The monkeys stand for honesty, giraffes are insincere...

At least, so sang Simon and Garfunkel. It’s hard to tell how sincere a giraffe is - how could you possibly tell? - but they are rather charming creatures.

You might therefore guess that, today, we’ve been to the zoo, Banham Zoo, to be precise, tucked away in a quiet corner of mid-Norfolk. We’ve been making sure to get out and about at weekends, and whilst we usually find a National Trust property, I though that a change might be nice. Besides, zoos have been hard hit by the pandemic, and need the visitors. And, Banham Zoo offers a giraffe feeding experience, bookable on the day.

Luckily, giraffe appear not to be as much of an attraction as the big cats, so on arrival I was able to book a slot, allowing us to take a gentle wonder around the zoo first. In fairness, Banham doesn’t have a huge selection of animals - it’s a regional zoo rather than a national one, but there’s enough to keep you occupied for a couple of hours and, on a sunny day, it makes a change to watch alpaca, penguins and lemurs, to name but a few.

The big moment soon came along, and a keeper showed us up to the upper level of the giraffe enclosure, where we stood at the end of an extended platform. The giraffes knew why we were there, and were ready with their big eyes, long eyelashes and even longer black tongues, waiting to be fed.

We were given a quick briefing - “hold the branch tight, they’re pretty strong”, “don’t get too close” - and were then let loose with some small, leafy tree branches. Those long black tongues and teeth are very effective at stripping the leaves and soft bark off and, given that an adult giraffe can eat 70kg of leaves a day, that’s probably a good thing.

You do get very close to the giraffes, but the platform is designed so that, whilst they’re at head height, they can’t easily get to you, so you get the advantage of proximity without the risk of injury, or industrial amounts of drool - the latter probably being the higher risk.

It does make me think that we really ought to see some in the wild at some point. Maybe, some day, this wretched pandemic will be halted...