I don't suppose that many of you out there will be old enough to remember the Great Wren Collapse in 1972. Back then , before running water, before sanitation and electricity, we had to do what we could to survive.
And so did the birds.
In 1972 nature-lovers began to notice that wrens were staggering around their gardens in obvious distress, and began to die out in droves when they couldn't catch their usual prey, which in those days was mainly rats. What was to be done ?
Well, luckily, researchers at the Palindromic Research Phacility (PRP) had been looking into old manuscripts, mainly written by witches, sages, necromancers and downright charlatans when they came across a strange thing .... back in those days ( around 1957) they believed that remedies which were palindromes worked far better than the others.
Their first big discovery was Lionoil .... lions, as you know, are always roaring for some reason, and their throats get very sore. What they needed was a medicine which was the same backwards as forwards .... like " Lionoil."
Readers, it worked. One teaspoonful of Lionoil twice a day got the lions back to full health, but it did more than that ... it got those boffins thinking up other possibilities. Maybe there were other palindromic medicines they could invent.
All children know that when they are ill , pop is the best thing to get them through it. It's palindromic ! And of course mum and dad are the best people to look after them ... they're palindromic too. Grown men, of course, prefer a madam every time.
Anyway, when these experts heard about the wrens which were having trouble with their little legs so they couldn't catch any rats, they set to work on the problem and soon came up with Leg-gel .... applied hourly to each leg every day and night for a week, it worked a treat and was so effective that rats got a bit scarce too. But that's another story.... and here it is.... it's enough to say that RatstaR made the remaining few rats famous overnight and they were able to live in swanky hotels, wear inappropriate clothes and generally swan about simply being famous. And more importantly, they were well away from their major predator, the wren.
There's that thing about gnats losing their lovely tangy taste in the Falklands a few years ago...this caused a mass starvation amongst Swifts and Hirundines who wouldn't eat them any more.
Bird-lovers all over the islands were panic-stricken until the boffins at PRP did a bit of chemistry and invented Gnatang .... it restores their tangy taste ... and within a few hours the swifts etc started eating them again to everyone's delight except the poor old gnats.
Believe it or not, in parts of Essex there are so many Barn Owls it's getting to be a problem .... road are getting blocked up, drains and sewers too, trains are getting derailed and services disrupted, pedestrians are having difficulty seeing where they are going .... the air is thick with them.
So ....... the council has started a huge campaign to persuade the local owl population to stop reproducing .... giant signs have been made with a leader of Essex Environmental Services holding up his hand the way traffic police do... and in big print it says
OWL WO !
! STOP !
NO
MORE
EGGS
!
So, a local laboratory has developed a medicine ( OwlwO® of course) which will ensure that all the county's owls will stop reproducing for the foreseeable future. It's delivered by injected mice with 38 cl of OwlwO once a week ... simple !
On the actual poster, of course, the two big "O"s are made to look like eyes ... strangely I haven't been able to track down any images of them on the net.
Not so far away in Kent they've had a lot of problems with a new "Legal High" which has hit the market. All over the county members of the public have come across victims of this substance standing immobile in their roads and streets in a posture resembling large flightless birds ... in fact they look really like an emu. They will often remain in that state for hours on end, bending forwards on one leg, one arm aloft with the hand pointing forwards, the other leg raised to resemble a tail .... often coming back to "normal" many hours later in the middle of the night having had all their possessions stolen, standing naked in a field or shopping precinct in a terrified state.
Some, having taken the drug, remain lucid enough to create a makeshift " Emu Outfit" before they are hit by the drug's devastating torpor, as we see up there in a rare shot of one unfortunate victim.
Police rapidly found the source of this substance ... its "trade name" is, of course, EmumE ... which when spoken , becomes " Emu me" and sure enough, that's exactly what it does.
When asked about the police response to the EmumE epidemic, a spokesperson would only say that the force was "aware" of the problem and meeting were taking place at the highest level.
Meanwhile, EmumE is widely available, and our reporter, Mo Amoa, was able to buy it on the streets of Tunbridge Wells within yards of the Police Headquarters.
One of the most remarkable ones was developed to help Puffins .... around the UK Puffins were showing signs of respiratory problems so something had to be done. Within weeks the experts at the PRP had produced a handy nasal spray which did the job perfectly. It was marketed as Puffinsniffup ... or
PUFFINSNIFFUP
..which saved our lovely Puffins ! They even learned to self-medicate ... little spray-cans with tiny nozzles were pushed into the soil by each burrow, and the Puffins son learned to plug each nostril onto the tiny tube and press down to get a measured dose of puffinsniffup® and then go about their normal business of entertaining tourists.
That's the power of Palindromic Medicine.
But after all that, to this day nobody knows why these medicines that are the same backwards and forwards are so effective.
Of course, there were a few failures ... a medicine called Wolflow completely failed to produce a race of tiny wolves which could be kept as "trophy pets" by celebrities ..... instead they developed rampant diarrhoea . Boggob, which was supposed solve the food supply problem by enabling humans to enjoy eating ,er, faeces, actually worked backwards by reversing the whole digestive system ,with unfortunate and rather antisocial results.
When problems like this rhea their ugly heads, moa and moa people have their lives destroyed, and often they end up burying their heads in the sand, rather like ostriches.
Well, there was a lot to read there ... but I hope you liked it.
Finding these things is a real pleasure .. I couldn't believe it when I discovered that Puffinsniffup was the same backwards as forwards and was a "plausible" idea. It hasn't really been used as a nasal spray for Puffins of course, all that cack was made up by me. Nor have Lionoil, Leg-gel, EmumE or any of the others, but it's the "doing" of it that counts.
And what I'm going to have a go at, and you too I hope, is to try to think up some Welsh ones. After all, Welsh is blessed with a really long palindromic word .. " godidog" which is indeed splendid. They don't have to have the same theme as mine... which were mainly based around birds/animals etc ... but it's good if you can build a story around them.
After all .. if you make one, it's probably totally unique !
A "first" for the universe.
Mind you, in a universe with infinite time and space, everything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times. That's a chilling thought !
So ... get thinking... and so will I. You can send in any that you find as a comment or to...
[email protected]
Phew ... that was a lot of words. So we'll snootle on to the music section ... here's an interview with Cara Braia + a song ......