It is a melancholy thought that the only really unusual thing that I have ever done in my life is to electrocute a hedgehog; and even that dismal distinction was - you porcubuscophiles will be happy to hear - inadvertent. The victim - a portly beast - managed to trap itself neatly between two wires in a horizontal electrical grid we have erected in order to keep our dogs from getting out. ZZZZZPLAT! - and Mrs Tiggeywinkle was instantly zapped into hedgehogly heaven.
Why do we feel for certain animals and not others? The stoat is more intelligent than the hedgehog, and with suitable domestication could probably be taught to collect the newspapers and do the washing up, but should perhaps not be left with smaller children or their pets. Those sharp eyes, those little prehensile hands, that knowing smile - they all suggest talents far beyond those of a hedgehog. Yet I would almost happily help a stoat onto our electrical grid, tying it in place with little manacles and sneering at it while it pleaded for help.
Execution chambers
And as for a mink, I would even wet it as well, as they do the accused in the better class of execution chambers in the USA, rubbing my hands and chortling with glee as I pulled the ON lever. Yet the mink and stoat are musselid cousins of the otter and the badger, creatures we all revere.
There is no logic in this. Why should we find a mink's desire to feed its minklets or a stoat its stoatkins utterly reprehensible, yet laud the otter as it snares an entire family of trout coming home from Mass, their missals under their fins, in order to turn them into Sunday lunch for a mewl of otterlings? As George Stephenson said when he saw hot water vapour emerging faster from B poppet valve than from A, thus seriously incommoding his engine governor, what we need here is parity of A steam. That is why all right-minded people should cheer the refusal of Galway Civil Court to give a penny in compensation to Kathleen Corban, who recently sued Walker's crisps because she had found a live earwig in her packet.
For if her story was true - and there is every sign that the court did not think it was - why sue? Why not rejoice at the survival of this most loveable of beasts inside a packet of crisps? The earwig is a very special class of insect, for it gives birth to its children in a living brood, not in the parentally negligent, wanton ways of other arthropoda who scatter their young in the form of eggs wherever they find convenient, before putting on the lipstick and heading off for the Thoracic Park nightclub.
Attentive parents
Earwig mothers are altogether different; they are fussy and attentive parents, ushering and shooing their families off to school each morning and putting enough aside from the housekeeping to buy presents for them all at Christmas.
So, more to the point, what did Kathleen Corban do with the earwig? I sincerely trust no harm came to it. I am fond of crisps, but I wouldn't like to spend a month in their company, and it would be a sad reflection on human nature if after four weeks in crisply confinement, the earwig was murdered as it made its break for freedom - avoiding the watchtowers, dodging the searchlights, cutting through the barbed wire; ahead, the forest and liberty... then, suddenly, TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT...
Still, you could make a deeply moving film about this tragedy, with perhaps Ralph Fiennes playing the earwig, a band of young starlets playing the crisps - in the nude, of course, except for a light dusting of salt, and perhaps a hint of cheese 'n' onion - and with Nicole Kidman playing Mrs Corban.
I've been talking to a Hollywood prodoocer about this, and he agrees: the Nicole Kidman part achieves credibility only if she's eating the crisps in the bath. In reality, Mrs Corban says she was watching the Late Late Show, so maybe the earwig died of that, but this seems an unnecessarily terrible end.
In our film version, maybe we should have Ralph falling into the water, with Nicole promptly emptying the bath to save him - to hell with modesty!, she cries - before giving him the kiss of life. This either revives him, or he dies; we'll do market research to see which end people prefer. For the Japanese market, we'll probably electrocute them, α la hedgehog, while they're having sex, and they die horribly. For the US, the earwig will be an alien from the future.
Moral universe
For the French, the earwig will be Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mrs Corban will turn out be Simone de Beauvoir. Together in the bath, they discuss the meaning of hell within a post-modernist, deconstructed moral universe. Simone will then have sex with one of the crisps, and Jean-Paul will write an essay on the existential meaninglessness of soap.
For the English, the earwig will turn out to be David Beckham, who scores the winner in extra time.
For home consumption, the earwig will be a barrister at a tribunal, and it dies of over-eating.
A Walker's representative, Kevin Malone, told the Galway court that his company had built a £15 million plant to ensure that nothing untoward got into its products. However, the court then heard a tabloid newspaper story about a deep-fried frog which had once been found in a packet of Walker's crisps.
Ah yes, as we suspected: Jean-Paul Sartre.