I normally try to take the whole family out for a meal whenever someone has a birthday.

This has been getting more expensive as the kids grow older and more likely to want to go to Zari’s or the Happy Meeting Place than Pizza Hut.

This week was Chrystal’s birthday and we asked her if she would rather skip the meal and go down to Monkey World in Dorset instead so she could see Seamus, the chimp we adopted for her at Christmas.

She opted for the 120-mile journey, so off we went.

She ended up with a meal anyway, as we stopped off for a big fry-up breakfast on the way down there. At motorway service station prices it ended up as expensive as a proper restaurant anyway.

When we got there we went right round the whole place. Saw lots of monkeys, but couldn’t find Seamus anywhere. All the enclosures have boards up showing photos of who is there, but Seamus didn’t appear on any of them.

It was very cold, as you might expect in February, so most of the animals were indoors. This made it hard for me to take any decent photos as we could only see the monkeys through glass, and with the sun so low in the sky the glass was full of reflections. Of course, we forgot to bring along Jayne’s SLR film camera with the decent zoom lens as well.

After going right the way round the park and seeing loads of chimps (including a couple of babies), orang utans, gibbons, stump-tailed macaques and other creatures, Chas and I decided to go off down the road to the tank museum while Jayne and Chrystal went looking for Seamus.

I can remember going to Bovington tank museum when I was Chas’ age, or younger. Its a great place for boys. Ours don’t have extensive collections of Airfix models of Bren carriers, Tiger tanks and half-tracks like I used to have, but Chas still enjoyed it. Frankie would have enjoyed it too, but we had to leave him behind in case we didn’t get home in time for his work in the evening.

Unfortunately a lot of the museum is closed while work is done on the building and only two halls were open. Fortunately they were the WWII hall, with all the most familiar tanks, and the Tamiya Hall with all the big, impressive machines. I would like to have seen the old first world-war tanks and the gulf war stuff, but there was still plenty to see.

Regardless of your views on warfare, you can’t help finding some of the machines awesome, and fascinating from a technical point of view. I was particularly taken with something called the TOG II, which never saw service.

I was a bit put out to see an empty space where the Swedish S-type tank should have been, especially after reading the information board for it, which contained the unlikely fact that the tank has a layer of jerry cans full of fuel attached to the sides “to provide extra protection for the crew”. I’m still trying to work that out.

When we had exhausted the possibilities of the tank museum, we returned to Monkey World, where Seamus had finally been located. On the way out I spotted the Swedish S-type tank on the road behind the museum. The outside was covered in fuel cans right enough and I gave it a wide berth.

Back to Seamus. It turns out that he had progressed from the nursery group to one of the adult groups but had some ‘problems settling in’ so he had recently been moved back the nursery group, but the signs have not been updated to reflect this.

Reading between the lines, it looks like Seamus is a bit of a thug and a bully who stirred it up too much when he was moved. I choose to re-interpret this as ‘lovable rogue’.

Here he is, between fights.

We all had a good time though, and set off home loaded with monkey merchandise, including some Monkey World blackberry and apple jam which I am looking forward to sampling. As usual the journey home was at least 30 minutes shorter than the journey out.

There is some strange warp in the law of physics, because journeys home always seem to be shorter than journeys out.

Its been a long day, but I’m determined to get all the full-sized photos onto Flickr before I go to bed.