DAVID AND VICTORIA PECKEM
David and Victoria Peckem were husband and wife penguin wazos. They and their thousands of neighbours lived on a huge ice floe in Antarctica together with some walruses and seals. Everyone lived on fish. It was fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, fish for tea, fish for supper. Although he would never have admitted it to any other penguin wazos, and especially not to Victoria, David often dreamed of other food - beef stew and dumplings followed by rhubarb crumble; pizza (without anchovies!) followed by ice-cream and jelly; coq au vin with new potatoes and mangetout. But no! It was fish, fish, fish.
And there wasn’t even much variety in the fish. Nearly always it was cod. He wouldn’t have minded a bit of turbot or mackerel or even squid. But again no! It would be cod, cod, cod with the very occasional piece of skate.
After breakfast every morning Victoria would be off down to the fishing hole. She’d spend hours under the ice looking for bargains. She usually went to the Wazco’s hole but sometimes she’d try Wazbury’s or Wazl or Wazda’s if she’d heard that there were particular offers or promotions there. Then she’d bring bring her purchases home. “David. I’m home”, she’d coo. “Got some fish for tea tonight. A nice bit of cod. I was lucky to get it. I thought we’d have it in a nice fish sauce.” And David would reply, “Oh, that’s nice Victoria. Well done old girl. I’m glad I married such a clever wife. And such a great cook.” And he’d give her an affectionate peck on the cheek. But in secret he was thinking of liver, onions and mashed potatoes.
Dreaming of food other than fish occupied a lot of David’s time. But he spent even more time thinking about another aspect of penguin wazo life. He had worked out that there was something very odd about the way penguin wazos were designed. Their bodies weren’t really suited to the conditions they lived in and he spent hours and hours wondering why this was and what he could do about it.
Of course, in some ways penguin wazos’ bodies were very well designed. When Victoria and her shopping friends slipped through the Wazco’s hole they were literally in their element. Their sharp noses and streamlined bodies were ideal for swimming about hunting for fishy bargains. Also, they could hold their breath much longer than most other wazos so they could stay underwater for long periods piling up their trolleys with cod fillets and steaks and cutlets.
The problem that was puzzling David was the design of the lower part of a penguin wazo’s body. Two little feet stick out from a round furry bottom. The feet don’t appear to be on the end of legs. Or, at least, if they are on the end of legs then these legs must be very, very short. And that’s where the problem lies. The legs are not long enough to lift the penguin wazo’s bottom off the ground. Now ‘ground’ to a penguin wazo means ‘ice’ so a penguin wazo’s bottom is nearly always just above, or actually on, ice. And this means that the bottoms of nearly all of the millions and millions of penguin wazos in the world are really, really cold!
That’s why, if you listen very carefully when you see a male penguin wazo strutting about, you’ll hear him going “Aaah! Aaah!” as its bottom slides along the ice. And if you listen even more carefully you’ll hear a female penguin wazo going “Oooh! Oooh!” as she waddles along. If you happen to be in the vicinity of a large colony of penguin wazos you’ll find that the air is filled with a cacophony of “Aaahs” and “Ooohs” sounding like some vast orchestra tuning up – an orchestra made up of only oboe and flute players (and a few piccolos – the baby penguin wazos can sometimes be heard going “Eeeh! Eeeh!”)
David had puzzled for a long time over this. He had also thought of some solutions to the cold bottom problem. For example, he wondered if he could get his fellow penguin wazos to wear short pants – maybe made out of sealskin, or walrus hide. He even thought of inserting a hot water bottle into the lining of the pants. He could use a hollowed-out walrus tusk for the bottle but he wasn’t sure where he would get the hot water from (though one of his more adventurous friends who had been to Australia had told him he could get some from some geyser he knew.) But David was more concerned about why a penguin wazo’s lower body was so badly designed in the first place.
