Invasion of the bloggy snatchers

Apologies to my lovely regular readers and the occasional visitors, but I have been invaded by racist tossers charading as commercial tossers.
First I get splattergun spammed by dweebs littering the blog with their nonsensical comments containing multiple links purporting to sell stuff (I think - I didn't follow any of the links to check). I then delete a few of the comments (there were MASSES of them) and set up comment moderation (sorry, sorry to all you visitors who shouldn't have to go through more hoops to post a much enjoyed and appreciated comment) to find my email box full of comments awaiting moderation from the tossers who were now impregnating their comments with racist innuendo. Vile, idiotic, selfish, outrageous gits. Get a life.
So, comment moderation remains until such time as these comments stop, and at the first sign of a return it goes on permanently. And I have tried to remove every one of the comments originally posted by the vile, idiotic, selfish, outrageous gits.
Gits.

Is it Ok to be Closer?

What's wrong with us? Where have our brains and our discernment gone? Is it too much work to create a life of our own instead of dwelling on the foibles of others? Isn't your own life more interesting, more satisfying, more challenging than that of some TV this or magazine that? And if life is a serious challenge (it is, of course), then mental and physical health allowing, isn't it preferable to deal with our stuff, try and make things better in our own way than wishing we were a wag or a bag or a lag?
I picked up a discarded copy of Closer & OK! on the train and flicked through. I hadn't realised (how naive) the extent to which it's all material that soils the soul, the heart and the mind. Utter detritus, utterly boring, utterly malignant, utterly dismal, depressing. A vile slur on the positivity of human nature and self realisation (and now I sound like some psycho-pseud).
I want to shout - "Girls! Women! Get a life! Pull those nifty socks up! Create your own future. It's hard, but it can be fun and it's all YOURS. Don't watch it happening from the outside. Think of yourself at seventy - how do you want to feel about yourself then? What do you want out of life? Dying with a flash bag and some designer label shoes by your bedside and a head full of others' dreams will not be adequate reward".
Did feminism die whilst I looked the other way?

Revenge is sweet

You might be able to tell, but just in case not, this is a rat's head. Just the head. No body. No tail. No claws. Just the head. Result!
This may or may not be the bastard that ate all my ducklings (opinions have been expressed, and rat, mink and polecat have all been fingered for the crime); all I know is that there is most definitely one less rat on the farm, and that it suffered a wonderfully gruesome, hopefully extraordinarily painful, demise.
I skip, I dance, I rain blessings on the head of whatever cat, dog, fox, beast, had this toothy monster for breakfast.
Oh, and the day just gets better and better (yup, I know, pride comes before a fall). The Last Ewe finally lambed today, exactly one month after the rest, and one week beyond the possible due date (extended pregnancies notwithstanding). The day after tomorrow I will have the MOST HUMONGOUS LIE-IN!

I'm claiming it on expenses

Like most people, I've been watching the unravelling of the MP's expenses scandal open-mouthed. I'm so jealous I can hardly splutter forth venom. As an M.P there'd be no need to pay for my Tampax anymore; I could have my poshest rugs repaired and paid for by other tax payers; I'd enjoy a variety of houses and flats pretending I'm living in whichever one took my accountant's fancy that week; I'd get my mole problems sorted at no cost to myself, and I wouldn't have to show receipts for slap up meals or treats that cost less than £250. Best of all, none of this would put a dent in my £65,000 salary. Show me the money!
There'd be one downside though, come to think of it.
No-one would trust me ever again. I would be despised at least as much as Fred the Shred. None of my good intentions or pleas for a refocussing on the important things would have any credence. My name, my judgement and my honour would be mud and filth. I'd have to spend all my time making feeble excuses rather than bellowing "Hear, hear" in the House, and have to satisfy myself instead with cries of "I didn't break any rules" in the comfort of one of my other houses.
But at least I'd have the satisfaction of knowing incontrovertibly that I'd been one of the gang responsible for ending parliament as we know it. My name will be forever secure in the history books.
And that is my 400th blog post. What a sad way to mark this mini milestone.

