Deaths in the family

September will never be the same again. Just as my oldest friend's birthday has been forever besmirched by 9/11, September is now also the month that my Mother died, and that I lost my beautiful companion, Mopsa. There in the photo are the two of them together, ten years ago; Mopsa a young and pint sized puppy, and my Mother, the most youthful of 82 year olds.
Seven years after a stroke, and for at least three of those having had enough of life, my Mother finally got her wish on the 2nd of this month. At 92, her life had been long and in many ways troubled. Naturally vivacious and social, she had a bitterness and anger that soured a number of long term relationships, but she also inspired great admiration; she was never boring, always lively, impeccably elegant, the best company.
The bitterness is easily and devastatingly accounted for. A Polish Jew, she and her elder brother were sent by their father from Poland to England to stay with his brother, just before the outbreak of WW2. Her parents and much loved younger brother, for whom I'm named, were to join them later. They never made it. Murdered by the Nazis, memories and a very few photographs were all that remained. And an anger and hate that weaved through her life for more than seventy years. Holocaust was never an historical or distant word in our family; it was the reality, an evil that had robbed us directly, palpably. Just one step removed, I can still hardly imagine what it was really like for my Mother, although the anger that was so deep in her, has now, via the blood of the womb, transmuted into another, less understandable, innate fury in me.
My Mother had requested the sparest of funerals, wanting no fuss at all, and certainly no partying. She asked that my sister, her neighbour of more than 30 years, my husband and myself were the only mourners. Accompanied by Rabbi Melinda, Elgar and Bach, we said our goodbyes. The overwhelming emotion was of guiltless relief; she had had enough.

And then, there's Mopsa. Mopsa has been part of my life for more than ten years, an almost constant companion, and my love for her is simple and real. It will always be so. As soon as I started working from home, I was planning to have my first dog, and I learned all things canine from her. She taught me the wonder of holding her head in my lap as we sat on the floor together, sharing secret looks like naughty twins; the terror of kennel cough caught at puppy classes as her brown eyes looked at me fearfully and trustingly; the excitement of walking through woods and fields as new scents drew us on; the feeling of never being alone when she was with me. Oh, and so, so much more. So big, so beautiful, so warm, so individual, so loving and gentle mouthed. I can never thank her enough for the wonderful pleasures she has given me; everything has been so much more fun with Mopsa there to share it. A walk on the beach, sitting in heaps of drying hay, evenings at home (so very many evenings) when I could drop my hand and stroke her lovely head. I'd tell her she was a beautiful dog every day, because she was, and to have that much beauty in your home and your life is a privilege.
Mopsa did not have a troubled life; she had a perfect doggy existence with people to love, her half sister for company and a farm to play in. She had cats to box and cox with, all kinds of livestock to stalk and eye up, people to lean on and pat with her paw, hands to thrust her nose into and lots to interest her.
But a Bernese does not have a long life, and Mopsa was nearly ten and a half, a veteran. The last few months have been quiet ones for her; no long walks, but days sitting in the farmyard watching all our comings and goings, a few strolls through the orchard, one last trip to the river, and another to the beach. And suddenly a more fastidious appetite, deciding that only steak or roast chicken would do, where absolutely anything was fine before. I was happy to indulge her. And then, two weeks ago, she could no longer walk and I knew that we wouldn't have her with us much longer. We carried her about, came running if she called, spent hours sitting with her. I had to work in London for a few days and phone calls home were decreed as Mopsa-free conversations; I knew I wouldn't be able to work if there was bad news. I drove back from the station late in the evening and there in the doorway, lit up and tail wagging, was Mopsa, welcoming me home. I finally let out the breath I'd been holding in for hours, days.
I wanted, so much, for her to go quietly and in her own time, but yesterday I knew that she had finally had enough, so the vet came, and in my office, where we'd spent so much of our time together, I held her head and crooned to her, telling her how wonderful she was, as she gave her last breath, puffed into my hands for safekeeping.

