Go Geckos!

Our son's school sports teams are known as The Geckos. The logo, on all t shirts, and other school merchandise is a splay toed gecko. You see the logo everywhere. Their slogan is "Go Geckos!" A sentiment I echo, if with slightly different emphasis on the "go".

I used to think them really rather sweet, and harmless. until that is, we moved to Sri Lanka. We see them everywhere too, of course. The real ones. In our house. that's fine and to be expected. What I don't like is their disconcerting habit of plopping spongily onto you whenever you are drawing curtains, opening cupboards etc. Or dropping out of my guest's trousers when she went to put them on in the morning...

However their little gecko poos are beginning to grate. They leave them everywhere. Judging from their prolific, if tiny, bowel movements, I am inadvertently providing them with too much to eat.

But what I really object to is them climbing into my kettle and drowning. Our househelp recently found a dead, and pretty decomposed, gecko in our kettle. It had climbed in between the mesh over the spout and a tiny 0.5 cm gap above the strainer part of the lip. And then couldn't get out. I am sorry about that part of the story. We have never looked in the kettle but filled it from the spout. We look now, obsessively, however.

Maheswary, who has killed rats with her 'bare' broom, (in our house), and is fearless, where insects and rodents are concerned, and also not averse to a little slack hygiene, was so repulsed by this discovery that she is still boiling her water for her morning tea in a saucepan a month later...

She also clearly doesn't trust her own cleaning prowess, as she had scrubbed the kettle out, (with Vim I discovered later, probably poisoning us more than the gecko was) but still won't drink boiled water from it.

My husband was characteristically unphased by all this and informed me, matter of factly, that I would have been drinking a 1 millionth part decomposed gecko in my tea so it was really nothing to worry about, despite Maheswary's firm belief that they are highly poisonous, bad, bad creatures.

Whereas I felt like Leontes in "The Winter's Tale" saying "I have drunk and seen the spider" I am with him on this one. If I hadn't seen it or known about it, I would have been fine......

After all, restaurants function on that axiom all the time don't they??