Fantastic Mr. Fox
and a Saturday excursion
Fox
hunting became illegal here in the UK in 2005.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is so out-of-the-closet now that he made his film
début four years on. Relatives have even
moved into the heart of the capital.
_________________________
So,
I am minding my business early Saturday afternoon. Max and I are on Jesus Green, the park that
hugs the River Cam. It's a space made
for lazy days notwithstanding the grass tennis-courts, the skate-park and band-shell. It's a perfect day. The sky is blue. The sun, bright. And, the grass beneath our feet is so
verdant, it looks as if it might have been painted.
Max
is old now. He leaves his ball and
flying squirrel toy at home. These were
made to make him run; but, running now leaves him winded. Instead, he prefers simple and several rolls
on the green. Legs flying, as though
he's trying to dance on the clouds. It's
behaviour that he began in a bid to prolong his walks. Today, he's using it to entertain. Tourists have their cameras pointed at him.
We're
at the mid-point of a city-walkie.
Cambridge sits like a ball against the sinews of the River. A city-walkie follows the curve of the ball, passing
through every green space available to us.
It
begins at the far edge of Midsummer Common.
This is the wild where a small herd of beef cattle manage the land,
where old-fashioned one-ring circuses pitch tents, one after another, all
summer long. It's where old Guy Fawkes
will burn in effigy come the Fall. Max
likes the scent of the beasts. There's neither
a bull nor a circus colt to which he doesn't believe he is related.
The
mid-point, backing Jesus College, is Jesus Green. Beyond us, city-walkies continue between the river's
lower and upper locks. At points, we
will literally walk on water to enter the city.
Max loves this part of the walk as in the city lay the remains of the
party scene: spilled chips & vomit.
From there, it's over the only public foot-bridge on this side of the
city, up the college backs and into Coe Fen.
The Backs bear the last signs of segregation in Cambridge. "No dogs." they read. Pity, as here lay the bridges that cross the
river, should we need to cut a city-walkie short. The Fen is a semi-arid wetland where the
attraction for Max is another half-flink of cattle. Coe
is the old English word for cow.
Back
in the middle, Jesus Green begins just beyond the cattle guards beneath the
Victoria Avenue bridge. This marks the
spot where the last of great College boat-houses rests along the opposite
shore. It's the last safe spot for Max
to drink from the River. Embankments
further along grow steep. A misplaced
paw would see him tumble down, armadillo like, into the water. He has done this once, already.
I
am old, too. The cold snap means that my
knee freezes, locks-up as if I'm wearing metal-plate armour that's been left in
the rain. "Pour l'amour d'armure!" I curse it. Even
bending down to unleash Max brings a complaint from the knee. It pops with the sound of burst balloon.
There's
a bench not far from where Max teases the air with his up-turned legs. "He won't bolt", I tell myself,
taking a seat. It's no time before Max
is off on his own, nosing the base of trees near the city-side fence. His graffiti 'I was here', penned in the
invisible ink of pee, is marked as an invitation. It's no surprise, then, that we were soon
after surrounded: Otters — Bears — Bear
cubs — and, Foxes.
Don't
take this literally. It's a rather largish
crowd of gay men, half of them shirtless.
It is typical of the British spirit that, as long as the sun is shining,
England might as well be Ibiza or Miami.
Despite the autumnal chill, it's weather made to go shirtless, with
shorts and bare feet. Blankets are
thrown down. Feasts are laid. The bears and bear cubs have dropped
themselves onto the pitch. Pouring
Champaign. Devouring canapés. The otters have gone off to play with the
foxes.
I'm
not much for bears and their cubs. It's
the weight, not the hair. The otters are
cute in a bony sort of way. None of
these men are foxy. But, the foxes do
have an unmistakeable animal attraction.
They're dressed in Fantastic Mr. Fox costumes, complete with paws and
tails. "The Fursuiters are out for fun!" I hear one of them yell. Then, all of them run. It's pandemonium. Max takes notice. I don't realize how flawlessly he fits in,
until an otter howls, "Fox hunt!" and drops to his knees, pulling nerf™ guns from his picnic
basket. Suddenly, all of the otters have
nerf™ guns. And, nerf™
bullets are flying.
I'll
leave you there. Max and I moved
on. I was afraid that he was becoming a
bit too animated. I would have loved to
have seen how this ended, ... when the bears and bear cubs finished ransacking
their picnic baskets. You might like to
imagine that they'd fall back, belly up onto their blankets, sated. I, instead, imagined them still hungry,
turning on the foxes and devouring the otters.
"Hmm. Tastes like Chicken!" I can hear one of them
saying.
The
rest of our city walkie was anti-climatic.
_________________________
Afterwords. Irreverent and gay.
Should
you not be familiar the imaginarium of gay slang, I introduce you to some of its
woodland creatures.
A
bear is a large, somewhat rotund hairy man.
Sometimes, when travelling on their own, a bear is easily mistaken for a
middle-aged heterosexual man who has simply let himself go; ... which,
incidentally is usually the reason he travels on his own. His cub is a younger version of himself.
Otters
are thin, hairy men of any age, though nature often takes its course, turning
otters into bears as years wear on. "Don't
make fun of our father's good looks", my mother used to say. "You'll grow into his skin one
day." She may have been right, but
I'll still make fun of his come-over.
Foxes
have no place in gay culture. There are
wolves, feral and inclined toward animalistic sexual naturalism. They come out only after dark, and, are
sometimes thought to be myth. But, there
are definitely no foxes. Hence, the costumes.
Chicken,
by the way, belong to the group of people usually defined by British heterosexual
slang as Birds, albeit rendered
simply 'nubile'. You-are-what-you-eat has become cliché. A sacrament less transubstantiation than
supplication. The desire to be
transformed never gets old. Some even
pray for it.
