Category Archives: Thoughtful

Small Holding, Spooky, Thoughtful

Spooky?

We live in a place that is forever asserting itself, whether via its climate or its wildlife, or by knocking over trees or blocking culverts.  The place has its own agenda, its own friends and relations (they often arrive unannounced for tea) and it is quite possessive.

Recently we were celebrating a sacrament (coffee and biscuits) with a friend on Sunday morning when there was a knock at the door.   Outside, in the drizzle was a young woman we had never seen before.  She was waving a long cardboard tube.

‘You don’t know me but I’ve come on an adventure!’

She wasn’t after out souls or even trying to sell us something.

She was just another one of the people that our cottage-holding had sent for (it’s happened before!)

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Deborah is an artist, and buys strange things at auctions that inspire her — she cuts them up and stitches them.  She had bought the map of our place — 1901 Ordinance Survey, at a sale in Leek, Staffordshire.  She’d bought it years ago but could never quite bring herself to cut it up.  It was personal to the house, you see; it had all the field names pencilled in, in Welsh, and even had the new well marked (circa 1980).

She couldn’t use it, and was passing within ten miles, so had brought the map home.  She couldn’t explain it and felt it was rather an odd thing to want to do but we didn’t — we know our home.  It doesn’t like to let go of things or people.  So we will hang the map, once framed, next to the horse brasses, the dresser, the polished pump-nozzle, the wooden rake and the photographs of past residents and their New-World descendants, who have visited  — all things that this sentimental old homestead has collected or reassembled since its original scant contents were dispersed at a farm sale in 2005.

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Thoughtful

A Different Sort of Storm

It is the mating season…  For trampolines — a male bowls across the hillsides looking for a mate, tumbles down the bank and leaps over the hedge.  He bounds down the slope then soars on a powerful gust, trailing his long netted plumage as he hurls himself down the valley.

Storm warning in Wales!  150mm rainfall forecast over night!

Dog in wet

The wind moans high above our house– we are in the lee of the hill.  It was built where the sheep sheltered — in the 1840s they noticed those things.  I noticed the tall trees at the end of the house flailing about in the turbulence of the mounting storm but Alan wouldn’t sleep in the spare room at the other end of the house — out of the reach of falling branches.

In mitigation for my cowardice I’ll tell you that two branches of Douglas Fir did fall, crushing a steel hurdle but missing the rotting old chicken coop, home to our precious new domestic fowl.  The old coop has been gradually sinking into the mud in the last week as the rainfall has reached 109mm.   It’s been a dry summer and autumn — ever since I started measuring the rainfall — only 718mm since April (believe me — that’s not much) so we know we are in for a deluge — a couple of meters, at least!

Stream in flood

As we obsess about our perennial preoccupation another storm hits Europe…  A different sort of storm.

We watch our television and we catch sight of four people hunched over a coffee table at the edge of a crowded room full of milling men in smart suits and the occasional power-dressed woman.  We are looking anonymously down on a room at the G20 and upon President Obama and President Putin and two interpreters.  Did you see it?  Their body language says it all — in a bubble, in a crowded room, they are straining to concentrate, to hear and to really understand each other.  It is so contrary to their normal stance that it is shocking.

Here, back in our world, a man is startled by an unfamiliar shadow, he looks up into the great oak tree on the edge of his yard to see a skeleton hanging, draped in a black cape — it is the spent trampoline — like a giant dead crane fly.

Everything has changed.

Candle

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Humour, Racism, Thoughtful

Thames Wash — The Boris Effect?

I am sitting on a slippery leather seat which is angled inappropriately for my personal posterior; it requires more weight and breadth for stability; it has been moulded by myriad larger arses than mine – smokers probably, sitting near the door, not for ease of escape in case of calamity (like me — one eye on the unrolling ribbon of tarmac ahead and one on the little red hammer to smash the escape windows when called upon by cruel fate to do so). No, the usual passenger in this warn National Express coach seat, though placed (like me) for ease of escape, nips out at each stop for a quick drag – a cigarette, one at Shrewsbury, one at Telford, one at Birmingham and a real gasper outside the Coach Station at Victoria.

