THOSE of you fortunate enough to have computers will know there are many internet videos there featuring cute baby animals doing cute baby things.
It's all good. If you think it common, vulgar or slushy, that's a valid opinion, though you should be under 24-hour police surveillance.
The rest of you will have seen and approved of lions lying down with lambs and suchlike. Everything loves everything else until they grow up and become evil, like humans. But you must watch the baby pandas on a chute in yonder China. Unfortunately, doctors tell me I'm a bit dense, so I can't figure out the original site of the video, but it's been posted up widely, and if you Google "baby pandas slide cute video", Robert is your uncle, and you'll get plenty of links.
We're talking about four baby pandas playing on a wooden slide. Don't ask why. Just relax a little. Down the little pandas tumble, sometimes ending upside down. It's just pure, innocent, fluffy fun, and the pandas' padding style of walking is also most admirable.
As some readers will know, I am a student of walking styles, disdaining the lazy Mediterranean stroll in favour of the brisk, northern, businesslike model.
But I have not gathered you here today to talk about walking styles. My subject is pandas on a chute. These lift the spirits. They make you think that there is a god and that life is worth living.
And, while neither of these things is true, we all need little diversions to give us delusions of joy. The internet is a marvelous thing. Before its advent, we'd to wait forever for a television documentary about pandas on a chute. Now, we can look them up any time and intone the ancient incantation underpinning all that is good: aaawww!
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