I’m trying to picture it in my mind’s eye now. “Hang on lads.” says the young, ambitious but wet behind the ears city council-man. “What the city really needs... Is a lion park!” His fellow counsellors all roll their eyes in exasperation but for fear of avoiding yet another late-night they vote to approve the opening of a lion park in a forest just outside the city of Gelsenkirchen and against all the odds the Löwenpark is built. I like to think that there’s a heart-warming 2-hour TV special on the hard work and sacrifices that led to the construction and assembly a colony of lions just outside a mining town in the heart of the Ruhr in 1968. Perhaps there will be an amusing interlude where one of big cats escapes only to help rescue a small child who got lost in the mines. Slightly more realistic (but no less fictional) was the park ranger receiving a call from one Günter Siebert in January 1970 asking to borrow one of the lions so he could use him as a mascot i