I went to the zoo
Hi all,
Quickish one this week, featuring: my trip to the zoo, the concept of December, and some things I’ve enjoyed recently.
THREE DAYS AT THE ZOO
Last week I went to Pairi Daiza, which is a big zoo an hour south of Brussels. I was on a little research trip - I’m currently trying to write another book, and it’s all still a bit vague but occasionally people ask what I’m working on and what I say is some approximation of: well, it’s a contemporary comedy like The Husbands; unlike The Husbands it doesn’t have magic in it, but like The Husbands it is a bit weird. And it’s set in a zoo.
Hence: this trip to Belgium.
I caught the Eurostar, which felt glamorous, and then a big double-decker regional train for forty minutes, which felt foreign and exciting, and then a little graffiti-covered local train, which felt unlikely, and then I got out by a big muddy field at the edge of a Belgian village and pulled my little wheelie suitcase over bumpy footpaths for twenty minutes, following occasional arrows in what was frequently (but not always) the right direction:
I know what you’re thinking: ooh, I’d love to piss on that bench. But sadly:
Eventually I got to the front gate and went in and stayed there for three days, at a hotel inside the zoo enclosure where they let you walk around a couple of the sections even late at night.
A lot of the experience was, you know, standard zoo feelings: I think most visitors to a zoo feel some mix of “oh my god LOOK at that ANIMAL it’s MAGNIFICENT and/or VERY CUTE”, and some “oh my god it’s having so much FUN” and some “are zoos… okay, actually? is this okay? is this specific enclosure that I’m standing by and feeling weird about big enough and interesting enough for the animal inside it?”, and then maybe some “well there are accreditation programmes that figure out the welfare stuff, organised by people who know a lot more about animals than I do”, the usual tangle.
But here’s a few moments that were very specific to this particular visit:
This sign:
Some of the zoo’s macaws and cockatoos leave their enclosures in the afternoons to just fly around and sit in the trees, huge blue and yellow birds on bare winter branches; they head back home in the late afternoon. This was so good, and also involved a LOT more signs around that all said, basically, “IT’S OKAY the macaws are MEANT to be in the trees DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE MACAWS PLEASE STOP TELLING US THE MACAWS HAVE ESCAPED WE PROMISE IT’S FINE”.
The guy feeding the brown bears early in the morning, who seemed so happy, like this was the best job in the whole zoo, or maybe the whole world: he drove his tiny truck up a winding path and then stopped at the top of the hill overlooking the bears, and took trays of cabbages and apples and meat and carrots out of the back of the truck, and just chucked them over, one piece of fruit at a time, apple in his hand and then tossing it and then again and again. He stopped five or six times at different points along the hillside with another armful of groceries while the bears woke themselves up and stretched below.
The Australia section of the zoo. Pairi Daiza goes harder than most zoos into “architecture like the place the animals are from”, which sometimes feels a bit… of its time, but for most of it I am absolutely not qualified to judge the authenticity of its recreations. What I can judge is the authenticity of the “Austral coast” section, which is modelled after an Australian country-town pub and its rainwater tanks. It’s all pretty much the right shape, but made of wood, which - I don’t quite know how to explain this to English people, but maybe imagine going to a zoo and they’ve decided to keep the badgers in a building styled after a little village church, and they’ve got the shape of the church right and there are little roses over the entrance and some stone gargoyle-adjacent curlicues and arches and the steeple and they’ve built it pretty much full-scale but also - for some reason that’s not quite clear to you - out of solid concrete.
Also, there were a bunch of birds, and in particular a lot of rainbow lorikeets, which I do love but which are everywhere in Australia. They always come top of the annual birdwatch survey, and they’re not exactly pests (at least not in the cities) but they’re certainly… pest-adjacent. So in this analogy, I guess the concrete church is surrounded by a whole load of pigeons.
In the morning I woke up just before dawn to the sound of huge sealion honks, and it was misty outside, and when I got up and walked around I saw a bear shaking frost from its back and then standing upright to scratch itself against a tree. The zoo birds were flying around their walk-through aviaries all we’ve been up for AGES, slugabed, and the wild birds were up and about too, in the nests that they’d built on top of the aviary netting.
DECEMBER
How is this month possible? How can it be so grey, how can the days end so early? Whose idea was this? Do we genuinely do this every year?
OKAY, THINGS I’VE ENJOYED LATELY
Electric Dreams, a new exhibition at Tate Modern looking at tech-y and computer-y art from the 50s to the early 90s (I took some pictures here)
One of the pieces at the exhibition was Suzanne Treister’s Fictional Videogame Stills, which I love so much - basically Treister made a bunch of fake screenshots of videogames that never existed, back in 1991-92, and they’re gorgeous and silly and weird and excellent. (You can see them all online at that link, too, you don’t have to go to the Tate! Also: they were first exhibited in a pub in my home town Adelaide - Treister has an essay with details here [pdf]).
This advent calendar of tiny digital artworks, most of them lightly interactive; each one might only take ten or twenty seconds to play around with, so it’s a lovely little daily treat. Desktop only, though. (I made a very small thing for it that’s coming up later in the month.)
!!!! Big news: last night I put all my summer-only clothes in a container under the bed! It is, yes, ten days till literal midwinter
Speak soon,
Holly