I’ve always liked the idea of having a quest. I was an impressionable child, so the likes King Arthur, Lord of the Rings and Scooby Doo affected me deeply. I longed for the old-fashioned values and morality of yesteryear, and idolised the purity and single-hearted dedication of St George or Sir Gawain or Don Quixote (!?). I was also something of a tomboy, so that up until really remarkably recently I would much rather have been the Knight in Shining Armour than have been rescued by him. I went to an all girls school right up to the age of 18 and was inclined to scorn those amongst my peers who displayed damsel-like tendencies; I thought them weak and silly, but most importantly I thought they were missing out on great adventures. I was always just ever-so-slightly hazy about what exactly my future quests would involve (given that damsels were conclusively out of the picture, and I was fundamentally too realistic a child to believe in dragons), but I was entirely convinced that they would be epic; the stuff of legends.
As I have got older (and more boring) my quests have not ceased, but they have changed in nature; they no longer involve chainmail, or mighty steeds, or even Gandalf. (OK, so they do sometimes still involve Gandalf-like figure; I’ve always had a thing for older men. And beards.). I can imagine what most of you are thinking at this point; you are assuming that I have given up the aforementioned delights for such mundanities as ‘the search for the perfect muffin’ (this would actually be a pointless quest here – it doesn’t exist, though Salvonne bakery goes some way to satiating baked-goods based cravings. Alternatively, befriending the wonderful Allyson Barnett works too.), or ‘the search for the golden ratio of bicarbonate of soda and white wine as red wine stain remover’. Not so! I am neither (yet) so middle aged nor so domestic. I have, in fact, swapped chivalry, folklore and legend for good old-fashioned expeditioning. I hanker to spend hours, days or months grubbing around in jungles, climbing glaciers or traversing wide oceans in search of the world’s last true wildernesses or rarest species.
As such, I have had to relinquish Gandalf as my ideal man (he’d be a pretty nifty chap to have around if the Balrog reappeared, but even I can see that this is unlkely), and have substituted a glorious melange of Indiana Jones and David Attenborough in his place. In so far as this perfect specimen of humanity takes actual human form I have always assumed that he’d be something like Gerald Durrell. I actually have no idea what Gerald Durrell looked like (I’m resisting the urge to ask Google Images for fear that he does not resemble Adonis that I so hope for) but two circumstances have cemented him in my mind as the ideal companion of my future life. Firstly, I happened to pick up a copy of ‘A Zoo in my Luggage’ (I have an irrational horror of being without reading material on public transport, and therefore picked up this rather bizarre looking book in Oxfam while waiting for the Oxford Tube). This is Durrell’s account of a trip to Cameroon in which his major aim was to capture a cross section of the wildlife in order to start a private zoo back in the UK. It’s absolutely and entirely charming (once you get past the un-PC nature of the quest, which didn’t take me very long); he recounts, with modesty and humour, fundamentally unsuccessful attempts to coax a ten foot python out of a crack in a boulder, the antics of his incredibly badly behaved chimp Lucy and the time he was stalked by an irate three inch long mouse called Alphonse. I’d recommend it to anyone seeking escapism on their London commute! Secondly, I chanced across an interview with his wife Jackie (they later divorced due to his alcoholism and work obsession but let’s not dwell on that), in which she recounted stories of their life together; she talks of waking up to find three baby chimpanzees bouncing on their bed, of keeping baby dormice in her bra (my capacious cleavage renders me very suitable for such a task, though there’s a danger that I’d lose them; I’ve been known to misplace my large collection of keys down there) and of being (platonically) absorbed into the harem of the Fon of Bafut Achirimbi II, an autocratic West African chieftain, while her husband was planning future expeditions with him. I was enchanted.
It’s taken me even longer than usual to get to the point, but we’re nearly there – one of my favourite passages from ‘A Zoo in My Luggage’ concerns Durrell’s search for the Picathartes, a very rare West African bird. He sought the Central African Picathartes, but there is another equally hard to track sub-species which lives solely around Sierra Leone and Liberia. I immediately determined that tracking down this particular feathered friend would be an eminently suitable expedition. A bit of background: the Picathartes is about 25cm long, and resembles nothing so much as a particularly stupid pheasant, though it also has a broad red eye patch, giving it a pleasingly debonair devil-may-care appearance. These birds build their nests on rock faces in thick forest, and require plentiful supplies of water. This makes the Freetown Peninsula a peculiarly suitable nesting spot. I first went in search of this creature when my parents were here in December; we left Freetown in the very early morning and climbed up an endless steep slope to a two nest colony. There we say, barely daring to breath, and expecting to see a Picathartes at any moment. Until, that is, my mother turned rather irately to my father and intimated that she couldn’t see the colony. Which was about 2 metres away and consisted of two bright orange foot square nests on a black background. After ten minutes of us all trying to help her in increasingly exasperated ‘whispers’ she admitted “Oh. Just that? I saw that right from the beginning.” And we admitted defeat; any bird in a hundred metre radius would long have gone into hiding.
Picathartes Take II happened just last weekend. I managed to persuade a couple of rather long suffering friends to be ready at 6am on a Saturday morning (pastries from the aforementioned Salvonne were necessary as a bribe). I finally arrived to pick them up about an hour later. Olive, oh Olive! I got her back last week after a three week extremely expensive stint at the mechanic, and Saturday was to be the first day of the rest of her life. Except that the engine cut out about fifty times before we’d even got across town. We had to abandon her and take to public transport. Finally arriving at the trail, we commenced our ascent to the nest. I do not move like a gazelle at the best of times, but was (even by my own exceptionally low standards) exceptionally clumsy that morning; every crinkly leap or brittle twig on the mountain seemed to find its way under my feet, every branch I grasped seemed to be covered in thorns and, worst of all, I was trying so hard to be quiet that I was gripped by hiccups. The sharp-eared Picathartes doubtless detected my presence before I’d even got half way, and we were again unsuccessful. Kenneth, our guide, was kind enough to say that lack of fresh faeces etc indicated that they hadn’t been there in a while, and we did find a feather and an egg fragment, but I was thoroughly disappointed. This quest business is much harder and more sleep-depriving than I’d expected…
I’m seriously considering playing the damsel-in-distress card after all, and leaving the following advert on knight-errant.com: “WANTED: One Knight-in-Shining-Armour prepared to spend several days camped out under damp rock to capture not-particularly exciting looking and entirely harmless bird and convey it to averagely fair lady keen to view it from the comfort of her own home.”
(I’ve just looked pictures of Mr Durrell. Alas! He is less Adonis and more Toad of Toad Hall (and I have peculiar horror of toads). He does have a beard though, so that’s something…)
saloneranger 