The more-than-amateur herpetologist Dr Peter Room pulled a neat trick at CSIRO back when I was a boffin and not long after he infamously birthed my love of snakes by forcing into my clammy hands a python, now seventeen feet long in the retelling (from two columns ago).
Those famous weatherproof outdoor barbecue settings, the ones where the wooden table is connected to the two long benches either side, are always a bother to clamber out of at the best of times.
Our group of scientists had our own setting for morning tea each day, a shoulder-to-shoulder gaggle of pure nerd, while the dung beetle scientists sat at theirs and kept the flies off us in summer.
Picture it: there’s mugs of coffee everywhere, Iced Vo-Vo crumbs and 10 of us nattering about test tubes and slide rules.
Peter then casually plonked an almost empty pillowcase onto the table top without anyone noticing it — until it moved with the ‘almost’ bit starting to wriggle out.
It took a good half foot or so of a juvenile diamond python to appear before people caught sight.
And what a calamity of legs and arms and watches snapping from their wrist bands, flying dentures and coffee mugs throwing their contents across white faces that were too dumb struck to scream although I did hear a decent fart squeak out from somewhere.
The python calmly slid toward an upturned coffee mug and wrapped around it.
The crowd gathered inside at a reinforced double-glazed security window and looked back at Peter and I sitting there.
I took a sip from my coffee.
“So what’s the weekend looking like for you?”
Such fun.
My cat caught a baby green tree snake the next week and never forgave me as I hung the captive serpent’s knotted pillowcase from the washing line before its release back at work.
Said cat sat there for 18 hours on watch and glared at me whenever I passed by, and in response I hung the bag back again with a carrot in it just so she could invest a few more vigilant days. Idiot.
Once I zippered up a small brown tree snake into a ‘smalls’ laundry bag and hid it in my golf clubs.
I then feigned the ole ‘oh-I-forgot-my-ball’ trick at the 14th tee and my weekly partners watched as I went through a bit of a routine while secretly unzipping the bag: ‘tees, no ... spare glove, no ... snake ... no’ before flinging the thing at them. ‘Ah, here’s my ball!’
Fences were climbed.
Or another day when my golf gang (oddly, still happy to join me) lost sight of me, only to see me eventually in the rough, my attempts at unfurling from my ankle a rather large and dark green tree snake, hopping backwards until I fell into the long grass.
I put it out of harm’s way and in gratitude the bugger chased me and my golf buggy all the way to the green, where the thing finally negotiated a climb up my golf bag where it gave all the clubheads a big squeeze before gliding away.
We laughed! Well, I did: car doors were slamming and engines starting.
When it comes to snakes, the loudest lectures seem to comprise: ‘just leave it alone’, which is fair when there is no threat, but all my dalliances have had the sole purpose to relocate the things away from people — usually my children.
One glided into the back of a church service and man, you could have played the Benny Hill music over the top. But when they clapped, it was only because the next song was starting.
Off on a country walk with my seven-year-old son we stumbled across a rather large copperhead having a nap. Naturally I wanted to —
“Walk away from the snake, Dad — walk awaaaaay from the snake,” complete with hand movements to draw someone back. Funny kid.
And the finger wagging never stopped.
Right up to — and particularly, including — that one day that many said would come.
Next week, the inevitable.