It's all Grotte

Yesterday, I learnt two things: that Grotte is French for cave and that albino aligators are a. freaky to look at, and b. may one day break out from their steamy Nuclear Power Plant home and look at some prehistoric art with their ugly eyes. Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams was great so long as you weren’t claustrophobic or averse to phallic symbolism. Down, down, down, we went in our hard hats and 3d glasses, into the Paleolithic caves to look at the pretty animal pictures and stalagtites and mites. It was all very Doctor Dolittle – bison with eight legs, a rhino with five horns and even a giant wood louse. I was particularly impressed by a mardy lioness who, the voice-over told us, was growling at her mate because he wanted it and she didn’t. There were a few handprints, made 35,000 years ago by a man with a crooked pinkie and half a lady’s groin. We also got to look at the world’s oldest female figurine, carved from ivory. I tell you, you’ve never seen a muffin top like it and don’t get me started on her knicker region. And all the while this was going on, in case we weren’t suitably mesmerised, we had a backing track of ‘angels’ singing to the rafters. Occasionally, we came out for a chat with an expert, like the paleantologist who we discovered, used to be in the circus but wasn’t a lion tamer, or the perfumier who’d eschewed the heady world of ladies pulse points and taken to sniffing mossy cracks around the Ardeche. Priceless!