Frozen duck

Two brace of duck have been hanging in the workshop for nearly a week and they are tonight's supper. But they can't be plucked. They have frozen solid. So now they hang from the shotgun hooks in the kitchen in a desperate attempt to defrost them in time for plucking, dressing and cooking for mates. If they get here.
Either way, Donald and his friends are as stiff as soldiers. The next question is whether plucking them in the usual outhouse is an option or if it can be done in the kitchen without causing a feathery and downy mayhem, the consequences of which I have to live with for months.

Snowmail - Channel 4 news

"And so to sheep. At Lydd Primary School, Romney Marsh, Kent to be precise, where the head has raised a school sheep to show children where mint sauce comes into play and how food really happens etc etc. Trouble is, it is now chops o'clock for Marcus the sheep and some parents are upset, complaining their precious things cannot sleep and all manner of weepiness.
Not that I am unsympathetic - this being Kent the poor darlings already have the trauma of the 11 plus to contend with. After which a little abattoir action ought to be a piece of cake, or slice of lamb..."

This wanged its way into my email box this pm from Alex Thomson of Channel 4 news. Oh gawd. More people who think meat comes in polystyrene trays wrapped in cling film. No more burgers for you, chums.

The Women's Room

Hearing that Marilyn French had died I picked up my furled and yellowed paperback of The Women's Room for a re-visitation.
I'd devoured it, age sixteen, as an angry emerging feminist. I can't remember how many times I reread the book, stunned and drowning in the future horrors that might lie in wait for me; drudgery, mopping, unwanted children, denied potential and extreme chauvinism. I looked about me, at the households I knew and saw some great female role models, but mostly I saw housewives, pretty happy it appeared to me on the surface, but, I asked myself, was Marilyn French revealing the murkier truths that would never be shared across the generations or across the garden fence, with a teenager?
Now, it somehow lacks the punch it did then. Once I was enthralled, engaged, furious. Now it has the feel of melodrama and soap. The pages don't turn as rapidly, the impact is cushioned. Is it because the tantrum teenager with fresh ideals is a matured cynical creature? Is it that I look back in almost disbelief at the tiny limiting box described and prescribed for women? I don't think so. I suspect instead that we all know more, have become worldly in what is probably an uncivilising manner, and are therefore increasingly unshockable by the smallness of most lives. And I don't like that. I preferred feeling the raw emotion that cascaded over the sixteen year old and the utter determination that I would never be that trapped in any mesh but that which I created for myself. Whether I avoided the sticky cobweb, who knows?

The full cycle

Ok, I know you can't see their faces, but they are rummaging in their new indoor quarters. A great big farrowing pen has been built in the cob barn in anticipation of bringing home a Berkshire breeding sow, but for now, five new weaners have taken residence for a couple of weeks until the ground has dried out a little and they can romp as usual outside.
It's been some months since there were pigs, rather than pork, on the farm, but once the sow arrives pigs should be in permanent residence.
The pen is a massive construction of box steel frame and galvanised tin, concrete floor and inbuilt drainage. There is nothing (I hope) that a pig can get its nose underneath - the strength in those snouts is unbelievable. Once the weaners are permanently outdoors, this pen will have a creep area built in so that future piglets can get away from their mother's monstrous bulk if she threatens, inadvertently, to squash her young.
Getting home from picking up the new weaners, I rush round feeding the sheep and putting away the geese and ducks before heading back to ear tag the weaners and put them in their new pen. But there, in the duck pen is an immaculate but rather flat looking duck. Dead as a dodo.
My guess is that as this was the beginning of the laying season and we've had, as everyone knows, a cold spell, that she was egg bound. She looked fine this morning. I never thought about picking up each duck to see if they were overheated...they all looked so well.
So, new movements both on and off the farm. Spring and all its excitements of life and death is announcing that it's very nearly here.

