beautiful plumage

Upon being presented with a leaflet of Stuff To Do in Lincolnshire my initial reaction was of fear mixed with disgust, not helped by the desperate language and extremely poor design of some of the advertisments for farm parks, seemingly the only new thing installed in the county to add to the existing activities of the odd nature reserve, occasional former-airfield-turned-walking-venue and rare castle. We had been warned off one specific farm park by a friend who'd been disappointed when she'd taken her eighteen-month-old grandchild there but had heard (relatively) good things about the (comparatively long-established) parrot farm/zoo/sanctuary in Friskney, near Wainfleet, nearish Boston and therefore in the unpleasant mid-east marshy coastal region of the county whence nothing good comes. Boston has fallen into disrepute in the years since the pilgrims buggered off to America and is now primarily known for thick-witted xenophobia and fatal explosions in moonshine factories in industrial estates. The only known tourist attraction, the Stump (or tower of St Botolph's) can be safely viewed from twenty miles away near Martin on a clear day and (as we preferred Lincoln for shopping and exposure to semi-urban civilisation) I've only been there once since several visits in 1993 when learning to drive and taking my driving test, it being one of the county's best sources of unmarked crossroads.

My original plan had been to journey there by bicycle, avoiding the use of a second car in order to transport five adults and one toddler without having to have someone illegally hiding in the boot or trying to crush three people into two-thirds of a rear seat. Light rain would have been manageable but extremely poorly-maintained roads on the levees beside a river across fenland which is mostly beneath sea level tend not to have very good drainage and the rain was too heavy and the road too narrow (or the puddles too wide) for it to have been possible to have avoided the puddles in order to avoid hitting the potholes (and ruts, and craters) concealed beneath the rainwater. I'd only glanced at the map sufficiently to work out the best route to cycle and missed the first turn-off of the normal driving route due to the sign being extremely small and missed the second turn off (leading more directly to the target rather than through somewhere nearish but still not particularly near) due to not having memorised all the small settlement-waypoints, particularly those deemed major enough to signpost. As a result we went right through the middle of Boston, fortuitously encountering the Asda and some relatively cheap petrol (which I'd been planning on trying to go past on the way home anyway), briefly finding some mobile reception in which to allow my sister's phone's map to update but losing our navigation-capable-phone-owning-passenger-lacking parents (who hadn't brought their GPS with them) at some point in the designed-for-horses streets near the marketplace, though they ended up getting to the target amenity slightly before us after sticking to the main road and following the signs.

From the car park, surrounded by flat fields of Zea mays, it didn't look as if our £6.95 per adult (though only £5.95 per codger) would be worth spending, even after spending the best part of an hour exposing ourselves to rain-worsened Lincolnshire roads and drivers in order to get there. Located at the outskirts of a village too small to really have any, there was one housey-looking building outside the compound on which a few signs were mounted and a hedged gate leading into the compound. As is usual with visits to anything with my parents we'd checked that there was something selling coffee and cakes before choosing where to go so we headed straight through the gift shop into the café before Edgar could start griping about not having had his lunch. It was more bacon-sandwichy than cakey as it also appeared to function as the staff canteen (which made me slightly nervous when some members of our party started slagging the facilities in voices louder than they probably thought they were when there were members of staff a few tables away who would ahve known that we hadn't even been around the parrots yet) but provided somewhere to sit for half an hour, had high chairs and didn't put too much unwanted and unasked-for butter in my sandwich.

As we were worried about the staff at the desk/till thinking we might have been trying to sneak through by popping to the café before paying the entrance fee we'd paid the entrance fee before popping to the café, compelling us to proceed in going round the attraction, such as it was. Fortunately, it turned out to be well worth it and was mostly empty, which I kept remembering was probably due to it being termtime, despite being a Saturday. The various examples of things which had previously been constrained or mistreated to the point of ripping out their feathers were mostly now happy enough for them to be apparently growing back. There was plenty of the usual parroty sorts of things such as the demonstration of the ability to climb all around the inside of their cages using both sets of claws and their beaks (in order to assemble (in identical poses) very close to people standing close to the cages in order to peer at them), the occasional bit of syrinx-wizardy mimicry and lots of random scrarking. There were a few non-parrot things such as a couple of kookaburras (which didn't, whilst we were listening) and a few peacocks, peahens and peachicks wandering freely around the enclosures, which Edgar decided to try and follow at one point, stopping when he'd cornered one in a cul-de-sac of corridors. Nicky, despite being frightened of things which flap such as moths and birds, walked through the walk-through enclosure without mishap. As well as removing shiny earrings and so on people who don't want things to land on an nibble them should also consider not wearing anoraks with hood-tightening toggles, as my parents discovered.