sorry, I'm feeling a little horse

I was entertained for a couple of hours on Twitter (on X, if you musk, I mean must) yesterday by some increasingly lurid speculation about what a woman named Charlotte Dujardin had done to a horse in a video that had been submitted to, and was under investigation by, some central authority governing equestrian sport and moreover was of a serious enough nature for her to immediately withdraw from the upcoming Paris Olympics.

A bit of background for the non-horse-adjacent such as myself: Charlotte Dujardin is a prominent equestrian sportswoman in the somewhat esoteric field of dressage who also happens to be the joint-most-bemedalled British female Olympian of all time. You might, as I very definitely already have done, make a relative value judgment about the lung-busting athletic prowess of cyclist Laura Kenny (the other joint record-holder) and someone making a horse walk sideways and do a bit of skipping, but that's what the record books show.

Anyway, the incriminating video, despite what internet speculation might have had you believe (i.e. some sort of Catherine the Great thing), contains some footage of Dujardin getting a bit enthusiastic with a whip while training a horse in an indoor training ring. No doubt there are acceptable guidelines for how hard and often you're allowed to hit a horse with a whip, both in official competition and elsewhere, and I have no reason not to believe those who say Dujardin is exceeding them here, but I do also wonder how people think horses get trained to do the weird stylised movements that dressage requires. I mean, it'd be lovely if you could get them into a meeting room and go through all this stuff on a whiteboard as if you were discussing football tactics, but horses are - and I'm aware there might be people outraged at this statement - EXTREMELY DIM and you've got to do things in a more basic way.

I was reminded here of the furore in 2021 around the widely-circulated photograph of Irish racehorse trainer Gordon Elliott sitting on a dead horse while making a phone call. I could have understood a degree of outrage if he had subsequently been revealed to have strangled the horse to death with his bare hands, but no, it had just (as far as I can gather) dropped dead while out on a training gallop. Again, those seemingly outraged that the death of horses might be seen as a relatively normal day-to-day thing in the multi-million-pound horse-racing industry seemed to be ignoring some fairly obvious realities which I had a go at articulating at the time.

Back to the current controversy - you will be unsurprised to learn that someone has already been and made sure that Dujardin's Wikipedia page has been updated with a sober and objective summary of the current situation.

Some of the material that made its way onto the internet during the initial excitement contained some links to Horse & Hound, the publication of choice for the Barbour-jacket and shooting-stick set. While I was there I was offered a couple of other links, one of which was to this story:

Just to be clear, in the equestrian community "sheath" is the euphemism of choice for "cock", so this, just to be even clearer, is an interview with a woman whose job it is to prise lumps of hardened knobcheese out of the ends of horses' cocks. I mean, someone's got to do it, I suppose. Nothing I could say here will be better than just letting the article speak for itself, so here you go:

This is just about perfect; my only complaint is that Horse & Hound weren't tempted to borrow the Daily Mail's usage habits and make occasional references to HIS ENORMOUS HORSEHOOD or something similar.

Note also that specialist horse knob cleaning products are available, including this one which tries (unsuccessfully) to put a slightly cutesy spin on the whole business. 

snorklebrity lookeyspikey of the day

Today's pairing features my son Huw, in the pool at our holiday house in Brittany a couple of weeks ago and borrowing some of his big sister's swimming accessories, in particular her face-mounted snorkel, and also the strange underwater artificial dinosaur hybrid submarine that I drew for my school yearbook at Bandung International School in Java in about 1979 (when I would have been about nine). Obviously the shape and positioning of the snorkel is the thing that brought the two together in my mind.

