Double, double, toil and trouble

As you may or may not know, I have been absent from the world of emails, blogs et al for a week whilst visiting Shosh and Gav in Staffordshire and I had a lovely time and it was a great break.

Courtesy of National Express I was transported from Bideford to Hanley bus station in relative comfort, apart from the second leg of the journey home on Saturday when the coach did not appear to have air conditioning fitted. Thankfully, though, the coach was not packed to the gills.

On the outward journey Barnstaple station provided an amusing and somewhat intriguing sight – one shoe dangling from a street lamp seemingly tied by its laces and dangling in the slight breeze. I am presuming someone had either a very lucky lob or a very good eye.

Then there was the lady in the seat behind me who was having great fun ringing up her friends on her mobile. “Hello?! Hello?! You up?! I boiled four eggs this morning, ate two of them for breakfast and was going to bring the other two for you but left them behind. “

“Hello?! Helloooooo?! You up?! I will probably ring you again as I get bored on the coach”. Oh lucky me I thought.

One of the prime objectives of my trip was to go out with Shosh on her mission to find a wedding dress - so many fluffy, slinky, puffy concoctions to choose from and so many price labels that burnt your fingers when checking them out. We were both completely amazed and chuffed with the final result on Tuesday though – the fourth dress tried on was ‘the one’. All those horror stories of trying on hundreds and hundreds and tramping from emporium to emporium were allayed on the second establishment visited. And even the shoes were sorted out on Friday! To say that we were pleased with our extreme cleverness is an understatement.

We went t’pictures on Wednesday and saw the new Robin Hood film. After seeing it I can understand the comparisons with Gladiator/Saving Private Ryan but it was a pretty good romp nevertheless. Going back to the subject of having a very good eye – our hero’s shot at the bad guy in the closing stages of the film was pretty efficient I must say and excellently carried out. Letting arrows fly skywards is great fun – I just wish my aim was that good at such a distance. However, with a clever bit of filming, editing and cinemagraphic licence perhaps there is hope yet....

We went to see my mum on Thursday which was lovely - I have not been able to get up to Rutland for ages to see her. Three generations of us females together could conjure a daunting picture but we didn’t sit around our cauldron – it was too hot for one thing and Tesco were fresh out of eye of newt anyway.

And so it is back home, with Biggles complaining that as soon as I had left everyone was rotten to him and took away his boydoggyhood. Hmm perhaps somewhere a different cauldron’s recipe was bubbling?

Nuts, whole hazlenuts....

Whilst waiting for filming to get underway on Saturday, I roamed through the shrubbery with my camera. As any good shrubber knows, there are delightful things to be found lurking just out of sight. However, I am not a very good shrubber and only managed to find a couple of interesting things.

There was the little snail nestling in the moss on a tree trunk:

There was what was once a gateway into either a long destroyed building or pen of some sort (with the hinges still on one of vertical stone slabs), complete with stone path:

And then there was the stone complete with a sprinkling of broken hazelnut shells:

So, had this stone been used as an anvil in much the same way as a thrush does with a snail? Considering how difficult it is to crack a nut even with nut-crackers, I assume not. Was it the remains of a squirrel's lunch? Or even a dormouse's breakfast? Or was it even the remains of a passing back-packer's pack-up who had stopped for a protein-rich snack using up the leftovers of their Christmas nut basket?

Any ideas anyone?

And never a bleat was heard

Jon had been approached a while back to do an interview for an American film company regarding the ‘Beast of Dartmoor’. It was supposed to have taken place a couple of weeks back, but the 'Iceland Incident' had quashed those plans, and after many alterations in arrangements it had finally been decided - during this week - that the filming would take place on Dartmoor. If nothing else, it presented a nice excuse for sandwiches, cake and a giant flask of tea, and a day out with - hopefully - nice weather to accompany us on our jaunt over the stunning scenery of the moor.

Biggles decided to show his appreciation for the trip by throwing up his breakfast over the back seat of the car – nice one Biggles! Ah the joys of clearing up vomit from the back of the car whilst parked in the entrance of a field, with rear end dangerously crossing the thin line between off and on road. All the while being watched by the benefactor of such delight, pathos etched upon his face. Chunks of ….. well I won’t go any further. It was like taking the children out on a sunny day’s trip to the country all over again!