Then, one day the Peckems’ ice-floe was visited by an albatross wazo that had got itself blown off course by a storm. It came swooping in with its huge wings all tattered and torn. It skidded along the ice, scattering the penguin wazos and knocking them over. It eventually came to rest with one enormous foot stuck down the Wazl fishing hole and the other dangling over the edge of the floe. Wazl’s had to be closed for the afternoon.
The penguin wazos picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, and gathered round the huge albatross wazo. Whenever a visitor arrived like this it was an opportunity to get the latest news about what was happening in the rest of the wazo world. The crowd of penguin wazos helped the albatross wazo out of the Wazl fish hole, pulled him up onto the floe and gave him some nice fresh fish to eat. Soon he recovered his strength. They took him to an ice-cave that had once been home to a family of sea lions and told him he could stay there as long as he liked till he was ready to resume his flight.
“What’s your name?” they asked him. “Alec”, he replied, “Alec Ambrose Albatross. But you can call me Lucky.”
They found out that he was a cargo albatross wazo. He carried all sorts of things all over the world by long-haul international flights. He had visited a lot of different countries and could speak several languages including Penguin Wazo. He was very proud of his job and told lots of stories about strange lands and strange wazos. He was clearly well-educated and had a fund of knowledge at his wingtips.
When David discovered how much Lucky knew and how much experience he had had, he decided that he would ask him if he knew the answer to the puzzle that had been bothering him for so long. He told Victoria that he would like to visit Lucky but didn’t mention his plan to ask about the puzzle. Victoria didn’t like him talking about cold bot….. er….cold lower parts of the body. So one night, just after dark, he and Victoria paid a visit to Lucky’s ice cave. Lucky invited them in.
“Hello, Mr Lucky. I’m David Peckem and this is my wife Victoria”, said David. “We live just over that ridge. We hope you enjoy your stay here.” “Thank you very much”, said Lucky. “I’m enjoying myself very much. I’ll soon be recovered from that disastrous storm, and then I’ll be on my way. But in the meantime I must say you penguin wazos have been awfully kind.”
Victoria, blushing and stammering, said, “We’ve brought you a little present. We hope you’ll like it”. She held out a parcel wrapped in pink paper and with a yellow ribbon round it. “Oh, thank you so much”, said Lucky, taking the parcel. He untied the ribbon and unwrapped the parcel. Inside was a box. On top there was a picture of a cod and the words “Fanshaw’s Finest Fish Fancies”. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said “Chunky Cups of Fresh Cod Filled With Succulent Cod Liver Oil”.
“My favourite sweets”, gushed Lucky in delight, as he opened the box and offered it to Victoria. “Please try one”. “Well thank you, don’t mind if I do”, said Victoria as she popped a ‘Codling Surprise’ into her mouth. “Would you care for one?”. Lucky offered the box to David.
“Er…No thanks”, said David uneasily, remembering what he had just had for tea and knowing what was for supper. “Must watch my waistline, you know”, patting his ample stomach and smiling wanly. Lucky picked out a ‘Crushed Cod Crème” for himself, popped it into his mouth and then asked David and Victoria to take a seat. He bustled off and came back with three tall glasses of freshly squeezed cod roe. “Cheers!”, he said and they all clinked glasses.
After some conversation about the weather and about how stormy it had been of late, David decided it was time to ask about the problem. “Err…Mr Lucky. You’re a wazo of the world. You’ve been around, seen a lot. Would you mind if I asked you about a problem that’s been troubling me for some time?” “Not at all, old chap. I’d be delighted to help. Fire away”. “Well”, said David, “It’s about how a penguin wazo’s body is designed”.
Victoria sat bolt upright and looked straight at David. “David. I hope you are not going to start talking about…bot…er..lower body parts.” Lucky broke in, “It’s all right Mrs Peckem…er…may I call you Victoria?” He smiled charmingly and she blushed and nodded assent. Lucky went on, “I can assure you, Victoria, that we will confine our discussions to matters of a scientific nature. Now, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind going through to the kitchen and refilling our glasses”. Victoria, somewhat mollified but still suspicious, picked up the three glasses and waddled off, looking round to fix David with an warning stare, before disappearing into the kitchen.
