Have you ever wondered why there are so few arks around? Like cravats and gentlemen and fake wood panelling on the sides of TV sets, you just don’t see as many arks as you used to.
I used to wonder about it, but no longer. Building an ark, I have learnt, is no easy job. It’s not all rum toddies and wearing a sailor suit and making sure the mice aren’t seated next to the pythons. Until you’ve tried to build an ark, you don’t know from trouble.
With all the rain we’ve been having, I thought it might be wise to prepare for the worst. But this immediately raised certain questions. The first of which being: how do you build an ark? The instructions handed down to Noah are sketchy at best.
Three decks, a door in the side, made from cypress wood – It might as well be a Norwegian sauna. It would be different if it were an ark of the covenant – there are specifications aplenty when it comes to arks of the covenant. I turned of course to the Internet, but would you believe that a research instrument that can produce 2 138 sites devoted to the career of Jan-Michael Vincent can produce not a single practical tip when it comes to saving your family and all the creatures of the earth from a cataclysmic deluge?
Where do you lay your hands on cypress wood these days? Let alone enough for an ark 300 cubits long by 50 wide? “Three hundred cubits of cypress? Can’t help you there,” said my wood supplier. “How about pine? I can give you all the cubits of pine you can carry and I’ll throw in free undercoat.” He’s taken to phoning me twice a day and sending over catalogues of wood. Evidently there is quite some profit margin on 300 cubits of pine.
Worse is selecting who will go on board. I soon gave up on that two-of-every-animal idea. With cypress wood at a premium, I just couldn’t see my way to clear to finding space for 50 million species of hungry beasts and their food. Although, in retrospect, I suppose the tapeworms could have shared space with the pigs. Ditto the lice and the Simunye presenters.
But what about the protozoans? How would I tell them apart from the amoebae? And I didn’t relish the prospect of having to grow plantations of bamboo and eucalyptus just to feed those damn pandas and koalas.
Besides which, confidentially, there are some animals I’m simply not interested in saving. Poodles, for instance, and I’ve never been mad about llamas. Snooty, if you ask me. And those ungrateful termites need expect no favours from a man with a wood-related overdraft.
So without the animals there will be space for a few extra humans. I ruled out immediate relatives, since the family genes will have an able representative in my own good self, but there the headache begins. Who else deserves to be preserved?
Gordon Mulholland, obviously, and Joost van der Westhuizen (it will be a golden opportunity to re-establish the Springboks as world champions, and they’re a one-man team at the best of times). That woman from the Morkels adverts. The Venezuelan ladies’ volleyball team. Snukie Zikalala for light relief. I’m tempted to take Wayne Ferreira and no other tennis players, just so that he can win a grand slam, but forty days and forty nights is a long time to spend under one roof with a freckled cry-baby. It’s all too much for me. For a 600-year-old man, Noah did quite a job.