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I've got a question for you that I bet you'd never thought about before.
How would you smuggle a penguin on your way home from holiday?
And I was just going to walk straight through customs and say, nothing to declare.
What I hadn't anticipated was the penguin was going to squawk just as I was going through.
So I was marched off into a little room and told that I couldn't take the penguin through
because,
you know,
it would be illegal to import exotic livestock and so on. 50 years ago,
Tom Michelle crossed paths with a penguin,
setting off a chain of events that would reverberate through the decades.
While working abroad in his early 20s, Tom saved the penguin from a miserable death,
covered in oil and tar on a Uruguayan beach,
and his life has been bound to him ever since.
Picking up a penguin and finding that I'm sitting here 50 years later puts me in mind of chaos theory.
There's a story that says something like,
you know, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo,
this leak can lead directly to a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.
And in the same kind of way, I feel that the picking up of the penguin,
that the ripples that set out for that have led to a tsunami in my life now,