I have now had a satisfactory and free, unisex wee, or perhaps it was a pee, with a bewildered old lady up from the country and a number of large foreign gentlemen, and now I wait in this sunny travel hubbub to be collected by my daughter, who worries about me getting lost in the metropolis. Secretly I know she thinks that, if left alone to wander the streets, I will provoke personal attack or arrest because of my uncontrollable urge to engage strangers in conversation and to make unwanted eye-contact.

She hugs me then takes me firmly by the arm and steers me into a newsagent’s to top up my oyster card – which I have remembered this time!

I wonder where the poor have gone – the street vendors, the alcoholics, the dog shit, the End-of-the-world-placard-man? London is eerily clean these days (what has Boris done with them all?)  I sniff the strangely pleasant air and we decide to walk by the river, through Battersea Park and to sit on pristine, plumped-up cushions on the steps of a modern pub. Frances goes in to get the drinks and a man in a well ironed shirt (and trousers) comes out to have a look at the front elevation of my pretty daughter’s obscured and un-categorised associate — me.  He realizes instantly that I must be her Mum, he says “Lovely weather,” and goes back in, and we sip local micro-brewery summer ale and watch the gulls, the cormorant, the geese and the helicopter flying up and down the Thames.  A lanky, middle aged man with a shaved head and yellow roller- boots wobbles past and a beautiful girl on a bicycle feeds treats to a little dog in her bicycle-basket.

Phoenix rising in Battersea

Phoenix rising in Battersea

That evening we, my two daughters and I, sit at a pavement table outside a restaurant in Clapham replete with Eritrean food and chat to the staff and I remember… I remember travelling this same road, let me see…

Forty years ago, I was in the back of a maroon Jaguar (the sort John Thaw drove in Morse), tired by two weeks on-duty and nauseated by the smell of leather and spent lighter fuel (everyone smoked everywhere then).  It was a dismal grey dusk with the traffic lights too bright and splintering into the dingy, sooty, half-light. Young black men were standing in groups on the pavement next to the junction when suddenly my, soon to be, father-in-law wound down his window and shouted racial abuse at what he believed to be the indolent unemployed. I cringe as I write this – as I did then; the lights changed and we sped off towards leafy Surrey. As I look back I catch the sad eye of a boy accustomed but still surprised by such unprovoked and vitriolic hatred.

Times have changed.

Thames Wash

Thames Wash

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Humour, Lambing, Thoughtful

Is Gladstone just premature?

Not the man — the lamb.  Born 3 days ago and left for dead — a bag of bones, floppy and wobbly and unable to hold up her bossed head and with thin inturned lips, no teeth and tiny flimsy ears (scan down to my last blog for the full harrowing tale).

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As Gladstone’s twin is normal, I’ve been reading about genetic abnormalities and virally induced deformities.  But a friend told me about a ewe who had twin lambs, two lambs by two different rams, of different varieties (a rougue ram had jumped over the fence).  She conceived at different times, the lambs were different maturities and different crosses — the difference in variety of their fathers made what had happened obvious and easy to prove.  So I think Gladstone could be premature even though her twin was not — we had two rams in sequence just in case the first one had missed any ewes.

The same friend has also produced some lambs from implanted foetuses (test tube babies!) although all were inserted on the same day there were 8 days between the birth of the first and the last — maybe little Gladstone’s implantation into the uterus was in some way delayed — eight days would do it — everything is accelerated in sheep.

Food for thought — what do you other sheepy people around the world think?

As I feed her four times a day I know I am looking for reasons why we can keep her but the most convincing evidence for her abnormalities being due to prematurity is the fact that she is improving so dramatically. Please excuse poor quality of the snaps.

Already her posture is better and she can hold her head up.  She wriggles when  feeding and is starting to have attitude — spits out the teat, then wants it back.  She still has teddy bear ears but is starting to look more like a proper lamb.

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Humour, Lambing, Thoughtful

God v. Nature

In my philosophy God and Mother Nature are mostly the same thing — she who knows best in the long run.  But…  Meet Gladstone!

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Born yesterday lunchtime and not quite right, the second and much smaller of twins — popped out as an after-thought and lay on the grass ignored (Nature knew).  Then ensued much running about, building of pens, pressing of the ewe (that knew too), and the spiflication of an elderly gentleman who held the ewe (who knew) while the elderly lady (who also knew) but tried to milk the ewe (who knew).  The lamb (who was not quite right) was held to the teat and made slurpy noises but nothing came and so they rummaged in cupboards and under beds and assembled the milk-bar.

