Eureka! That’s a nice name for a girl, isn’t it? And a natural progression, methinks, on all these Storms and Summers gaily trotting around clutching Daddy’s cycle-gloved hand in breakfast places on a Sunday morning. If you have been hanging out under Julius Malema’s bar of soap and not paying the slightest bit of attention, I am dead keen to become a father. And should the old chromos produces a girl child, I shall call her Eureka.
Not because I don’t like the name Jane. Or because I absolutely dig the way “Eureka Hatman” scans… but because, should Eureka get lost while my gaze is disturbingly locked on making sure my bike doesn’t get nicked while having a Full House at some trendy breakfast place on a Sunday morning, and I go into an entertaining panic and shout out her name, all of the other breakfasting cyclist daddies might come running over to see what it is I’ve discovered. I always wanted to be an inventor.
Or Epiphany. Epiphany Hatman. Nice. I might save that one for my son. Double the fun at public breakfasts.
But I digress. What I really want to relate to you today is how I shouted “Eureka!” while having an epiphany over breakfast at Hatman Mansions this morning. You see, a startling revelation came my way at exactly the same time as my fishpaste-on-toast.
The BBC’s Earth News reported to me that, contrary to what all of us bar David Attenborough (because he knows absolutely everything) thought, pet dogs don’t rely on smell to identify the arrival home of their owners. No way, Jose (assuming Jose has a dog). Your mutt, in fact, checks you out, bru, and tunes himself “Hey, that looks like the grumpy git who usually feeds me that Hill’s Science Plan low-in-polyunsaturated-fats and high-in-Omega 3, 6 and 9-oils crap when I’d much rather chow a Steers burger. I’d better pretend to be excited.”
Yes, your “best friend” recognises you by looking at your face. Bona fido. Did you get that? No, not the face thing, stupid. My use of the words “Bona fido” instead of “Bona fide“, which would have been the correct terminology. You know why I did that, don’t you? Yes. Play on words. That’s right. Good. i also feel that there’s a place for humour, no matter how woefully executed, in South Africa. And I can’t tell you how chuffed I am that you’re with me on this one.
If you’re still with me, I think it’s time (because, according to The Most Important Things To Try To Remember While Blogging, a book I wrote earlier this year, blogposts should always – and this is non-negotiable – feature a still or moving image really early on in the post to hold the attention of the ADD-addled people who view blogs and I’ve left this very, very late) to show you a dog that is plainly very happy to see its master after recognising her by LOOKING at her. Not after smelling her, OK? OK.
Here we go…
Lick, lickety, lic… oops!
Sorry. I have no idea how that little snap slipped in. Google Search can be very unreliable at times. Let’s try again…
There. That’s more like it. A dog smiles longingly at its owner after assessing his facial detail.
As I said, this has been an epiphany for me. It explains why my Jack Russells have stopped attacking me when I stumble in dronk at 3am. Since I started taking the precaution of wearing a burkha.
* Source: BBC Earth News
Fred Hatman (AKA Howard Donaldson) knew he wanted to be newspaper journalist at age 13. He has worked as a reporter and sub-editor for the Daily News and Cape Times, both based in South Africa and Wimbledon News, Today, London Daily News, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror, all based in London .
