In the week that I couldn’t get my mother to serve me a chicken and mushroom pie, some bears managed to raid a cafe
Peak bear performance was attained today, at Wildwood Devon near Ottery St Mary (also peak British placename performance, but that need not detain us here).
Two five-year-old European brown bears, Mish and Lucy (no relation), escaped from their enclosure at the park and headed straight for its cafe’s food stores, where they happily ploughed their way through a week’s worth of honey before being gently lured back home with a bell and some other snacks, whereupon Mish promptly fell asleep.
It’s perfect. The Teddy Bears’ Picnic (what a big surprise in the woods it must have been, especially to whoever was responsible for keeping the enclosure secure!), Winnie-the-Pooh, a suggestion of Paddington in the eminent reasonableness of it all, plus European brown bears being by far the cutest and most childhood-teddy-like of all. This is the good news story we need. Enjoy it. The year is shaping up … badly.
Mish and Lucy were originally rescued from an Albanian snow drift. I am on my way to Devon to ask them for directions back there. Summer, the vilest of all seasons, is properly here. Once again I appear to have neglected to get my air-conditioned bunker built in time and so I am stuck on this boiling isle, whose architecture, culture, working and retail hours are designed to cope only with temperatures of “brisk” and below.