Meanwhile the lamb got weaker and weaker and visiting farmers (who knew of course) shook their heads and advised euthanasia (only that wasn’t quite how they put it).  ‘Call her Gladstone’, said one amongst other helpful remarks.

‘I know she’s not quite right — she’s got underbite, and no cartilage in her ears and her back is twisted like the toy lamb Alison had when she was little, whose wire frame got bent by too much cuddling — do you think she’ll unbend with time — some babies have funny shaped heads but they come right, or get hair so no one notices…’

Gladstone took to the bottle like a professional and, God bless the ewe who knew — she is amenable, when the spiflicated gent stops holding her she stands and watches me feed the lamb then, bemused, she cleans up the smelly, milky mess I have made of her and takes her off with her other lamb for a rest.

Last night I slept badly wrestling with a moral dilemma of the lamb who will not do — my head rang with advice.  Farmers say ‘the first loss is the easiest’. An old boss of mine used to say ‘we must not strive officiously’, when he meant ‘it’s time for this poor little bugger to meet her maker’

I woke up decisive — no more feeding — it’s up to the Shepherd in the Sky.

The lamb didn’t seem to be breathing — it had been a cold night, I tiptoed to take her body from the pen without the ewe knowing, a little tufty ear twitched, a small black eye opened.  The crooked lamb jumped up and ran to meet me baaing for breakfast (still a bit wobbly).

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I went indoors to think about it while I made her breakfast.

Death is always the same but who knows how life will turn out — that’s the trouble with euthanasia.

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Thoughtful

Filling the Spiritual Void — the anxious atheist

When we introduce children to scientific thinking and our reasoning becomes increasingly evidence based, our world becomes more secular and religious concepts begin to seem weird – that is when we humans may be missing a trick.

The French are ahead of us in this: for more than half a century their state education system has been secular so that, for many, religious faith is alien and impossible to fathom, it does not fit into our way of thinking anymore.

This may deprive us of several useful psychological tools.

The concept of an over-arching God, a power greater than ourselves, particularly a beneficent power was very useful. It may have been delusional but it allowed us to relinquish overall responsibility, taking us out of ultimate control. Being in charge is very stressful – all those decisions – having to understand everything and be assertive. It was much easier to have faith in the overall management and just pray – now we are self reliant but full of self doubt.

It is a sort of growing up, a loss of innocence, a loss of humility and a growing sense of our own importance, grinding self-reliance and sneaking insecurity that can be so destructive – it takes us to the Accident and Emergency Department in the middle of the night when by morning we are feeling better.

Other things have contributed – we are empowered and less restrained by gender and class, we are more free-standing, not so much a part of a family or a close supportive community.

We could however acknowledge one overarching power that is not God, but is greater than ourselves – that is the accumulation of human development, knowledge and co-operation. It is the billions of years of natural selection and adaption and one man’s knowledge and understanding, built on that of other men (and women), built on that of all men and women, since the beginning of time – that great pyramid of our achievements. But it’s not a pyramid, is it? It’s an infinite pyramidal mesh – immortal, invisible.  It is wisdom – sounds religious to me! It does sound like something worthy of faith and that is, I think, what we are missing — faith, or rather confidence, in ourselves — in our wider self which is immense.

And we miss the idea of an afterlife which is the ultimate in delayed gratification, of investing ones efforts in long term projects!  The converse which is a finite life without judgement, without a final moral reckoning lays us open to short-termism — live while you can and die happy (only we don’t).  Does this have a negative effect on future generations?  We are not, after all, going to be looking down from Heaven and seeing the consequences of our actions — nor burning in the fires of hell and damnation for the things we did that we knew all along were wrong.

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Pious role model from Limerick Cathedral

We have to think of our descendants as our afterlife — that’s not too difficult and, believe me, they will judge us!

The Commandments were set in stone — that was the point.  You knew where you are with commandments set in stone, you had a moral compass that avoided constant moral negotiation with oneself — my Mum knew exactly what was right and what was wrong and there was no room for negotiation — no shades of grey.

The irony is that today everyone has protocols for everything except the really important moral dilemmas where a protocol would be really useful.

We wanted to have it our way with our wonderful free will and just like that day where it all started in the Garden of Eden we can’t un-eat the apple.

