DINOSAUR PROBLEMS

I’ve been troubled by dinosaurs – specifically by the variety known as Tyrannosaurus Rex – twice this week, causing me to believe that the most ferocious of the “terrible lizards” has really got it in for be, despite being long extinct in all places apart from those lost islands that occasionally turn up in old movies.

I went to bed the other evening, but found that I couldn’t sleep, but really wasn’t in the mood for picking up one of the mountain of books and making a start on that whilst so many others lay in a “semi-read” state.

Looking about the gloom of the room, at the very edge of the glow being given out by the bedside lamp, my eye alighted upon a little gift that I had once been given, and which had since lain untroubled atop one of the drawer units – one of those tiny little “Build Your Own Dinosaur” kits of the sort that you can usually find in museum gift shops.

“Aha!” thought my non-slumbering mind “That’ll only take five minutes and might take my mind off things!”

And so, I leapt from under the duvet and grabbed the box, opened it up, and began the construction of my tiny little Tyrannosaur.

AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER and several rebuilds and swear words later, and it still didn’t really work properly.

I kept on telling myself that this really ought not to be beyond my capabilities because it was really meant for children (“Over threes” if I was to believe what was printed on the packaging). I made allowances for myself for having larger fingers than might normally be expected to be dealing with the tiny fiddly pieces, but still couldn’t award myself a Krypton Factor of anything other than zero.

It didn’t help that I had to get up and rummage about the house and look for a tool to pop the tiny, TINY, punch holes through, nor that I kept on putting the wrong parts in the wrong place and got the thing almost finished before noticing that I’d put the little motor in back to front.

Also, trying to build this thing on a less than one hundred percent static duvet, in the half light of a bedside light, and all of the shadows it brings, probably didn’t help either, but those are mere excuses, and whilst I was able to finally go to sleep knowing that all of the parts were finally in place, somehow the tops of the legs didn’t quite slot over the positioning pins correctly, and this troubled me.

I was proven right to be troubled when I did finally manage to wind up the little motor the following day (the noise it made would have not gone down too well the night before, I fear…) and his little legs bounced all over the place as he did a little jig, firmly and resolutely on the spot like a hopeful busker.

“And I thought it would be a nice, relaxing little present for you…” was the disappointed retort when I tactlessly explained my woes.

 

Meanwhile, the OTHER dinosaur problem found me trying to wrangle out a few words for Manchester Museum’s “Stan” for the “Talking Statues” competition and finding that my word-wrangling skills are really not what they once were.

Still, I had a bit of a go and sent something off, getting stupidly fretful when I didn’t get a response to my email fore a while, and then mentally kicking myself around the room when I suddenly became aware, several days later, that the “Talking Statues” project is actually a mobile phone thing, where you bleep one of those mysterious square things (which I don’t really fathom) and the statue supposedly calls you back.

So, I may very well have missed the point with my huge Brian Blessed-style bellowings to the gallery, so that was a bit of a waste of time, although, once the competition has been well and truly lost, I may publish those words here some time - Just for the record, you understand…?

Dinosaurs, eh…? Can’t live with ’em… luckily we don’t have to.