Western world preoccupations

I know that you can get terribly maudlin about the state of humanity, and spend a lifetime weeping pointlessly into your beer or beard about things you intend to do nothing much about - infant mortality, torture, abuse of human rights and so on. But there are times when media preoccupations are downright obscene considering what is truly important, and when the ability to value what's significant is appallingly flawed.
This whole week's nonsensical fixation on two light entertainment figures having made a daft balls-up made me want to chuck the whole media industry into a large blender and flick the switch. I wasn't madly bothered about the Russian oligarchy losing its roubles, although I had a moment of unsurprised horror when I read that $70 billion of the $700 billion coughed up by the ailing US government to prop up the financial sector would be going to pay bonuses to those workers who still somehow thought they had reached their performance targets.
But what really pulled me up short was a story so utterly horrific that I couldn't understand why it wasn't front page news and the leader for every TV bulletin.

Somalian rape victim, 13, stoned to death.

There aren't many stories in the press that can make me cry with shame and horror. This did.

Gralloching, lairage and more

Health warning - don't scroll down if you'd rather avoid seeing pictures taken in an abattoir.

I love a day when new words come pouring into my ear. Or when words I sort of think I kind of know, finally start to make sense.
Today was a day that I knew I would have to meet head on at some point. I've been trogging lambs and pigs to the abattoir for many years now, but I hadn't ever seen the process from start to finish. Thanks to the incredibly useful EBLEX who run short courses for meat producers on all sorts of areas crucial to the farmer, I finally saw the whole story.
It's key that your animals are slaughtered at the right time: when they are at the best rate of fat to lean. Too fat, and they have to be trimmed and you've spent weeks feeding your livestock unnecessarily, expensively and to the detriment of your meat. Too lean, and you'll have a flavourless, scrawny chop on your plate and dissatisfied customers. A lamb is covered in fleece, so you have to get (gentle) hands on to find out when each individual lamb is ripe and ready. There's a Europe wide classification system for lamb based on a combination of fatness and conformation used by every abattoir and every butcher and every supermarket and every wholesale and retail purchaser. Getting it right on a live animal is as much an art as a science. This is not something you absorb through rural osmosis, but something you have to be taught, and it has to be practised so you keep your hand in.
Today's course was held at a huge local abattoir, and run by two extremely knowledgeable, jolly and helpful experts. We looked at the charts, we had the pictures explained, and then we went to the lairage (nice new word number one) to grade ten pre-selected lambs.
I fondled a scrawny article, a fat beast and one that was fat but had unequal conformation, and then another seven lambs along the spine, loin, shoulder, tail and between the legs to arrive at an estimated grade for each. Then it was on with the white boilersuit, hairnet and hard hat, a disinfect of wellies and hands, and into the processing area.
The scale of the thing took my breath away: a continuous line of machinery, people and lambs, with everyone focussed on their task, executing it cleanly, swiftly, carefully and with the right tools for the job. We were asked if we wanted to see the slaughter, and no-one baulked. It was so calm, professional, simple, with the layout designed to cause nil stress to the animal or the slaughterer. I watched several animals being stunned and throats cut. I wanted to make sure I saw the reality of where my animals are headed, and I felt nothing other than reassurance and thanks that such an important role in the food chain was being so expertly undertaken.
We followed the line as skins were removed, guts discarded (for deer this process is called gralloching - second new word of the day) and offal inspected. We were shown examples of condemned livers - suffering from tapeworm or fluke and other parasites - and also arthritic joints that meant a leg or more might be spurned as unfit for human consumption. Every liver and heart is kept alongside its carcase; if there is something wrong with these organs, the meat might also be compromised, and it is thoroughly checked. I saw the results of injecting against Bluetongue in the wrong muscles (the neck is the recommended place), and that lambs were being sent both too thin and too fat to slaughter.
We watched the professional grader determine the score of each lamb, the automatic weighing, the tingling with electric current, which reduces the need for hanging by tenderising the meat (hmm...not sure about that one), and then headed for the chiller, where the ten lambs we'd attempted to score were now tagged with the official result.
Out of the seven I'd guessed, I only got one spot on, but the other six were only one grade out, so I was reassured that I can pretty much tell what I'm looking for.
I take my animals to a small farm slaughter house, and the system is nowhere near as mechanised as this, but I will see if they can give me the condition scores and if my estimates improve.
And if you fancy a few more good meaty words in the gralloch mode, you gut a fish, paunch a rabbit and draw a chicken.