The drawing was accompanied by the following explanatory (well, sort of) text:

It's interesting to unpick all the things that (consciously or unconsciously) influenced both the drawing and the text in my nine-year-old mind:

• The BBRFC on the creature's sleeve, and indeed the rest of the design of the T-shirt the creature is wearing, is a reference to Bandung Barbarians Rugby Football Club, a loosely-organised group of expatriates from various countries (mainly the UK, Australia and New Zealand) for which my father used to turn out. My recollection of the various rugby days out we went to during our time in Java was that they were mainly a pretext for epic beer consumption, probably mainly the product of the Anker brewery with whom the club seemed to have cooked up some sort of endorsement/sponsorship deal, judging by the club T-shirt I am wearing in the images below (probably taken at Pangandaran). The beardy guy piloting the craft is also probably modelled on my Dad, though I should point out he has never smoked a pipe as far as I know.

• The general concept for the creature is clearly adapted/stolen from the Tintin book Red Rackham's Treasure which I read approximately a gazillion times. The smaller shark-based craft there was the brainchild of eccentric genius Professor Calculus. That's his English name, anyway, he was called Tournesol in the original French books. Translations into other languages are available, including, rather marvellously, Welsh; who knows what his name is there. 

• Obviously kids love dinosaurs, and you can see bits from at least three separate dinosaurs in the design of the creature: the head with its distinctive crest is clearly a parasaurolophus, the big fin thing on its back looks as if it's from a dimetrodon, and the spiked tail is a bit like that of a stegosaurus, informally known in slightly tedious paleontological nerd humour circles as a thagomizer. The fins at the rear are presumably a hangover from the fish design I stole the idea from, and I have no idea why the front limbs seem to have their elbows on backwards.

absolute bulltwit

Here's a bit of random fun: you'll probably have all seen one or more of the various internet things that attempt to categorise putting an animal's name in front of the word "shit" and the various subtleties of meaning that ensue. Just to be clear, none of these lists are definitive and there's plenty of scope for disagreement; I don't think that Urban Dictionary categorises "horseshit" quite as I would use it, and defining "bullshit" as "lies" is, while probably OK for day-to-day use, not quite in line with its specific technical meaning about which whole books have been written.

Anyway, the point of all the preamble is to introduce the results of a quick and unscientific survey which I cooked up after having occasion to use Twitter's (sorry, X's) search facility to search for instances of the word "bullshit" in my own tweets (sorry, "posts"). I can't remember why now but I'm sure it was important enough to justify taking some time off work to do. So here we go (one example for each):

bullshit: 51 occurrences

horseshit: 7 occurrences. Note that the specific tweet I chose here features a video where someone uses the word "bullshit" to describe essentially the same thing, thereby implying that the two terms are interchangeable in at least some subset of circumstances. I will reluctantly allow this.

dogshit: 7 occurrences

batshit: 2 occurrences

apeshit: slightly surprisingly, zero occurrences. Must try harder! I did once use the word "apeshittery" though which I am going to insist a) is a word and b) counts.

pigshit: once, here. This word doesn't feature in the Urban Dictionary list and pretty much has a single use case: as part of the phrase "thick as pigshit" or some variant thereof, as below.

sheepshit: well, no, but a near-miss here

All other animals: zero occurrences, with the caveat that I haven't appended the word "shit" to the end of every single animal, living or extinct, known to zoology and/or palaeontology and put it into a Twitter (sorry, X) search box. So it's possible that at some point in the past I used the word "pterodactylshit" or similar and it's out there un-found by my research.

Note that I have opted for slightly lower-resolution and generally less satisfactory screenshots over direct embedding; this just reflects my lack of faith in the Twitter (sorry, X) platform's long-term survival under the new regime. 

killebrity lookylikey of the day

My elder daughter, as befits a massive Harry Potter fan who has read the entire novel sequence about nine times and has many assorted items of Potterobilia in her possession, has a Harry Potter-themed duvet and pillow set, which features among other cartoonish renderings of the principal characters Harry's pet snowy owl, Hedwig (yeah, I know, owls again). This is all well and good but to me the owl as rendered has more than a touch of the Jason Voorhees about him, don't you think?

