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the savoury taste of lizard droppings

November 17, 2003

At last! I finally know what lizard shit tastes like!

This weekend I had an extremely bad cold, which necessitated: (a) spending almost the whole weekend in bed, and (b) drinking a lot of hot boiled-up ginger and honey to make my throat feel better. At some point on Saturday afternoon, I threw a spoon into an empty coffee cup that was sitting in the sink, and then, sipping my ginger drink, realised it needed a little more honey, and, therefore, that I needed the spoon again. I fished the spoon out of the cup I’d just thrown it into, and – because I was carrying a hot mug with my hands – put the spoon in my mouth. “That’s funny.” I thought, “This spoon has acquired a strangely savoury flavour* in the thirty seconds or so that it occupied that cup. I’m not sure I like this.” So I turned round and looked in the cup, and found the source of the flavour – a small lizard turd sitting at the bottom of the (otherwise dry and empty) cup. A turd on which my spoon had, briefly, rested. Obviously, I spent the next five or ten minutes spitting and rinsing, and brushing my teeth with nice, minty-fresh toothpaste.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, to be quite frank.

I should say, though, that the presence of lizard shit in my sink is not, in itself, surprising – my house is full of lizards. They shriek like birds, which is annoying from time to time, but they also eat insects, and so, on the whole, they are a good thing.

Except when they shit on my utensils.

*in case you’re interested, it tastes a little like mushrooms, only somehow… earthier.

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