The other evening, I went to see a friend do a storytelling performance he called “The Drunken Rabbit”. It featured such not-quite-only-for-children animal stories and ditties as The Marabou by the Berlin caberetist Jodok, Manfred Kyber’s The Patented Crocodile and of course Soviet poet Sergey Vladimirovich Mikhalkov’s The Drunken Rabbit, the hilarious piece of rhymed and hollow bravado that lent its name to the show.
How The Camel Got Its Hump, from Kipling’s “Just So” stories was the last tale of the night.
My friend, tall and rangy, sporting a natty salt-and-pepper goatee and cloud of coarse hair, is, in ordinary life – if you can believe it, and I hardly can and I have known him for years now – an official church musician, a paid player of one of those giant organs and remunerated singer of songs of praise. Amiable and easy, fit in his boots, a Married Man, Father to three excellent grown Sons, scientist, physician, thespian, he makes a truly magnificent Marabou, big bird, storyteller and shaman, all three.
Human relationships with other animals had been on my mind since the morning.
It’s near last call, the exasperated Djinn is already saying something to the effect of “If ‘Humpf‘ is all you can say, O! Uncooperative Camel, ‘Hump’ is what you shall have!”.
One of my younger brothers was an Uncooperative Camel. As a little kid, he would shout “Bulldozer!” to approve and “Humph!” to disapprove of something. A particularly volatile, determined and brilliant personality, this brother was then and is now fearless, infinitely and usefully curious. And utterly devoid of sympathy, but not of kindness.
Kipling’s story was an easy tease. Predictably, my brother took it badly. Not so much because he felt vexed by the moralizing gussied up as exoticism – he was born impervious to moralizing. Even at the tenderest age, he valued his vile temper as his own, fuck-you-thanks, vile temper. “Humph” was his personalized way of saying “No” throughout childhood. Rather, he saw Kipling’s tale as bullshit from top to bottom; it made him impatient. And as to exasperated Djinns, from that day to this, he believes in phenomena, not hocus pocus. Kipling was Dad’s favorite writer. Ma read us those “Just So” stories with brio.
A warm August night, a glass of wine, good company, good fun and a reflective spirit go together like housework and a BBC podcast.
Sadiah Qureshi, who holds the chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester, was talking to a History Extra interviewer about her new book, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Penguin, 2025) while I was washing glasses and emptying the dishwasher this morning.
Before getting into the details of notions of “extinction” and the story of the Dodo bird, the island of Mauritius, Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin, Qureshi caught my attention by insisting on first defining “species” as “way of being”.
That is, she’s first of all saying something like: extinction of the “dodo way of being” is in equal measure a natural, moral and cultural phenomenon.
And I think she means something like this, viz.,
Only blood red plums and hardy dwarf goats survived the long drought
– and the arrival of strangers.
– They had only white beans in the market.
And, as I do not gain new ones, sadly, as I grow older, I lose friends
– and their inimitable way of beings.
Biologists warn the planet is undergoing an unprecedented loss of way of being. It sounds serious.