As soon as they managed to divest themselves of French rule, in 1960, they promptly reinstated all the old spellings and just kept the cooking and the bureaucracy. We might be forced to spell it that way, but we wouldn’t like it, and neither did the Malagasy. It would be rather as if someone had taken over England and told us that from now on we would be spelling Leicester “Lester” and liking it. They decided, in their rational Gallic way, that if that was how the names were pronounced then they could damn well be spelt that way too. When the French took over Madagascar at the end of the last century (“colonised” is probably too kind a word for moving in on a country that was doing perfectly well for itself but which the French simply took a fancy to), they were impatient with the curious Malagasy habit of not bothering to pronounce the first and last syllables of place names.

Antananarivo is pronounced Tananarive, and for much of this century has been spelt that way as well.It looks a little like a large cat with a bat’s ears, a beaver’s teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder. It is a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise. ’s role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about.Chapter 1: Twig Technology The aye-aye looks a little like a large cat with a bat's ears … and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder.

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