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    DAVID RISH


Tasmanian children's writer and dramatist     

It caught my eye

I was, on a recent fine Spring Hobart day, traipsing the beautiful streets of our city, admiring the architecture, the temperature, the clean air when I suddenly thought; heck but walking is painful. Now, if our local council was on the button, they’d do something to remedy this. No-one really likes walking. A city where walking is entailed is a city many of my ilk (and my ilk is many) just won’t visit. Immediately (well, almost immediately; I never do anything in a hurry!) I went home and lay down for my afternoon nap (my morning nap had been cut short by a telephone offer of a new, guaranteed sleep inducing machine – I bought!) and it was in the half-dreamy state that I came up with a solution. Pigs! Pigs is the way to go! (Or should that be, Pigs are the way to go?)  Pigs are the way to go. If the council and Mr Valentine wanted to, they could stake a riding-pig every ten parking meters, or every ten metres, or so. Pig farmers would love it and I know that both pigs and pig-farmers are lovely animals and people respectively because my brother once worked at a piggery near Deloraine. (He used to travel there on his motor bike which worried our mother immoderately but that’s neither here nor there.) Tired pedestrians could then avail themselves of this free pig ride. Grumpiness would be cut down. Street fights would probably vanish and partners going home to partners without throbbing varicose veins and tight shoes are more likely to get on. Divorce rates would be cut and the only people who might possibly not like that are divorce lawyers. Pigs are the way forward, anyone can see.  Children would love it. (Children love animals. I know because I was a child once and I loved animals then and can, after an excellent local education, extrapolate excellently.) Tourists would love it. They’d flock here. (Note to self: make joke about flock to sheep. Maybe not because really not all that funny!) They’d tell all their friends who’d come here to see what all the fuss was about. The local businesses would boom. The local business owners would be happy. Their divorce rates would go down. Everybody would be happy, except for, of course, those previously mentioned divorce lawyers.

These hypothetical pigs wouldn’t be, of course, just ordinary pigs. Well, they would be ordinary, but they’d be trained. There’s no way anyone could countenance releasing untrained pigs on an unsuspecting public. This training could be done by the local young unemployed. They could be trained by pig trainers to train pigs. They’d be extremely happy because they’d have a useful job at last. Even divorce lawyers wouldn’t be unhappy because young people aren’t generally married and would, ipso facto, have little or no need to get divorced anyway.

Now, I can hear the environmentalists among you saying but, David, what about the extra methane. What about the greenhouse gases. Fair enough but despair not, your columnist has a solution. Use those gases to fill brightly coloured balloons. Children love balloons. I know because I was once one - a child, not a balloon, that is! Young unemployed people could be employed to fill balloons with pig gas. Children would love it. Tourists with children would love it. Even divorce lawyers might love it because, after being made redundant, they’d need something to cheer them up. (Note to self: perhaps the out-of-work divorce lawyers could be retrained as balloon fillers!!! Brilliant David, brilliant.)

Look, I think I’ve established how all round beneficial my idea would be for the city. Let’s stop prevaricating and get on with it.

Now, I’m tired. I’m going to extend my afternoon nap to my pre-prandial snooze.

Catch you next time with what’s recently caught my eye.


© David Rish , 2008
06/04/2008
drish@netspace.net.au