I had all kinds of allergy problems with certain meats, and with fruits and vegetables with pesticides. So I turned to bear, caribou, venison, hippopotamus, buffalo, elk and moose. Taste-wise, buffalo and elk are tied for first. Not gamy, and loaded with protein. And very expensive, I might add.
There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.
If you were to go to the National Museum in Addis Ababa, you would walk into a huge room filled with literally tens of tons of fossils, and most of them would be elephants and rhinos and hippopotamus and monkeys and giraffes and antelopes and so on. Hominids are very rare in the landscape, and it's very rare to find them.
I wanted to use the hippo to get people out of their homes, away from the Internet and the TV, and to explore London with a new perspective.
A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.
I'd say the best is when I was in Africa, I saw a hippo in a house. Someone had a pet hippo. And they're meant to be one of the most dangerous animals on the planet, and they had one that was sort of just wandering in and out of their house, just sort of roaming about.
I've worn a chainmail suit to swim with sharks, glided over Cirencester with a James Bond-style paramotor strapped to my back, eaten hippo steaks and had a bat dive down my bra. And all the while, I had to face the camera and smile.
Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool Opotamus?
What I find funny are peoples' blind spots. That's the funniest thing about anybody - when they just don't realize who they are. What's funny about seeing a hippo do ballet is it thinks it's a swan.
