Rambling Rush: Indiana X and the Gecko of Doom

IT has been a busy few days for the road-running, pet-loving, surfer-girl, hard news journalist Shona Aylward.

For a start, she saved a despairing gecko from a certain death. Well, almost.

Shona is a creative being, and as such, has a beautiful heart as part of her garden decor.

The heart has a chain on it, unfortunately for a certain gecko.

“I noticed something flapping around and went over to have a closer look,” said Shona.

To her horror, she discovered the gecko had somehow gotten its head stuck in one of the tiny links on the chain.

“I hate geckos and it was freaking me out, but I had to do something, I couldn’t just leave it there,” she said.

“It was frantically moving about and I didn’t want to touch it as it tried to bite me,” she said.

To make matters all the more interesting, Gypsey, her fun-loving Airedale, was ‘dancing’ around, trying to get involved in the action.

To her immense relief, her significant other, who will for the purpose of this article be known as Indiana X, arrived on the scene at that moment.

After calming Shona down to a mild panic, he greased the little gecko in Bio Oil (no expense spared to save the creature’s life) and carefully slipped its head out of the chain.

When Shona had initially tried to free it, the gecko had reacted aggressively. But when Indiana X saved the day, the gecko leapt happily to freedom.

Upon reflection, Shona did admit that it was “a rather bizarre thing to do, having to get a gecko’s head out of a chain”.

Okay, so that was Wednesday’s action.

The following day she managed to get herself locked in the South Coast Herald office.

And it wasn’t because she was working late (although the term ‘workaholic’ is appropriate).

“I was changing for gym and came out from the toilet and everyone had gone,” she bleated.

“I had to phone a colleague to help, fortunately it wasn’t too long a wait.”

Which brings us to Friday.

Perhaps it was her fear of being locked in again, but she was late for work.

The reason: she ran out of petrol. On the Mzimkhulu river bridge. Not like Shona to do anything quietly or away from public view.

“The car literally just stopped,” she said, stunned that it should misbehave in such fashion. And slow to learn that, in fact, her car does not run on air.

“I admit I had been chancing it, free-wheeling it and thinking that I would top up the tank soon,” she said.

Has she ever run out of petrol before? “I’m not going to answer that,” she said, her face going beetroot red.

Fortunately Indiana X wasn’t far off, and he managed to save the day. Again.

Although this time around, he was tempted to have a slug of the petrol some of his distressed damsel’s colleagues had brought hurriedly to the scene!