“You know, the design of the feet….the short legs…. The..er…bottom.”, David hurried on in a whisper. “It’s always cold. Why is a penguin wazo designed so that its bottom is always cold?”
Just then Victoria came back with fresh glasses and put them down on the table. She deliberately banged the table with David’s and gave him a sharp grimace as if to say “Don’t you dare!” Then she went back to the kitchen and pretended to be washing up. Lucky pulled himself up in his chair, took a large pair of old-fashioned pince nez out of his top pocket, placed then on his beak. He peered down at David. “David, my friend”, he said in an avuncular way, “that’s a very good question, and one that has baffled many generations of wazos, not just penguin wazos. Any wazo with a philosophical mind will have asked himself, or herself of course, ahem, that kind of question many times. We are only now beginning to get a glimpse at the answer. The very latest theories argue that it is all to do with evolution.” He pronounced ‘evolution’ very slowly and with each syllable distinct, as if it were a magic word like Abracadabra. Ee-vol-you-shon. “According to evolution, some characteristics, such as eye colour, or a liking for fish, or leg length, can be inherited, that is they can be passed down from one generation to the next.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of that”, said David, “we did evolution in wazology at school. And ‘survival of the fittest’, but I thought that meant that good, useful characteristics would be passed on from generation to generation. Not useless uncomfortable things like cold bottoms.”
“Ah hah! A common misconception”, said Lucky, in a superior way that David found just a little annoying. “You’ve probably heard of the peacock wazo”. David nodded his head. He had seen pictures of this wazo whose tail was enormous and had all kinds of pictures on it including lifelike eyes. “Well, did you know that the peacock wazo’s tail has no function whatsoever. It’s worse than uncomfortable - it is a very great nuisance to the peacock wazo. It’s heavy. It gets in the way. It doesn’t even make the wazo look fierce. Utterly useless, a complete disaster – but it is inherited.”
“You know I’d never thought of it like that. I thought maybe the eyes on the tail made it look like a huge animal to frighten off attackers. Or something. I mean, how could such a great useless thing make the peacock ‘fitter’?”
“It’s quite simple really”, said Lucky. “Sometime in the dim and distant past, peahen wazos began to rather like the look of bigger tails on peacock wazos. No reason. They just happened to like it. It became, as we say, fashionable. And that gave any peacock wazo with a slightly bigger tail an advantage in finding a mate.”
“I still don’t see….”, David started, but Lucky got in first “…what that’s got to do with cold bottoms.? It’s the same thing. Long long ago, when the first penguin wazos had just left the sea and had started to live on land, they might have had long legs that kept their bottoms high up off the ground. Then one day, just by chance, a penguin wazo with shorter legs was born. We’ll never know who it was or whether it was a male or female. But we do know that because its legs were shorter, its bottom got colder – and it would go “Aaah!” or “Oooh!” as it waddled along.
“Now”, he continued. “it also just happened – how, we don’t know, or need to know - that the “Oooh!” or “Aaah!” sound made by this penguin wazo was attractive to the opposite sex and, hey presto, evolution took over and now all penguin wazos have short legs and cold bottoms.
Victoria emerged from the kitchen just in time to hear “…cold bottoms”. “David! she snapped. You promised not to talk about bott…er…lower parts of the body. I think it’s time we went home. Don’t you?” She turned to Lucky. “Thank you Mr Lucky for your very kind hospitality. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay. Come on David.” And she headed for the door.
David followed her, but his mind was in turmoil. He saw it all now. The random change, the new fashion, the evolutionary advantage. A cold bottom was a hot item. And as they waddled back home across the ice and over the ridge, he forgot all about his own cold bottom. Instead, he was listening , as if for the first time, to Victoria going ‘Oooh Oooh’ as she headed home and he thought how sweet it sounded, as if all the tiny genes in his body were singing together in an age-old chorus.