owlebrity pastrylikey of the day

It was Alys's birthday a couple of weeks ago, and Alys is a big fan of cute wildlife of all kinds, and owls in particular, so one of the things we did to celebrate was take her to this owl sanctuary up at Festival Park in Ebbw Vale. It's a funny little place, to be honest, but to be fair it does what it says on the tin in that they have lots of owls, including a couple that they got out and allowed the kids to interact with. As an aside, you will recall that we visited another owl sanctuary (one with what I deduce to be a higher budget for general site maintenance and presentational stuff) in the vicinity of Kington in Herefordshire in 2015; Alys probably doesn't remember that one, though, as she was only about three months old at the time.

A week or so later as part of general birthday celebrations for both girls (Nia's birthday is a week after Alys's) we went to Center Parcs for the weekend, and had some treats for breakfast including some pains au chocolat as everyone loves them, including me. It was only when I chanced to look at one of them end-on that I was struck by its uncanny resemblance to the barn owl we'd interacted with a week or so earlier. See for yourself:

That picture is obviously cropped to just the relevant bit; the small item of prey that the owl's baleful gaze is fixed upon is in fact Huwie, as you can see here. I'm happy to be able to report that he was able to make good his escape without being torn apart by razor-sharp beak and talons, eaten and then burped up again as an owl pellet a short time later.

cushlebrity woofylikey of the day

Come with me, if you will, as we continue our magical journey into the ever more esoteric realms of Things That Sort Of Look A Bit Like Each Other. We've done people, obviously, but also trees, religious buildings, cuddly toys, large Arctic islands, cartoon rabbits and tubes of tablets. In that vein, here's a cushion my wife bought the other day. It's fun and funky as an ornament but not actually very comfortable to lean on as it's rather tickly. Furthermore I was immediately struck by its resemblance to one of those dreadlocked Hungarian Puli dogs that look like some sort of high-maintenance grooming nightmare. I suspect if you took one of those, ripped its head and legs off (you might want to put an old sheet or some newspaper down first), disembowelled it and then stuffed it you would arrive at something that was a) more comfortable to lean on, b) cheaper to feed and c) quieter. 

On the other hand the RSPCA might be popping round for a word.

another gutsy performance

In some ways it's hard to remember what "normal", pre-pandemic life was like, but if you concentrate hard enough I'm sure you can recall some aspects of it. Remember how we used to gambol in a carefree manner through grassy meadows? Remember how we used to - without really giving it a second thought - touch other people? I mean, not in that way, or not in Tesco anyway. Also, you remember how whales used to explode? It's a shame they don't do that any more, isn't it? 

Well, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that nature is healing, things are returning to normal and once again if you pop your head out of the window, in addition to the melodious sound of birdsong and the raucous guttural whooping of howler monkeys throwing bananas at each other, you may also hear the distant dull wet crump of an exploding whale. 

Here's one, for instance - apparently off the coast of California, and the type of whale isn't specified but I think it may be a gray whale. The original tweet which I quote-tweeted (see below) doesn't have any sound but this one does. It's not the hilarious series of colossal burping and farting noises that you're probably hoping for, though, just a couple of Californians going WHOOOOOAAAHHH DUUUUDE and WHAT THE FUUUUUUUCK.

I myself recall experiencing something similar after a surfeit of creamy shellfish and beer at Belgo in the late 1990s https://t.co/ncXNDvGne3

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 29, 2021

One thing that seems odd on first watch (I mean apart from seeing a dead whale vomit up its own intestines) is the recollection that blue whales (and therefore, I rashly extrapolate, baleen whales in general) have quite narrow throats, only about big enough to swallow a football. So it seems odd that they could cram, for instance, an entire pair of lungs up through there. On reflection, though, this might actually be crucial as presumably it's this narrow aperture which enables the build-up of gas pressure which propels the internal organs outward. I think if you were to try and blow your own lungs out of your mouth (and I'm not suggesting you do) you would find quite a lot of pressure was required.

