June 28th, 2005 AD

I saw a programme on Animal Planet in which a man wandered through the forests of Madagascar and caught just about any small animal - snakes, rodents, lizards, bugs - and showed them to the audience in delight. It would have taken some temerity to do that because many of then could have bitten and killed him. But real courage, I guess, would have been in catching his boss by his neck and showing him to us.

One of his "presentations" was a lizard, which apparently does not have eyelids. But the little fella (the lizard) has a long tongue, which he uses to wipe and clean his eyes. Imaginative that I am, I started wondering what would have happened if evolution had taken a different turn and we humans had ended up without eyelids. We may have been using our tongues to wipe our eyes. If a person had eyelids, it may have been configured an abnormality and disfiguration: "He loved her despite her eyelids."

Or, who knows, it may have - like dimples - been considered to be something that adds to good looks: "His eyelids excited her as much as his bank balance did."

Leaflets on eye care would have contained this injunction: 'Do NOT wipe your eyes after eating spicy food."

When I told a friend of mine about this lizard, he said, "Well, looks like humans would have had to put their tongues to use in one more way, eh?" Then he winked and laughed.

Some people have only one thing on their minds.