Wooden elephants are stalking me...

I've always found carved wooden animals fun and when done well really beautiful. I had a collection of wooden antelopes/gazelle as a kid - they seemed to be all the rage at some point (presumably in the seventies or eighties) and every car boot sale or charity shop I was dragged to had countless numbers of them and they were always dirt cheap so I decided to start a herd of wooden animals! A few years went by and I seem to recall getting to about 30 or 40 strong herd of wooden antelopes and gazelle... I even found a warthog and a crane/stork thing. Then the inevitable happened - we moved house and as part of the move I was told it was time to get rid of the herd so I gave in and donated the whole collection to a charity shop and never looked back.


Now I know what you are thinking, what does this have to do with wooden elephants stalking me - well this is what happened over the last few days.

Recently I started to decided to go with a more geeky random sciencey/museum like decor theme at home and along with old wooden tiki's and carved boats and bowls that used to belong to my parents, my various buddha statues and preserved insects - I thought it would be nice to get a few wooden animals again - not a full herd but one or two really nice pieces to fit with the new theme. But as with all things the perfect items have to be stumbled upon and can't be forced into existence!

I went into a charity shop on monday this week that I have been in only a few times as I know its a pretty rubbish one, but on monday I felt drawn to it for some reason and the first thing I noticed upon walking in the door was the most beautiful carved wooden african elephant - I don't think i've ever seen a more perfect carved elephant in my whole life. Only about 4 inches tall and about 6 or 7 inches long and a lovely warm rich wood. It wasn't priced and I dreaded asking as it looked like the kind of thing they would charge a fortune for as it was so beautiful but I had to have it so I picked it up and asked the old lady who was in charge of the till and she told me that it was a very expensive elephant, rare collectors piece and that she'd have to charge me the extortionate price of 50p for it! I actually laughed out loud, the old bat really made me smile with her sense of humour!

After the successful find on monday I decided to have a look on ebay just to see what other wooden animals there might be that I liked the look of and found a carved indian elephant that was very pretty but not worth the £30 price tag - partly because I don't have that kind of money right now but also largely because I don't like them as much as I like african elephants. However the universe clearly has a strange sense of humour as well because today I had some time to kill whilst waiting on a bus so I went into another charity shop I never go into because it too is usually absolute rubbish and often has a very strange old dead lady smell to it. But I was drawn to the shop and could barely believe my eyes when I walked in the door and the first thing I laid eyes on was a wooden indian elephant! almost completely identical to the one I spotted on ebay less than 24 hours earlier and yet again without a price on it so I crossed my fingers and wandered up to the till elephant in hand (feeling a very strange sense of deja vu) and thankfully yet again it was a delightfully extortionate £1 price tag!

So it would seem that I have wooden elephants stalking me, I wonder whether this is restricted to pretty pachyderms or if i've got a whole wooden migration of ark proportions heading my way?