I spent all last week at the University of Sussex, fulfilling the residential school requirement of my Open U degree, of which more later, perhaps. Between that and the recent trip to France, I’ve been feeling a little bit disconnected from London lately, so the good lady and I decided to head into town this weekend and do something, well, London-ish. We eventually decided on the Zoo.
Visiting London zoo as a child is probably my first London memory, actually - I must have been seven or eight, on a family holiday. I vividly recall the reptile house, and also a tiger I managed to get a pretty decent photo of as it stalked up and down its enclosure by the glass screen, as well as elephants, zebras and polar bears, all now relocated to the more spacious environs of Whipsnade. I can’t have been thinking about this too deeply at the time, but the understated, plain-brick 19th century architectures made a powerful impression on me, to the extent I always knew instinctively those other places we went to, the ones with all the garish rides and multiple savoury snack stalls, weren’t proper zoos. Founded by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1823, the gardens still evokes a sense of Victorian rationalism and cold, hard scientific endeavor.
There isn’t a tube that’s particularly close, so we strolled through Regent’s Park first, stopping off at The Honest Sausage for lunch. A relatively recent discovery, The Sausage is nestled innocously between the highways and byways that criss-cross the park, and sells, as the name implies, seriously good sausages. I visited in my lunch hour a couple of weeks ago on the recommendation of the excellent Sausages and Bread and was greatly impressed. After a few choice mouthfuls of pork, fresh bread, gloopy onions and tangy mustard, we were good to go, and made our way round to the Zoo entrance. Rather predictably for a sunny Saturday afternoon in the school holidays, there was something of a queue, but we decided to tough out the 45 minute wait we were told to expect and occupied ourselves by assessing the merits of the free vitamin drinks that were being handed out (we were rewarded by a mere 40 minute wait).
The girlfriend was there in part to hone her photographic talents, so once inside we adopted a leisurely pace which involved us both wandering off quite a bit (my own pedestrian efforts can be seen on flickr). I finally got to see a Komodo Dragon, as Raja was out sunning himself in the hot weather, eyeing my fellow visitors and I dubiously. The lions were both asleep, spectacularly unimpressed by the proceedings around them, and the tigers were in hiding after a lovers’ quarrel. We met the monkeys. In the reptile house, the amphibians put on a pretty poor show by comparison to the obligingly lively reptiles, although the no flash photography rule means this hasn’t really come across too well. Nonetheless, I assure you the cold-bloods were on good form.
The plan had been to amble along the Regent’s Canal up to Maida Vale afterwards to inspect the extent of the damage Gordon Ramsey has managed to inflict on The Warrington, however the girlfriend’s impractical choice of footwear meant her feet hurt too much, and so we retired to the more local Queen’s Head and Artichoke for a couple instead. Of course, after that, the idea of cooking began to sound considerably less appealing than a boozy curry at the local Indian, and so the plan changed again, proving that I am nothing if not adaptable.
Status: reconnected.
