To London, for dinner with Ros and a visit to my parents. And that means a trip on newly-nationalised Greater Anglia, with its fairly new, quite nice, Stadler rolling stock, with a hot cup of tea to drink and some Viennese whirls to keep me going until dinner. Well, I say that, but Greater Anglia offer, as entertainment, what I tend to describe as “the first class lottery”, in that you can never be sure if your train will have the scheduled first class carriages, regardless of what they’ve sold you even an hour before.
But I digress.
One of the things I enjoy most about train travel, and regular readers will know how much I like train travel, is looking out of the window, watching the world go by. Naturally, I like to do this in comfort, one of my rare extravagances.
The first half of the journey south and west to the capital is something I look forward to, although you do cross into Essex just before Manningtree. It does have one unusual feature though, i.e. polar bears. Now I acknowledge that polar bears are not native to Suffolk - at least, I don’t think that they’ve been native for a very long time - but the recent addition of polar bears, the first rescued from a zoo in Sweden that was closing, with others following from Nuremberg Zoo, means that Suffolk boasts the largest dedicated polar bear enclosure in Europe. And, as trains pass by, it’s something to look out for.
I do acknowledge that there are many people who don’t really approve of keeping such animals in captivity, and I do wonder how captivity affects the animals concerned, but where an animal cannot easily be returned to the wild, it seems logical to at least give them the best environment possible for them to live out their lives and to give the public an opportunity to put these creatures into context more readily.
Today, one of the bears was lying on its stomach, seemingly watching the trains. I wonder what it was thinking? Are polar bears potential trainspotters?
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