe:

And a tiger:

And a lion:

There were meerkats:

I watched the meerkats for a while, but as they ran around and scrambled over the rocks and branches in their enclosure, I found it hard to tell them apart. Ideally, there should be some sort of way of differenciating between them. A kind of meerkat rating system to distinguish one meerkat from another, perhaps it could be online, like those price comparison websites you see advertised on TV all the time. Some way of comparing meerkats. They could get Gio Compario to appear in the adverts. He could sing a song.

After a while, I began to find the bits where there weren’t any animals more interesting than the animals themselves. I like the idea of paying eighteen pounds to go and look at some mud and bits of old wood and concrete:

MOST COMMONLY OBSERVED IN CAPTIVE MONKEYS

August 3, 2009 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

My favourite paragraph from The Human Zoo:

Physiological Sex can also be observed in other animal species and it is worth taking a look at a few examples. As one might expect, they are most readily encountered in the animal zoo, rather than in the wild state. Many zoo animals have been seen to masturbate when kept in isolation. This is most commonly observed in captive monkeys and apes. In males, the penis is stimulated sometimes by the hand or foot, sometimes by the mouth, and sometimes by the tip of the prehensile tail. Male elephants stimulate their penises with their trunks and female elephants kept in a group without a male stimulate one another’s genitals with their trunks. Even a male lion kept in isolation in a zoo cage has been seen to heave itself up into an inverted position against a wall and masturbate with its paws. Male porcupines have been observed to walk around on three legs, holding one forepaw on their genitals. One male dolphin developed the pattern of holding its erect penis in the powerful jet water intake of its pool. Sex dreaming also seems to occur in animals and in domestic cats, the erection of the penis while asleep has been observed to lead to full ejaculation.1

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1 Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo, 1969, p89

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