the last book I read

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

Hasten ye back with me now, if you will, to the wild and woolly days of the mid-19th century, where men were men, women knew their place and if you wanted a light to see by during the hours of darkness you were obliged to fire up some dangerous contraption powered not by a couple of hundred volts of nice convenient alternating current out of a hole in the wall but by the literal rendered life-essence of a colossal sea creature, who didn't just hand it out willingly to passers-by but had to be relieved of it somewhat invasively by being protractedly speared to death, peeled, boiled and wrung out into barrels by hordes of malodorous rum-crazed sailors.

It's tough work, roving the seven seas searching for giant aquatic mammals to violently murder and butcher, and carries some risks: scurvy, starvation, drowning, falling off a mast, being speared with your own harpoon or being smashed into mince by the thrashing fluke of an enraged whale. Nevertheless young men are queueing up to be taken on by a whaling vessel, including our narrator, who introduces himself in the book's famous opening sentence. He has travelled from New York to New Bedford, Massachusetts to enlist on a whaling ship. Stopping off at a crowded inn for the night, he is obliged to share a room and a bed with exotic South Sea Islander Queequeg, who it turns out is also seeking similar work as a harpooner. 

Striking up a friendship, Ishmael and Queequeg travel to Nantucket together to enlist as crew members on the Pequod, soon to set sail around the world a-slaughtering and a-rendering, aiming to return three years hence stuffed to the gunwales with enough whale oil to make everyone's fortune. They meet with the ship's owners to discuss the terms of their employment but don't get to meet the captain before the ship sails. They do learn something of his reputation, though: Captain Ahab, a harpooner in his youth but now a fierce and a grizzled fiftysomething sea captain, recently inconvenienced by having one of his legs chomped off at the knee by a sperm whale. 

The ship trundles off and the crew go about some standard sea-going business, giving the reader the chance to meet some of the crew: mates (in descending order of seniority) Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, each of whom commands a whaling boat with a harpooner, all of whom are of exotic race: Starbuck has Queequeg, Stubb has a Native American called Tashtego and Flask has an African called Daggoo. It later transpires that Ahab has brought along his own secret team of crack oarsmen and his own harpooner, a Parsee called Fedallah, who seems to be a bit of an amateur soothsayer and issues some slightly Macbeth-esque prophecies about events that will have to come to pass before Ahab can die.

Ahab eventually puts in an appearance and explains the unusual nature of the Pequod's mission: find Moby Dick, the white sperm whale who took his leg, fuck his shit up and ultimately pop a cap in his ass. All other considerations are secondary, including the usual bagging of as many whales as possible on the way. Since the acquisition of as much whale oil as possible is the direct means by which the crew get paid, this causes some consternation, but Ahab's crazed enthusiasm carries the crew along with him.

And so the Pequod and her crew set off on a journey round the Cape Of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean and into the Pacific, where Ahab expects to find Moby Dick. On the way they do manage to bag a few whales, just to keep their eye in, which gives the narrator an opportunity to explain in some detail certain aspects of harpoon and lance technique, processing of whale carcasses, extraction of oil, and also to examine the distinctions between different whale species (the Pequod is a ship specifically designed for hunting sperm whales and Ishmael is somewhat scornful of the mainly European crews who hunt other varieties, mainly right whales) some aspects of the whale's anatomy, including an entire chapter (chapter 95, "The Cassock") devoted to describing how to make a trench coat out of a whale's foreskin. 