Some light relief

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Time for an off-farm topic rant

Lordy, lordy, I'm getting crosser by the second.
You'd think, wouldn't you, what with the Freedom of Information Act, the desire for open government (huh!), and the stated aim of helping small businesses stay in business during this painful financial slough of despond, that access to information about government grants and tendering opportunities would be freely available to all, not on a pay per view basis like some seedy porn channel in a one night stay hotel chain.
Whether you are a third sector organisation with charitable aims of alleviating poverty, or simply a micro company doing everything you can to provide a product or service, unless you can come up with the dosh, you cannot find out what opportunities exist that you may be eminently able to exploit/deliver beautifully to a client's satisfaction. Some portals say that you can register for free (again huh!), but in fact give you a peek into limited possibilities and then pull out the stops to rake in your cash (from a couple of hundred quid up to nearly a thousand) for access to the fuller picture.
At any time I think this would be a serious failure to ensure equal access to public sector contracts and grants, would wonder if it was in fact legal, would hate the fact that some middleman was given a contract to control access to this information on behalf of the public sector by provison of some halting, circuitous, irritating portal, but now? Now you can add immoral, spiteful, stupid and shortsighted to the charges.
Next thing we'll have to pay some company somewhere enough to make them profits just for supplying us with water....
Anyone for a gallon of air? Going cheap.

The minister of silly thoughts

This is utterly irresistible. You couldn't make it up.
There's this Minister of the Environment who's banned this ad because he doesn't believe in man-made climate change.
Now, if he was minister for transport, or minister for using as much electricity as possible, or minister for self-indulgent ideas, or minister with absolutely no portfolio, or minister for irony, or minister for stirring things up by saying truly daft things, or minister with the most inappropriate qualifications for his job ever, or minister for denial, or minister for sticking his head in a pillow case and then in the sand, or minister for having his cake and eating it, or minister of pillocks, or minister of laughing stocks, or...
Come on, suggestions please. What job would you give him?

Brushing against the bizarre

The adverts trailing the walls alongside the escalators in the tube have always intrigued me, indicative as they are of the inner London Zeitgeist. I'm as curious about the positioning of the worn out stubs of chewing gum as I am about the content.
Coasting up the escalators this week I was reminded of how when times are tough our proffered entertainment becomes increasingly surface, aggressively light-hearted.
There was the big, round, over-made- up face of Jimmy Osmond, mascaraed and foundationed within an inch of his middleagedness. He's in Grease, which I can just about fathom, and is shortly to move to Chicago where he's to play Billy Flynn - which I find entirely unimaginable and absurd. Wondering how the little cheeky chappie of Puppy Love fame can exude the slick, sleek, sophisticated, manipulative odour of Mr Flynn (Bryan Ferry would be MY choice), nearly had me tripping over the last moving step and into the unsuspecting back of my fellow commuters.
And then there was Dame Edna Norton. Sorry, Graham. He's starring in La Cage aux Folles as Albin the drag queen. I felt as if I'd fallen back into the seventies, goggling in surprise at Danny La Rue. There were the huge ads for six packs if you would only stick to a full-on gym regime and take a heady concoction of supplements. And on it went. It was bizarre - this determinedly showbizzy presentation of life when all around me people were looking grim.
The most serious thing I could find was an ad for using tissues to avoid spreading cold germs.
And in the train, squashed far too close to everyone else in the Friday rush hour, I overheard parts of a truly odd conversation. It became clear that a teacher was talking about a colleague who was having an inappropriate relationship with a sixteen year old student. The word inappropriate was his, but he felt it wouldn't do him any good reporting it, and as the student was sixteen, it was kind of alright, wasn't it? But, he hummed and hawed, it was never really alright if you were the teacher and the sixteen year old was your student, was it? I could hear him tussling with what he'd like to call his conscience, and failing to come to any conclusions either way. The young woman he was talking to was decidedly not sitting on the fence; it was wrong in her eyes, a teacher taking advantage of a situation where a pupil should be able to trust them to do the right thing.
It reminded me of my history teacher who went out with and then married an ex-pupil shortly after she left the school. And the girl student who stole a male teacher away from his fiancee who also taught at the school. And the teacher who was mentally abusive and cruel to a pupil he went out with immediately after she left school, and.....
Life is much simpler, back in Devon. No escalators with ads, no eavesdropping train crushes. Just the odd bit of burglary, arson or murder.

