ALPACA PUNCH
The Pedant Class and Your Stars
IDON’T know how good it is at spelling and grammar, but the alpaca is in many other ways a remarkable animal. It spits when it is angry and hums when it is happy. When I say “hums”, I don’t mean the slang use of hum, which began its life as an onomatopoeia for the sound bees make and later became a synaesthetic word describing the fragrance of an unwashed body that smells so strong as to be almost audible.
The alpaca does not smell bad, but when in a good mood it makes a humming sound that is oddly comforting and has apparently been used in forms of alternative therapy. (“Don’t worry, Mrs Jones, we’ll just install a humming alpaca in your bedroom and everything will seem much brighter in the morning.”)
My interest in alpacas was sparked on a visit to a remote part of the Eastern Cape. The journey involved getting out of the car several times to open and shut farm gates on a dirt track. Near one of these gates was a herd of sheep guarded by several alpacas. I’m not sure if they were intentionally put there as guards or if they were simply sharing the field, but as soon as we entered their domain the alpacas formed a line in front of the sheep and looked at us in a most threatening manner. One of them had rather creepy pale blue eyes. It looked like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, except with a soft alpaca jacket instead of a bearskin flung over its shoulders.
Alpacas have lovely silky hair that can be made into luxurious items of apparel, which is the main reason they are now bred all over the world.
According to Wikipedia, “illegal alpaca smuggling has become a growing problem”. Is there a legal kind of smuggling?
Alpacas are attractive animals, shorter cousins of the llama, that look as though they would make good pets. Except for the spitting, of course — although maybe one could train them to aim at a spittoon. Perhaps an alpaca could even be taught to hum your favourite tune instead of endlessly warbling that Paul Simon song, You Can Call Me Al(paca).
If sheep could hum they would have a much wider repertoire: Ewes Do Something to Me; Ewes Are Always on My Mind; Ewes Are My Sunshine; There’ll Never Be Another Ewe; Only Ewe … OK, I’ll stop now.
The alpaca is well known in certain parts of the US for reasons that have nothing to do with its coat or its musical talents. In 1961, the Al Packer Automotive Group was founded in Baltimore by a Mr Al Packer. Al Packer dealerships have multiplied since then. As far as I can tell they sell Ford vehicles at reasonable prices, but they really should branch out into knitwear.
Reasonable prices are placid and logical and will listen to reason. One is able to negotiate with a reasonable price because it will weigh up all points of view before making a reasoned decision. Unreasonable prices, on the other hand, are stubborn and irrational and dig their heels in when challenged. A bit like alpacas, which protest loudly (not so much humming as swearing) when separated from their ovine friends and parted from their prized alpaca wool, which is sold at ever more unreasonable prices.
Speaking of fashion, I was puzzled by an advertisement for a winter dress made of “alpaca fabrication”. Last time I looked, fabric was the material of which dresses are made and a fabrication was a dressed-up kind of lie, like saying “faux” instead of “fake”. Was this perhaps a rare case of honesty in the world of haute couture? Was the dress made of faux alpaca fur? If I were an alpaca, that would be enough to make me spit. LS
Unreasonable prices are stubborn and irrational and dig their heels in