camel – ThursdayAgain

This week the Malian transitional government will give the French President another camel after the one they gave him as thanks for helping repel Islamist & Tuareg rebels was killed & eaten by the family he left it with in Timbuktu.

“As soon as we heard of this, we decided to replace it with a bigger & better-looking camel,” said an official at a press briefing yesterday afternoon.

“The new camel will be sent directly to Paris. It is a shame about what happened to the first camel. It was a present that did not deserve this fate.”

President Hollande was presented with the camel when he visited Mali in February shortly after dispatching French troops to the former colony to help combat Tuareg & al Qaeda-linked fighters moving towards the capital in the south, from bases in the mountainous deserts in the north of the country.

The President joked at the time about using the camel to get around Paris during the daily rush-hour, but in the end he left it with a family in the ancient city on the edge of the Sahara desert.

French leaders have received many gifts of exotic or wild animals from Africa over the years & have sometimes had other problems in hanging-on to them.

Last week, a robber chainsawed a tusk off the skeleton of an elephant presented to Louis XIV by a Portuguese king in 1668. Police caught the robber, as he fled, with the tusk under his arm.

I suspect we shall be soon be seeing a spate of “camel-themed” menus appearing both at a number of pricey Parisian restaurants & at more reasonably priced eateries in Timbuktu.