THE BOB AND ECHO SHOW

Today when Echo and I were taking a Spring morning walk, we cut across the cascade of paddy terraces and took the road down through the forest on the other side. We'd gone about 20 meters when I saw a young monkey cut across the road ahead of us and then another; then some elders followed, drifting in the general direction of our garden, which always comes to mind when monkeys are around.

When we got down to the place where the dastardly marauders had crossed, we noticed that quite a few of them had gotten across and were hanging around in the trees waiting; on the other side of the road there were still a goodly bunch of the redfaced vandals who couldn't get across till we went by, so they were just sitting there on a bunch of logs, well into the forest, watching the Bob and Echo show on their version of tv.

Since that audience was closer to us, Echo pegged a rock at them but they didn't flinch an inch, since it landed about 30 meters before it reached them. She did the same again. The monkeys did the same again. I said to Echo 'They know it's a woman throwing so they're not intimidated.' Whereupon on behalf of men everywhere I picked up a rock and threw it at the pillaging denizens; it landed about 30 meters in front of them. I haven't thrown a rock in quite a while, I'm way out of practice, only a couple of snowballs all winter, there haven't been any monkeys around for a long time and so forth.

Anyway the shaggy visigoths (no offense intended to human Visigoths, who were eminently noble in their way and, as placation from the Roman Empire they had recently sacked, were privileged to occupy that part of Spain where my daughter was born) found this all mildly amusing; they looked at each other and gave that sort of anticipatory snicker often heard in human living rooms in the first few minutes of prime time. We did our best, but the Bob and Echo Show only managed to last a couple more minutes until the unscrupled simians lost interest or went off to get a snack and we were cancelled, with likely reruns and no residuals.

After we had walked further enough down the road, the rest of the massed marauders loped across and joined their fellows, still drifting in the general direction of our garden. I figured we'd better get home before they did, since the new shiitake are just coming out, so we hastened on in parallel with the path of the feral vagrants.

To be continued with what later happened in that regard...