Nuts

It is SO autumn. The Virginia Creeper that drapes the cottage on the way to town is ablaze, the leaves are dropping from the young fruit trees in the orchard, the bedspread was slung onto the bed to warm my shivery shoulders last night, and the squirrels are nicking all the nuts.
The acorns are ripe, and a gentle tap sends them cascading to the ground, leaving their school caps behind them. But can I find any hazelnuts to munch? In 11 kilometres of hedgerow on the farm I found a smattering of samples, the evidence of a good crop nicely gnawed and lying empty on the ground. No doubt there are snug hoards hidden from view for winter snacks, but none for me.

Small IS beautiful

I don't know why I subscribe to Spiked; I've probably said it before but their stance (all progress is good, green politics is idiotic, cheap food for all rah rah rah and stuff the consequences blah bleurgh blah) drives me quite wild with fury.
Here they are grudgingly singing the praises of the new Jimmy's Farm spin-off, gasping with surprise that he can find it in himself to praise the new technologies and processes that large scale modern farming embraces.
Not surprisingly the piece made me spit chunks of small scale produced Gouda type cheese (the photo is of a cheese made on the course I attended a month or so back).
What is all this sneering at small scale production? Would you really want to only ever eat ready meals concocted in a factory rather than one made to order at a local restaurant or in your own or a friend's kitchen? Would you refuse to wear a hand knitted cardie and only buy your woollens from Primark?
Brian says: "I don’t believe that we should all know where our food comes from or how it’s produced". What? You're happy that your sausages come from the dregs of pork that you'd never consider eating if it hadn't been made palatable by factory processing? You don't care if people or animals are exploited to keep your guts full and your body warm? It's ok if farmers get shafted left right and centre just so you can buy a £1.99 chicken or get a bogof heap of fruit and veg?
I was in awe of the robot milking machine; you can't produce one celery plant or one pint of milk and hope to keep the world fed - large scale is essential. But small scale operations produce stuff that just can't be bettered. We need both, just like we need to maintain rare breeds as well as commercial strains of livestock to ensure a healthy gene pool. Small is forever beautiful.

Bit of blatant self interest

Sorry I haven't posted for a few days; I was busy voting myself a £24k annual expense award. I put my hand up, but no-one seems to have sent me any forms to fill in. Do I need to become an MP first?

They're closing my post office

"The Government has decided that up to 2500 Post Office branches across the UK will close. This local consultation will not change the Government decision, but aims to help Post Office Limited identify if the appropriate branches in this area have been proposed for closure."
So says the leaflet I picked up in the post office today. Instead of having a village post office that is open for 16 hours, four days a week with a heap of handy parking for those of us who live out of the village, they are proposing a mobile service open for a total of five hours, two mornings a week, and that we should instead use another post office 4 miles away (8 mile round trip) that is on a fearfully dangerous bend on a main (well, main for round here) road, with parking for one car.
They say that we can also use online services, but the village has been refused broadband by BT.
I am appalled that a Labour government is overseeing the dismantling of rural community services and at their failure to ensure equal access to key services across the country. They are a suicidal government.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Enough of lambing and spring. Let's leave the pastoral red in tooth and claw world for some rat race sneering.
I don't know anyone like the competitors on The Apprentice. I have no idea if they are actors or one-offs or clichés of a group that I just haven't come across (other than in the zoo perhaps). They lie without compunction (have they forgotten that they are being filmed, watched and noted?), have the kind of bitter rows I've only ever seen within families, and are, each and every one, vile on a surfeit of ego.
Can you imagine announcing to anyone let alone to the whole BBC viewing public, that you have a high IQ? Serious chips on shoulders and inferiority complexes going on there. Or perhaps you'd feel happier emphasising some part of a self-perceived brilliance? No. The narcissism is of truly Greek proportions.
It makes for extraordinary viewing and tells you everything you need to know about how not to manage people. Not one of the current crop is a simply nice, intelligent person with good or interesting ideas; they are all deeply flawed humans. They will all be fired because of their hubris, human frailties and the will of the gods - aka Siralan (is that one word or two?).
I wonder how they would fare being put in charge of the lambing shed? How would they divvy up the shifts, make sure they had the right equipment and skills, collaborate in a life or death situation, ensure cleanliness and good husbandry? If they can't run a pub grub night effectively (otherwise known as a piss-up in a brewery), they wouldn't stand a chance.
Horrid tykes the lot of them. I watch it through spreadeagled fingers; it's almost unbearable.

