The bloody boy’s filled the bloody bath with bloody snakes, again!
I first encountered My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell when it was a set text at school (I think we were supposed to admire the wonderfully evocative descriptions of nature and of Corfu, but my teacher, an ex-monk named Ted Fraser, was pretty subversive, so maybe not) and I’ve re-read it regularly ever since; I could make a serious claim that it is the funniest book in English and it never fails to make me laugh out loud, especially this scene when a naked Lawrence Durrell (also one of my favourite writers) bursts out of the bathroom to astound the assembling party guests; of course we know how much Gerry embroidered his memories so we don’t know if Larry actually said this, but the rhythm, the three points, the perfection of this exclamation just illustrates how fine and natural a writer one or other of the brothers was.