Saturday 22 December 2018

silent night


 Just time to wish everyone a Happy Christmas and a thank you for reading this blog in 2018.
This silent night is Pixie and Pocket and was photographed by daughter Phoebe.


 Not so silent is the one eyed Rocket - seen here checking out if Father Christmas is really coming and will he be getting anything that's wrapped up because he likes the paper best. He has already taken  a present out of its jiffy bag and unwrapped it himself, hiding it under his bed and it wasn't even for him. This morning he stole the Green and Black's off the bed of our guests staying in the Pink Tower and was seen running around the house with a red glass bauble in his mouth. This christmas may be a bit trying. He seems to think he is a bi-ped and now can reach everything by just standing on his hind legs- the butter, the cream pot, the bread ...and we haven't even got to a turkey yet.
 We have to keep him far away from the tree and the other red glass baubles.

So I asked Pixie if she could be bothered with an interesting fact as it was nearing Christmas and she tells me she's on holiday. However she did eventually oblige and her very interesting fact for this month is that Rudolph's red nose is more than likely the result of a parasitic infection of the respiratory system.





And Pocket - who couldn't even be bothered to get out of his box said  In time we hate that which we often fear. And I said Shakespeare said that. Anthony and Cleopatra Act 1 Scene 3. and he said exactly.And I said surely you don't hate Shakespeare? and he said Shakespeare? You don't expect me to read as well as do everything else do you? And I said what exactly is it that you do do? And he scowled at me and said he did a little light dusting. I said Really? Look at all those cobwebs above your box - you might have tidied them up and he said they're there to catch the flies so I'm doing you a favour.


I'd have to look back over all the posts in the blog to see what has happened this year - but it has gone quickly and we lost some friends.
 Remembering dear Beezle who this time last year sported a jaunty red ribbon in true Christmas spirit.



So with the help of Chloe (other daughter)'s beautiful art work of one of the many rooks rescued this year including Croaky and Colin from Gosport I wish you a very Merry Christmas.





The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.



Wednesday 28 November 2018

miss - my dog ate my homework

The one eyed Rocket has been given the all clear by the vet. He managed to save the eye though it is unlikely he can see through it. 


 Unless we put a patch over it we can't tell if he can see through it but he can certainly see through the other one and is as mad and as wild as ever.


 He is a wriggly worm and doesn't keep still enough to look into that eye and he's only still when he's asleep when of course his eyes are shut. He's not one bit frightened of the perpetrator Pocket the cat.


This morning he got trapped inside a box (see below) and quite honestly nothing is safe from him as he's learnt how to jump.

 Pixie who is fed up with all this puppy talk asked if we could put some pictures up of her when she was a puppy. Pixie has obviously never been small but here she is a lot smaller than she is today.

This is when we first laid eyes on her in Scotland with her owner/breeder Fran



and this is when we brought her home at ten weeks. In all her eight and a half years she has never been ill and like some of her siblings is still going strong in spite of the average age for a wolfie being around 7 due to their magnificent size. She comes from a wonderful line that Fran and Bill have bred and long may she stay with us.

So her interesting fact this blog post is that pteronophobia is a fear of being killed by feathers.
I said good job I 'm not looking after any rooks at the moment. And clearly Pocket the cat doesn't have that fear what with all the birds he brings in which nine times out of ten we manage to liberate before their feathers kill him.


 And the naughty Pocket's bon mot which she says is hers but I know was said by Anais Nin is
It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar." And I said "so you're insecure?" And he snarled at me and said he wasn't. And I said well why did you bite our guest then?
He ignored me.

 I'm still volunteering at the wildlife hospital where these owls were, (photo by them - the hospital not the owls). I am actually looking after two hedgehogs myself at home - brought to me by a neighbour - which I am over wintering. They eat like horses but at the moment under weight so would not survive a hibernation. They are in the stable - may be that's why they eat like horses.


The Beasts
By Walt Whitman (1819–1892)


I THINK I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.


Thursday 25 October 2018

the blind assassin


Actually the blind assassin is a misnomer. The assassin was not blind but blinded his prey.


 Here is the beautiful Rocket puppy photographed by our friend Henrietta, relaxing after attending a hectic party. Rocket - not Henrietta. The party left a treasure trove of toys which he dutifully removed from the re-cycling box in the kitchen. He chases a beer can around the floor, eats a champagne cork,  noisily destroys nine paper napkins then - silence.  A soft whimpering reveals an empty cream pot well and truly stuck on the end of his nose. Ha! But all such frivolities have come to a temporary end. The next evening, cornered by the ever playful Rocket, Pocket the cat strikes out with his paw - all claws extended like a canteen of knives and blinds Rocket in the eye. The vet doubts he can save the eye and instead has sewn it up and we must wait another week to see if it is saved. It is unlikely the vet tells us again. We are heartbroken but after a week in his lampshade collar which is driving all of us mad, he continues to be the lovely mischievous puppy he always was. He is now a wabi -sabi dog. Wabi -sabi is the Japanese  world view centred on the acceptance of imperfection. An aesthetic that is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete,


I asked the blind assassin Pocket (above)for his bon mot and he said " All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched," I said that was very profound for a blind assassin and he admitted that Seneca had said that. He was merely repeating it. I said I hoped he was feeling wretched.


