Zoo's are great

Well I'm back from the barren spell of not posting. This was entirely due to having 12 days off work and spending loads of time having fun. This included going to the zoo with my wife - and several hundred other people.

So, the zoo was great. It's a lovely place with no real commercial feel to it and is surrounded by countryside so you feel at one with nature. And elephant poo.

There are a couple of things I really like about zoos. Firstly, the way 'wild' animals are allowed to become ever-so-slightly domesticated. For example, the gorillas have TV's in their enclosures; the orangutans have old cardigans and sheets and the chimps have plastic bins and Ribena bottles. Wouldn't it be great to see a group of mountain gorillas watching an episode of 'Strictly Come Dancing' in the middle of an east-central African rainforest?

The second thing I like is the large open enclosures that are filled with tree stumps, huge mounds of earth, vines, burrows and exotic vegetation, but not one sodding animal. The poor punters gawp for hours in the vain hope of actually seeing an albino hunting-shrew or a nine-footed sloth but to no avail. Just shrubs and dirt.

However, the best bit about our visit was the bonkers-mental monkeys and gibbons who, at regular intervals would go completely bananas (see what I did there?) and start whooping, screaming and "ooh-ooh aah-ing" like furry psychopaths. It was really funny and they seemed to be goading each other in to making more and more extreme noises. Sort of primates with ASBO's.

Oooh, they're little monkeys the lot of them.