Joe Bennett: Maybe it wasn’t the last straw that broke the camel’s back

Columnist Joe Bennett loves a good metaphor, but reckons it wasn’t the last straw that broke the camel’s back

First in a series of dubious metaphors: the last straw. As in the one that broke the camel’s back.

The principle of the metaphor is sound: that everything has a breaking point and until that point is reached the thing remains intact. The principle was demonstrated by a Monty Python sketch 1000 years ago.

John Cleese is a waiter in a posh French restaurant, serving a diner who is grotesquely obese. Cleese feeds him and feeds him and the diner swells until he is pulsing like a volcano and he can eat no more. Then Cleese tempts him with a single after-dinner mint. The man eats it and bursts. The mint was a last straw.

The breaking-point principle is true of bridges - they stand until the moment that they fall - and it is true of life itself - we live until the moment that we don’t. But I’m not convinced that it’s true of a camel’s back, especially in relation to straw.

I met a camel once in western China. Its proprietor urged me to climb on board but I declined. At close quarters camels are unattractive beasts. Their hide is coarse. They stink. They appear to have been assembled from spare parts. Their lips are all but prehensile. And their teeth are simply terrible.

That said, you have to admire their resilience. They are the only mammals to thrive in deserts, and they have unmatched digestive systems. Offer them one of those crude wooden reels on which heavy-duty electric cable is wound and they will lick those terrible lips and go to it. Within a day or so there will be nothing left except the metal bits.

Famously, a camel can drink a hundred litres of water in 10 minutes. That’s a tenth of a ton of a water. If any other animal did that, its bloodstream would be fatally compromised and it would die. Not so the camel. It just belches, wipes those lips and goes on its way.

Camels have been used as beasts of burden since trading began, plodding across the deserts in loping caravans. The Bedouin Arabs have made particular use of them. As cattle are for the Maasai people, so camels are for the Bedouin: status symbols, literal evidence of wealth. Even today at a Middle Eastern wedding where the oil-rich guests arrive by Range Rover, the men will carry, as part of their formal get-up, a camel stick.

And they race camels still, keeping them in training camps in the same way as our society keeps horses. In the UAE there was a scandal about child jockeys being brought in from India and then discarded when they grew too large and there was talk of replacing live jockeys with robots, dressed in the colours of the relevant sheikh and with a little robotic arm to do the beating with. It all seemed a bit unfair on the camels but then fairness has never been their lot.

They evolved to survive the most gruelling climate and terrain and have been exploited for just that reason. But they have never quite been domesticated. I didn’t trust the one I met in China and the Bedouins don’t trust theirs. At night they hobble them, bending up one of the front legs at the knee and tying it back on itself, so the beast is effectively three-legged. Otherwise it would be long gone in the morning. And who could blame it?

A camel can carry 250kg with ease. That’s two fat men, a brace of Trumps. No one deserves to carry a brace of Trumps. And at a pinch, a camel can lumber along with three or even four Trumps on board. I don’t know what volume of straw would weigh as much as four Trumps but I’d suggest it would be about half a barnful.

Now picture the scene: a cussed, independent-minded animal is being laden with half a ton of straw. The loader straps bale on top of bale, using a ladder to reach higher and still higher, until the stack is of a size to threaten its own stability. Meanwhile we are supposed to believe that the beast stands meekly immobile, even as its vertebrae creak and groan with the approach of the point of maximal loading. Finally the loader shins up the ladder one last time and places a single remnant blade of straw atop the load. On the instant the camel’s back snaps and it goes down like a capital V, its spinal column ruptured, its rear limbs paralysed, its death imminent. No, I don’t believe it either.

Next week, the elephant in the room.