Death at the weekend

It's harvest time. The number of surplus cockerels raised for meat is being diminished by twos each weekend. The Aylesbury drakes are fattening nicely and it'll be their turn soon. This week two of the pigs are off to the butcher. The remaining three Berkshires are booked in as are the second batch of lambs.
The freezers will judder into life and host a year's supply of meat and poultry, and the horrendous livestock feed bills will be cut dramatically. Poultry feed has jumped from £6.50 per 25k to £8.50 in less than six months. How organic farmers make any kind of living with their feed at Harrods prices, is beyond me.
We've heard a great deal this year about poultry farming and the real price of properly raised chicken. I suspect all the good awareness raising will be mowed down in the face of job losses, house repossessions and the general gloom of depression.
What I do know, is that my dressed weight 3.5 lb - 4lb cockerel tastes amazing, and that not even the poshest organic shop-bought bird can start to compare. Why this is, I don't know, but my birds head towards the guinea fowl in flavour (which I adore), have a density of meat that is really satisfying, and that every single scrap (excepting heads, feet, and colon) will be eaten.

Five minutes peace

I can't believe how tired I am, and lambing has only started and there are just a couple of dozen ewes to deal with; how friends with 500 manage, I can't even start to imagine. Either way, you're in and out of the lambing shed like some crazed self-winding clockwork toy, checking behaviour, changes in eating patterns, signs of water bags, general atmosphere, and topping up one set of triplets with bottled milk as their first time mum hasn't really got enough of her own. Neither me nor far more experienced farmers I know have ever come across a first-timer having triplets - what was she thinking? Luckily the lambs are evenly sized and full of energy and survival instinct, so no larger bully is benefiting over the others.
Mini and major dramas are enacting themselves all over the place. The first batch of incubated goose eggs are starting to pip, so I am hoping there may be goslings under the heat lamp in a couple of days. One of the geese is sitting on her own full nest, au naturale, as proud and protective as can be. An Aylesbury duck suffered from a prolapse of the oviduct, so she has been dispatched, plucked and is in the freezer, my clean lambing Dickies boilersuit now covered in white down. A ewe gave up trying to lamb after some sterling effort, and intervention brought out one malformed lamb that had blocked the cervix causing another perfectly good lamb to die, leaving the mum with one good healthy ram (this run of triplets is ridiculous - that's three sets so far). Saddest of all, the matriarch, Mrs Longtail, succumbed to pasteurellosis, something the flock had never suffered from until last year when two ewes were also lost to it in the final stages of pregnancy. They are all vaccinated against this lethal pneumonia, have been well fed and are in a well ventilated barn, but you can't avoid the inevitable stress to the body caused by lambing or stop cold windy weather. I'll have to discuss future planning with the vet.
My old cat is getting scrawnier, but still eating, drinking, purring, strolling, mock-hunting, and as you can see, happy to share a bed with Mopsa on a filthy welly-boot dirt strewn kitchen floor. And I am off to check on the ewes, again.

Yet more firsts - some good, some most definitely not

Last month I was counting off the various firsts of the year to date. Now there are more to add to the list.
This morning there was a heap of straw in the goose hut, pulled and picked into a comfy doughnut shape by one of the geese. I parted it carefully, and yes, the first goose egg of the year. Traditionally they start laying on Valentine's day, so if it was laid before midnight, she was spot on. I'll wait til there are enough eggs to put in the incubator and then let them do their thing by benefit of electricity, leaving the geese to sit naturally on another clutch.

