Meerkats, Otters and two year olds
Last Saturday morning we had agreed to look after Little Ray of Sunshine in Battersea Park while her mum Hija ran an errand nearby. It’s been a few day since we had seen her and we were met with a hearty “NANA! POPS!”.
You may not know this, but one of the many little treasures in Battersea Park is a small zoo. Where else do you take a nearly 2 year old?
It is a small zoo, evidently specialising in cute animals. In fact we didn’t actually see that many animals - Meerkats, Otters, Wallabies, various monkeys and a rare spotted breed of pig. They also have play areas and (bizarrely) a helicopter.
First up were the meerkats. We got LRS out of the pushchair and straight away realised there was a problem.
The trousers were wet.
We’d only just picked her up and already we had a nappy leak. Aparently potty training isn’t playing out quite as per the ‘experts’ forecasts. There was only one nappy spare in the buggy, so this didn’t bode well. We did a nappy change and left the trousers in the sun on the buggy to dry out.
No one pays much attention to such things, so wearing a nappy with a longish t-shirt seemed to be the sensible thing to do.
So, back to the meerkats.
They live in an enclosure which has a clear (ish) plastic dome in the middle for up close observation. The dome however is accessed through a 3ft diameter tunnel which slopes down into the ‘hide’ underneath the dome.
Guess who LRS nominated to take her down there?
Yes indeed, so Pops gets down on his hands and 60 year old knees and crawls through the tunnel.
The things you do for love!
10cc sang about walking in the rain and the snow when there’s nowhere to go (cultural reference #1), but they didn’t mention crawling on your hands and knees to visit the meerkats up close and personal!
Next were the Otters.
We’ve been wanting to see Otters for ages - trips to Scotland (not just mainland, we visited Shetland and Yell (off Shetland) and Unst (off Yell) in search of Otters. We’ve scoured Wales in search of Otters. We’ve seen them in nature programs by Welsh naturalist Iolo Williams who got up at 5am and wearing a wet suit, hid in a pond to see Otters (and who incidentally we narrowly avoided running over in the car whilst he was out for a run on one of our trips to Wales) but never managed to see Otters in the wild.
And all the time, they were on our doorstep in Battersea Park.
But these Otters were a bit show-biz. They lolled around on their backs, soaking up the attention and demonstrating their manual dexterity by rolling an acorn around in their ‘hands’ (probably properly referred to as front paws).
We had arrived at the Otter enclosure just before 10:50, with the promise of feeding at 11.
Boy that was a long 10 minutes.
Trying to keep LRS focussed on the Otters for that long was a bit of a mission. The Otters played their part practically juggling with their acorns and standing on their hind legs to shout abuse at the meerkats.
After what seemed like an eternity, a young zoo keeper appeared in the meerkat enclosure next door to the Otters.
She explained that these were Asian short clawed Otters and they were pretty vicious, so she’s not allowed in the Otter encolsure. Instead, she throws their food from the meerkat enclosure next door.
So it turns out the Otters are the gang lords of the manor and whilst they may well have been hurling abuse at the meerkats, much of their squeeling was related to demanding their lunch from the zoo keeper.
So Otters - cute looking but not very cuddly. Cuddle that and you’ll never play guitar again (cultural reference #2 - answers on a postcard please).
We toured the rest of the zoo and ended up in a ‘water park’ which had various stainless steel troughs, bowls, pumps and Archimedes screws (look it up) to move water around. LRS was captivated and we spent about half an hour there, during which time my main job was to pump water into a trough by hand so LRS could let it drain out again through various channels.
Sunday afternoon was LRS’s 2nd birthday party - a joint party with 2 friends. She’s not quite 2 yet, but this was a stroke of genius by Hija and her two co-conspirators, as it avoids two other birthday parties for two year olds.
Just before you write me off as an old curmudgeon, this event entailed about a dozen hyper-active children at various stages of ‘terrible two-ness’, accompanied by their increasingly frazzled looking parents.
It reminded me what 2 year old boys are like - exhausting!
Of course, LRS was well behaved! no bias here!
To be fair, we arrived when proceedings were well underway and only had an hour or so before the field started thinning out and only a handful of the die-hard pre-testosterone hyper-active males remained. All very cute (to a point) but something of a relief when they eventually were down to a couple of parents with children and one mum who had the genius idea to send her child home with her husband, so she could stay behind and help tidy up.
The rest of the week has flashed by until Friday night when we again returned to see LRS and Hija. One of her presents is a Thomas the Tank Engine wooden railway set which kept her entertained all evening until bedtime. We even watched a couple of episodes, narrated (if you remember) by Ringo Starr. Takes me back!
That’s it until next week.
Have a good ‘un.
Jerry