Tuesday, May 29, 2007

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??

4 comments:

Caveman said...

Now thats a classic story! I must admit I have always filled the kettle by opening the lid, because I'm obsessive, or maybe because we have an ant problem and once found a small dead one of the little critters floating in my tea - however, now I'm shamed by this miniscule imposter in my tea in the light of your magnificently superior tale!
Great blog, enjoying the stories!

Giles Marshall said...

I didn't even know what a gecko was, other than the surname of the Michael Douglas character in 'Wall Street'. Am being considerably enlightened and entertained by the blog, and perhaps rather relieved that the worst England throws up is a little bit of scale in the kettle! Thanks for the perspective!

Paradise Lost In Translation said...

Thanks Caveman. I gather it's not really 'blogger etiquette' to reply to comments, but as you are the FIRST person to leave a comment I just wanted to express my appreciation! It was so exciting to see "1 comment" under the post. Also tryign to work out which of my friends would give himself (herself?) the blogger name of 'Caveman' as I'm sure you are not a random 'hitter'....

Giles Marshall said...

Lots of bloggers leave comments on their own blog. It's part of the continuing discourse that blogs inspire, and it helps boot up the comment numbers!!