Until I found myself on Necker Island – no, sadly not as one of Richard Branson’s mega-rich guests but, more prosaically, as a speaker at a business conference – I’d never seen a real-life lemur.
But Branson imported them and the island is now teeming with the cute creatures, sitting on your shoulder, leaping through the trees.
Lemurs originated in Madagascar, an island so isolated for so many centuries that there are now more than a hundred species of lemur on it, plus an astonishing variety of indigenous flora. There are acres of spiny forest, including six species of baobab peculiar to Madagascar.
On holiday in Madagascar this winter, we hadn’t the time or energy to track down lemurs in the wild. So we set off for a glorified zoo, the Lemur Park, outside the capital, Antananarivo.
It’s a 12-acre tract of protected forest, complete with a cascading river running bright red from the iron in the clay. We saw chameleons silently stalking along branches, kingfishers whirring over the water and wonderfully varied and unusual plants. And lots and lots of lemurs.
Nine species of lemur have been introduced, of which we saw four. You are led round by a guide, whose main job is to see you don’t touch or disturb the lemurs.
As they are fed every day by the wardens – who put chopped mango into nooks in the bamboos or the trees – they are completely unfazed by humans.
We watched tiny babies clinging to their mothers’ undercarriage, while their bigger siblings rode her back, teenagers play-fighting in the trees and parents dozing off.
My favourite moment came when I was leaning over a stone wall, watching a couple of tortoises in an enclosure.
Two blond dancing lemurs, the size of whippets, wanted to get from one side of me to the other. So they bounced along the wall towards me, one behind the other, and then simply leapt with a giant bounce right over me, clearing me with feet to spare. They landed on the wall and bounced away.
At the time, I was intently watching, over the wall, a large tortoise, two feet from head to tail, eating a mango.
Then along crept another tortoise of about the same size, and very slowly examined the back end of ‘my’ tortoise. He obviously liked what he saw, smelt or felt, because he began, very laboriously, to mount her.
It took a while but he was finally pretty well on top of her. He was intent on the job while she paid absolutely no attention: she just got on with eating her mango.
But he was now in a position to see over her shell to her head. And, from this vantage point, he clocked that she was eating a mango. He immediately slid off her with untortoise-like haste, came round the side and commandeered her mango.
Wasn’t it ever thus?
Prue Leith’s Being Old … and Learning to Love It! is out now
