Please don’t judge me. I am NOT a vegan. Honest. My shoes are leather. On principle. I eat steak tartare. Again, on principle, because I don’t love it.

So you can see, I am a man of principle. The foremost one being: don’t eat it unless it was walking/flying/swimming/crawling (eeeuuuuwww) more than a few days ago (aged beef excepted).

And with an irony common in most carnivores, I really like animals. As in, living, breathing ones. I really like them. They’ve always held a fascination for me. So ‘hitting the jackpot’ for me, many years ago, happened in a South African safari park. We safaried, we saw kudu and springbok and ostrich, in the wild, magnificent, galloping across the veldt in vast herds, then we had a ‘brai’ and ate them all.

But I don’t like the zoo. You get to see animals, but…

Its not right. To see a bear in a little ‘cell’, 20 foot square. Lions in cages. Elephants in… big cages. Its just wrong. They’re not happy. Tigers are made for runnin’, not pacing like convicted murderers. The zoo upsets me. I know, I’m a hypocrite, because I get no upset at a butchers block.

So Lila and Joey took Mel and me down to deepest, darkest Kent to go ‘glamping’ in an animal reserve and ‘safari park’, near Hythe, close to Folkstone. That famously animalistic region of the world.

And there, in Port Lympne (as its called), they have animals in ‘enclosures’ the size of small parks. And an amazing selection of animals at that. To see, not to eat. Unfortunately. But lions, tigers, bears, red pandas, all manner of apes, rhinos, antelope… basically, if it runs across Africa or Asia; they got one. Or some. In families. Mating pairs. Because, like all ‘zoos’, they have to be ‘conservation centres’ where ‘reproduction of endangered species’ is what they’re all about! And NOT busing round families from Bromsgrove, Hartlepool and Clapham in big, open-sided jeeps shouting ‘LOOK MUMMY, A SQUIRREL!!!!’, which happened to scamper into the Leopard enclosure. They even have fucking dinosaurs!!!! Don’t get them in Regents Park Zoo, do ya??

Its a great place. Glamping was… ok. Lila and Joey loved it completely. Mel’s a tougher audience because she couldn’t demand a better room.

But it was fun. Great fun. And the only bad thing about the whole trip is that you have to actually drive through South London to get home. There’s no other way to do it. And it takes fucking hours of agonising, endless traffic. Why couldn’t they just put Kent up near Potters Bar? There’s loads’a room there.

Happy Friday

A xxxx