Accomodation-Lifestyle/SA500020

It’s not the most enlightening of stories but I needed to add something to break the monotony of three consecutive computer and business postings.

Last weekend I tried in vain to revive a good lizard friend of mine from an uncomfortable, embarassing and slow fate.

Edmund was one of the many small lizards who help around my house. He is about the size of my thumb and spends his days eating disease-ridden mosquitoes. Little lizards like this are common in my village (as well as 1.5 meter water monitor lizards which look like alligators!), they do no harm, make no mess and I always find their flash and unpredictable movements fascinating.

I don’t quite feel the same way about cockroaches though. Despite getting used to them crawling over my toes in my old apartment I’ve never really grown to accept them. They are more evident around this time of year as it rains.

Although I believe I’ve successfully sprayed my main cockroach nest, I went out and bought cockroach houses. Despite the name, these are not the pleasant gift all homeless cockroaches who have families to support might appreciate. Instead they are a cardboard box with a sticky floor. They have appealing bait for the cockroaches to eat but when they touch the ground they end up like Brer Rabbit.

I leave a few cockroach houses in my kitchen and also in my bathroom overnight.

I awake to find a poor lizard trapped inside it. Unlike cockroaches, lizards crawl close to the ground and therefore his entire body was glued down. In an effort to free himself he had managed to thrust his face up his ass and presumably he lost his willpower to continue shortly after. I assumed he was dead.

That night I decided to remove the houses as I’d prefer not to have these lovely reptilian friends on my conscience. I then noticed he was still breathing and resolved to get him back to his old self again. He must have had a pretty horrible day.

It took about 40 minutes, using scissors, chopsticks and a spoon handle to eventually free the poor thing. It took a lot of work trying to get his limbs away from the glue, but I got there in the end. I called him Edmund.

Edmund’s immediate problem was that he instinctively lies as still as possible. It’s a practical survival instinct until you happen to find yourself with glue in every orifice which is threatening to dry. He was also too tired to actually prise his sticky limbs off the table surface too. I began a painless process of rubbing him in talc and basically making cocktail stick crutches for him in order to stop his joints from seizing up.

I put a big blob of honey on the table for him and a puddle of water. I was hoping that he’d use his survival instincts to perhaps take a wash and lap up the nice sugary liquid I’d kindly provided. Instead he uses his reptilian brain to take a swim in the honey and to ignore the water. I force him to take a bath in my soup spoon.

I speak with Tik and she volunteers a lizard house for him. This lizard house is more the kind of house a father lizard would consider mortgaging. It was a big cardboard box, lots of space, I furnish it with a blob of peanut butter and bowl of water and leave him (in his crutches) to sleep off his momentous day.

Sadly I wake the following morning and he had passed away to a place where he can lie still as he wants without fear of seizing up any stiffer.

This is a sad story, but with an important morale:- “If you are a lizard, don’t go inside cockroach houses”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.