Dr K vs Boredom

Today's post comes to you courtesy of a guest blogger: the illustrious Dr K!

Today at work I was quite bored and sent a text to Darren to tell him this very interesting fact; just to pass the time! It's not that I had boring things to do, just that I'd been too productive and finished everything on my list, and nothing more had come my way to keep me occupied. Darren immediately responded to my text with the usual stock response of 'Build a Fort!', which, to be honest, is wearing a bit thin now, along with some other inane suggestions like 'learn to fly', 'make a new origami model', 'make the tea', 'pick your nose', 'pick a colleague's nose', etc. etc. But in amongst the silly ideas was the suggestion that I write him a Guest Blog Post. This was an excellent suggestion, although I immediately started to wonder what I could write about...

… at that very moment a colleague of mine shouted across the office 'Come and look at this picture!' I wandered over the other side of the office to be greeted by a picture of a strange creature. Due to copyright reasons I cannot show you the picture, but here is a representation of it lovingly recreated by Darren.


My colleague asked me to tell him what I thought the creature was, after also telling me that we have them roaming wild here in Britain. After a thoughtful few moments I decided that this was some sort of joke, as this particular colleague of mine likes to kid us around, so I said 'It's a deer... with something in its mouth that makes it look like it has tusks'.

Well, after much discussion I have now learnt that there are indeed deer with tusks in Britain. Who'd have thunk it? I had never heard of Chinese Water Deer until today. Reading the Wikipedia article on them I was interested to note that they were introduced to London Zoo, from China, in the 1870s. They are very good swimmers, hence why they are called Water Deer. The London Zoo population was transferred to Woburn Abbey and later Whipsnade Park in the 1890s. There are now over 600 roaming wild at Whipsnade and 250 at Woburn. Due to some escapees, there are also wild populations in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. They are colloquially referred to as Vampire Deer for obvious reasons!

Well that alleviated the boredom for a little while !