I was watching one of my favourite programmes last night called QI (Quite Interesting). It was all more than quite interesting and all the way through I was doing the usual pleading with my brain to remember at least one interesting fact from the show so in the unlikely situation of that subject ever coming up in a conversation, I would have something to say about it and dazzle everyone with my cleverness and as usual my brain was refusing to accept anything.
‘Come on please. They are talking about the real people who Gulliver’s travels and Robinson Crusoe were based on. This is very interesting. Could you try and remember this please?’
‘Sorry, no can do. The disc is full.’
‘But how can that be? I don’t know anything really.’
[Yawn] ‘Well you know this morning when you were trying to memorize your mobile phone number?’
‘Yeah’
‘That took a lot of space.’
‘Oh cool, so did I manage to memorize that at the end then? Huh, I hadn’t realized that I had.’
‘Oh yeah’ [Yawn] ‘077 something, something and all the rest of it.’
‘077?! That’s all you’ve got?’
‘Hey come on, it’s a long number. How many digits? Ten? Eleven? You know I’m not good with numbers.’

But as soon as a picture of a kangaroo came up, for some reason I knew that I was going to remember this interesting fact no matter what. And I did!
‘What is it that kangaroos can not do?’ Asked Stephen Fry.
‘Play the piano.’
‘Oh shut up Brain.’
‘Drive’ Said Alan Davis
‘Vote’ said another guy
‘It’s a bodily function.’ Said Stephen Fry
‘Burp’
‘Fart’
‘Yes’ said Stephen Fry, ‘kangaroos can not fart.’

Interesting! But it gets even better. Apparently, as I write this, cutting edge experiments are being done by scientists who hope that one day those species of bacteria that live in a kangaroos’ guts can be fed to cows and with any luck stop them from farting so much and ultimately end global warming.

Uhum, yes. Sounds like a great plan. But is there a plan B that maybe we could work on before starting this? The thing is I’m just not comfortable with the idea of experimenting with trying to improve cows again. We all remember what happened last time when we tried to do that, don’t we? And who would have thought that something as innocent as feeding some cows to some other cows would start such an appalling chain of events with the cows all going mad and even worse, making some of us go mad too with the terrible thought of not being able to eat burgers for while. Oh those were tough times.
[Yawn] ‘Oh yeah, very tough, very tough. Is it lunchtime yet?’
[sigh] ‘No not yet.’
‘Snack time?’
‘No’
‘Play time?’
'No'
'Sleep time?'