Special Offer of the Day

I have been very busy recently making lots of arrangements for our next travel extravaganza. It is one of the things we do - we travel. We spend wad loads of cash on long holidays to exotic places to wallow in beauty and to seek out the most interesting and cutest animals that money can find. While people can always understand my obsession with cute - who can't resist an adorable baby elephant, an orang that is vaguely reminiscent of your youngest brother - must be the ginger thing, a kangaroo that will not take no for an answer and insists upon getting into your camper van, despite being threatened by Mr. DBM wielding a tyre iron, a flying fox dangling off your arm, it's beautiful brown eyes staring right into your eyes, oh, I could go on and on and on and on...........but I can see you might get bored. I can also hear you cry - "Hang on a minute, what this about a flying fox - a bat, cute!?!" See, here is where I start veering off from the general population in my animal obsession. I really do think that flying foxes are very cute. I also happen to think that weevils could possibly possess one of the most endearing faces in the animal kingdom. See, I like different, unusual, odd, rare, peculiar and out of the ordinary plants and animals.

I have been known to trek through the forests of Borneo to find the world's largest and, probably, ugliest and smelliest flower. Who wouldn't want to see a flower that looks and smells like a rotting hunk of meat? In Africa, when others were demanding elephants, me, I wanted to see vultures and I got really excited when we saw a secretary bird. It goes around stomping on lizards and snakes and, no, it doesn't do shorthand. I am overjoyed by sightings of antlions and pitcher plants, cockroaches and geckos, komodo dragons and any kind of frog, toad, salamander or newt. And I haven't even started on the other two thirds of our planet - underwater. Sea snakes and leafy sea dragons, pygmy sea horses and warty frogfish, not to mention night dives to see spanish dancers and spawning coral. I could spend all day trying to communicate with a cuttlefish. I plan entire holidays just to catch glimpses of sharks, be they great whites or whale sharks, wobbegongs or snaggletooths. In fact, the whole starting point for our gallivanting around the Galapagos is so that we can see the schools of hammerheads before their fins end up in someone's soup!

This has led me to wonder what fostered this fascination with all creatures great and small. I suspect the blame must lie in the direction of a certain Sir David Attenborough. Like most children, I spent many hours in front of the TV and, given the chance, I would be watching nature programs. My siblings may have had other ideas and I am now very capable of giving a mean deadleg due to hours of endless practice while fighting for control of the TV. Mr. DBM claims that he never fought with his family - just the odd bout of Greco - Roman wrestling. Now I have to wonder - whose family was the normal one? I have always assumed that siblings had all out fights about most things, but apparently not!?!

So, in my quest for unusual animals, and to fulfil every biologists dream, we are heading to South America and the Galapagos! Just think of all the odd animals I can find there. Marine iguanas (the only marine lizards) and all of the finches that allegedly inspired Darwin to come up with his Theory of Natural Selection, including the vampire finch - honestly, I kid you not, there is a vampire finch. They are particularly fond of the blood of my brother's favourite Galapagos attraction, the boobies. I keep trying to explain to him that they are birds, but whenever they are mentioned he zones out and I lose him for a while. There are the giant tortoises, flamingos and pelicans and my all time favourite and the cutest of birds, the Galapagos penguins, right on the equator! And, of course, let's not forget those hammerheads..........

The whole point of this post is not to make you jealous about my next holiday or bore you to death with a list of 1000 animals to see before you die. In fact, I am getting to the bit where something bugs me. When I tell someone what Mr. DBM and I are doing for our holidays, the normal response is: "Oooooh, aren't you lucky?" Well, that really bugs me. I will admit that my childhood upbringing had little to do with me. I did have a great childhood, thanks to my parents and, I can now see, although I couldn't at the time because we were too busy fighting, to my brothers and sister. But, I would like to think that a lot of the rest was not luck. I worked damned hard. I didn't go to a great school, but I worked hard at the school I did go to. As a student, I didn't spend all my time drinking beer and protesting student loans. I actually worked to get my degree. I then moved out to Canada and I was lucky to meet Mr. DBM - who had also done everything possible to get a good job with a good wage. No luck there. In reality, the main reason that we have the time and money to spend has nothing to do luck - although, wait, perhaps it has, if you count bad luck. The bad luck is that we can't have children. There are lots of downsides to this, the most important one being who the hell is going to look after us when we are old and smelly? But, there are definitely upsides. Loads of cash that doesn't have to be spent on nappies, food, electronic gadgets and education. No need for an inheritance. We don't have to worry about ruining the planet for our children or our children's children. As far as I am concerned, I have done my bit to save the planet by not having kids! Still, I can't help but wonder what life would have been like if we had been able to produce some little DBMs.......

So, the next time that I tell you that I am spending an arm, leg and right ear (the left one is too damaged to sell or trade) on a holiday, maybe you should be saying "Oooooh, aren't you unlucky!" And this finally leads us to the Special Offer of the Day - One exotic holiday to the Galapagos, an expensive camera to capture all those magical moments and cute and not so cute animals and a brand new 42", high definition TV to view all those wonderful photos. But wait, that's not all - I will also throw in an almost new car - how's that for a deal? How can anyone resist? And how much is all this going to cost you? Not four, not even three children. Hell, I am not even asking for two - just your first born is all that it will cost you!

Please note, this offer is not open to anyone with children between the ages of 13 and 21. You can keep them!