An Obvious Elephant

It was not that unusual, at least for around here, but it was rather an obvious elephant. After all, this part of the Black Country is not as well-known as, say, Africa or India for its populations of large mammals. In fact there have been remarkably few sightings of migrating wildebeest on the local ring roads, even in the rush hour.

Although, after closing time there have been reports of several sightings of elephants. However, we can – mostly – discount these as rather unreliable as naturalist discovered very few wild elephants the particular lurid shade of pink common to all these reports.

Still, as for the matter of the penguins in our local government offices, I think we all know what than means. So, we have no need to investigate any of that, or at least that is what certain representatives of the local penguin community ‘suggest’. The number of bodies of influential people turning up at the morgue apparently flippered to death also suggests that too intrusive scrutiny into the doings of the penguin community as they now call themselves could meet with a similar fate.

That leaves the elephant.

Not that anyone is suggesting, of course, that in these days of diversity and equal access, there is anything wrong with an elephant shopping at the supermarket. It is just that some fellow shoppers feel the size of the shopping trolley used by the elephant does block up the aisles somewhat. This is especially so when the elephants often fill their trolleys with whole trees. This can be a bit awkward when there is a queue for the checkout snaking back up the aisle, which makes some of the more tempting bogof offers somewhat hard to reach through the foliage.

However, many feel that with the supermarkets now employing more lemurs and other more arboreal assistants, they will be able to assist customers with the more difficult to reach items. Perhaps then we will have to accept seeing a more diverse selection of fellow creatures in the supermarket on our shopping trips than has hitherto been the case.