Lovely as a sleepy lizard

Like everybody, I could complain about my job. Really only about the hours - I'd like to work as hard as a rentboy at a televangelists' convention three days a week and then have four day weekends. I suppose I could also complain about the fact that my office is in Brussels, but that's not my office's fault, and if it was in a better city where apartments aren't so cheap they'd have to pay me more, or else I'd be complaining about my salary. So there you are. And my job has great benefits, like the way I'm being paid to fight with people on the company blog - I gave up looking at comment sections of anything a long time ago because of the contribution it makes to my misanthropy, but hey, if it's my job, cool - and knowing about what's happening in Mozambique and the way I get to go sea kayaking in Marseille in a couple of weeks.

And yesterday my job benefited me by teaching me, in the course of research for one of my articles, that Abu Dhabi has a falcon hospital. And it's one of several in the region. Can you believe it? That little scrap of information took my breath away - slapped me across the face with the fact that not only do people live so differently from me, but people love birds in an absolutely different way from me. There are so many wonderful things in the world. Obviously I shouldn't have had to look all the way to Abu Dhabi to realize that, but you know how things jump out at you from time to time.

Also varied and wonderful is something the F-word got for me, Life in Cold Blood, narrated by the mighty Attenborough. I don't know the last time I've seen something so pretty, though there're so many reptiles and amphibians making it that from time to time I feel like I'm watching porn that's missing my horny mark. It's all the relationships within a species that really gets me though, not just the jissoming relationships, or not just the jissom in the jissoming relationships. Like the je t'aime moi non plus of Australia's sleepy lizards, who spend two months together a year, and then split up, and then get back together, and who mourn their partners if they die. Or the ritual combat of king cobras, who can kill a large animal with a single bite but whose menfolk content themselves with wrestling and pinning each other down to settle territorial disputes. I swear the more we learn about animals, the more mysterious they get.