The Pequod also meets a few other ships on the way, and Ahab is keen to quiz their respective captains about sightings of Moby Dick. Eventually as they head south-east from Japan towards the equator, they start to hear news of recent sightings, and eventually a spout is sighted attached to an unmistakable white humped back, and Ahab smells the sweet sweet scent of revenge. There then follows a three-day chase with several excursions in the whaleboats and much furious thrashing of those boats into matchwood by Moby Dick while the crews manage to stick a few more bits of iron into him to slow him down. Eventually the climactic battle sees Moby Dick turn on the Pequod and stave its side in, sinking it, while also dragging Ahab down to Davy Jones' locker by getting him entangled in a harpoon rope. While everyone else either goes down with Moby Dick, drowns, or is eaten by the circling sharks, Ishmael manages to climb upon a piece of buoyant wreckage and floats for a couple of days before being rescued.

Moby-Dick is the sort of book where it's almost futile to express an opinion, its critical status being so unquestionable, partly because of its age (published in 1851, the only entries on this list which pre-date it are Pride And Prejudice (1813) and Fanny Hill (1749)). For what it's worth, though, I found it to be a rollicking adventure story, though not without some thick and chewy language in parts which demands your full attention and a series of digressions into tangentially-related topics which some might find baffling or irritating but which I found, in the main, fascinating. Obviously it's not just about slaughtering whales and making luxurious outer garments out of their genitals, it's also about obsession in a more general way, and its corrosive and destructive effects on those who harbour it and on those around them.

I found that I was already familiar with quite a bit of the terminology through having read Willard Price's Whale Adventure many times as a child. What was vaguely apparent to me then and blatantly so now is how totally implausible the central plot conceit was, i.e, that there existed in the world of the 1950s whaling boats which conducted themselves, for no obvious reason, according to the technology-free conventions of a century earlier, keel-hauling, manual harpooning and all. In hindsight this contrivance was shoehorned in solely to enable Price to swipe large chunks of plot and whale-related exposition from Moby-Dick and only introduce modern-day stuff like helicopters at the end when the Hunt brothers needed their asses conveniently rescuing.

I also recall watching the 1956 film a couple of times on TV during my youth; the only bit I (or anyone else) remember is the ending where Gregory Peck shouts at the whale for a bit before lashing himself to its back and being dragged to a watery grave. Chunks of Ahab's final rantings (the "from hell's heart I stab at thee" speech) also crop up at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. 

I've had the old Penguin Classics edition of Moby-Dick on my shelves for probably upwards of 25 years; what prompted me to read it was partly the feeling that it was about time for another Project, but also a rather odd article in the Guardian featuring quotes from a whole host of people who took some pride in never having read it (an article which I slightly annoyingly now can't find) which just tweaked my contrarian instincts enough for me to promote it to the top of the to-read pile. Like a few other books on this list with a daunting reputation for difficulty and general indigestibleness (House Of Leaves and Lanark being two fairly recent examples) I was pleasantly surprised at its readableness; it's probably only fair to observe that the current lockdown conditions are pretty much ideal for concentrated reading of attention-demanding books, while being a massive pain in the arse in many other ways. 

celebrifry woodylikey of the day

Just looking through some photos from a couple of walks we've done in the last couple of weeks, and found this photo of a rather splendid old oak tree that we encountered by the side of the path between the car park at Llanfoist Crossing and the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal at Llanfoist Wharf. I'd been up here before as part of our ascent of the Blorenge in late 2009, but not (I think) since. I daresay the tree hasn't changed much in the intervening ten-and-a-half years.

Anyway, I snapped a photo because from one angle you can clearly see something resembling a face; I say "clearly see" but of course what I mean is see something with a sufficient number of markers in the right places for the weird wiring of the human brain to go into a pareidolia frenzy and go FAAAAACE LOOOOK IT'S A FAAAAACE. 

But whose face? Well once you've got past the usual Green Man and Ent references you notice that the nose and the prominent chin point in slightly different directions. This and the general air of benign treely wisdom immediately made me think of broadcaster, author, actor, polymath and general National Treasure Stephen Fry. Obvious, isn't it?

headline of the day

Well, I don't know, you do your best to make your little corner of the blogosphere a brighter place, and this is the thanks you get:


Actually this is an article from today's Independent taking the piss out of giant pandas for being ridiculously fat, lazy, fussy eaters and generally useless at sex. So not like me at all, then - after all I am a relatively unfussy eater, as long as you go easy on the eggs. On the other hand, I do like a nice bamboo shoot or two.

canuck panic

Sorry, I know I'm boring you now. Two further Canada-related things: firstly you can find several hundred photographs from our trip here.

