ram: more elaborate procedures than Flaviu’s, which merely involved chewing through a cage.
I set off in the opposite direction to the prison, towards South Hessary Tor. It was a curious experience temporarily living inside the mind of a lynx, as it not only made me quite good at tracking but gave me a strong craving for chamois. You don’t get chamois in west Devon and I am a vegetarian so I settled for the packet of crisps in my rucksack. The packet was one of those with GRAB BAG written on it, a thoughtful and liberating gesture from the manufacturers granting permission for assertive action to people like me who’d previously been hesitant around crisps and afraid to admit what we truly wanted. I climbed the tor and scanned the blasted and desolate surroundings for the lynx. I could not see the lynx. I sat for a small number of minutes and admired the new iron cobra head on top of the tor, which stood next to the stump of the previous iron cobra head. The previous cobra head – one of four erected in 1867 to mark the boundary between Walkhampton Parish and the Forest of Dartmoor – had been snapped off by thieves a couple of years earlier. I puzzled over the mentality that had led to this surreal, nonsensical act of vandalism, conducted out of sight of any building save for the abandoned farmhouse down near Foxtor Mire. Did the thieves later transport the cobra head to Bude on the north coast and sell it at the sprawling Sunday car boot sale there, being haggled down from an ambitious show price to the one they’d actually hoped for? Or perhaps they listed it on eBay, with a ‘Buy it now’ teaser price, in the hope that somebody just happened to be using ‘cobra’, ‘blacksmith’, ‘retro’ and ‘Duchy of Cornwall’ as search terms that week?
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