Drusillas and the Escaped Llama

Two hours ago the phone rang. Having failed to grasp the receiver and dropped it behind the television cabinet in a moment of tired oafishness, I then had to scramble amongst the furry dust to find the voice of Phillip Miles. "A llama's escaped from Drusillas Zoo," he said excitedly, "I thought you'd like to know." This titbit of interesting and obscure information was the entirety of his conversation with a brief lowdown on how the police were trailing Mr Llama included; perhaps the unusually spelt hairy one was attempting to find his or her home in the Andes. Whatever the reasons for the llama's flee, I enjoy the fact that when Phill heard this piece of news, his first thought was to contact me.

I have since trawled the internet for further details, but it seems that the incident is shrouded in secrecy with not a whiff of it on the Drusillas website or anywhere else Google has sent me.

The llamas escape, whilst perhaps just a figment of a tired nurse's imagination, has taken me back to a time a little over a year ago when my fondness for llamas came to a culmination when I took a llama for a walk. My sister had given me the birthday present of a walk with a llama and so I turned up at the Ashdown Forest Llama Park to take Toby for a stroll. There was a llama who shared my name, Dave, but the llama park worker said that our personalities were ill-suited, which seemed to me to be something of a presumption considering she had only met me moments before. What can it have been about Dave the Llama that meant that we were likely to argue? If I had taken him for a jaunt, would I have ended up with a face-full of llama phlegm? Or, was the llama park attendant misjudging both of us and would we have, in reality, got along splendidly and found that we had much in common? I will never know, but I will not complain as Toby was a perfectly adequate companion apart from an early roll around which slightly unnerved me.

Perhaps the escapee, if he is still on the loose, is looking for a llama-friendly home, a like-minded person who knows the joys of wandering through misty glens. If so, perhaps he will alight at my door in the early hours of the morn and invite me for a stroll across the South Downs. I shall sleep lightly tonight in the hope of hearing clattering hooves striding through the streets of Moulsecoomb.