In October a squid was elected to the North Macedonian Assembly causing great controversy as North Macedonia is landlocked.
Despite, as a species, not being native to North Macedonia, the squid in question was born in the Oceanarium in Skopje and therefore qualified to run for government under the non-cephalopod sub-clause lacking North Macedonian constitution.
The squid’s agent (and former manager of the National Oceanarium of Macedonia), Zoran Stojanovski, stated that the squid was able to vote on key assembly bills by indicating its opinion through the process of removing food from either a jar labelled ‘yes’ or a jar labelled ‘no’.
The squid, which gained 57% of the vote in the First Electoral Unit which covers representation for most of central Skopje, ran on a campaign platform of ‘We’ve tried everything else, why not give a squid a go?’ Its pro-EU stance appealed to liberals, and its staunch refusal to recognise cuttlefish appealed to the rightwing.
Anyway, all this reminded me of the groundbreaking work with octopuses carried out by renowned zoologist, Dr. Evadne Plummaster, in the late 1960s in Florida. In going back through my university notes, I have discovered I had a copy of her laboratory log of her work with her octopus Sergei where she attempted to prove that octopuses have eight limbs – a claim of course made by natural philosopher Giovanni DiMasco three centuries earlier that had him exiled from Rome for heresy. Below I have collated the more significant moments and entries.
October 4th 1967 – This morning I placed a plain cotton shirt in Sergei’s tank. The limited number of options for his appendages seemed to cause Sergei distress. Having fumbled about with it briefly, he decided it was a danger and expelled ink all over it. The result, though disappointing from the point of view of sartorial development in cephalopods, has great potential in my wardrobe as, once I’ve dried it out, I intend to wear the resultant ‘tie-dye’ garment to a friend’s baptism at the weekend.
November 2nd 1967 – This morning I showed Sergei a centipede and he has since become catatonic. I blame myself. A lot of my work with Sergei has involved praising him for his many limbs and I fear that his sense of self-worth has become integrally intertwined with him having a greater number of appendages than other creatures he is aware of. I shall abandon my millipede experiment for tomorrow.
December 14th 1967 – Despite his many limbs, Sergei is unable to accompany himself on the banjo whilst playing the flute. ‘Oh Suzannah’ came out more like static interference mixed with angry wasps, and his ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was an offence to art. I have given the recordings to Yoko Ono.
January 1st 1968 – Toasted the new year with Sergei. He’s not good with alcohol. He spent the whole evening wearing a cowboy hat and throwing pistachios at the vice-chancellor.
February 9th 1968 – Sergei has become a beatnik and has taken to writing ‘beatnik poetry’ by arranging shells at the bottom of his tank. I awoke to discover that he had written the following during the night:
‘Tentacles are groovy
My soul is mauve
Be upholdent unto the tinkerman
I need more shel . . .’
It is of very little poetic worth, but I’m having it printed onto two thousand T-Shirts to raise funds for the department.
February 14th 1968 – I woke up this morning to discover that Sergei had stolen all the hob-nobs. He’d placed them all inside the treasure chest in his tank to stop them getting soggy.
March 2nd 1968 – How many octopuses does it take to change a lightbulb? One. I took the rest of the day off.
March 12th 1968 – The T-Shirts have proved to be a big success. As a consequence, Edgar, my boss, has bought tie-pins for the whole department to stop our ties getting into our soup. This had begun to be an increasing issue, with Derrick the lab technician having his favourite kipper tie ruined by a spicy gazpacho. Sergei has used his tiepin to jimmy open the treasure chest and retrieve the hob-nobs. He refused to share.
April 1st 1968 – Sergei had placed a bucket of water on the door jamb so that when I came into the lab, I got soaked. I would state this demonstrates an understanding of April Fool’s Day, but he’s done the exact same thing everyday this week.
May 14th 1968 – Sergei has grown a moustache. Well, he’s attached some kelp to the front of his face and has been trying to get into nightclubs. I have distributed a photograph of Sergei with and without the moustache to all the bouncers in the downtown area to ensure he doesn’t get in.
May 27th 1968 – Sergei has just returned this morning having been missing for a week. According to police reports, he’d been hitchhiking up and down the Florida Keys. It’s immensely frustrating that I couldn’t witness this, as seeing how many vehicles Sergei was able to flag down at once might have supported my nascent ‘8-limbs’ theory.
June 3rd 1968 – I’ve tried to introduce Sergei to different puzzles to test his cognitive ability and to see if I can confirm how many limbs he has. He became infuriated with the building blocks as his recreation of the city of Petra kept falling down every time the aeration tube bubbled. He gave up with the New York Times’ cryptic crossword very quickly, and couldn’t work out which piece was Betty Boop’s nose in the twenty piece jigsaw I gave him. There was only myself and Derrick in the lab to play pattacake with him, which is a shame as this seemed to be a promising avenue for exploration.
September 9th 1968 – Sergei has locked himself in the bathroom and is refusing to come out until Governor Kirk makes calamari illegal in the State of Florida. He’s holding the department’s glue stick supply to ransom too and says he will flush one every half hour until he gets confirmation of the Governor’s cooperation. I’m hoping he’ll get bored shortly and it’ll all just blow over like when he kidnapped Sidney Poitier and refused to release him until sushi was banned in Tallahassee.
October 31st 1968 – Halloween and Sergei decided to dress as Yehudi Menuhin. We made a violin for him out of a matchbox, a ruler and four elastic bands. He started trick or treating early in the evening and had collected four Charleston Chews and an ‘Oh Henry!’ chocolate bar before a slight mix-up where he ended up performing ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, receiving four standing ovations and an ‘Oh Henry!’
December 12th 1968 – Professor Jenkins in the Classics’ Department has just told me that ‘octo’ means ‘eight’. If only we could now decipher ‘pus’, we might truly be onto something revelatory. V. excited. Sergei has dressed himself up as Santa. The beard is sodden and ridiculously limp. Perhaps it’s cats? Eight cats? Does that work? Where does that leave us limb-wise? Thirty-two? It can’t be.
January 12th 1969 – It came as a surprise last night when I turned on my television and saw Sergei being interviewed on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. He performed a version of ‘Hey Jude’ on bongos accompanied by Acker Bilk on clarinet before slithering over to the sofa and communicating with Ed by holding up cards with different phrases on them: ‘yes’, ‘no’, I hope to be touring with the band in the spring’, ‘my mother was killed by pirates’, ‘I’ve been hugely influenced by the work of Dionne Warwick’, and ‘where is your latrine?’. When I confronted Sergei about his unsanctioned appearance on the highest-rated live show on television, he threw a stone at me, held up a card that read ‘my mother was killed by pirates’, and went to sulk in his castle. She wasn’t killed by pirates; she’s alive and well and living in an aquarium in Nebraska.
January 21st 1969 – Using the latest video footage analysis technology, we’ve been able to discern that Sergei used between 6.2 and 9.3 limbs when playing the bongos on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’.
March 10th 1969 – I discovered this morning that Sergei has successfully applied for power of attorney over me. He now has control over all my assets and is legally empowered to make all decisions concerning my existence on my behalf. Apparently, according to the court documents, my inability to count eight legs in three years was cited as evidence as a major flaw in my cognitive ability, and the caught feared I couldn’t be trusted to make decisions for myself. As a consequence, I am now sitting in Sergei’s tank, and he is eating hobnobs at my breakfast bar.