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Neurophysiology, Thoughtful

The Man in the Alley — Seeing Red

They’d been to Ronnie Scots to listen to jazz that was so weird and avant guard that  they wanted to giggle so they left early and got the bus home but something caught her eye — from the top of the bus — in an alley — the shape of someone, slumped.

 

Thanks to Yuichi from Morioka, Japan [CC-BY-2.0] via Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to Yuichi from Morioka, Japan [CC-BY-2.0] via Wikimedia Commons

They got off the bus at the next stop — I know her, she would have to do that…  And they walked back and found the alley and the man.  He was lying with his shoulders against a bin, in a puddle, the weather was dry — she thought he had wet himself.

The conversation was stereotyped, ‘Are you okay?’

‘Fuck off!’ he just wanted to be left alone, he was probably drunk — they left.

As the young couple walked home the doubts began to hatch.  Was he just drunk?  Was he ill, a diabetic having a hypo, perhaps?  Had he been mugged, stabbed?  Was it blood on the ground, hidden in the shadow and the distorting spectra of the street light?

They phoned the police, who must have been grateful.

Then she phoned a friend who was me and set me thinking about all the puddles of blood and abusive men (and women) that I have tried to help — the insulin enhanced right-hooks I have dodged, ducking and diving to avoid the punches and projectile vomits that pursued me in my previous life.

A friend of ours found a man, collapsed and cold, on the moor — he was barely conscious and could well have said, ‘Fuck-off!’ but the friend for some reason that he will never understand  (he had no particular medical knowledge) asked the man if he was diabetic.  ‘Yes,’  he said and passed out.

That knowledge and hot sweet tea saved his life.

People with diabetes get ill and confused with high blood sugars, they don’t smell of alcohol but do smell of acetone (like alcoholics the morning after) which can be misleading.  Untreated diabetes does not give you hypos, but the treatments can and the hypoglycaemia can make you seem drunk, can come on very suddenly and make you violent, confused and incontinent.  It can rapidly lead to brain damage and death. If in doubt you can always give them sugar — if they are suffering from a high sugar you won’t make it much worse but if they have a low sugar you may well save their life.

As for the blood — blood is one thing in a hospital ward, in a labour room or the back of an ambulance but it is quite another as you follow the drops up a half lit staircase or out of a back door into the dusk.  Then it explodes onto your retina, impacting on your senses like nothing else.  A tiny drop of fresh blood will grab your attention and lead you to the next and the next.

In half-light blood assaults the senses

In half-light blood assaults the senses

We have evolved to follow injured prey, to find a wounded comrade, to see red and know the danger.  This phenomenon always amazes me — makes me remember that I am an animal — reminds me to wear something red to a concert if I want my friend, on the stage, to spot me — explains why I cannot read the cooking instructions, written in white on the scarlet pizza box — the red, you see, just fills up my senses.

Wear something red to be noticed

Wear something red to be noticed

If the man in the alley were lying in a pool of blood, you would have known,  and believe me, you would have smelled the blood!

Look into the half-light and you will see blood.

Look into the half-light and you will see blood.

 

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Ecology, Humour, Thoughtful

Frazzled? You’ve got Red Queen Syndrome

The Red Queen by Bill Brooks Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Red Queen by Bill Brooks Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Red Queen Syndrome is running (or riding a turtle) to stand still — the first documented sufferer was the Red Queen in 1871, in  Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there (I played the White Queen once — it was my finest hour, but a long time ago).  The phenomenon was recognised in 1993 by Matt Ridley — The Red Queen, Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature explored our origins and the need for constant evolution to keep one jump ahead of our competitors, our predators and, particularly, our diseases.  As the Red Queen said,’Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else you must run at least twice as fast as that!’

John Tenniel's illustration -- 1897 edition of Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there.

John Tenniel’s illustration — 1897 edition of Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there.

It’s a long time since I read Ridley’s book and at this distance I can only remember the messages that I took away from it — woven into my own narrative of life — the need for  the greatest genetic variation in a population so that the maximum options are available in case of emergencies (don’t forget Darwin) — those threats which will  inevitably emerge to confound us, due to the constant pursuit of organisms whose job it is to harm or out- perform us.    Oh, and the need for sexual reproduction and our sexual fascination with those most different from ourselves —  Jack Spratt Syndrome! It is the quest for new and useful genes — affording us the greatest possibilities to adapt or die.

