How I became a meme: meerkat provides head start on road to online fame
Writer explains how he topped Reddit ranking and became a minor celebrity with the help of passing wildlife
The meerkat was the mob’s sentry. His job was to scout the horizon for hawks and other threats, and to do that he wanted a high point for a good vantage. The small carnivores move on four paws but stand on their hind ones. I wanted a picture of a meerkat on my head. Without exchanging a word, each side knew what he was getting from the relationship.
I got down on one knee and kept still. I could hear the patter of his steps – I say “his” but I cannot say for sure he was a he – and then felt a quick, thrilling and alarming movement, the weight of him climbing aboard.
Meerkats are adorable in photographs and from a distance. They are a type of mongoose indigenous to southern Africa, and in Botswana there are colonies of them in the Makgadikgadi Salt Pan. This one had been habituated by a local safari camp, meaning that they assigned a worker to stand nearby until the meerkats got used to him and understood he, and his kind, didn’t present any threat.
Once, in Baghdad, a guard had handed me his AK-47 and a photographer took a shot of me smiling, which under the circumstances made me look idiotic
When one climbs on your head, you realise they are 25 centimetres of solid muscle sheathed in bristly golden hair. And claws. That’s the feature I didn’t see but couldn’t miss as I felt him on the top of my cranium, and the warm wonder evoked by their adorability was replaced by wondering if the next sensation of warmth would be of blood running in patterns down my face like Christ on the Via Dolorosa. Now that would be a picture!
Well, I’d come this far. I handed my camera to my friend, who was already shooting his own photos. I neither grimaced nor smiled. Once, in Baghdad, a guard had handed me his AK-47 and a photographer took a shot of me smiling, which under the circumstances made me look idiotic, whereas with just a serious face I looked merely homicidal. In any event, I sensed the appropriate move here was deadpan. I held my reporter’s notebook.
Back home, my son, Jeremy, asked if he could post it on Reddit. “If it gets on the top 10, I’ll buy you dinner,” he said.
I didn’t know what Reddit was. “Go for it,” I said.