COOKING WHEN CAMPING INTRODUCES certain challenges. You're away from your usual kitchen, you have to improvise with less, it's hot or cold or maybe rainy, you have to manage a fire, and every now and then, if you're in Australia, a large lace monitor will wander through like the bully of the town, to a Morricone whistle. (You'll have to provide the ocarina yourself).

This pictured animal wandered up to us on the weekend just as we were sitting with cups of coffee in the morning sun. Hey, mate, I said, got nothing for you; but the lizard came on. When I got up, waved my hands in the air, and made a bit of noise, it showed itself as an unafraid-of-humans campground bandit, taking a few aggressive steps at me, and hissing with its mouth open. Fine, son, I said, you go for it. I'm not about to fight a metre-and-a-half long lizard with claws and statutory protection. There's no angle in it.

We're not beginners at camping cooking. All our food is stored in click-locking plastic tubs, the garbage is stored in a bin inside the car, scraps get cleaned up. So all the lizard could do was wander around bashing things and trying to knock over food-smelling objects, which it did for a good ten minutes, before it found the only thing we'd left out: the washing up bucket, with two steel cups, a chopping board, and a little utility knife, a bit bigger than a paring knife.

This lizard reached in to the bucket, and came up with the plastic handled knife, with a 6-7cm blade, grinning in its mouth for all the world like Blackbeard the pirate about to board. And for a few steps it wandered about our campsite with the knife in its teeth, while we wondered how on earth you deal with a knife-wielding lizard. (For the record: shouting 'hey, no, stop' is ineffective). Finally, while I stared at it open mouthed, it opened its jaw wider, gulped, and the whole knife disappeared, handle first, down the hatch. At which point it sauntered off into the scrub.

What on earth do you do at that? I really like lizards. This is obviously not going to be good for the animal in the medium term and probably the very short term. Two days later I'm still in a bit of shock about it. It's just one of those completely unexpected and unpleasant things you witness every now and then, that have absolutely no meaning.

The end. No moral.

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