And Pixie's interesting fact is that it doesn't half hurt when Rocket bashes you with his lampshade collar that he has to wear to stop him scratching it.


 From behind, with the big lampshade thing round his neck, he looks like a little robot hoover as his head skims along the ground. As a consequence Pocket the cat is now scared of him. Ha! And next door's hens are all looking very worried.



Pixie's other interesting fact for this month's blog post is "and thus the heart will break, yet broken live on." I said is that really a fact? And are you allowed two interesting facts? You'll be writing the whole blog post next. And she said alright - it was Lord Byron said that and that perhaps he'd be better at writing the blog post.  And I agreed and said he'd more than likely begin it with "there is rapture in the lonely shore - I love not Man less, but Nature more.. rather than talk about blind assassins which anyway is the title of a marvellous book by Margaret Atwood.





So the nights are getting colder and there is rapture in the lonely shore and it will soon be the end of the dahlias but with a bit of careful mulching they'll be back again next year.

And the last of the roses .............




The horses - by Edwin Muir


Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning. 



Tuesday 25 September 2018

rocket, pocket and stopit

 So here is Rocket. He looks a sweet, peaceful biddable pup in these pics but believe me he is an anarchist. You can't turn your back on him for a moment or he'll be leaping high in the air to grab hold of the washing on the line and bring it ripping down or taking everything out of the re-cycling bin. I find I'm constantly crying out "Stop it!" The other trouble is that when you call Rocket - Pocket comes and when you call Pocket Rocket comes. Obvious really. I'm  wondering if we shouldn't have called him Stanley. I took him to a gardening job I had and he ran away with my trowel, took all the weeds out of my basket and dug holes where I didn't want holes.Then he fell asleep on my kneeling pad with me still kneeling on it. He really loves gardening. Particularly pruning the roses low down. "Stop it!"

 I 've been given a sheet of paper (now ripped into small pieces) that tells you all the types of people your puppy should meet before they get too old. Men with beards(or women), people in uniform, vicars, babies and the great thing is we've ticked them all off as we have a dressing up box so I just pretend I'm a vicar and put on a white collar back to front. I also have a false beard that works really well on your head as a quiff. So that's two people with only one prop. There's no sign of a  mermaid or a pirate on the list but I've dressed up as one just in case. You don't want a strange pirate to turn up at the front door to be met by a barking dog.

 Dressing up can be very useful. When I was trying to get a mortgage quite a while ago and was self employed, single and pregnant I doubted the bank would even consider me. So I stuffed my bra with a massive amount of socks to give me a bigger bust line than my pregnant belly,  put on a baggy jumper to hide my bump and sailed into the bank feeling like an Elizabethan galleon. The manager couldn't take his eyes off my "breasts" and muttered "I think we can give you the figure you're after."


 So Colin from Gosport has finally flown away! Last evening at dusk I saw a flurry of black tail feathers fly over the hedge and he was gone. He determinedly remained a wild bird and I'm so happy for that. The shade tunnel is now vacant for any other fledglings next Spring.

 As Emperor Pocket  and Emily Dickinson would say "That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."

 Pixie is finding Rocket rather annoying and is seen here consulting her diary incase there's an opportunity to go away somewhere without him. I ask her about her very interesting fact for this post  and she tells me that a single, little brown bat can eat up to a thousand mosquitos in a single hour. I asked her if the use of the word single seen here twice was supposed to tell me something.


I love beetles. There is this wonderful book packed with photos of them and some of them have the most glorious names. These are genuine names though they do sound as if they come out of some sort of fairy tale. Wouldn't it be fun to meet An Agreeable Caterpillar Hunter or a False Clown Beetle? There's a Javan Fiddle Beetle and a Splendid Earth Boring Beetle. A Telephone-Pole Beetle and a Subangulate Warrior Beetle. I have ferried the names away in one of my many notebooks and in doing so realise that I am a hoarder of words. I must use subangulate in a story somewhere. There - spell check says it doesn't exist but it does in the Oxford English Dictionary. Possessing a slight or obtuse angle. A bit like this blog post I suppose.


A friend of mine is also getting a puppy and calling it Beckett. It reminded me of living at home with my family as a child. Living at home was like living in a Samuel Beckett play. This poem which I wrote a long time ago is an absolutely true account of what used to go on. This happened on a regular basis when my parents watched television. I promise you - it is all true.



small talk


Mr B(who sat in his big leather chair
lost in its wings)
would stare at the set in the corner
and although Mrs B
would bring in the tea
he never felt the need to join her.
Should she speak
(and he could not hear)
he would raise to his ear
a massive trumpet
made of tortoise shell
whilst she,
mouth full of crumpet
would quell her irritation
and her lips would move in syncopation
“What did you say dear?”
Mrs B thought of euthanasia.
Eventually, instead of death
she brought him ear phones
and plugged him in
by curly cable from his head
across the floor and coffee table
to the belly
of the telly
as if he were joined
by an umbilical cord
and Mrs B who ignored the screen
did not have to listen
at Christmas to the queen
or commercials for tampons and lager
but could play as softly as she liked
the Beatles and Wagner.
And when she needed to talk
Mrs B would walk to the porch
and flash signals across the room
with a torch.