He glanced across at his wife and smiled happily at her. “Aaah!” he said, and he slipped his wingtip into hers and pulled her closer..
ooOoo
David and Victoria Peckem were husband and wife penguin wazos. They and their thousands of neighbours lived on a huge ice floe in Antarctica together with some walruses and seals. Everyone lived on fish. It was fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, fish for tea, fish for supper. Although he would never have admitted it to any other penguin wazos, and especially not to Victoria, David often dreamed of other food - beef stew and dumplings followed by rhubarb crumble; pizza (without anchovies!) followed by ice-cream and jelly; coq au vin with new potatoes and mangetout. But no! It was fish, fish, fish.
And there wasn’t even much variety in the fish. Nearly always it was cod. He wouldn’t have minded a bit of turbot or mackerel or even squid. But again no! It would be cod, cod, cod with the very occasional piece of skate.
After breakfast every morning Victoria would be off down to the fishing hole. She’d spend hours under the ice looking for bargains. She usually went to the Wazco’s hole but sometimes she’d try Wazbury’s or Wazl or Wazda’s if she’d heard that there were particular offers or promotions there. Then she’d bring bring her purchases home. “David. I’m home”, she’d coo. “Got some fish for tea tonight. A nice bit of cod. I was lucky to get it. I thought we’d have it in a nice fish sauce.” And David would reply, “Oh, that’s nice Victoria. Well done old girl. I’m glad I married such a clever wife. And such a great cook.” And he’d give her an affectionate peck on the cheek. But in secret he was thinking of liver, onions and mashed potatoes.
Dreaming of food other than fish occupied a lot of David’s time. But he spent even more time thinking about another aspect of penguin wazo life. He had worked out that there was something very odd about the way penguin wazos were designed. Their bodies weren’t really suited to the conditions they lived in and he spent hours and hours wondering why this was and what he could do about it.
Of course, in some ways penguin wazos’ bodies were very well designed. When Victoria and her shopping friends slipped through the Wazco’s hole they were literally in their element. Their sharp noses and streamlined bodies were ideal for swimming about hunting for fishy bargains. Also, they could hold their breath much longer than most other wazos so they could stay underwater for long periods piling up their trolleys with cod fillets and steaks and cutlets.
The problem that was puzzling David was the design of the lower part of a penguin wazo’s body. Two little feet stick out from a round furry bottom. The feet don’t appear to be on the end of legs. Or, at least, if they are on the end of legs then these legs must be very, very short. And that’s where the problem lies. The legs are not long enough to lift the penguin wazo’s bottom off the ground. Now ‘ground’ to a penguin wazo means ‘ice’ so a penguin wazo’s bottom is nearly always just above, or actually on, ice. And this means that the bottoms of nearly all of the millions and millions of penguin wazos in the world are really, really cold!
That’s why, if you listen very carefully when you see a male penguin wazo strutting about, you’ll hear him going “Aaah! Aaah!” as its bottom slides along the ice. And if you listen even more carefully you’ll hear a female penguin wazo going “Oooh! Oooh!” as she waddles along. If you happen to be in the vicinity of a large colony of penguin wazos you’ll find that the air is filled with a cacophony of “Aaahs” and “Ooohs” sounding like some vast orchestra tuning up – an orchestra made up of only oboe and flute players (and a few piccolos – the baby penguin wazos can sometimes be heard going “Eeeh! Eeeh!”)
David had puzzled for a long time over this. He had also thought of some solutions to the cold bottom problem. For example, he wondered if he could get his fellow penguin wazos to wear short pants – maybe made out of sealskin, or walrus hide. He even thought of inserting a hot water bottle into the lining of the pants. He could use a hollowed-out walrus tusk for the bottle but he wasn’t sure where he would get the hot water from (though one of his more adventurous friends who had been to Australia had told him he could get some from some geyser he knew.) But David was more concerned about why a penguin wazo’s lower body was so badly designed in the first place.
Then, one day the Peckems’ ice-floe was visited by an albatross wazo that had got itself blown off course by a storm. It came swooping in with its huge wings all tattered and torn. It skidded along the ice, scattering the penguin wazos and knocking them over. It eventually came to rest with one enormous foot stuck down the Wazl fishing hole and the other dangling over the edge of the floe. Wazl’s had to be closed for the afternoon.