The scenery changed somewhat when we came upon the journey through Princetown, famous - of course -for its foreboding structure, Dartmoor Prison, which sat staring at us with austerity. Then it was out again over the cattle grid and on to the moorland where the ‘pedestrians’ have no respect for the Highway Code whatsoever, and why should they? Several stops later, in order to accommodate various sheep, cattle and the odd foal crossing the road, we eventually met up with the film crew in a lay-by. And there were a lot of them – and all were being transported around in black vehicles that dwarfed our little Daihatsu. Passers-by may well have got the impression that it was a Saturday afternoon meeting of the local ‘Men in Black Club’.

Biggles, however, was unimpressed and was more interested in sniffing here, there and everywhere and leaving his scent wherever possible on the landscape. And then I was back in the car, and the sinister looking entourage moved off slowly, with us nestled in second place, to a beautiful little spot they had found that was ideal for the filming they needed - just down the road from Burrator Reservoir.

A few hours later it was the trip in reverse, this time encountering the ‘teasing’ sheep. These are the ones who threaten to cross the road but loiter at the verge instead. They taunt you into playing a game of ‘kangaroo’ down the road whilst they put one foot out, then back again, and then look disdainfully at you, all the while chewing as if pounding a stick of gum between maxilla and mandible. Perhaps they were just poking a proverbial tongue out at the sheepdog that was asleep on the back seat of the car - blissfully unaware of their audacity.

And to round off a very nice Saturday sojourn, Jon and I heard our first cuckoo in years. This may seem a pretty unremarkable event to some, but it was only the other day that I mentioned to Jon that I had not heard a cuckoo in ages, to which he replied that he hadn’t either.

DARTMOOR
by
Noel Thomas Carrington (1777-1830)

Dartmoor! thou wert to me, in childhood's hour,
A wild and wondrous region. Day by day
Arose upon my youthful eye they belt
Of hills mysterious, shadowy, clasping all
The green and cheerful landscape sweetly spread
Around my home; and with a stern delight
I gazed upon thee. How often on the speech
Of the half-savage peasant have I hung,
To hear of rock-crowned heights on which the cloud
For ever rests; and wilds stupendous swept
By mightiest storms; of glen, and gorge, and cliff,
Terrific, beetling o'er the stone-strewed vale;
And giant masses, by the midnight flash
Struck from the mountain's hissing brow, and hurled
Into the foaming torrent; and of forms
That rose amid the desert, rudely shaped
By Superstition's hands when time was young;
And of the dead, the warrior dead, who sleep
Beneath the hollowed cairn! My native fields,
Though peerless, ceased to please. The flowery vale,
The breezy hill, the river and the wood,
Island, reef, headland, and the circling sea,
Associated by the sportful hand
Of Nature, in a thousand views diverse,
Or grand, or lovely, - to my roving eye
Displayed in vain their infinite of charms;
I thought on thy wild world, - to me a world, -
Mysterious Dartmoor, dimly seen, and prized
For being distant and untrod; and still
Where'er I wander'd, - still my wayward eye
Rested on thee!

You must have been a beautiful baby

During the torrential rain and flooding experienced in Nashville over the first weekend of the month, Nashville Zoo welcomed the arrival of two 'storm' babies. One was a Eurasian lynx cub, born on the Saturday, and on the other was a Baird's tapir which was born on the Sunday.  

These tapirs are the national animal of Belize and commonly referred to as 'mountain cows' in Central and South America.When he grows into adulthood Noah (as he has been christened) will lose his reddish-brown coat brightly marked with white streaks and spots and acquire the distinctive cream-coloured marking on his face and throat, and a dark spot on each cheek, behind and below the eye. The rest of his hair will be dark brown or greyish-brown and like other tapirs he will have a small stubby tail of around 3 - 5 inches and a long, flexible prehensile nose. He should reach around 2 metres (6.6 ft) in length and 1.2 metres (3.9 ft) in height, and weigh in the region of 240–400 kilograms (530–880 lb) - Baird's tapirs are the largest and heaviest of the New World tapir species.

In its natural habitat the Baird's tapir is found in the dense jungles of Central America including southeastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador.and can be found at altitudes as high as 3,350 metres (10,990 ft). They can be either diurnal or nocturnal, eat plant matter and communicate with shrill whistles.

