Yore 'avin' a laugh.

***Subject, a dear friend of mine applying the finishing touches to his Patsy get-up for the New Year party***

In order to fill the guilty void when I’m hungover I seek solace in the innocent times of yore.

Usually this just means sitting in front of the computer watching the opening of The Animals of Farthing Wood over and over again but on New Years day I went to the museum instead.

I’ve not been to the Natural History museum since I was a child, when it played a major role in my obsession with animals. One day when I was about ten years old I drew a picture of the African elephant in the atrium of stuffed mammals. The particulars may have been a little skewed by time but I vaguely remember being surrounded by a huge crowd, collectively sighing with delight at every flick of my pencil.

That picture hung up on my kitchen wall for several years and the mental image of the elephant in the main hall is something I've often associated with a whole era of my childhood.

So, on the first day of my twenty-fourth year on this planet my logic went as follows: if I see that elephant again, after all these years, my hangover will dissolve as the memories of my prodigious pencil skills fill the void that last night's gin has left within me.

Before I could gaze into my past, though, I had to ask a woman behind the gift-shop counter where the elephant was, which sounded weirder out loud than I had anticipated, as if I was holding up the gift-shop until they handed it over.

The whole mammal room had been re-arranged. The big cats were no longer in the glass cabinets and they seem to have been slightly culled before being placed in amongst the giraffes, camels and the elephant in no apparent geographical order.

Some of their faces were strangely familiar.

But when I saw the elephant nothing stirred, in fact I’m fairly sure it wasn’t even the same elephant, which I think had a cocked leg.

I moved on, seeing if I recognised anything else. I recognised the leopard, because it is a shrewd example of taxidermy, but the lions looked newish.

Round the front of the barrier was a small boy sat on a camp chair sketching the male lion’s mouth.

I asked him how old he was. 10, he said and I told him about the elephant I drew when I was his age, that it hung on my kitchen wall for a few years, and left after telling him his lion was cool.

I felt fulfilled, then; a good deed, a cool story for the little dude and a legacy for him to follow, sort of.

But perhaps the whole time he just was thinking; “this guy smells a little bit like lime, and a lot like industrial paint-stripper... I bet he thinks he's being all profound, I bet his elephant was nowhere near as good as my lion”

Yeah, well, it was. Ten times better, buddy.