Secondly, in the light of my cryptid post of a week or so back it would be remiss of me not to point out that Lake Okanagan is legendarily home to the lake monster Ogopogo. I clearly remember having a set of 45 rpm 7" singles when we were kids that had various nursery rhymes and songs on them, one of which was a rendition (sung by a young-ish child as I recall) of this song. This article suggests that it was the song which lent its name to the monster (back in the 1920s) rather than the other way round.

whale meat again

I've noticed a bit of a flurry of sea monster stories in the Daily Mail recently, and by "a flurry" I mean "two": this one about a mysterious thing washed up on a beach in China, and this one about a slightly smaller but equally mysterious thing washed up on a beach in Scotland.

The first (and indeed only) rule of mysterious dead things either washed up on beaches or hauled up by boats is that they are always the badly (or extremely well, depending on how you look at it) decomposed remains of some perfectly well known and documented creature, however freaky and weird they may look. Just as the bizarre-looking thing hauled in by the Zuiyō Maru is just a basking shark, it's equally clear that the Chinese sea monster is a dead rorqual (i.e. a large-ish whale) of some sort, and that the Aberdeen sea monster is some sort of smaller toothed whale or porpoise, probably a pilot whale, since these great big blubbery cretins are getting themselves stranded on beaches all the time.

I will admit, even knowing all this, to a certain fascination with mysterious stuff washing up from the murky deep - if you feel the same way then the cryptozoology section of Darren Naish's excellent Tetrapod Zoology blog is the place for you - lots of excellent stuff on the two Montauk monsters (aka a couple of dead raccoons), the Lake Champlain monster (probably a funny-shaped log), the Hook Island monster (an elaborate hoax) and many more (including some land-based stuff). The coelacanth really has a lot to answer for here - because it managed to skulk around undetected for 65 million years without having the decency to evolve into something different and start wearing digital watches and entering into complex hire purchase agreements we now have to put up with the constant chorus of "well, you don't know there aren't a colony of plesiosaurs in Loch Ness, do you? Remember the coelacanth!".

One last word on this subject: if you do find yourself with a large dead whale on your beach in a state of decomposition and need to get rid of it pronto as it's putting the beachgoers off their ice cream, then on no account should you attempt to blow it up. On the other hand it may just blow up anyway; you never know.

non-overlapping my arse

This morning's post-9am traffic jam Radio 4 accompaniment was a bit of Start The Week with Andrew Marr. The usual array of luminaries including Sarah Bakewell, author of a new biography of Michel de Montaigne, an author who I have to admit I'd never heard of, 16th-century French essayists not really being my forte, and also Will Self, who with a trademark display of his inimitable sesquipedalian logorrhoea memorably referred to Montaigne as being "instantiated by his methodology". How true that is.

Also appearing was biologist Steve Jones, who I hereby nominate as Welshman of the day, just because, well, he's Welsh. I'd switched off before they got to the bit that explained what he was doing there, but he and Will Self did get into a conversation about science and religion that caused just a faint plume of steam to start issuing from my ears.

Basically Jones trotted out some analogy about conflict between science and religion being a bit like a fight between a shark and a tiger; each is great and pretty much invincible on its own turf, but useless in the other's. This is basically a slightly cutesy version of Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria argument, and I suspect Jones offered it for the same reason Gould cooked it up in the first place, which is as a defence mechanism to avoid getting sucked into a clabby conversation he didn't want to get involved in.

