You look like a varanus prasinus

In Paris sometimes I feel like I’m an actress walking around the artificial set of my film (I’m certainly famous, the only problem is that no one realises it). Beautiful buildings press up against me. Trees line the edges of streets. Flowers are confined in their pots on window sills. The rest of nature is cordoned off in parks. Everything in its place – lights, camera, action.

On a visit to my native Sydney earlier this year after having been away for two years, one of the things that I noticed with my eyes cloudy with European winter, was the way that in Sydney nature has not been put in its place. There vegetation won’t be tamed to stay in pots and parks and can be found creeping all over the buildings, sprouting through cracks in the road, coiling around the wheels of your car. The copy on advertising billboards is covered cheekily by vines and weeds sprout through office keyboards.

Often when I put my hand into my letterbox in Paris without looking to see what’s inside first, I think to myself how I would never do that in Sydney, where who knows what deadly spider might be partying in there, ready to bite my big party pooper hand. In Paris the only spiders I’ve ever seen are spindly household midgets, the kind of spiders that couldn’t harm a jelly baby and which are, in any case, quickly gobbled up by my cat.

Of course although Australia has fourteen species of lethal snakes, including the Taipan-the most poisonous snake on earth- and a whole tribe of lethal spiders, it’s not like
when you grow up in Sydney you carry around anti-venom in your purse.
But when I lived there, accidently sitting on a blue-tongued lizard, huntsman spiders making out on my bed and fat cockroaches (the likes of which have never visited Paris) running up my leg, although scream-worthy events, were common occurences.

But something they have in Paris which they don’t have in Sydney is
Reptile’s World.

The name of the shop makes me swallow a giggle, like Toy World or something, for me it conjures up images of a supermarket where people wheeling trolleys browse around, adding a snake to their trolley, some turtles, some Varanus Prasinus and so on. But really it's just your average reptile shop.

I visited the shop recently and I am officially a fan of Varanus Prasinus. I’m certainly not one of those lizard-girls who walk around with lizards on their shoulders or poking out of their handbags, but these goggle-eyed green lizards, which climb trees with a dancer’s agility, won my winnable heart. They reminded me of about a million people I know.

But it was depressing to see a large iguana in a cage not much bigger than him (the sign said `not for sale' and I’m hoping this means that he’s just resting there for a day before he takes off on a package deal to the Caribbean).

I'm addicted to visiting zoos and peeking in at pet shops because it gives me the opportunity to be near animals I don't normally get to see. But when I see big, animated dogs trapped inside tiny glass boxes in those pet shops on the quai de la Mégisserie or tropical iguanas packed into cages in cosmopolitan pet shops I get teary and question whether I should actually visit these places.

I was just reading an article saying that reptiles live twice as long in captivity. It makes me think of what Woody Allen says in the film Annie Hall.

He recounts the conversation between two women where one says `Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.'
The other one says, `Yeah, I know; and such small portions. '
And then Woody says:
`Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering,
and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly'.

I think about that iguana stuck in a cage, full of loneliness, misery and suffering... and he gets to live twice as long!