99 YEARS OLD AND STILL HANGING ON HOPEFULLY...

INSPIRED by the recent book Being A Beast by Charles Foster, I decided I should try to follow in his clawprints and do something similar. Foster’s greatest success, as he recounts in the book, was when he spent some time trying to be a badger but firstly I do not know anyone with a JCB that could be used to dig me a badger sett and secondly I didn’t really fancy eating worms. Anyway Foster has done badgers, so I decided it would be better to be a sloth.

The languid lifestyle of a sloth has always appealed to me: they hang upside down, only moving when their food runs out or to come down the tree once a week to go to the toilet.

They also have very sharp claws which may be used to disembowel any creature that irritates them. What more could one ask for? Hanging upside down, however, is not as easy as it may seem.

First I had to find a place to hang. It’s all very well if you have a nearby rainforest with a canopy you can suspend yourself from but there is nothing like that at Beachcomber Towers. Fortunately, I spotted a sturdy wooden rail that looked eminently hangable from, so hooked my feet over one end and hung happily for the best part of 20 seconds.

My mood was carefree but then the strain began to tell. This hanging upside down business is by no means as easy as sloths make it look and my arm and leg muscles soon began to ache. So I unhooked myself and thought about the problem in a sitting position.

Then a solution hit me: I strapped pieces of Velcro to my feet and hands, returned to my hanging posture and let the Velcro take the strain. I hung there blissfully for several minutes but then began to feel both thirsty and peckish so shouted down to the kitchens.

I don’t know if you have ever tried to drink a glass of Laurent- Perrier ultra brut Champagne while hanging upside down but I can assure you it is no easy matter, particularly when one of the servants is holding the glass because one’s own hands and feet are Velcro’d together.

Only when he drew up a table, put the glass on it and supplied me with a long straw did I accomplish the feat.

The whole experiment, however, came to an unfortunate end after a few days when our cleaner Ebola came to do her thing in the room in which I was hanging.

I suppose she cannot have recognised me when viewed from such an unusual angle, for when she saw me hanging there, she caught her breath, rapidly attached an upholstery nozzle to the vacuum cleaner and proceeded to vacuum all the algae and moths from the pullover I was wearing in simulation of sloth fur.

“Oi!” I said. “What do you think you are doing?”

“I might well ask the same thing, Mr Beachcomber, sir,” she retorted.

I fixed her with as steely a gaze as you will ever see from a man- sloth and said, “I am being a sloth.” She is lucky I didn’t disembowel her.

I think I now understand why Charles Foster became a badger.