Sexing the sea monkey

Hello my lovelies! Sit back in your chair, stretch your legs and imagine my unbridled joy when I found this page in the sea-monkey instruction manual.

Shall we take a stroll together, hand in hand through this garden of delights? Take a moment to read it through before you continue with my blather below. Otherwise, it won’t make sense. Ahem. Like the others do.

Let’s start with the very first sentence: “Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys® come in two sexes: male and female.” Well, thanks for stating the bleedingly obvious. Good lord. What next?

Our old friends the “quotation marks” make their first appearance – the “whiskers”, “chins” and “graspers”. Actually, I must tell you that Barry has a spectacular set of graspers – a fine bushy luxuriant set. Enough to make a nineteenth century barbershop quartet ashamed of their mutton chops. Yes, old Bazza’s well endowed in the grasper department, let me tell you.

And I’m very glad that they clarified that girls are females. I’m not sure I would have got that myself. Even at the age of 4 and up.

If you read the fine print, you’ll see that the females are large and placid (like, say, a cow), while the males are small and aggressive (think leopard). She minds her own business; he spends his time street dragging in Berwick, desperately, if fruitlessly, attempting to win her affections. She’s not interested. They never are. But boy, can she swim! She can swim so FAST that they put it in CAPITALS. “Who’s the leopard now hey Barry?” Coco cries as she darts behind the alien spacecraft in the aquarium. “You’ll never get your enormous graspers on me!”

Note that it’s the “boys” and not the “girls” who are the “troublemakers” as you’ll find out. Oh, yes you will. You’ll find out. The hard way.

POSTSCRIPT: My treasures, I wrote this post last weekend. However, since then, in fact JUST THIS AFTERNOON there have been developments! As I noted, Barry isn’t short of graspers, and well, I’m not sure how to explain this, but Barry is…erm…grasping Coco! She’s fine, so don’t worry. Actually, she seems completely oblivious. I think she might be a bit of a minx in fact, because I didn’t see her swimming FAST at all. She seemed to be loitering about Barry for quite a while. “Oh, Barry, don’t! Stop! I’m going to give you twenty minutes to cut that out!” We know your type Coco. Oh yes.