Here are some happier pieces of news:
1. Search for Oliver Rackham on this page and find him cited as an influence between Nick Drake and Bob Dylan.
2. My parents have bought another field. My mother told me she was about to phone their Bible study group leader and cancel going that evening on the grounds that they had bought a new field and needed to inspect it. This is a Biblical joke.
3. I forgot to say, the Herbarium at Bologna has a specimen of tomato in it, the first recorded occurrence of a tomato on Italian soil.
4. I know I'm long overdue posting about the product names here which sound wierd to English-speakers. Only I've forgotten most of them, except "Hello Spank!", a brightly-coloured cartoon DVD for children in my local supermarket; if you took away the exclamation mark and changed the cover to a grey-scale sad child on a white background it could be an English or American misery memoir. But the other day I saw this cat food: Randy Cat. I love the lascivious lip-licking image. Watch out! That is one randy cat!
Not as fun as Randy Cat, but there's a lot more here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dazbert.co.uk/sites/rudefood/index.php?page=editorial.htm
Will they put more alpacas in the new field? Having recently gone to lambing day at Wimpole Hall (very thoroughly recommended, at least for the non-squeamish), I'm sold on lambs at the moment. Lambs are a good thing. (I was even contemplating going demi-vegetarian until I forgot and ate lamb casserole at lunch the other day by mistake, so there went all my good resolutions. -- CCC does do good lamb stews, unfortunately.)
ReplyDeleteThe wonderful thing about alpacas is that they give birth at about half past ten in the morning with minimal fuss, unlike sheep, who keep shepherds up all night being complex. My mother went to feed a small group once and was puzzled that she could hear an occasional bleat even though she could see that all of them were placidly chewing the cud. After a while she realised that one of the heavily-pregnant females had its new baby hanging half out of its rear, pausing on the way to the ground. Eventually it all just slipped out, lay there recovering for a bit, and was up and running round the field shortly afterwards. The mother wasn't bothered.
ReplyDeleteYes, the lambs we saw being born were actually whipped out by a vet student, not natural births!
ReplyDeleteThere were lots of mothers with small children there for a day out: the children (and fathers), I noticed, were only marginally excited by/interested in the proceedings, but their mothers were absolutely fascinated. (Empathetic identification and recent experience, I suppose).
I was describing it to my sister, who's about to give birth for the first time in about 3 weeks: she asked me if seeing it would have inspired her in advance of "the miracle of birth". Not unless the midwife is literally going to stick her hand up and yank it out, I thought (I gather that sometimes they do pretty much do just that.....!)