Catmachine

I'm not that keen on zoos in general but one afternoon I had a lot of time to kill waiting for my train. Given that the station I was due to depart from was called Bahnhof Berlin Zoologischer Garten , going to the zoo was an obvious choice. So I put my suitcase and bass guitar in left luggage and headed there. I had been to Berlin Zoo before as a child – back when there had been a Berlin Wall and everything – but all I could remember were the tigers. Genuinely nothing else had stuck in my mind. The tigers had lived on an island but you could walk through a tunnel built through the middle of it and look out at them through thick perspex windows built into cave mouths on the island's central peak. Arriving at the Tiger Island as an adult, it turned out this setup was still in place thirty plus years later. The tunnel was shabbier than I remembered, but the perspex windows were still there. And there, curled up next to one of them like a giant housecat, was one of the tigers. I lo...