Free 69 for 1 by Alan Coren Page B

giraffe. It will almost
certainly have another giraffe standing beside it, for this is the season when they are searching for somewhere to mate. My advice is to tiptoe downstairs and move the car to a safe place.
    Now is the time when, in Tescos all across the land, you may expect to see short ginger customers jumping up and down in the six-items-or-less queues. Orangutans are impatient creatures, who,
should the checkout lady summon a supervisor to query the correct accounting of a bunch of bananas half-eaten en route to the till, may begin throwing trolleys. It is wise not to remonstrate, lest
the customer turn his attention to throwing you.
    As the hedgerows commence their lush seasonal burgeoning, be especially cautious when plucking wild flowers therefrom. The sinuous tendril you gently ease aside may well be a black mamba, that
spry little chappie whose clever camouflage is not his only fascinating feature: the venom of one particularly feisty example is recorded as having once accounted for an entire platoon of Gurkhas,
much to the relief of a beleagured Japanese gun crew who had been about to chuck themselves on their own bayonets.
    Similarly, with the trout season happily upon us, take particular care when casting for the plump speckled fellow lurking beside a floating log. The log could be out of there in a trice and have
your leg off before you know it.
    On a closing note, many readers have e-mailed me to express fears that our domestic cats may be threatened by all the ocelots, lynxes, servals and so forth which have escaped into the wild, and
enthusiastically bred (an Uxbridge gentleman has written to say that the nocturnal racket has made his wife stone deaf in one ear). The answer is, I’m afraid, that not only will some of our
British cats be killed, but also that others may be, how shall I put it, compromised. If you find that your own dear tabby has given birth to kittens able to slice open a tin of Whiskas with a
single swipe of their claw, I urge you to seek professional advice at your earliest convenience.

Plug Ugly
    J UNE 6. No coincidence there, then. But I am writing this on D-Day minus 1: I do not know what tomorrow will bring. I know
what it is supposed to be bringing. I have been anticipating it for a very long time, the planning has been meticulous, the preparation exemplary; and yet, once what tomorrow is bringing is
brought, who can guess what it will bring with it? Planning and preparation can go only so far. That is how it is with D-days.
    I have known for months that June 6 would be Delivery Day. Mrs Coren has it in writing. That is because it was all Mrs Coren’s idea. She wants the world to be a better place. Especially
for her, which is why she spent so much time and effort and money on getting the box fitted to our front wall. And the thing inside the box. The thing has to be inside a box, and the box has to
have a lock on it, because you have to stop people stealing what is coming into the thing. For the thing inside the box is a plug, and what is coming into it is electricity.
    Why would people want to steal the Corens’ electricity? To run their electric car. If the plug were not inside a locked box, when our electric car is not plugged into it but pottering
about on the electricity from which it is now unplugged, anyone could come along and plug their own car in. Hang on, you say, you have not got an electric car. Wrong: it is being delivered on June
6. By the time you read this, Mrs Coren will have plugged it in, and I shall be staring at it.
    I know what I shall see. Go to www.goinggreen.co.uk and you can see it, too. It is called a G-Wiz. That there is something of the cartoon about its name doesn’t stop there. Noddy would
love it: otherwise indistinguishable from his, this one has a roof. Mrs Coren tells me it will save congestion charges, parking meter fees, petrol costs, insurance payments, road tax, and the
planet. In that order. She tells me this while I