There was the first flush of blossom in the orchard. It is on the unknown tree - I think it is a plum but don't really know - and the reason as to why it never fruits and reveals its true nature is clear; every year it blossoms far too early and the frost will kill off any premature buds. Looks like it's getting it wrong again.
Then there were the two nuthatches eyeing each other up. One of them, the male I guess, was displaying and trembling his tail feathers for all the world as if he was a bird of paradise; never seen that before.
And then on Wednesday I came in to find my first ever ominous recorded phone message from the animal health department of Defra announcing that the farm is in the newly enlarged Bluetongue surveillance zone. To be honest, the chances of doing anything to prevent my sheep getting this disease is nil, and the temptation to bury my head in activity is strong. I know only too well that some midges and mozzies have survived our warm winter. What a way to welcome the lambing season.

War Horse

I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon with tears splashing down my face and trickling down my neck. I was with a thousand other people, many of whom were dabbing uselessly at their eyes or struggling to keep juddering shoulders under control; it was practically full house for the penultimate matinée of the current run of War Horse at the National.
I'd come up by train from Devon, travelling for five hours, just to find myself right back there, but now the countryside was animated by extraordinary lifesize puppets of horses, crows and geese. I sat there wishing all my friends had been in the audience so that we could have shared this astonishing experience.
Michael Morpurgo wrote the book on which the play is based, just a few miles from here in Iddesleigh. For me, the Devon roots of the story added further poignancy to this tale of love, family, war, bitterness, violence, humanity and the ties between man and beast. We see the wrangling sale of a young colt and the bond between growing horse and growing boy seasoning. Humanity in its black, white and grey sides is blatantly portrayed, with both the loss of feeling and the fervent hold onto emotion and kindness when faced with the impossibility of war.
The overwhelming horsepower on stage was so strong that I could almost smell their sweat. Utterly horselike, the puppets were completely convincing as proud cavalry mounts and withered broken-mouthed starvelings; the deaths of horses as desperate as that of men.
Critics who have mocked this piece as a bit of flagrant anthropomorphism have missed the point; the puppetry is masterful, amazing, pure theatre at its most magical, but it is the capturing of the emotional journeys through appalling wickedness, and the death and simultaneous survival of the spirit, human and animal, that had us all weeping.

Layers of detritus

The farmyard tells an ever changing story. It has a daily tale. Today, soft white down dances across it, caught by puffs of wind. Spots of blood speckle some of the feathers. I have been dispatching and plucking the two surplus Aylesbury drakes and my hands smell of burnt feather and my hair is full of fluff. This evening I will be clean, but the farmyard will bear witness for a week or three yet.
A couple of days ago the muck heap in the little yard was savaged and its goodness spread about various fields. A few tractor bucket loads was snatched for the vegetable garden, and en route a small trail of the precious stuff was dropped in the farmyard to tantalise the dogs who brunch on it eagerly. I must pick up the remnants before they bust their guts.
The goose hut is in the orchard, some way from the compost heap, so when their dirty bedding is barrowed away down the track, through the farmyard and to its designated rotting place, wisps of straw drop to reinforce any interested watcher that I have, yes, mucked out again this week.
And then there are the dried onion stalks. I plaited up the onions and removed any excessive stalk length, binning most but again dropping some, and they mix with the rest of the detritus in the yard.
Not all the farmyard droppings are organic; small bits from the tractor, nails, washers, dull coloured bits of metal and offcuts of wood tell you that a repair job took place in recent days or that something fell out of a barrow or a toolbox. I pick these things up and put them where they belong, but tomorrow there will be something else, evidence of other comings, goings and doings.

****!

Driving back from Exeter yesterday lunchtime in good mood I tuned to Radio 4 and the mood melted away as I realised that the news was all Foot and Mouth related. These days that sort of report has a physical effect on me; I'm sure a heart can truly sink. I get home to messages from farming neighbours and friends, all wondering what will happen next. Plans are swiftly changed - trips to sheep sales are cancelled, preparations for moving livestock are abandoned - and we all hold our breath.
The BBC ten o'clock news doesn't cover as much information as the Defra website which is not reassuring; whatever else you want it is consistency of message.
This morning it seems as if the new outbreak is of the same particular strain as leaked from Pirbright. This gives transitory relief; if it was a different strain the whole farming community would be in an even greater panic of contemplation of unknown quantities. As it is, the ethereal nature of the transfer of the disease will come under greater scrutiny, but how one traps an airborne virus is beyond my imagination. I look at the disinfectant mats laid at the gateways of farms and wonder if they are simply band-aids over mortal wounds.
Looking at the morning papers, I am dismayed that politicians of any colour only think of their own political capital at times of disaster; why this situation should be seen primarily as haunting the government rather than the farmers it actually affects is beyond me and the comments that the Chief Veterinary Officer was pushed by economic reasons to prematurely declare that Foot and Mouth had been eradicated are surely utter foolishness.
The Defra website will be a continually open window on my computer today. If the concern over a pig on the farm in Norfolk is substantiated, farming hell is at hand.

