REVEALED: Julian’s favourite animal

So, here’s how you voted!

You knew this week would be the Manny special, but it seems that you didn’t expect us to orchestrate this reveal…!

JULIAN LOVES

TORTOISES!!!

😲😲😲

Speaking of his love, Julian comments:

My favourite creature is the tortoise. 

Having nursed Emmanuelle through her egg-binding difficulties in 2002-03 I discovered that the most famous tortoise in English literature, Gilbert White’s Timothy, was another large female erroneously given a male name. 

Like Emmanuel/Emmanuelle Timothy is famous not for what s/he does but simply for being and eating, and, like a sundial, counting ‘only the hours that are serene.’  The creature lived with White, who viewed it with something of the detachment of a naturalist, rather than the warmth of the pet-owner, from 1780 until his death in 1794.  ‘When one reflects on the state of this strange being,’ he wrote, ‘it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two-thirds of its existence in a joyless stupor, and to be lost to all sensation for months together in the profoundest of slumbers.’  His words, not mine. 

I would pick up and wake a tortoise from its slumbers if one were handy, more lovingly than the chap in the left hand photo is doing.  That is not me, but someone with similar hair.  Mine is almost as long now.