Super Honest Taxi Drivers and Errant Hippos (part 2)

(Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)


This is Dirk in London Zoo being counted in the annual census, but where shall we start?

Errant Hippos, Honest John or .................. Tobogganing Policemen?

Or in 1985, at Washington Square in New York City?

Ok, Honest John it is.

It was September (1985) and I was in New York because a group of performers from London had been invited by Time Out magazine (UK) and The Village Voice magazine (USA).

We did a bit of this and a bit of that, but in between my partner and I busked incessantly in Washington Square Park and made a wad of money.

For some naïve reason I chose to keep all of this in a hat on the bedside table in the hotel - admiring the sculpture like arrangement and preferring that to the anonynimiy of the room’s safe.

With each day the green dollar pile increased until one late return to hotel and sleep revealed that a chambermaid had chosen to get rich quick.

She had left me the hat.

No Honest John in the Grammacy Park Hotel then.

On Christmas Eve just passed – Honest John, a certain Mohammad Asadujjaman originally from India – discovered that a customer had forgotten and left 21 thousand dollars in cash in a bag on the backseat of his taxi.

Like me, 25 years earlier, the cash-careless customer went firstly to the management and then ended up at the Police precinct where we were both informed that there was no chance of getting the money back – and what were we thinking of anyway idiot!

Except maybe things have changed in 25 years – you can read the story here.

And whilst we are on the subject of Police lets spare a thought for the good officers who surprised and excited by the snow in England last week, stopped the van, took out their riot shields and started tobogganing.

There are many interesting aspects to the story - which you can read here - their child like reaction to a world turned white, the adult like response of their superiors, the initiative of the photographer who put the film onto Youtube but my own favourite is the fact that the person filming them had been trying to toboggan down the same slope in a kayak!

Which brings us to Nikica, who didn’t have a kayak and probably wouldn’t be able to use one even if she did, but was able to swim to freedom when heavy rain flooded her pen at the zoo in Montenegro.

Nikica – you can read her story here – is thus an escaped hippopotamus and strangely considered by local authorities as “one of the world's most dangerous species”.

Judging by the photo of her scoffing a baguette I would say that only bakers need fear her and she remains as far from the top of my list of things that can kill you as tortoises like Dirk.

There has been a lot of talk in these pages lately - well a little - about mosquitoes.

Apparently a simultaneous attack of 1.2 million would prove fatal so they WOULD make it on MY list.

Sharks certainly would and personally I wouldn’t go anywhere near one.

But at the top of my list, just after hornets, are crocodiles.

Now, if the crocodiles start swimming out onto the streets you won’t see me for dust.