This tapir has been classed as endangered by the ICUN and in 1996 it was classed as vulnerable; hunting and loss of habitat being two of the main reasons for this status.

And talking of beautiful babies, how about little Einstein the griffon vulture born at Hamburg Zoo recently? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I am sure his parents must love him:

Happy Birthday wishes

Happy Birthday Ant!

And  a little birthday song for you - a complete non-sequitur but pretty jolly

2 May 1933 : Loch Ness monster is sighted


Although accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland's Loch Ness date back 1,500 years, the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is born when a sighting makes local news on 2 May 1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier related an account of a local couple who claimed to have seen "an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface.

BEES MAKE HONEY

Being a domestic engineer (a profession suggested to me by the man at immigration in Texas to replace the age-old expression "housewife") seems to infer that several everyday tasks may require the need of a hard hat or overalls.

In the case of the poor woman in Victoria, Australia who went out to collect her washing from the line, one or both of these may well have been ideal apparel. She discovered, to her horror, that a swarm of around 20,000 bees had attached themselves to some of her more colourful garments and presumably clung on to the fabric - and themselves - in a cacophony of buzzing and humming in defiance of her laundry day antics.

She telephoned a local bee keeper to come along and clear the offending creatures and her garden became a hive of activity whilst he dealt with the little darlings. He explained that “bees swarm in the spring when their hives become overcrowded, forcing the queen bee to head out with some of her workers. The bees then cluster nearby while scouts head out to find suitable locations for a new hive.”

Bees on their own are sweet little things, but get a group of them together and they instantly become akin to a crowd of football hooligans who cling together in the terraces and threaten all those around purely with the sight of their numbers and noisy chanting. There may be safety in numbers for those concerned, but to the outsider those numbers are terrifying.

An update from Major James Bigglesworth - aka Biggles - about life at the CFZ and his training programme

I woke up this morning a bit earlier than usual and had a good stretch and yawn to get my body ready for the day ahead. I nuzzled the old dear awake by thrusting my cold nose in her face – I don’t see why anyone else should be asleep if I am awake – and then proceeded to scratch and wash myself in order to annoy the grumpy old git as he tried in vain to return to sleep. It is great fun doing these ablutions on the bed as I can make it bounce up and down when cleaning my privates, which causes utterances of extreme annoyance from the two-leggeds lying under the bedclothes. That is if they have managed to reclaim any of them because I usually try and get as much of them as possible to lay on myself.

A good game is to sniff loudly at the air that comes through the gap at the bottom of the closed door and then try to force open the door with a hefty kick of my front legs. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it does then I break out and head for Graham’s door to make sure that he is awake. I never bother with Oll’s door – he doesn’t get up till 11 in the morning and I know it would be wasted energy trying to rouse him.

Then it is off downstairs at a rate of knots, either with Graham or the grumpy old git – no use wasting time walking sedately when there are two cats downstairs to annoy and garden borders to check out. Sometimes the old dear gets up first and lets me outside – she is nice – she is the one who gives me food and I follow her around all day like a shadow making sure that she is not doing anything that I am going to miss. These humans don’t use the garden bushes for emptying their bladders, which is something that I don’t quite understand, but they are peculiar creatures in lots of ways. So when the old dear goes upstairs I sit on her chair to keep it warm for her. I am not sure that she appreciates my warm bottom on her chair from the way she sighs when she returns downstairs, but I am a creature of habit and I accidentally did it once so have to carry on doing so.

From about 8 pm in the evening I incessantly try to round her up to send her to bed so that I can go with her and root around in the bin and reveal the grumpy old git’s disgusting habit of eating pork pies in bed. I like telling tales on him – I pretend that I am a mummy’s boy and that is what it is all about – telling tales. I get told off for dragging wrappers around the bedroom floor and on to the bed, but he gets told off too for eating such things upstairs in the first place.

They tell me I have some disgusting habits too, but I really do not know what they are on about. Drinking out of the lavatory is fun – it is just the right height for me to get my head in and there is a never ending supply of water to lap up. I do not understand why they make weird noises of disgruntlement when I try to kiss them goodnight after having one of these night time drinks.

Ahhh it is a great life being the alpha male in the CFZ household – the training is going quite well and I nearly have my pack exactly where I want them. They keep trying to usurp me but I foil them at every turn because I am a dog and I am cleverer than they are.