Zoo Day (No 4)- Not!

Off to Zoo Day No 4. Got mixed up with the buses again - and arrived an hour early, which was good, because I could get around places before they got too busy.

I wandered along and saw two women at a big enclosure window, laughing and taking photos. ‘Must be a monkey doing something funny!’ I thought, and rushed to see. But inside were zoo staff ‘mucking out’. One of the ladies stopped chuckling long enough to explain that her granddaughter was being a ‘Zoo Keeper for a Day’. Gran was enjoying it. Not sure about the young lady.

I walked through a monkey house, with some rather miserable looking monkeys. But they may not have been (miserable - they were definitely monkeys - not sure what they are). One was sitting right at the (rather mucky) window, and I took lots of shots, but terrible overhead lighting causing their eyes to be in shadow. Then this one hopped down at the other side, put his hands on the window, looked out for a moment or two. The window was grubby, the lighting was terrible so I haven’t got his eyes clearly, but you can see his hairy nose and I loved his wee hands - you can see his fingerprints.

I went for a cuppa before going in to the talk. The two girls behind the counter were talking in hushed tones. ‘She’s lost the baby.’

In this context, in the zoo, I wasn’t too rude in asking,- ‘Who? Mrs Panda?’ Yes. I see in the paper that the zoo ‘rents’ the pandas for £600,000 a year. One has to ask if that money could be better spent…

I wandered off to the talk, wondering why there weren’t more people. Was I early? Yes, I was! A whole week early. It dawned on me that it was cancelled this week because of the school holidays. Duh!

However, I’m back home before I would have been up on a dreich holiday morning, so I’m ahead of myself.

I shall continue packing. We’re working our way through the contents of the freezer, the biscuit tins, the wine rack and I know there’s a big bag of Maltesers in the larder just waiting to be removed.