Saturday, March the 18th, 2006

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

Squirrels : Emissaries From the Beyond?

In the latest issue of the superb Chat! magazine, Ruth The Truth (the “psychic agony aunt”) has this advice for Janice from Pembroke: “the squirrel in your garden has a message”*. Skeptics, nay-sayers and other blighters will retort that the squirrel's message is likely to be “Give me some nuts” or “Give me some more nuts”, but Ruth The Truth—and the squirrel-fanciers among us at Hooting Yard—know better.

I can speak only from my own experience, but it has long been apparent to me that squirrels are in fact emissaries from The Beyond. All that hectic twitching and scampering is evidence not merely of a high metabolic rate but of the fact that their tiny squirrel brains are jam-packed with pulsating psychic energy. I do not deny that they want nuts, either to nibble right away or to put in storage for a long hard winter, but that is not the whole story. Consider those bushy tails. Have you ever wondered why they stick upwards, rather than thumping along the ground, like the tails of so many other animals? It is because each hair of a squirrel's tail ends in a minuscule receptor, designed by nature to pick up and capture some of the billions of psychic messages swirling around the ether. These spooky thought-phenomena are invisible, fugitive and volatile, unnoticed by us humans with our puny minds, but they are the very atmosphere of the squirrels' world. Those quivering psychic nodes in their tails strain to pick up signals from those who have passed over to the Other Side, be they other squirrels, stoats, weasels, birds, insects, or indeed humans.

Ruth The Truth, in Chat!, does not divulge what message the squirrel in her garden has for Janice from Pembroke, and it would be no doubt foolish to try to guess. But I am foolish sometimes. Perhaps Janice is a widow, and her departed husband has sent reassuring news from Heaven, or, more worryingly, a stricken plea from the Pit of Doom and Desolation. Maybe Janice had a pet swan which succumbed to bird flu** and it has sent, via the squirrel in the garden, news from that place to which perished swans are consigned when they leave the mortal world. It could even be that Janice from Pembroke trod accidentally upon a dozing bee on her garden path last summer, and the bee is telling her she is forgiven.

It is unlikely that Janice from Pembroke is a keen reader of both Chat! and Hooting Yard, but if she is, I would like to invite her to share with us the message she has received from the squirrel in her garden. It may be, indeed, that she is unable to translate the message from the argot of squirrels in which it is couched, and here we can help, for Mrs Gubbins is a skilled interpreter of these things.

*NOTE : I am indebted to Charlie Brooker of The Guardian for alerting me to this important matter, in a piece entitled Supposing … The mainstream's as mad as it seems to be.

**NOTE : Janice from Pembroke could have avoided her swan's bird flu death had she paid careful attention to Saving Your Swan (see 20th February 2006).