Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 December 2006 21:21:03
Just after I started going to my current church, I met a guy called Ian (not his real name, just to be on the safe side) who had just started at the local uni. Ian and I would occasionally hang out together, but more usually we'd just catch up for a chat after church.
Now invariably, a chat with Ian would go in an entirely random direction (I'm sure you've realised by now that I'm completely normal, so it must all be Ian's influence that sends these conversations off on a tangent, obviously). Famously, sitting in the pub after church one day, Ian announced that if he reaches the age of 80, he intended to go to the local zoo, climb into the tiger enclosure and get mauled to death. Why? "Well, for starters, it would be an impressive story for the grandchildren to tell their friends - no one else's grandads will have died in such a cool way. And let's face it, once you're past 80 there's not much left to live for, so I might as well go for it." I did try to point out to Ian that his grandchildren might not think, "Grandad died in a really cool way" so much as "Grandad went a bit loopy at the end", but he was having none of it. "And I want someone to write a folk song about it, too." Riiiiiiight...
But yesterday's post-church conversation was perhaps the most bizarre yet. Somehow we'd ended up discussing what laws Ian would pass if he was Prime Minister. Most of them were fairly sensible but, Ian being Ian, he couldn't resist throwing something slightly odd into the mix. "I'd make fox hunting legal again, but with a few changes to make it more fair to the fox. Give the foxes guns or something, train them in hand-to-hand combat. That way, it would be a more even contest."*
I'm beginning to worry about him...
*incidentally I still like my dad's suggestion for fox hunting - keep it legal but, if they fail to catch the fox, they have to shoot one of the huntsmen instead. It's the only way to keep the numbers down, you know...