Over at The Dabbler (beta) I post on a terrifying 16th century family portrait, which I saw at Longleat House.
Have you been to Longleat? You get to drive around amidst lions and tigers and wolves and, most thrillingly, deer. Not monkeys at the moment, alas, they all have herpes, naughty things.
We took Brit Jnr a few weeks ago. What a waste of time; tots can’t see anything. At one point you can wind your windows down and feed the deer repellent pellets. One monster was literally poking its enormous head right onto Brit Jnr’s shoulder, but she only had eyes for a plastic cup. It crinkled. The lions, tigers and giraffes were quite lost on her but she got very excited about some chickens. More on her scale I suppose. Plus, she’s got no frame of reference by which lions should be more interesting than say, Yorkshire terriers. It’s a good day out though, if your kids are a bit older than 11 months.
7 comments:
I haven't been although I have a friend who takes people on dates there - slightly odd choice maybe.
Thanks for that, Brit. Monkey herpes fatal to humans would be on my list of 'things I don't want to know especially just after eating my breakfast'.
Monkey herpes sounds like the pitch to one of those disaster movies where Morgan Freeman plays the President and Bruce Willis has to rescue his daughter from a plague ravaged city...
merpes?
I took Millie to London zoo when she was just under one. She failed to see any zoo animals, including a 16 ft giraffe standing right in front of her, but she did spot a pigeon.
I took her back when she was a bit older and she liked the fish.
What is missing is a nice Meerkat compound, the kids are just as bored, the adults tickled pink.
Have you ever been tickled pink by a Meerkat, missus?
What I find most interesting about old paintings is to see how they wanted to be represented. I mean, the moment after the portrait was taken, the marmoset ate the parrot and one of the kids vomited on the Baron, but in the mean time -- that's how they wanted to be remembered.
Yes, David, I wonder whether this isn't the obverse of the modern family where sulky kids and bored parents are forced to smile for the camera so everybody can see how happy they are. Is is possible that when the sitting was over they all got down on the floor for a tickle-and-rumble fest?
I've often thought our gloomy image of Victorian life is based in part on the fact that they didn't smile for the camera.
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