Look, I saw a BIG snake - not a flipping 'slow worm'

Everybody has a phobia or two don’t they?



Spiders and heights often top the phobia ‘hit list’ but I know of perfectly stable and decent people who are extremely wary of such unusual items as buttons and bananas. Such phobias don’t have to be rational –- they just exist whether we want them to or not.



My phobia, however, is entirely rational and I think people who don’t suffer from it are the truly irrational ones.



I refer of course to snakes.



I just can’t stand the pointless little blighters and that is why it came as something of a shock to come face-to-vile-little-face with my first ever wild one on what should have been a peaceful Sunday afternoon.



I was out walking my dog, Snoopy, in a field near the Wiltshire village of Holt. With the Ipod in the ears and the sun on my back all seemed well with the world until Snoopy started sniffing around what looked like a small black tyre.



Suddenly the ‘tyre’ burst into life, uncoiled itself and revealed that it was a huge, black serpent disguising itself as a harmless tyre in a way that only something as fiendish and (literally) lowdown as a snake could do.



I thought this was time to run – sadly my dog thought it was a time to chase and it took some time to coax the daft ‘mutt’ away from the enormous python-like creature that had shattered the peace of our walk.



In something of a (perfectly understandable) panic I then headed off and met a number of other dog walkers whom I urgently warned about the gigantic and quite possibly man-eating slimy beast that was on their path.



Alarmingly no one seemed the least bit worried (were they mad?) and one foolishly unperturbed lady said ‘I wouldn’t worry – it is probably only a slow worm’.



A what? A worm? This was a freakishly long and clearly deadly brute – to compare it to a ‘worm’ was like saying those who had encountered the shark in Jaws had merely been terrified by a big silver haddock.



Madness.



Strangely, however, in the days that followed several people agreed with this crazed ‘worm’ theory’. I had personally never even heard of a slow worm and yet people said ‘they are nothing to fret over, they are just legless lizards’. Legless lizards? Isn’t that exactly what a nasty little snake is?



So, I feel it is my duty to warn others in this area that there is clearly a mass of these gargantuan scaly things around and a bizarre conspiracy to pass off God’s biggest mistake (the snake) as something as innocuous as a humble worm.



And talking of God, what was it that wrecked the Garden of Eden? Yes, that is right – a snake. The writing was on the wall from Genesis.



A worm? Pah.

Movies, Marley and magic moments

I am, and always have been, a film buff and this week has given me two great reminders as to why I so enjoy movies and the cinema.

The first came on Saturday when I went to the Odeon in Bath to see the new romcom movie Marley & Me.

On the surface this isn’t the kind of film that would normally get me through the Odeon’s door but as a proud owner of an extremely mischievous labrador (that's my dog Snoopy pictured here as an innocent looking pup - oh boy has she changed!!!!) I was intrigued to see the film version of John Grogan’s book.

The film was pretty good (I won’t go much further than that), but why it had an impact on me in a ‘this-is-why-I-love-the cinema’ kind of way is that it produced a wonderful collective moment.

Without going into too much detail, although this is a lightly comic piece, there are a couple of scenes which do (quite spectacularly) tug at the old heart-strings and this is where watching a film in a cinema leaves seeing it at home on the TV for dead.

As we watched the somewhat sad events unfold on screen, I started to hear the odd snuffle. This snuffle started to grow into what sounded like something of an epidemic and soon we were all left in an uncomfortable silence broken only by people quietly letting their emotions show or desperately trying not to with fake coughs and yawns.

OK, you could have felt a little bit manipulated by all the schmaltz – but it still worked very powerfully.

Being in a cinema when emotions like this are expressed really does have a power. Whether it’s hearing a whole audience laughing hysterically or sharing that stunned silence at the end of a movie when nobody really wants to move (I certainly sensed that after The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas), this experience is something to behold.

Probably my favourite example of this goes way back to when I did my training as a journalist in Sheffield at the time ET came out. About 20 of us young reporters made a pilgrimage to see the movie and I should think half of these would-be cynical old hacks were blubbing like babies as that somewhat ugly alien looked like it was dying. Better still, and this still remains a one-off in my experience, the moment ET took Elliot’s bike off the ground and into the sky to avoid the police, half the audience stood up and cheered. It was an amazing spontaneous moment which reminded us again of the unique magic of the cinema.

Two days after seeing Marley, I spent a very enjoyable evening at the wonderful Little Theatre in Bath for one of their superbly organised film quizzes. It is always good to be in the presence of people who know their onions – and trust me, many people at this quiz were practically full-time onion producers.

We thought we had a crack team (me, our business reporter Rupert Hall, our leisure reporter Dan Biggane and my proud film snob son Oliver) and we went under the great name of The Bath Chronicles of Riddick. That name, however, turned out to be one of the few good decisions we made all night as we went on to crash and burn and muster a score of just 37 per cent.

I knew we were in trouble when, anticipating that we would get a question such as ‘Name the characters in the Magnificent Seven’ (pictured left) I asked one of our number (Dan) and he said ‘The Hulk’ as he thought they were a super hero team.

Despite (or maybe even because) we struggled a bit, we really enjoyed the night and it felt great to be in the presence of people (like) us who truly love their movies.

Next on my film agenda is the Brian Clough movie – The Damned United. Bet that won’t make me cry. ..