Mozzies

I can't sleep. My skin is all reflexive shudders. The night world thrums and hums and buzzes. The whole house has tinnitus. Upstairs the mosquitoes thrive and feed on my blood, raising small welts of absurd and long lasting itchiness. Tubes of sting relief are scattered within easy reach. I clap my hands and in minutes squash a dozen of the flimsy insects; speed is not one of the tricks in their armoury. Under the inadequate protection of the duvet I dream of being swathed in muslin and the mosquito net turns into a shroud.
I come downstairs in the middle of the night to seek some quiet and then depress myself by looking at what can be done to diminish their numbers. On a farm not much, unless you want to deprive the livestock of water and create massive feeding grounds for blowflies and worse on their resulting rotting carcases. Perhaps it is simpler to get the river re-routed.
Last autumn it was the cluster flies and perhaps that is yet to come, although some in the north are already infested. These beasties behave very oddly, congregating in huge, unbelievable numbers at the windows and cling there buzzing whilst you swat the lot to death with the tried, tested and effective fly swat, purchased two for a pound at the local market. That's one for each hand. Outside their feet stick to the peeling whitewashed walls, perhaps providing food for any non-migrating birds and bats; their sole redeeming feature.
Enough already. My sleep has been disturbed by the mozzies for several nights and I am tired and irritable. The dogs sleep through, their thick fur a solid protection. If I am to function during the day I must drown their night noise with interesting thoughts that bring buzz-free dreams.

The end of the line

Today, the Berkshire boars have reached the end of the line. After eight months chewing up the grass, roots and goodness of Devonian soil, they have been taken to the abattoir. At the weekend the ubiquitous Ifor Williams trailer was manoeuvred into place, the ramp opened (and held firmly in situ by a goodly chunk of metal bar), and for three days they have been fed inside the trailer so that their loading would be entirely stress free, for humans and pigs alike.
No matter how many times you do this, intimations of mortality haunt your dreams the night before and sleep is inevitably broken and unsatisfying. No matter how scrupulous the planning and preparation, you worry about an unhappy loading, with one or more pigs careening off into pastures unknown at the last moment in Tamworth Two fashion. I am far more relaxed when taking lambs to slaughter; they may wriggle but they are eminently handleable. By the time they are mature, pigs are not easily persuadable or coerced and you simply cannot catch an errant pig.
But it all went off without a hitch and the paddock is now empty, bereft of grass and moon-cratered. I will wander through it to pick up any ancient rubbish that they might have unearthed; bits of old baler twine, small tractor parts, gate catches and heaven knows what else. The pig ark ramp needs replacing; they used it in their games and have chewed great holes through the ply to more easily poke their snouts into previously untouched territory.
Come spring the grass will once more cover the ground, and a new lot of weaners will take their turn to rummage and explore.

