The Giraffe, Danny, and Me

The other week I decided to enter a competition that appeared on Danny Wallace’s Facebook page. The competition was to win a digital radio, a keg of beer (beer which Danny has brewed) and some merchandise to promote Danny’s new book, ‘Who Is Tom Ditto?’. To enter the competition you had to begin your facebook status with… “I just ordered the new Danny Wallace book, ‘Who is Tom Ditto?’ and the BEST thing happened straight after…” followed by your imagination. Then after a few reactions from your friends, you sent a screenshot to the designated email address. This is what I did. Some people believed what I wrote, and lots of people have told me how much they enjoyed it. And since I ended up winning I felt it only right to save the story for posterity. Here it is…

I just ordered the new Danny Wallace book, ‘Who is Tom Ditto?’ and the BEST thing happened straight after… I was on twitter and it turned out Danny was stuck in Cardiff, he needed to be in London within hours for an important appointment at the BBC. What could I do? I offered him a lift. Half an hour later I’m outside Cardiff train station picking up Danny and making a mad dash for London. I wondered what it was that was so important, Danny explained that he had been making a series of unbelievable stories. And that very day a giraffe has escaped from Whipsnade zoo and was being hunted down by the locals. I got Danny to London in good time but the camera crew had already left without him. What could I do but drive Danny up to Whipsnade. Word had it the giraffe had headed south but due to a few wrong turns we ended up north of the zoo, near Bletchley Park. And what did we see? The long neck of a giraffe sticking out of the trees. We jumped out quickly and were shocked to see we were the only people around, the only people who had noticed her. Danny promptly called the zoo who stunned us with the news that the giraffe was pregnant and due to give birth any day now. She promptly sat down in front of us and started making strange noises… We began to panic. The zoo talked us through the situation and it became clear that she was going to give birth at any second. It had been a bad pregnancy and her health was at great risk. There was no time to get her back to the zoo. What were we going to do? It was at that moment a group of men in flight gear approached us. They were WWII plane enthusiasts, and had been flying a Lancaster Bomber over the local area. They had landed in a nearby field… We knew what we had to do. With the help of a passing farmer we managed to get the giraffe into the plane and off the ground within the next twenty minutes. The next thing I knew we were in a field outside the zoo, and the medical personnel were all ready to take the giraffe away. But there was no time. She gave birth right there in the field, but thanks to the excellent work of everyone, mother and baby both survived. The zoo decided to name the baby after the pilot. Turned out his name was Tom. They already had a giraffe named Tom. I could tell Danny wanted them to name the giraffe after him, but instead he said “then why don’t you call him Tom Ditto”?

Haven’t got my beer yet. But I am so damn thrilled that, for once, my overactive imagination has been put to good use. Also, really chuffed, as I had to pack in my old unreliable iPod and it’s (Asda’s own, and covered in house paint) ipod dock at Christmas, which was okay as I got this new fancy iPod Touch which has a little speaker on it. But this new monumentally piece of awesome digital radio actually lets me play music through the bluetooth setting. So I christened the radio in the most fitting way, I played through the opening of Danny Wallace reading ‘Yes Man’. I am a happy Danny Wallace fan :-).