That is the only acceptable defence for offering it as an argument, though, as it's completely bogus; there are no circumstances where religion is more useful to you than science, and they certainly do obtrude on each other's territory, unless you claim that your putative God intervenes in the world in no detectable way whatsoever, in which case what you've got there is a sort of loose Deism which resembles any of the world's major religions in no way whatsoever. The only way you can justify the notion of religion as useful in any real-world situation is to conflate the concept of religious faith with concepts like ethics and morality, which despite being clearly nonsensical is precisely what proponents of religion do all the time, in a desperate scrabbling attempt to claw back some real-world relevance.

A fight between a shark and a tiger would be pretty awesome, though. Perhaps in a paddling pool or something. Or a bath full of custard. Then again maybe they wouldn't want to fight? Maybe something deeply beautiful would happen.

it's only 4.5 inches, but I'm hoping it'll go hard overnight

Couple of photo galleries for you, in non-chronological order, just to mess with your head. Firstly, everyone else is doing it, so I thought I'd better get in on the act - here's some photos of the snow in Newport. I gather other places have had 8-10 inches - we've only had four or five, but it is starting to come down again quite hard again now, so who knows where it'll end.


Secondly, here's a few photos of some Christmas and New Year antics. We hosted Christmas for various family members without any major mishaps (I overcooked the turkey a bit, but lashings of gravy took care of that). No Christmas Day pictures in paper hats, I'm afraid, but:

• On Boxing Day we went for a walk around the Newport Wetlands nature reserve, which I visited back in May 2008. Less birdlife flocking about at this time of year, but apparently there were some dunlins and redshanks down on the tidal flats. Not that I'd know a dunlin if I was pissing on one, but luckily my Dad is a bit of an amateur ornithologist.
• We visited Doug and Anna in Reading for New Year, as well as Doug's sister Pippa and her husband Mike, and two cats and two chickens. The cat and chicken combo sounds like a disaster in the making to me, but I am not an animal behaviourist or a zoologist, as you know.
• On New Year's Day we went down to Alton to meet our fellow Munroists Jenny and Jim. I didn't take any pictures, but we did manage a nice mini-pub-crawl round Alton. The Eight Bells is probably the pick of the bunch, I'd say.
• Then on Saturday we went down to Bournemouth to see our friends Hannah and Mark. On the Sunday we went for a bracing walk up onto Hengistbury Head, where there was a convenient trig point to be bagged, which was nice.

carnage

While we were in Pembrokeshire we foolishly forgot to do any pre-emptive gardening before we left, and as it was a bit wet (to say the least) while we were away, by the time we got back the whole garden (and the herb patch in particular) had turned into some sort of gastropod brothel. Check it out:

They were climbing up the outside of the mint pot -


in the mint -


in the chives -


on the lupins -


and even getting up to some hot transgressive forbidden interspecies snail-on-slug action on the back wall -


Finally I encountered this gargantuan bastard feasting on my oregano -


That was the last straw; enough already. Time to deploy the slug pellets.


Luckily these are irresistibly delicious to slugs and snails and our monster friend immediately homed (sluggishly) in on them and started chowing down with a certain amount of gusto -


- little realising the hideous fate that was in store for him. The effect isn't immediate, but at some point during the night a chemical reaction occurred and jumbo here experienced something like the bloke in the famous scene from David Cronenberg's Scanners, i.e. he turned inside out in a probably painful manner. The aftermath makes sobering viewing:





So, to recap: do not mess with my oregano or I'll feed you something that will cause you to turn inside out in a painful manner. And I don't mean my spicy meatballs.

that is rather slippery of you, agent starling

If you spend any time sitting out in our garden on a sunny day, you may find yourself feeling a few spatters of what you might imagine to be rain, even though the sky appears blue and cloudless. Glance up at next door's roof and you'll see the explanation. Kids with water pistols? A furiously wanking tramp? No, in fact next door seem to have some sort of plumbing and drainage problem at present which means the external guttering is full of water, and the local starling population seem to be using it as an impromptu bird bath on hot days. And why not? They even let the occasional sparrow get a look in from time to time, before tearing their wings off and pecking their eyes out.

the last book I read

The Hunter by Julia Leigh.

