A Desk at the Zoo

My job as a children's author has taken me to some interesting places. I have had residencies in the Blue Mountains, Beijing and Ghana. This month I have a residency at the Melbourne Zoo. In collaboration with the Wheeler Centre, Cate Kennedy, Estelle Tang, Judy Horacek and I have been offered a 'behind-the-scenes' artist-in-residence experience to celebrate the zoo's 150th birthday.

Today, I took my laptop in to work at the desk that has been set aside for us to use. I share an office space with the director of the zoo and his assistant, who has promised us all kinds of exciting animal experiences which I am looking forward to enormously. But for now, as I have a deadline at the end of this week, I planned to keep my head down and plug away at my novel. As there is no internet access, no loads of washing to put on, or garden to procrastinate in, I decided it would be the perfect working environment.

That was until I allowed myself a lunch break and a little wander. Well, someone should have warned me that the meerkats had just had babies! Who could possibly concentrate on restructuring a novel when there are meerkat babies to watch? Really, they were just too adorable for words. So here is a video:


What did I tell you? Mesmerising, aren't they? Perhaps working at the zoo is going to be more distracting than I first thought...