Back in '71, when I was pregnant with my first child, I went for a long desperate cross-country run through Prussian territory. Waving my arms like a folle, dodging the crottes of maudits corbeaux flustered from the heaps of corpses left over by Napoleon III’s second-last stand, trying to catch the eye of the franc-tireurs, searching for Zündnadelgewehr  in the grenade pits.

In ‘46, just before bringing forth what remains of my second child, I was sitting in a prototype grey Panzer taking *** shots at a couple of charred hibakujumoku (the ******* eternal gingko) when I felt her chewing at my innards. Needlessly and in spite of my best intentions, my strict upbringing and the “Manual”, which I'd almost learnt off by heart, I leapt up off the soiled wicker seat, banged my head on the ****** periscope handle and pulled the red ripcord.

Later, I imagined her breastfeeding on what was described as “the flesh of my withered gland”; I watched her little nails squeezing the calico pythons squirming in my camouflage maternity flack jacket and recited doggerel from the Shorter OED, the classic tales of mirth and fury.

My last, Cenozoic, carried in my matrix through the Sturm und Drang of the Quaternary glaciation, cougar-pelted and covered in flint chips, something like thalidomide finished it off (according to the magnetic resonance). God, how I loved to paint the trichinosis, the rhinitis, no, the rhinocerii (we were pre-literate, after all) on the cave walls. Augustus I called it, buried with blueberries, primitive to any distinctions.

Still, the albino alligators with the orange eyes escaped from the biosphere on the Rhine, the one right beside the nuclear reactor, twenty miles from the cave entrance. They were mutant twins. Reading Herzog's plump lips, they headed straight for the heavily guarded cave door. One paleontologist and one art historian patrolled the opening in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Dressed for duty in typical ice age fashion, long caribou ponchos draped over leopard skin undergarments, they were ready for anything: filmmakers, epistemologists and brutal English; with their laptop PCs, flip phones and clipboards, they were avant-garde obscurantists. They didn't stand a chance, standing there by the door hole, waiting for their cameos.