UNICORNS

If I could have high-fived myself without it looking weird, I would have.

Instead, I strode to my car with all the usual post-workout endorphins pumping through my veins, hopefully each red blood cell high-fiving another for me.

I haven’t been to the gym on a Saturday for ages. I go on Sundays most weekends, before church, when the place is practically empty. This weekend though, I decided I would kick myself out of bed and not waste another Saturday morning.

It helped, I reckon. From the car, I drove into town, looked for a birthday card for my Mum, and found myself eventually over eggs benedict in Café Rouge.

It says something I reckon, when it’s easier to find a unicorn, than it is to find a suitable card for your mother. The shops are full of chubby pink rainbows, sparkly hooves, and flying horses with horns. The unicorn, mythical or not, is back.

Marco Polo, Fourteenth Century explorer, described them as ugly brutes, barely the size of an elephant, wallowing in mud, with heads like those of a wild boar, ‘contrary to our notions’.

Indeed. Methinks Marco might have found himself a rhino.

Anyway, I found a pink, flowery card for my Mum. Not sure if she’ll like it; sometimes I think I’m on a winner if I pick the very last thing I’d choose for myself. It is the thought that counts, and if the thought is me embarrassing myself out of love for someone else, than perhaps that will do it. I find buying cards disproportionately difficult.

I suppose the unicorn phase is for little girls - a kind of Twenty First Century My Little Pony. Indeed, the mythology of the unicorn was always that they could only be tamed by young women - fierce in battle, peaceful when captivated by beauty. The metaphor wrote itself. Perhaps this latest craze has deep roots in our history, our collective understanding. Perhaps I’m a little slow to cotton on to what every woman implicitly understands. Perhaps.

Or perhaps my brain is working overtime with endorphins or adrenaline from the gym, and it’s simply a nice thing evolving out of a case of medieval explorers describing a rhinoceros.