Bucket list birthday breakfast

Hitting the big five-oh, and Cathy had a great idea of how I could celebrate it in style, with rhinos!

Card made by Cathy

And so it was that early on my birthday we were at West Midlands Safari Park meeting the Asian rhinos and feeding them breakfast. I wasn't sure how close we would be allowed to get to the rhinos. (Petting a rhino has been on my bucket list for ages.) Turns out, we got close enough to get slobbered on as we fed them cabbage and celery starters. 

We met three adult rhinos and a baby' (less than a year old). The baby was adorable although his mum would push him out of the way to get to the cabbage. Rhino mums don't indulge their kids! Got to be tough to be a rhino. 

Asian rhinos have prehensile lips, which means they can grip things like door bolts, so extra security is needed on their pens. The lips are very flexible and they caress your hands while you feed them. They are very rubbery and warm, and I felt perfectly safe letting them engulf my hand to take the cabbage. 

However, while it's perfectly fine to put your hand into the mouth of a female rhino, the males have knife-like incisors in their mouths so it's advisable to just chuck the cabbage in from a safe distance. In the wild, male rhinos use their incisors for scrapping with each other over who gets to make it with the lady rhinos, and given they can do some damage to armoured rhino hide, they would make short work of a human hand if they accidentally bit you. 

For the main course of their breakfast the rhinos have a mix of different kinds of yummy pellets, mixed in with powder that simulates the dust that rhinos naturally consume while feeding in the wild. The dust helps them poop properly. Given how much rhinos can poop in an average day, it helps to make sure the poop is as solid and dry as possible. 

After breakfast was over, we bade goodbye to the rhinos. We then went on the Safari Drive, where we saw some more rhinos, and then looked at some of the other animals in the park. I enjoyed the sealion show and the nocturnal house with free-flying bats. But it's hard for any other animals to compete with the experience of being snuffled by friendly rhinos.

Not-snack of the month - American breakfast selection box part 2

On to the second half of the selection box of American cereals that Cathy bought me.

Next on the menu were Golden Grahams.

These were delicious. They are crunchy and have a sweet taste that's like burnt brown sugar (but burnt in a good way).

I was interspersing the packets of Cheerios with other cereal and had reached the last variant of them. I had high hopes that Honey Nut Cheerios were going to be a bit special.

But they were a bit disappointing. I couldn't really taste any honey or nuts. They tasted like Cheerios.

Leaving the disappointment of Cheerios behind I went for the bright red packet of Lucky Charms as my penultimate choice of cereal.

Lucky Charms are basically misshapen Cheerios with foam mallow bits in that have a surprising texture and a 'snap' to them when they are chewed. The foam mallows are very sweet and have some flavour to them, although it is hard to tell because the sweetness is overpowering.

My final packet of cereal was Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

These are basically the same as Golden Grahams, but dusted in cinnamon. As I like cinnamon flavoured things, they were a real hit!

So, what's the verdict. This was a great box to munch through and picking a cereal every day was quite fun. I wasn't planning to rank the cereals when I started out, but it seems like the natural thing to do.  I would probably rank them as follows:

1 - Cinnamon Toast Crunch

2 - Cocoa Puffs

3 - Lucky Charms

4 - Golden Grahams

5 - Trix (if only for the novelty value)

Joint 6th - the various Cheerios

Obviously no one told Setanta

Watching Setanta Sports News this morning while eating my mini Oatibix, I was pleasantly surprised to see highlights of the England v Holland under-19 game. That wasn’t just because England won, but because the presenters hyped it up by saying “And now, action from New Meadow, where England took on Holland last night…”

When you support a lower league team, just seeing the ground on TV is relatively cool. But obviously no one has told the Setanta crew that the official name for the ground is the ProStar Stadium, and “New Meadow” has been excised from the vocabulary by the STFC marketing thought police. (Even though on the big sign next to the stadium that announces the building plans, it still says ‘Site of the New Meadow’, as Cathy pointed out when we went to the Aldershot game.)

And a shout out to mum (‘Hi, mum!’) who told me at the weekend that, just like I refer to the ProStar Stadium as the PornStar Stadium, she calls it the Prostate Stadium. Which is just as bad, if not as rude.

Illuminated by darkness

Bit of a profound way to describe a thought I had this morning at about half 7. It was very dark this morning, and as I sat munching my wheat bisks (none of that fancy branded cereal for me) I noticed just how incredibly dark it was outside.

And then the thought struck me: What if the sun doesn’t rise today? Of course, I know that I was being ridiculous, because the earth revolves on its own axis once every 24 hours, and day was going to follow night as surely as nauseous regret follows the snaffling of a dozen mince pies. (Not that I’ve done that… recently.)

But that half moment of fear made me realise that in pre-scientific times there was no sure way of knowing, which is why the Egyptians et al used to celebrate the sunrise every day (or at least I think they did – perhaps I ought to look historical trivia like that up). And how do I really ‘know’ that stuff about the Earth on its axis, other than that I’ve been told about it and apparently there’s this invisible, un-measureable, unquantifiable thing called gravity that would stop working if the world suddenly stopped spinning. So, the sun was going to come up because we hadn’t all been catapulted off into space while we slept – what a comforting thought!

The upshot of all this frenzied brain activity was me being a bit more grateful when the sky started to lighten than I usually am.