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Spend your days in the sun-shee-iine

We greeted the arrival of the sunshine in London for the first significant time this year with some degree of delight and promptly headed off to spend a diverting Saturday afternoon at London Zoo, and later Regent’s Park. As Rob wrote, just over a year ago, the monkeys always seem to be the most popular animals, and this weekend was no exception. Personally, I rather enjoyed watching the Spider Monkeys gracefully move between the bars of what seemed to be a rather small cell. I think the monkeys (a term I’m rather ignorantly using to refer to the whole gamut of primates on display) are particularly fascinating because it’s so easy to anthropomorphise. And after watching the monkeys for half an hour, you wonder how anyone can still believe in creation.

At the risk of inducing a great big Richard Herring-style “aaah”, the zoo also offers a chance to observe some animals of the uncaged variety (the zoo organisers themselves have not missed the opportunity to point this out: somewhere near the monkey enclosures stands one side of a cage designed for vistors to pose behind while being photographed. It bears the caption: “the world’s most destructive animal”. Aaah. I see what they did there.) and Saturday’s specimens seemed to be of a particularly stupid variety: cleary simple instructions like “Don’t tap on the glass” mean the exact opposite (“tap on the glass, frighten the small newborn chick, and wonder why your wife tells you off”). Similarly, the signs requesting that you take “no food” into the goat petting enclosure obviously mean “wander in with your melting ice cream and wonder why the goat starts chasing you around”.

After spending most of Sunday afternoon in the park with the paper (trying to avoid the sea of Red and White that had invaded Islington earlier in the day to celebrate the local football team having won something, apparently, not that I’m bitter, or anything, you understand), we polished off the weekend by watching an entertaining and revealing documentary about Vincent Van Gogh, presented by art critic and Dr Fox lookalike, Waldemar Januszczak. I had the vaguest idea that Van Gogh had once lived in Brixton, but I had no idea that he used to walk to his work in Covent Garden (in what is now Wagamama’s), and later spent time living in Twickenham and Isleworth.

3 thoughts on “Spend your days in the sun-shee-iine”

  1. Intertextuality is alive and well on the paste website! Cf:
    “the monkeys (a term I’m rather ignorantly using to refer to the whole gamut of primates on display)” (Matt)
    “monkeys (and by that inaccurate description I mean the whole gamut of primates, apes etc)”
    (Rob)
    Could it be coincidence, or one of those uncanny subconscious memory recall things, or are you bloggers just getting more alike?

  2. Definitely subconscious.

    Of course “(anonymous)”, as I believe I’ve mentioned to you before, if you’d like to add to the ranks of former Bristol English students blogging on Paste Magazine and create a bit of diversity here (or at least break up the male dominance a bit), then I’d be happy to set one up for you…

  3. I think I’m too shy to post my all-too-scanty thoughts on the www. But will keep you posted, one day I will finishing scribbling something and actually manage to submit it to the site. It would probably have to be Anonymous!

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