Read and digest the piece Collapsed Puffin, below. Then reread it and redigest it. If necessary, rereread it and reredigest it. Now, using a sharpened pencil and a sheet of foolscap paper, write a variation of the piece from the point of view of the companion, Squiffy. You should aim to address the following matters:
1. Why do you think the narrator keeps nagging Squiffy regarding his goggles, ear-corks, nasal icicles, and furry boots?
2. Which of the pair do you think is the pilot of the chopper?
3. Does the collapsed puffin actually exist or is it an hallucination borne of cold, exhaustion, or even piblokto?
4. Do you think the narrator’s love of puffins, guillemots, auks, and bonxies is sincere and unreserved, or is it an affectation?
5. Can you recall any nursery rhymes in which bonxies appear?
When you have finished, turn over the piece of foolscap paper and, on the reverse, write an even more compelling variation from the point of view of the collapsed puffin.
I have considered these questions carefully, and arrived at the following conclusions:
1. Why do you think the narrator keeps nagging Squiffy regarding his goggles, ear-corks, nasal icicles, and furry boots? – Pure jealousy. Squiffy is obviously a male catwalk model, attired in the latest ‘edgy’ Karl Lagerfeld and Vivienne Westwood fashion accessories, far beyond the purchasing power of the humble narrator.
2. Which of the pair do you think is the pilot of the chopper? – Trick question, there is no helicopter, but they have with them a choice selection of axes, whose use is temporarily impeded by the cold.
3. Does the collapsed puffin actually exist or is it an hallucination borne of cold, exhaustion, or even piblokto? – It is simply a Hitchockian plot device, a McPuffin, if you will, designed to lure the reader into a quiet corner, where they can be fiendishly murdered by a selection of improbable oiks.
4. Do you think the narrator’s love of puffins, guillemots, auks, and bonxies is sincere and unreserved, or is it an affectation? – Sincere, perhaps, but currently under investigation by a specialist animal-protection unit at Scotland Yard, otherwise known as the Auk–ward Squad.
5. Can you recall any nursery rhymes in which bonxies appear? – No, but they have a walk-on part in the Arctic-flavoured Jethro Tull song Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day, from their 1974 LP War Child, for no good reason at all.
Well done Max, all these answers are correct, apart from the ones that are incorrect.
Although “Skating Away …” was not a nursery rhyme, another Jethro Tull song served as one. When I was a tot, my mother would chant “Aqualung” at me, repeatedly and relentlessly, until I got her to stop by feigning sleep.
A cautionary tale, to be sure, Frank.
As a child, I didn’t experience any Tull songs as lullabies, but during religious instruction at my school, we were tormented by photos of Ian Anderson and the singular apparel covering his loins, described in the Bible as ‘the piece of cod which passeth all understanding’.
I have sharpened my pencil..