Can you Adam and Eve it...?

...is cockney rhyming slang for 'can you believe it', but I’m not going to London now.

I’m going back 40 odd years to Granny’s house outside Swansea, South Wales.

I push the wooden side gate which leads to the magical garden and the house and there, on the window sill, is that huge Conch shell she used to keep. 
‘If you put that to your ear you can hear the sea’ she said. So I did and got an earful of water, but, there again, it does rain a lot in Wales. Shaking the last drops out, I put the shell against my other, dry ear, and am astounded. Yes, I really can hear the sea! She wasn’t fibbing!

Anyway, Granny was a formidably feisty lady.

One day she tested me on this: –

‘Adam and Eve and Pinch Me

Went down to the sea to bathe

Adam and Eve got drowned.

Who got saved?’

Like a shot I replied ‘Pinch me!’

And she did!

Grandpa was much the same.

Three cups on a table. Me and Grandpa on one side and Uncle M on the other. Uncle M blindfolded and turned away while I placed the coin under one of the cups. And Uncle M guessed right every time! How did he manage that?

Well, Grandpa smoked a pipe and, wordlessly, he aligned the pipe to coincide with whichever cup the coin was under. Middle cup meant pipe was in the middle of his mouth etc.

So Granny and Grandpa, like some ancient Adam and Eve outsmarted me, the young clever clogs!

‘So when is the snake appearing in to this Adam and Eve story?’ you may well ask. 

Well, I was coming to that.

At a tourism conference, located in the south of England somewhere with links to zoos, I had a once- in- a- lifetime experience.

They brought around a pet python for people to stroke. Now, I have no fear of animals, except cows, and I was quite happily stroking the soft, surprisingly warm scales of this snake when, Whoosh!

It emptied its bowels on my feet! The sickening, yellow, rank, foetal- like remains of a half -digested mouse sent me running off hysterically to the toilets.

Slamming open the doors I was confronted by a row of men holding, Yikes! smallish snakes in front of them – in front of the urinals in fact.

Arrrrgh!

Flying out of the Gents and into the Ladies I tore off my tights, put them in the bin and, as I began to wash my feet, legs and shoes furiously in the sink I became aware of several pairs of eyes, in suits posher than mine, with badges, more senior than mine, looking at me.

‘A python has just..., careful now, choose the right word here..., DEFECATED on my feet!’

As they silently edged away from me I realised-

Without a doubt, they absolutely didn’t Adam and Eve me.