In A While, Crocodile

I wasn't really sure why, but I've been quite keen on working up various new versions of this picture, based on a preserved crocodile I encountered last year in the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée in Paris. I was already quite pleased with it back in January (What a Croc), but I kept tinkering away, and this is just the latest version. I've tried putting it in a proper mount and frame, and it looks even better (mind you, most things usually do). But I did wonder why it seemed to speak to me with such a strong voice, and why I felt compelled to keep returning to it.

Then I remembered this:

Duh. Of course... This photograph will have been taken around 1972. That is the 18-year-old me, posing in my bedroom in our family's flat, on the 4th floor of a seven-storey council block that was built around 1950 and demolished a decade ago. But that plastic crocodile hanging in the window behind me, bought on a visit to Whipsnade Zoo around 1965, has survived many subsequent changes of location (though it has lost much of its tail along the way) and has been a constant companion ever since. I suppose you might say it embodies the way the alchemical fantasies of youth can endure into the more mundane realities of late middle-age. Even when lacking most of their tail (something the Paris croc has in abundance).

But what kind of idiot holds on to a plastic crocodile for over 50 years? This kind.