Welcome to the Jungle

Squirrel monkey at London Zoo

It's a monkey!

This weekend I went to ZSL London Zoo with my boyfriend. We had been meaning to go for about a year, because last year for his birthday present I adopted a squirrel monkey for him from the zoo,* but obviously we had to wait until the coldest weekend in the year. Being a naturally chilly person (both in temperature and personality), I wore eight layers of clothing to ensure I wouldn't get too cold. I was so bundled up I couldn't lift my arms above shoulder-height. But it was worth it!

But anyway, we had an awesome day! It was the first day of half-term, so I had expected it would be pretty busy, but in fact it was fairly quiet - I think the cold kept people at home. It was really nice being able to walk around the zoo without being buffeted by hordes of people. We went to visit my boyfriend's adopted squirrel monkey, Bounty, who lives with his monkey clan in an awesome exhibit which you can walk through. It's highly entertaining to watch them all bouncing around the place, and consequently I have a whole lot of monkey photos which will probably take over this blog for some time! Prepare to learn more than you ever needed to know about squirrel monkeys...

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*Because I kept asking what he wanted for his birthday and he kept giving me silly answers like "a monkey". I am nothing if not literal :D

Snowy Gates

Not as wonky as my previous offering, happily! If you look closely you can see the nubbins of snowmen that appeared to have been decapitated by the time I got there.

Wonky Architecture in the Snow

There's a reason why I hardly ever post pictures of architecture or buildings or even landscapes on this blogs, and it's because I struggle like a small child to take pictures that are even vaguely level. The even sadder thing is that my camera actually does have a "grid" function that you can turn on, superimposing a grid onto the screen, and then you can line up the picture with the lines on the screen and not take photos that look like they've been captured by a seasick photographer on the high seas. Alas, I have only ever turned the grid function on by mistake, and I have no idea how to do it on purpose. Consequently I fear that my photographs will continue to be as ludicrously wonky as this one.

Another snowy architecture photo. I do like the colours in the photo, especially the weirdly green trees, covered in lichen. If only my hands weren't so ludicrously wobbly!

Dark Archway

If only it had been really sunny I think this could have been a good photo. We've had copious amounts of snow here for the past week, and as I missed the first day of snow, when it's all pristine as nice, due to being a hundred and fifty miles away, I was determined to catch up with the photographic opportunities as soon as possible. I went on a mad rampage of snowy photography on a very overcast day, and then today, when it is still snowy but also very sunny… I forgot to take my camera as I left the house. Facepalm! It's even more inexcusable because I got some nice pictures of snowy rooftops from my window this morning, after last night deposited another inch or so of fresh snow across the landscape. Ho hum!

I am going to the zoo at the weekend, so look out for some blurry pictures of exotic animals coming your way very soon...

Tangled Up In Blue

The latest controversy to strike the office at my place of work is the vexed issue of tea scum. One half of the office insists it's caused by leaving the teabag in too long; the other half have an unshakeable belief that scum will occur if you put the milk in last.

 I once had the formation of tea scum explained to me by a scientist friend, so when the debate got heated for the second time and my opinion was canvassed, I couldn't stop myself from pointing out that although I couldn't remember the scientific explanation, I knew that neither camp was right and that the scum could be reduced by introducing acidity to the tea in the form of a drop or two of lemon juice.

This was met with a stony silence and then my colleagues resumed the debate. But my curiosity was piqued again and so I had to Google it. Turns out that tea scum was unexplained by science until the 1990s when research was conducted into the question that concluded that the calcium carbonate found in hard water is what allows scum to form in tea through oxidation at the tea's surface, and that scum can be eliminated either by using soft water or by introducing acid to the mix, for example with a drop or two of lemon juice.

Who knew?

Wax & Wane

A photograph of a candle, in case you had difficulty working that out. Wikipedia, my trusty guide, tells me that while modern candles are usually made of paraffin, back in the day they could be made from beeswax, tallow, or even spermaceti extracted from the head of a sperm whale. Poor sperm whales. I was amused to note that their scientific name is physeter macrocephalus. I confess don't know what "physeter" means, but "macrocephalus" translates as "bloody big head".

I was also intrigued to discover that sperm whales have the largest mammalian brain both in proportion to its body size and mass, and is the only living creature that has a gullet large enough to swallow a human whole. The most famous sperm whale is obviously Moby Dick, but I have to admit that I wasn't a fan of the book. The only aspects of it that I really enjoyed were the ones in which Herman Melville got into the scientific aspects of whaling. There's nothing like the smug feeling of reading an author whose book you're not enjoying strenuously denying the existence of the blue whales we now know really do exist. Okay, so Melville was a Victorian living in the pre-Attenborough age, but that's not the point.

On the Hedge Of Glory

Regular service is resumed! I apologise profusely for the break, I hadn't realised it was almost a week since my last post. That is most disgraceful of me. I need to head outside in the sunshine again and get snapping some new wintery pictures! Although the only real hint that this photo of a hedge was taken in the depths of January is the profusion of brown twiglet leaves (this is a technical botanical term).

Hedges do not normally strike me as something particularly photo-worthy, I have to admit, but sometimes you just have to strike out in a fresh direction and risk looking like a hedge-obsessed madwoman. For the sake of art!