Weaning lambs

Tonight will be a noisy night. Bleating will carry over the barns and penetrate through dreams. Several times I will be half out of the bed in Pavlovian response before I remember that today the lambs were weaned and their calls are unlikely to be due to being caught in fencing, fox attack or rustling. The ewes have been put into a field with a minimum amount of grazing to dry up their milk, and their lambs are on rich pasture in the orchard to fatten. They will share the orchard with the geese whose diet is also grass, and I must remember each morning to shut the goose hut door once the birds are out, or the lambs will bounce up the ramp and bash around inside the hut, causing damage with their sharp little feet and growing girths.
A decade ago, new to sheep, I was devastated to come home to find two unknown but happy Jack Russells, one still a pup, blood dripping from their jaws, yapping in hysterical excitement in the garden. I shut them up in the porch and went into the field to find three ewes down, their cheeks torn out, their tails ripped, their lambs unharmed. The vet came and humanely destroyed the ewes. I said to him, naively, that their lambs hadn't yet been weaned. "They have now" was his blunt but right response.

Killing me softly

I was going to let it pass without mention, but I find that I can't. I am just so pleased that the smoking ban has finally come into force.
I spent my life until my late teenage years living in a house with a father who smoked almost incessantly. It was before the grave warnings on the side of fag packets and the messages of ill health and worse were only starting to be heard and believed by most folk. Smokers were in the majority, or so it seemed.
I always hated smoking. Not in a mild fashion, but with a searing vengeance. I hated that the smoke made me choke, that it stank out the whole house, that the ceiling in the sitting room was yellow and that my father had chronic bronchitis. I would avoid spending time downstairs in a room that when you entered, your head would be above the swirling clouds of smoke, and your neck below. I couldn't understand the addiction to something so unpleasant, or that the father I loved dearly was causing himself and our home to be in thrall to the fag.
I never thought kids at school who smoked surreptitiously behind the bike sheds or the gym were cool - they had breath that stank, yellow fingernails and ash on their clothes - what was cool about that? Pubs and parties were great until the fug got overwhelming, and I shuddered at the way my clothes reeked when I got home, particularly as we didn't have a washing machine and I'd have to lug them to the laundry or splosh them about in the sink.
I don't think I ever kissed anyone who smoked, and when I finally did, it was on the understanding that the ciggies were history.
At work for a local authority I was agog when an idiotic councillor with a love for the weed, insisted on rearranging the already inadequate office space to allow staff to have a smoking room. I don't recall her asking for a room where drug addicts could shoot up, or for a row of optics to hang from the wall in case an alcoholic needed a fix between their liquid lunch and the end of the working day.
I have an over sensitive snout and throat; it was part of the imprint created by my father's ultimately deadly habit. I find it difficult to walk behind someone smoking on the street if the wind blows the smoke my way. I can't wait at a bus stop with smokers, or be near anyone desperate to light up as they step from a train. I don't despise them for their habit, I just can't stand the physical assault it makes unknowingly or not, directly on me. And I hope for all our sakes that the ban will help more people give up the noxious weed.

Censorship

Rachel has made me chortle most mightily, and one is obliged to share a good thing. Apparently I am damned and forbidden reading for the under eighteens. I am officially an adult blog. This is determined based on the presence of the following words:

• sex (8x)
• murder (5x)
• death (4x)
• dyke (3x)
• rape (2x)
• cocks (1x)

I didn't recall discussing dykes, so I did a blog search. The references are to Dick van and Greg. I'll leave you to search for my comments on cocks. Go on, have a laugh...get your rating here.

Walking the dogs

Mightily peeved at nature since scooping the remains of the baby nuthatch off the grass this morning. Need a walk to get the brain back on forward motion. We head across the farm to the wood. There is a full size roe deer, bouncing through the long grass. The dogs pretend to pursue but turn back at my call, and we plunge into the thigh high purple moor grass in the patch of culm. I count 24 orchids, a fluttering of butterflies, Bird's Foot Trefoil that will soon show its flowers, in fact all kinds of everything. I feel the stress drain out of me, literally through my feet into the boggy patches of watermint. Perhaps it will make the plants grow even more lush.

R.I.P young nuthatch

Sometimes I hate my cats. I know they only do what comes naturally, and they are fabulous rodent catchers. But today I found the newly fledged nuthatch dead and bedraggled from a mumbling in the cat's mouth. I suspect the only reason it hadn't been eaten was a surfeit of mouse earlier in the day. If the young great spotted woodpecker goes the same way I might not be held responsible for my actions.