In Brazil we have that phrase about the gift horse and it's mouth, but what we really need is the phrase --"don’t wait too long to look at a fox’s mouth or else you will be caught prying at its butthole as it walks away from your henhouse." Only years of cultural acculturation would make this phrase instantly understandable, so let me bring you up to date.

The Buddha above pictured was a gift, though a special kind of gift, a gift from a friend who is selling everything they have to fund a move to another country. It’s a parting gift, a gift that came along with the amply priced pieces of furniture that we took off her hands. A ‘couldn’t fit it in my suitcase, and I love you’ gift.

The giver, a fox both in 70’s and Aesopian parlance, gave us the Buddha. She told us to put it on the fridge and surround it with coins, a charming gesture which instantly reminded me that all religions are equally stupid. Then she stayed at our place for an increasingly tense and unhappy three weeks, during which we saw past the 70’s fox and watched the fable unfold like a slap to our face.

Exactly which animal we are is debatable, perhaps best assigned by another person. Indeed what animal would feel intensely uncomfortable with an already-former friend staying in the house, hogging the computer, bitching dinner guests she’s never even met before, filling rooms with smoke at 9 in the morning, and eating food in quantities designed to be just small enough not to pay for anything, but do nothing about it? Some weak, stupid animal. I go for Donkey. But maybe our petty bourgeois manners and offenses taken fit best with something like a chicken.

Anyway, the moral hit home a few days ago, when the phone bill arrived and the disappeared fox left R$200 worth of droppings in our cupboards, which are now, like the Buddha whose coins went for bus fare, so dastardly bare.