I was in one of those "everything £1" shops in the centre of Newport last week and I was having a desultory rummage through their paperback section, not expecting to find anything more interesting than the usual Britain's Hardest Bastards true-crime stuff, when I came across this. The synopsis on the back cover looked interesting, and the Faber & Faber logo is usually a reasonably good indication that it's not going to be utter rubbish. I enquired as to the price - it turned out to be a pound! So I bought it.

The un-named protagonist (identified only as "M" - he does give a name to a couple of people during the course of the book, but we're led to assume this is fake) is, as the book title suggests, a hunter. He's been hired by a biotech company to investigate reported sightings of the supposedly extinct Tasmanian tiger and bring back tissue samples for genetic analysis. Needless to say the tiger is not intended to survive the sampling process (as it involves heart, liver, etc. being removed, which is bound to smart a bit).

He rents a room with the Armstrong family on the edge of the wilderness where the creature was sighted. It turns out Lucy Armstrong's husband disappeared some time previously on an expedition (of an unspecified nature) into this same wilderness, and she has retreated into heavily-sedated seclusion in her bedroom, leaving her children Sass and Bike to run the house. M finds himself torn between the hunter's desire for solitude he feels during his expeditions into the wilderness, and an increasing connection with the Armstrong family.

And that's about it, really. It's another short book (170 pages) and it commendably doesn't waste time giving M much of a back-story; we're just straight into him setting up at the Armstrongs' and heading off onto the plains to smear himself in wallaby dung and set some snares.

Instead of spoiling the ending for you, I'll veer off at a slight tangent - one of the things that induced me to shell out the princely sum of one pound on the book was the central premise, since the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine is a fascinating creature. There's something slightly spooky about large animals (the thylacine was about the size of a large dog) which are extinct, but were around recently enough for photographs to have been taken (the last thylacine died in Hobart Zoo in 1936, unless the subsequent uncorroborated stories of sightings are to be believed). There aren't many other examples, but the quagga and the poor old passenger pigeon are another couple.

The thylacine is also a fascinating example of convergent evolution, whereby similar environmental constraints result in two only very distantly related species developing very similar characteristics. In other words, if it looks like a dog and barks like a dog, then it might be a dog, or it might be a carnivorous marsupial. Hope that's clear.

up north. not grim. who knew?

Just a few notes from our long weekend in the Lake District.

Despite the torrential rain on the M6 on the way up on Saturday, Sunday was gloriously sunny, so we headed off to the village of Braithwaite to walk the Coledale Round, one of Wainwright's favourite Lakeland walks, or so the the book from which this extract is taken would have you believe. And very good it was too - we deviated from old Alf's preferred route slightly, largely at my instigation, because it seemed a shame to skirt within a mile or so of the highest peak in the area and not visit the summit. So we sacrificed a visit to Hopegill Head and instead detoured west at the head of the valley to visit Grasmoor (2791 feet) before rejoining the designated route on the ascent of Eel Crag. From there it's downhill all the way to the Coledale Inn where we made short work of a couple of pints of Thirst Ascent from the local Keswick Brewery.


On Monday we went for a shorter walk up the old railway line from Keswick to Threlkeld, where we visited the excellent Horse & Farrier pub. This one had several beers by the mighty Jennings Brewery of Cockermouth, which were equally well received. On the way back we stopped off at the Castlerigg Stone Circle for the obligatory mystical druidic chanting and nude virgin sacrifice and defilement. Later in the afternoon we visited the Twa Dogs Inn for another couple of pints of Jennings, and a look at their impressive stuffed bogart that in no way whatsoever resembles half a badger badly Araldited to half a fox. Judge for yourself....


Anyway, some photos (mainly of the Coledale expedition) can be found here.