The animals went in two by two
I’ve just had a rather exciting sort of weekend 
That is to say, Saturday was a rather quiet day which I mostly spent trying to tidy the mound of papers in my room and decipher the opening chapters of Gunther Grass’ “The Tin Drum” in Esperanto. But Sunday my boyfriend came to pick me up in his car and we went to Twycross Zoo for the afternoon
It was actually a bit of a risk going, because the weather seemed to be so appalling bad all Saturday. Sunday dawned a bit brighter, and I managed not to get rained on when I went to Mass in the morning, but there was a high potential for showers. As we drove towards Twycross on the M42 we were engulfed by a particularly vicious shower, and I don’t know how my boyfriend managed to keep the car on the road, because I could barely see it. Luckily it was just about lunchtime, and so we stopped at a fairly pleasant pub in Appleby Magna and I had lasagne and some rather tasty chips.
By the time we’d finished stuffing ourselves the shower had passed, so we tootled down the road to the zoo. It was a little expensive - about £9 each for adults - but it must be over ten years since I last went to a zoo, so I was excited enough to pay My experience of zoos is a little limited; when I was a small child I used to go to Dudley Zoo once a year, but then I think that they were losing so much money that they had to sell all the exciting animals like the polar bears, and it was never so much fun after that. I went to Chester Zoo when I was in the Girl Guides, and I thought that was utterly amazing, and I have a vague memory of going to Twycross once, when I was about six.
As I had been warned, Twycross Zoo has an awful lot of monkeys. I am not averse to monkeys, indeed I used to very much enjoy going to the West Midlands Safari Park and watching their attempts to break the windscreen wipers off my parents’ cars, but all the same, I think I have a monkey saturation point. Some of them were quite cool - the orang utans and the chimps were particularly interesting - but a lot of the smaller monkeys were much of a muchness and you really did begin to feel that once you’d seen one endangered spider monkey scratching its bottom, you’d seen them all.
Happily, Twycross also had some much more exciting animals. There were at least four Asian elephants for a start. Babel claims that he only saw two, but he wasn’t looking properly 
I have always thought that elephants are really cool, and when I was very small my Dad used to tell be bedtime stories about the couple, Jumbo and Flossie, who used to live at Twycross Zoo. Jumbo and Flossie used to get up to ever such exciting things - they ate a lot of cream buns, and ever so often they would try to escape
There were two lions, who must have been dosed up on something because they looked rather calm. There was a leopard, which was very spotty and looked much more active. There were dozens of flamingos which were as pink of flamingos are supposed to be, and also a rather cool pool full of penguins which I could have stood and looked at all day were I not in the company of a rather impatient Babel There were some things which looked like pigs but weren’t, an incredibly unattractive camel which appeared to be a strange shade of black, and three of the most goregous giraffes you ever did see
The rain held off until right at the end when we were ready to leave anyway, but even then it was only a brief shower and as we made our way back to Leicester, we decided to stop off in Market Bosworth. Obviously I knew that this was the location of the Battle of Bosworth, although I had forgotten until Babel hazarded a guess which I saw confirmed on the side of a litter bin that the battle had taken place in 1485, but I knew nothing whatsoever about the town itself. It turned out to be a charming little place We parked the car and had a little wander, hoping to find a tea room but unfortunately half four on a Sunday afternoon is not the optimum time to find an open tea room, and so we settled for a cup of coffee in one of the local pubs. It wasn’t a bad cup of coffee actually.
After that, we headed back to Leicester because we were scheduled to visit my boyfriend’s sister and her family. His sister has a little boy who is just over a year old, and whilst I do not like children by any stretch of the imagination, he is a very good-natured and well-behaved sort of child, with a very attractive head of curly hair I don’t know why I don’t like children - I was speculating recently whether it could be a result of me being gay, that I might be missing some sort of hormone straight people have which makes them want to reproduce, but I’m not sure whether that is the explanation or whether I would just like it to be the explanation so that I had a socially acceptable excuse for being a child-hater… At any rate, it is always a stressful experience interacting with other people’s relations, but I got through yesterday without incident and we’re supposed to be going to Rutland Water with them in the near future, so perhaps that will make me feel a bit more comfortable.
Rather to the horror of my boyfriend’s sister, we then proceeded to go to a petrol station and eat chocolate for tea, before my boyfriend gave me a lift home which was really very kind of him given that it was already quite late at night and he had to be up early for work the next morning. It was a nice day overall, and a distraction from real life for a few hours. I don’t know what had been going on at home during the afternoon, but when I got home my mother most definitely had red eyes from crying.