The penguin wazos picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, and gathered round the huge albatross wazo. Whenever a visitor arrived like this it was an opportunity to get the latest news about what was happening in the rest of the wazo world. The crowd of penguin wazos helped the albatross wazo out of the Wazl fish hole, pulled him up onto the floe and gave him some nice fresh fish to eat. Soon he recovered his strength. They took him to an ice-cave that had once been home to a family of sea lions and told him he could stay there as long as he liked till he was ready to resume his flight.
“What’s your name?” they asked him. “Alec”, he replied, “Alec Ambrose Albatross. But you can call me Lucky.”
They found out that he was a cargo albatross wazo. He carried all sorts of things all over the world by long-haul international flights. He had visited a lot of different countries and could speak several languages including Penguin Wazo. He was very proud of his job and told lots of stories about strange lands and strange wazos. He was clearly well-educated and had a fund of knowledge at his wingtips.
When David discovered how much Lucky knew and how much experience he had had, he decided that he would ask him if he knew the answer to the puzzle that had been bothering him for so long. He told Victoria that he would like to visit Lucky but didn’t mention his plan to ask about the puzzle. Victoria didn’t like him talking about cold bot….. er….cold lower parts of the body. So one night, just after dark, he and Victoria paid a visit to Lucky’s ice cave. Lucky invited them in.
“Hello, Mr Lucky. I’m David Peckem and this is my wife Victoria”, said David. “We live just over that ridge. We hope you enjoy your stay here.” “Thank you very much”, said Lucky. “I’m enjoying myself very much. I’ll soon be recovered from that disastrous storm, and then I’ll be on my way. But in the meantime I must say you penguin wazos have been awfully kind.”
Victoria, blushing and stammering, said, “We’ve brought you a little present. We hope you’ll like it”. She held out a parcel wrapped in pink paper and with a yellow ribbon round it. “Oh, thank you so much”, said Lucky, taking the parcel. He untied the ribbon and unwrapped the parcel. Inside was a box. On top there was a picture of a cod and the words “Fanshaw’s Finest Fish Fancies”. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said “Chunky Cups of Fresh Cod Filled With Succulent Cod Liver Oil”.
“My favourite sweets”, gushed Lucky in delight, as he opened the box and offered it to Victoria. “Please try one”. “Well thank you, don’t mind if I do”, said Victoria as she popped a ‘Codling Surprise’ into her mouth. “Would you care for one?”. Lucky offered the box to David.
“Er…No thanks”, said David uneasily, remembering what he had just had for tea and knowing what was for supper. “Must watch my waistline, you know”, patting his ample stomach and smiling wanly. Lucky picked out a ‘Crushed Cod Crème” for himself, popped it into his mouth and then asked David and Victoria to take a seat. He bustled off and came back with three tall glasses of freshly squeezed cod roe. “Cheers!”, he said and they all clinked glasses.
After some conversation about the weather and about how stormy it had been of late, David decided it was time to ask about the problem. “Err…Mr Lucky. You’re a wazo of the world. You’ve been around, seen a lot. Would you mind if I asked you about a problem that’s been troubling me for some time?” “Not at all, old chap. I’d be delighted to help. Fire away”. “Well”, said David, “It’s about how a penguin wazo’s body is designed”.
Victoria sat bolt upright and looked straight at David. “David. I hope you are not going to start talking about…bot…er..lower body parts.” Lucky broke in, “It’s all right Mrs Peckem…er…may I call you Victoria?” He smiled charmingly and she blushed and nodded assent. Lucky went on, “I can assure you, Victoria, that we will confine our discussions to matters of a scientific nature. Now, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind going through to the kitchen and refilling our glasses”. Victoria, somewhat mollified but still suspicious, picked up the three glasses and waddled off, looking round to fix David with an warning stare, before disappearing into the kitchen.
