South Downs Leisure Centre

 There have been a handful of dreams lately featuring the familiar rundown zoo or aquarium, but none of them quite substantial or coherent enough to write down until last night's. I was driven far out into the countryside by my wife, who wanted to take me to a leisure resort she was in the habit of visiting for business purposes. As we drove through the glistening green hills of the Sussex Downs, I felt a boyish excitement not often experienced these days. The resort appeared, an extensive golf course, a fancy hotel, a fairground, zoo, prehistoric sculpture park, and swimming pool. I read the signs for the attractions in quick succession as we drove by. We were there to play golf, but I would much rather have visited the zoo and model park.

We parked up and entered the resort, removed our shoes, and scraped our bare feet on deposits of chalk that were scattered around. The reason behind this was never explained to me, and I did not ask. In order to reach the golf course, it was necessary to walk by one part of the zoo. My wife strode purposefully on, ignoring the beasts, but I gave each cage a cursory glance. They were arranged in a straight row of identically square, open air compounds, smaller than they should have been and shoddily maintained. It had the look of an underfunded Soviet zoo, or a Victorian menagerie, and the animals were in a poor state of neglect. It was the sort of place that would have been closed down immediately following an inspection.

The first few enclosures housed a number of small, rodent-like mammals I did not have time to identify, followed by specimens of the lesser monkeys. As we walked at a brisk pace, they passed by in a blur, but next came a family of gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), considerably malnourished and squatting on faeces-smeared concrete. The largest, a gangly male, tugged on his upper lip, which showed signs of advanced infection. The following pen had emaciated big cats, and the last in the row held a lone polar bear (Ursus maritimus), its gaunt, mange-ridden body convulsing in a kennel. I tried to point out this last animal to my wife, for it is rare to find polar bears in British zoos, but she was either uninterested or had seen it before.

We then entered a building that acted as an intermediary between the zoo and the funfair. I was horrified to see a grid of holes in the ground, with long snakes rearing ramrod erect from each. I noticed that they were cobras (Naja sp.) of various species, vividly coloured, the tight holes keeping them trapped in position and preventing them from escaping. They rather resembled the beds of garden eels one sees in aquaria, albeit with menacing hoods and flickering forked tongues. When we got too close, one of them lashed out and tried to bite us, but we jumped away at the last second. There was no barrier between the cobras and visitors, another instance of the resort's appalling safety standards. With the zoo behind us, we reached a shabby fairground, my ears filled with furious hisses.