100 YEARS OLD AND STILL PANDA-ING PORPOISEFULLY...

YESTERDAY I wrote of my attempt to verify a finding in a survey by the face-painting people at Snazaroo that more than one in 10 children aged 6-13 do not recognise a rhinoceros. Naturally I also tried to check their findings that 52 per cent have no idea what a red panda looks like and 22 per cent are unable to point out a porpoise.

To validate these figures, I assembled a group of the offspring of the serfs on the Beachcomber estate and asked if any of them had any idea what a red panda looked like.

“Does it look like a panda?” one asked. “Is it red?” asked another. “Well it’s sort of reddish-brown,” I said, “but it’s a distant relative of the raccoon with scarcely any connection to the giant panda, so you could say that ‘red’ is half-right, but ‘looking like a panda’ is not the right idea at all.”

“Even a bad idea is an idea,” said the young fellow who had suggested that it looked like a panda, “so technically speaking, you’d have to admit that I have an idea what it looks like. It’s just a wrong idea.”

“Let us move on to porpoises,” I said. “Put your hands up if you can point out a porpoise.”

The all looked round and no hands went up. “There are no porpoises around here,” one girl said. “Just a polar bear, a few sloths and a trained pack of Yorkshire terriers for security reasons.”

“There might be a porpoise in the mansion,” a boy said. “I have reason to believe there may be a porpoise or two on the staff.”

“Whatever gives you that idea?” I asked.

“Well only the other day, I was making a phone call to a large company, and it was answered by a recorded message saying that calls are recorded for training porpoises, “the boy said. “Knowing how Beachcomber Towers is always ahead of other organisations technologically and creatively speaking, I would not be at all surprised to hear that you have a team of trained porpoises answering the phones. If you allow me to enter the mansion, I would be happy to go to the telecommunications centre and try to point out the porpoises.”

“What if they’re dolphins?” a precocious young lady asked the boy. “They’re very clever and they look much the same as porpoises. If they had a mixture of dolphins and porpoises, how would you know which ones to point out?”

“I would point to all of them,” the boy said after thinking it over. “Then I would be sure of having pointed out the porpoises, as well as pointing out the dolphins as a sort of bonus.”

Another boy then interjected: “What’s the point,” he asked, “of having dolphins answering the phones if you’ve only trained the porpoises?”

“Perhaps Beachcomber has trained the porpoises and the porpoises have trained the dolphins,” the girl replied, casting an admiring glance in my direction. At that stage, I thought it was best to take my leave and let them get on with it.

Further research is clearly needed.