“You know, the design of the feet….the short legs…. The..er…bottom.”, David hurried on in a whisper. “It’s always cold. Why is a penguin wazo designed so that its bottom is always cold?”
Just then Victoria came back with fresh glasses and put them down on the table. She deliberately banged the table with David’s and gave him a sharp grimace as if to say “Don’t you dare!” Then she went back to the kitchen and pretended to be washing up. Lucky pulled himself up in his chair, took a large pair of old-fashioned pince nez out of his top pocket, placed then on his beak. He peered down at David. “David, my friend”, he said in an avuncular way, “that’s a very good question, and one that has baffled many generations of wazos, not just penguin wazos. Any wazo with a philosophical mind will have asked himself, or herself of course, ahem, that kind of question many times. We are only now beginning to get a glimpse at the answer. The very latest theories argue that it is all to do with evolution.” He pronounced ‘evolution’ very slowly and with each syllable distinct, as if it were a magic word like Abracadabra. Ee-vol-you-shon. “According to evolution, some characteristics, such as eye colour, or a liking for fish, or leg length, can be inherited, that is they can be passed down from one generation to the next.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of that”, said David, “we did evolution in wazology at school. And ‘survival of the fittest’, but I thought that meant that good, useful characteristics would be passed on from generation to generation. Not useless uncomfortable things like cold bottoms.”
“Ah hah! A common misconception”, said Lucky, in a superior way that David found just a little annoying. “You’ve probably heard of the peacock wazo”. David nodded his head. He had seen pictures of this wazo whose tail was enormous and had all kinds of pictures on it including lifelike eyes. “Well, did you know that the peacock wazo’s tail has no function whatsoever. It’s worse than uncomfortable - it is a very great nuisance to the peacock wazo. It’s heavy. It gets in the way. It doesn’t even make the wazo look fierce. Utterly useless, a complete disaster – but it is inherited.”
“You know I’d never thought of it like that. I thought maybe the eyes on the tail made it look like a huge animal to frighten off attackers. Or something. I mean, how could such a great useless thing make the peacock ‘fitter’?”
“It’s quite simple really”, said Lucky. “Sometime in the dim and distant past, peahen wazos began to rather like the look of bigger tails on peacock wazos. No reason. They just happened to like it. It became, as we say, fashionable. And that gave any peacock wazo with a slightly bigger tail an advantage in finding a mate.”
“I still don’t see….”, David started, but Lucky got in first “…what that’s got to do with cold bottoms.? It’s the same thing. Long long ago, when the first penguin wazos had just left the sea and had started to live on land, they might have had long legs that kept their bottoms high up off the ground. Then one day, just by chance, a penguin wazo with shorter legs was born. We’ll never know who it was or whether it was a male or female. But we do know that because its legs were shorter, its bottom got colder – and it would go “Aaah!” or “Oooh!” as it waddled along.
“Now”, he continued. “it also just happened – how, we don’t know, or need to know - that the “Oooh!” or “Aaah!” sound made by this penguin wazo was attractive to the opposite sex and, hey presto, evolution took over and now all penguin wazos have short legs and cold bottoms.
Victoria emerged from the kitchen just in time to hear “…cold bottoms”. “David! she snapped. You promised not to talk about bott…er…lower parts of the body. I think it’s time we went home. Don’t you?” She turned to Lucky. “Thank you Mr Lucky for your very kind hospitality. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay. Come on David.” And she headed for the door.
David followed her, but his mind was in turmoil. He saw it all now. The random change, the new fashion, the evolutionary advantage. A cold bottom was a hot item. And as they waddled back home across the ice and over the ridge, he forgot all about his own cold bottom. Instead, he was listening , as if for the first time, to Victoria going ‘Oooh Oooh’ as she headed home and he thought how sweet it sounded, as if all the tiny genes in his body were singing together in an age-old chorus.
He glanced across at his wife and smiled happily at her. “Aaah!” he said, and he slipped his wingtip into hers and pulled her closer..
ooOoo