This holds for almost everything — from our adaption, through natural selection, to emerging diseases and changes in our environment to our behaviours, technologies, economies, emotions and societies.  Everything is evolving all the time so we have to run to keep up.

As I slow down it seems to be getting faster.

My husband and I watch the prices of oil and electricity increase so we invest in solar panels. We’ll be able to heat our water for free!  But the immersion heater, which we have never used, is not responding — out with the electrical screw-driver — running to stand still — developing new skills.  Bang!

My computer is poorly, a problem in its power pick-up, it cannot be repaired because things have moved on in the 4  years since I bought it — no parts available, not made any more.  I have to buy a new computer — full of innovation — I have to run to stand still, change my behaviour, find all the secret clicks, do everything differently — where’s my e-dictionary — won’t open — connection broken — run troubleshooter — OMG.  Passwords won’t work — ‘Have you forgotten your password?’  No I bloody haven’t.  I will adapt and soon this new computer will seem second nature — I’ll probably even dream within its constraining matrix , but it will go on evolving and eventually (probably quite soon) it, or its successor, will out-run me.

People don’t get too old to do their job — the job evolves so that they no-longer recognise it.  The job out-runs them!

Now I’m going to try to download a picture of the Red Queen which may well take some time.

4228642691_539a578681_o Helena Bonham-Carter as the Red Queen from the film Alice in Wonderland, 2010, by Tim Burton. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

 

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Thoughtful

Why Blog?

Lambs2014 009gambolling

Why blog?

I blog because when someone asks ‘What have you been up to lately?’ my mind goes a  blank and when I ask myself, ‘What’s it all about?’  I don’t always know.  These days my concentration is so much upon the now that I lose perspective.

Once it’s logged and blogged and photographed it’s there to be recalled, it is fixed in the narrative — made sense of — preserved — formatted for storage.

So, sorry to say, I write for myself and my family and for friends who might say ‘What have you been up to lately?’

When I ask, ‘What’s it all about?’ I can have a litttle browse and remember all the amazing things that we have — meanwhile you are very welcome to share and if you are a little obsessed by sheep and blown away by Nature — so much the better!

What is it about holes
Buzzard scavenging for after-birth
Primroses
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Communication, Thoughtful

A Mammalist view of Words

There are two sorts of individual: those who need words and those that do not. If you are a writer you are likely to be one of the former — but not necessarily. Nonsense! Everyone needs words!

We have a friend who is a bit different, actually quite a lot different, he has a genetic abnormality that affects his ability to use language — the language part of his brain is absent or switched off.

A dog knows some nouns – his name, ‘dinner’, ‘walkies’, ‘stick’, and some verbs — ‘fetch’, and he understands ‘No!’ My dog understands some phrases – ‘feed the dog’, ‘feed the sheep’ and ‘go to bed.’ But he can’t articulate very clearly and, okay, his grasp of sophisticated language isn’t great.

Our friend’s articulation is better, he has the right equipment but his grasp of language is similar. This is quite a disability – but not that much of a disability. He looks different but is physically robust, as strong as an ox, has good balance and co-ordination, is hard working and eager to please – he will dig or sweep or wield an axe all day. He will walk home, day or night, mile across the fields and is never out of work and rarely short of money. He also has terrific social skills, notwithstanding his appearance and people’s often negative response to him for all the above reasons.

The thing is: he has a very well developed grasp of the non-verbal, knows exactly what is going on, who likes who, who doesn’t and who would stab you in the back – ‘Bad man!’ And he is right. This is another reason folks are wary of him. I’m not sure about the workings of his sense of humour but he loves to laugh, he rejoices in laughter, is attracted to it, infected by it, bathes in good humour when it surrounds him.

His life is very difficult – he loves to be in a social setting but social settings increasingly fear those who are different and finds excuses to exclude them.

It’s a shame I cannot transpose his perception of the world into words for you because, if I could, it would have the emotional intelligence that would stun you and there would be no bull-shit.

Words are very blunt instruments.

This brings me to the thought that set me off on this tack. People that haven’t always lived with animals find it odd: the concept of personality in other species and that is only because we depend so much on language. It means we miss a lot.

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