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.

Smile please

I don't think I can match the jobsworth of the week award over at Katy's, but I had very brief dealings with a pair of prime examples this morning.
I had an early appointment at the dental hygienist, and was hurtling towards town (within the speed limit, obviously) when I got caught up in a rare snarl of traffic. I know the dentist makes you pay if you miss your allotted session, so two minutes late I rang from my handsfree to reassure them that I was on my way, and that I'd be with them in just two more minutes.
I could feel the receptionist winding herself up beyond the call of duty to say "you are late and...", so before she was able to complete her little piece of spiteful daily joy I cut her off with "I'll be with you before you put down the phone."
I parked (first time ever) right outside the surgery, leapt into the rain and into the building before she could say "but".
I announced my arrival to a different woman. "Oh", she said, checking the screen, "you're late...." (all of 4 minutes behind for a twenty minute slot), "I don't know if..."
Are they on commission for latecomers and no-shows? Deep breath, girl. "I rang", I said, "just a moment ago."
"Oh. I don't know if you can still....."
"It's a 20minute slot, and there is NO-ONE ELSE IN THE WAITING ROOM".
She sees the look on my face.
"Take a seat".
Five minutes later, now nine minutes late, the hygienist comes down looking for me... "Why didn't they send you up?" she asks.
Sometimes the look works better than words.

I love that image of the chattering clockwork teeth; it reminds me of one of my favourite items in my parent's joke shop.

April fool

And then I checked. It's September. So I looked again at the Guardian weekend colour supplement, and yes, there really was a two page article (sadly no links to the actual thing) complete with photograph, encouraging you to run backwards with your neck twisted askew in a feeble attempt to stop you from running under a bus, into a grimacing parent with a pushchair and ten carrier bags (sensibly not plastic, must be hessian or linen) or into a lamppost. Apart from the assured bad neck, plentiful bruises and worse, I couldn't get my head round the benefits because I just couldn't take it seriously. I look forward to the letters page next Saturday.
So I hunt down the latest on Foot and Mouth on the Defra website and bang, there is a warning about some disease I've never heard of with a name that sadly yanks the bells on the April Fool's hat; Bluetongue. This is the first time this disease has ever been recorded in the UK. On top of Foot and Mouth it seems rather careless of some straying biting virus-riddled midge that some new notifiable disease has appeared at this time; you might be forgiven for imagining that we are tumbling into a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.
Foot and Mouth scares are starting to emerge outside of Surrey. Those in Norfolk and Solihull have thankfully come to nothing, but now there is another in Hampshire and you can't blame farmers if they start to feel distinctly nervous that the Surrey boundary will not contain the disease for much longer. Rather than limbo, perhaps we are perched in purgatory.

An itchy critter

First we had mozzies, but I didn't even think "malaria", just itchy irritating bites. Now we have a small tick, removed and shoved into a clean sample bottle for posterity and I am thinking, hypochondriacally, Lyme disease (also meningitis, arthritis, heart and neurological disorders).
I hoik sheep ticks off the dogs from time to time, being careful to do the twizzling thing with the tick stick to avoid leaving the head buried in their flesh. Even so, the welts part the fur and mini bald patches result for a few days. But never before have I had the dubious pleasure of removing one from my own groin. Immediate thoughts - crabs - how did I get that? Bed bugs - yuck! But a trawl through the terrifying medical websites and a look at the mite in the bottle says no, it's just a tick.
I walk through long grasses on the farm in shorts and sandals. The advice is to always wear long trousers tucked into your socks and boots - what in 70 degree sun? So now I suffer with minor groin itch (yes, far too much information) and a constant shivery wonderment that is my body asking itself whether there are any more of the critters lurking in the warmth of my skin. Tickle tickle tickle.

Disgusted of Devon

Words fail me.






Photograph: John Stillwell/PA from Guardian website

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.