Читать книгу Crap Days Out - Gareth Rubin - Страница 19

Quite what the dolphins think of this whole farrago is anyone’s guess. It seems a bit presumptuous to decide they have nothing better to do than tow what are essentially land-based animals around in the water. They have mackerel to catch for one thing. They don’t expect us to give them a piggy-back around Coventry Cathedral if they fancy knocking about outside their natural environment. Just think how stupid you would look in a cathedral with a dolphin on your back. ‘What’s that, Jeff?’ ‘It’s a dolphin on my back.’ ‘Thought it was.’

Swimming with dolphins makes as much sense as paddling with badgers or cooking with squirrels.

Despite this, people seem to think if they just leap out of a motorboat waving their arms like nobody’s business and attempt to grab on to a passing sea-mammal’s fin, the little chap will turn, smile kindly and ask where he wants to go, like an unusually smooth and wet taxi driver. They think that after a quick dip with a bottle-nosed dolphin all their deep-seated psychological issues will drift away in a sea of calm. Not a chance, sunshine. The dolphin will do his very best to drown you and that won’t help you at all. It might well make things worse – nearly drowned by a dolphin, it doesn’t sound positive.

Perhaps a clue that they are not 100 per cent behind the undertaking is the propensity of the squeaky hairless bastards to disappear as quickly as their fins will carry them at the first sight of some idiot in a wetsuit. And since there’s a fair-to-middling chance that if that dolphin does let you get close to it, it’s because it is actually a basking shark which could literally swallow you whole, you might just change your mind when you get close enough to realise just what you’ve done. Those stories you hear about dolphins protecting divers from shark attacks? Total propaganda. Any dolphin witnessing such an attack will do nothing but hang around on the sidelines watching and laughing as the stupid unwanted human gets what’s coming to him for messing about in shark-infested waters.

There’s a clue in the word ‘infested’. Nothing ‘infested’ is nice. You don’t get ‘balloon-infested’ parties. No one describes a summer as ‘holiday-infested’. Sharks, they ‘infest’ like it’s going out of fashion. Stay away from them and their snide dolphin mates.

And another thing, if dolphins are so clever how come:

a) They keep swimming into tuna nets

b) They haven’t invented anything. Not even spoons. Answer me that.