My good colleague Geoff Adams wrote last week about an encounter with a snake.

I said blithely “I’ll see you and raise you, Adams”. He hasn’t been to the water cooler since.

Humans evolved an innate fear of snakes, as have most mammals.

If you don’t believe me and are prepared to have your cat never speak to you again, simply pop a whole cucumber quietly on the ground behind it. You’ll see.

The ‘nurture’ to override this fear of ‘nature’ came to me with my inability to say ‘no’ to anyone in higher authority.

My postgrad supervisor was chatting one morning about something I had lost concentration on, owing to the seven-foot python passing by outside the window.

I pointed it out.

“Want to go catch it?” he said with glee as he sprung to his feet.

Dr Peter Room was a world-renowned entomologist who confessed to me his repressed and true love of herpetology, which was stymied by the small island on which he was raised.

“Britain has only got three bloody snakes,” he lamented one night over whiskey toward the end of a barbecue dinner, where on either side of his drinks cabinet were two matching terraria — one which contained some recovering bearded dragons, the other a sleeping carpet python.

“Care to hold it?”

“We-really-must-go-thanks-for-a-wonderful-evening.” I think my car door wasn’t closed until the second intersection.

To continue:

“Want to catch it?” he asked again.

No, I didn’t thanks very much, moments before my crash course began by tailing this six-foot gentleman running a very long way around the building to show me the finer skills in picking up a snake without it pooing on you and without you pooing yourself.

He put it into my sweaty, quivering hands — one around its neck, the other just leeward of the soon spraying rectum — as I sucked both of my lips into my mouth.

“Don’t do that, you look even more like a frog — not smart,” he said before sprinting off.

“Where are you going?” the words came out contralto with little effort. Almost harpsichord.

“Getting the camera!” He didn’t break stride; actually he did, the bastard, slowing right down and leaving me in what’s known as deep-end phobia therapy.

I was now in the sun. The snake started to warm up and, oddly, took on the shape of a long stiffening broomstick, pushing my arm span out beyond that of a lying fisherman’s.

“Don’t stretch it!” the boss said on returning.

All I could say was “eff-ef-ef-eeeee-fe fe fe fe bee bee beeee beeeeee”. Or similar, ending this baptism of fire with trouser dampness.

“You must have sat on the dew,” he smirked.

For me, snakes are now gorgeous, and I love catching them whenever I can, with the sole excuse of ‘I need to get it away from people’.

“But honey, we’re on Mt Bogong, the nearest people are —”

“That’s near enough.”

I once yelled “Nooooo!” in the nick o’ time before a grubby private school prig could swing a shovel at a python coming down a Moreton Bay fig in front of a baying crowd of students.

Dorky, ill-dressed and awkward Dr Wilson then waddled up, a ton of books under one arm, pen clutched between teeth and grabbed the thing by the neck and released it down by the river. The snake, not the schoolboy, although if I had my time again ...

“Do that instead,” I said on returning and pocketed my cool-teacher-of-the-year nomination, swaggering away like I was in a King Gee commercial before rolling an ankle and dropping all my books.

It got better (or worse, depending on if you were a jape to my theatrics).

My first wife famously placed a perfect silhouette of her hand onto my left cheek — quite red actually — when I invited her into our gazebo, having prior curled up a green tree snake on a truss just above her head.

“Look dear! I say! What’s that above you?”

Crack!

Worth it.

Next week: The snake theatrics create a void in Andy’s world, as his friends vacate his life for good.

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Saturday, 3rd February 2024

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