Babysitting pandas

I am thrilled. Two baby pandas are coming to live in Scotland. The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) is working with officials in China to bring a breeding pair of giant pandas to Edinburgh Zoo. If successful, Edinburgh will be only the eighth zoo in the West to care for this enigmatic and endangered species.

We are on a flight to Berlin. "Look! they're going to have baby pandas at Edinburgh zoo. How fun is that?? Aw look at that one with the bib on. Bless." He flinches from the Daily Mail coverage of this unlikely collaboration with contempt. I am still in trouble for describing his most loathed publication as "the paper" as we boarded.

I am patiently told that the baby panda wearing the bib, the one holding a comic and even the one bouncing joyously down a slide in a childrens' play park, all represent the thin edge of the wedge. "The panda is an ecological cul-de-sac," he explains (this he's got from Chris Packham who used to be on the Really Wild Show) and I am reminded of the larceny of the Chinese. "Remember when you're wearing blue overalls and eating grass because they've guzzled up all our gas and laid waste to every square inch of arable land in Africa that we once paid half a million quid a year to babysit the pets of our future overlords. How we'll laugh."

Evil