‘A trip to the dead zoo coincides with Joe Biden’s visit — what could possibly go wrong?’

The dead zoo is an easy sell for kids. Any other cultural institutions might take a bit of wrangling to convince them it’s worth getting off the sofa for, but not the dead zoo. The first trick is to never call it by its real name — the Natural History Museum — because that has the deal-killing words ‘history’ and ‘museum’ in it and they will think you are trying to trick them into learning something. No, call it by its unofficial moniker, because that has all you need to know — like a zoo, it’s full of animals, but they are all dead, and therefore much cooler, in every sense.