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Well that was a disappointment. London Zoo and my desk are not entirely close together. It’s a 45 minute walk, or a short roll on the bus, but the thought of meercats and a whole zoo to ourselves once the general public had been kicked out had a whole heap of us heading north on buses an tubes, only to be herded into a small fenced garden from which we could look into the monkey enclosures and they could look in on us.

The irony was not lost on us. Or on them, probably.

So there were no meercats - at least not within our limited field of vision - but there was a scraggy and very friendly mog that came up and spent half an hour rubbing itself around my ankles and purring like a tiger as I tickled its neck.

It was after food, of course, so it had come to the wrong person. Not only was there no meercats, there was also nothing for vegetarians. There was mayo-drenched potato salad, of course, and some tomatoes and dry bread, but beyond that nothing but barbqeued giraffe (or perhaps beef, I don’t know - giraffe just seemed more appropriate in a zoo somehow).

So the herbivore collective stood around mopping up our mayo dregs with the dry bread until they came around with jelly and ice cream, which again we could not eat.

It was a shame, really, because it was a lovely venue. The sun was shining, it was warm, and the strange mix of writers, sales people and industry types made for an interesting evening. The sounds of the animals calling to each other added an exotic feel to the proceedings, until a looky-likie Eddie and Patsy arrived, as they seem to do with alarming regularity at such events. Unfortunately wearing a red wig and saying ’sweetie’ a lot does little to make you look like an Ab-Fab refugee, though.

So, David and I pootled off through Regents Park among the flowers and the freshly mown lawns towards the city, talking as we went and avoiding the footballs that came at us from every direction.

I came home and browsed meercats on the web.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2003 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.