What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?
Not quite the street, but a public footpath through the ancient woodland of Markstakes Common.
The best thing I’ve ever found there was a panda.
It was sitting quite happily in the crevice of a split, hollow oak tree. Not a real panda, obviously, but a toy one, placed so perfectly that it seemed to belong there. He looked so content that we left him exactly where he was.
Later, returning to the gates in the old flint wall, we found another panda. This one was sitting on top of the wall, in a completely different pose.
My daughter wondered what on earth pandas were doing appearing in an English ancient wood full of deciduous trees.
“There isn’t even any bamboo,” she pointed out.
I suggested that, with climate change, perhaps there would be eventually.
We never discovered who was putting the pandas there, which made the whole thing better. For a while, Markstakes Common had acquired its own small and unexplained population of pandas.
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