Them thar wild animals

It's Saturday, I have the office car (not pranged anything yet this weekend...).

So I thought I'd do my duty wild animal wise and go to Mokolodi Game Park, just outside Gaborone. I even found it, first time - that does not often happen to me here. (It's off the Lobatse Road).

Since people rave about the park's restaurant, that was my first stop. It has nice outside seats, with a view over the park (no giraffes wandering by), and a day's special involving pork knuckle, sauerkraut and 'bratkartoffeln'. Almost enough to make me turn back! But in the end I had a wonderful salad and a fillet steak with chips. Folks here are great on meat, less so on vegetables.

Then off I drove towards the game park, only to find that you have to be a member to drive your own car in it, otherwise you have to participate in a guided tour (which costs less, I am Scottish!). And today's tours were already booked. I suppose that is nature conservation for you. Did not see anything alive, though passed closely by the reptile department. Bit scary that!

My local colleagues seem to think that those wild animals are best kept in a zoo. They are really scared of them, perhaps not surprisingly. I told one that in Europe buffalo milk is used for rather nice mozzarella - she exclaimed 'How do they milk those wild beasts?'

It reminds me of the day my son (then 9) and I met a little snake sunning itself on a stone in Scotland. Not sure what it was, but my (half-African) son screamed and screamed and ran away. Even then I wondered if a fear like that could have been passed down genetically (certainly not culturally in our case). Having just read Carl Jung on something like a common unconscious (between all people) which is fed by ancient myths I still wonder about that. He suggests that apart from their own psyche people's unconscious is also fed by all sorts of stories and myths from ancient times till today. (Though I think Jung looks at this from a learned middle-class point of view - he analyses [probably Swiss] folks' dreams and links them to all sorts of mysterious mystical events all over the globe. Can't imagine that my friend's English removal man, who, on being told that she works for the European Union, said 'never heard of it', would have similar dreams, and might well think his analyst is off his head talking about squares and circles, and ancient Indian myths. Myself, I prefer Freud, plain old sex and family problems. No wonder Freud and Jung fell out.) Wow, bit of a detraction here, no?