I rarely blog my reading of blogs, this seeming just too 21st century to bear, but today I do just have to record a blog I really enjoy, Emma Beddington’s BELGIAN WAFFLING. Describing herself as “an ex-Eurodrone, unfit mother, slattern,” she writes a most amusing blog on that most difficult of subjects, herself. With the added bonus of an ongoing series of pictures of mournful dogs.
Most really recently she has been writing about ZAFARA by Michael Allin, which is about the first giraffe in France. She reports:
Zarafa WALKED from Marseille to Paris in 1826, accompanied by 4 Egyptian handlers, 2 antelopes, some cows, and zoologist Etienne Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, who kept a sort of diary of the trip:
“Today the giraffe toured a part of the city, accompanied by her keepers, a numerous picket of police and a great crowd of the curious. The courteous animal did not fail to visit the Prefect, who accorded her the welcome due to a beautiful stranger. In order to protect her from the cold temperature she was dressed in a mantle of waxed taffeta”.
I also like this:
“One can say that the Giraffe has nothing elegant or graceful in the detail of her forms; her short body, her high and close-together legs, the excessive length of her neck, the declivity of her back, her badly-rounded rump and her long and bare tail, all these things contrast in a shocking manner; she seems badly built, unbalanced on her feet, and yet one is seized by astonishment at the sight of her, and one finds her beautiful without being able to say why”.
Isn’t that lovely?
Interesting.