Mutton racing
Lamb racing: not a serious sport. These beasties were well accustomed to humans and not keen on running anywhere. They had to be chased by hooting farm children, and even then they kept stopping for skritchies and treats from the crowd. I think they did a best 3 out of 4 and no lamb won twice. This was from Sunday again.
On a sinister note, they’ve been pulling bodies out of the sea on a beach up the coast from us today. They’re up to five now, including two found by walkers after dusk, washed up on the beach. And Twitter tells me there’s a helicopter out looking for another.
There were thousands of people on the beaches today and the news is treating these as ordinary swimming accidents, but nobody knows anything. They have no identities, no backstory. They don’t even know if any of these people were together. Five is a real lot for one day around here, with little wind and calm seas.
It seldom gets above 80° here, but I think it was nearer 90° this afternoon. Eh. I’m off to take a cool bath.
August 24, 2016 — 10:13 pm
Comments: 14
Alpaca bag
We went to a tractor festival on Sunday. We almost didn’t. I’m going to level with you here: I’m not all that into tractors.
These people, these people are into their tractors. This isn’t even the first tractor fest we’ve been to this Summer (though the other, you’ll recall, was a traction engine thing. This was, like, John Deeres). This was a three ring tractor festival. Glad we went; it was one of the best country fairs we’ve been to.
In addition to my alpaca friends here, there were three-banded armadillos, a skink, a wallaby and A WHOLE TENT OF CHIKKENS! There was a pair of buff Orpingtons there that probably weighed more than my whole flock.
As dog is my witness, I shall take Buff Orpington as a username some day.
The food was exceptionally good for one of these events. Too good, in fact. By the time we decided to eat, our first (and second) choices had sold out. I had a very decent pad Thai and a cider (note to visitors: all cider in Britain is hard).
And thus the Summer fete season marches on. Next weekend is a big one; it’s a long weekend. After that, it all kind of peters out.
Ah, well. Gather ye tractorfests while ye may.
August 22, 2016 — 8:22 pm
Comments: 18
Long weasel is long
And on Sunday we went to a country fair and I mauled somebody else’s weasel (“no, ma’am, that’s a ferret,” said the woman). That’s a fully grown ferret. It’s a female. Big size differential.
Sadly, chickens and ferrets are like matter and anti-matter. Plus, the cats would kill me.
Oh, and.
Ummmm.
I bought another Spong mincer. Uncle B was like, “you’re going to convert the house into the Museum of Spong, aren’t you?”
No, silly. I’m only interested in tabletop Spong mincers with the asymmetrical base. My fetishes are highly specific.
It’ll be the Museum of Tabletop Spong Mincers with the Asymmetrical Base.
August 16, 2016 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 17
Where are you, Winston Churchill?
Went to an airshow Saturday. There were several in the South of England this weekend. They do this so the Red Arrows (for example) can fly down the coast and do one show after another in one big go.
The picture is (part of) the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. The RAF has one Lancaster bomber, one Hurricane and one Spitfire they’re keeping in the air and they fly them together to the various shows. People love them.
I hit up Wikipedia to find out when the Battle of Britain officially started and ended (answer: depends if you ask the Brits or the Krauts). I learned that it has the distinction of being (the only?) battle to be named before it was fought. Winnie named it in his “finest hour” speech:
What General Weygand has called The Battle of France is over. The battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour”.
Makes you nostalgic for a time when our leaders not only acknowledged a war for the survival of Christian civilization, but actually were on our side in it.
Anyway. Highlight of the day: watching a soldier teach a little boy to cock and fire a Glock, with his mother helping out. I could’ve wished for them all to show a little more barrel discipline, though — even if it was a dummy training weapon.
Low point: the little boy who ran up to his mother shouting, “Mummy, look! It’s one of those things cowboys wear to keep their guns in!” To his credit, he was super excited about it, but it was sad to see a ten-year-old boy who didn’t know the word holster.
Apologies to Uncle B for mangling his nice picture down to weasel blog size.
August 15, 2016 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 16
Mister, Kipling
Nice day. Field trip!
We went to Burwash, to Rudyard Kipling’s house, Bateman’s, the farthest away of our regular National Trust jaunts. We’ve been there many times before (in fact, we first signed up to the National Trust there). Big, big Kipling fans, us.
It’s a desperately cool Jacobean house but, even better, his daughter left the whole thing — furniture, knick-knacks and all — to the Trust. So it’s as near exactly the way it was in Kipling’s lifetime, including all the shit on the desk and his trash can full of first drafts. The latter was emptied twice a day by a housemaid, who burned the contents. He was very, very controlling of his work and image.
Today, unexpectedly, they had a Kipling historian who was lucky enough to look a bit like Kipling (probably not a coincidence, that) giving a one-man show in the garden, telling the story of Kipling’s life. It was very well done.
It was full of fun Kipling facts. Like, he was born nine months after his parents took an enjoyable holiday at Rudyard Lake, Staffordshire. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
He was a kind of a pre-movie movie star. Before he moved to the country, a local pub landlord organized tours past his house. He wrote three times to complain about it before he learned the landlord was selling his complaint letters for cash.
In fact, toward the end of his life, tradesmen stopped cashing his checks (cheques here) — the autograph on it was worth more than the amount written.
We hope to do more of this, now it’s warmed up a bit. But it’s still very cold at night, like in the low fifties. It’s been such a miserable, cold Summer, even one of our dimmer acquaintances was heard to say, “I know they say the earth is warming, but…”
August 9, 2016 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 13
Whoo whoo!
Good lord, that was a huge steam rally! All traction engines (steam vehicles that don’t run on tracks, for you non steam geeks). We’ve not been to this one before.
I wouldn’t like to say how many engines were there. Thirty? Fifty? I like the two in the picture because the size difference. The one in the back is a German engine. Probably the biggest one at the show, but it was broken down for the whole day. Poor bastards; I don’t know how they’re going to move it out of there if they can’t get it going.
The one in front isn’t anything like the smallest, though.
There were so many of them zooming around, I’m amazed nobody got squashed. At the end, they tried to gather them all together in the arena. It was a sight to behold, but completely unphotographable.
At least, with the little camera I took with me. I’m holding out hope Uncle B’s came out better.
Happy Monday – here we go!
August 8, 2016 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 9
‘Merica intensifies
Yes, that’s a bald eagle. No, I don’t suppose most falconers are allowed to keep one, but these guys breed all kinds of endangered hunting birds. Though I’m happy to report that old baldy is no longer endangered.
Another pic from the fete over the weekend; a falconry exhibit. Cool stuff, but I realize these things are repetitious. That’s partly what I like about them; they’re the same every year.
This was the fete that has the miniature horses and the guy who herds Indian runner ducks with border collies. If that rings a bell, this one always happens on the same day as the one with the really good boot sale (read: flea market) and we dash to get to both of them.
It was followed on Sunday by a music festival we’ve never been to, and we haven’t been to it again. We got there and the whole village was full up. No place to park.
This weekend we have a steam rally and an event in aid of the RNLI. Can I take the pace? Good weekend, all!
August 5, 2016 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 10
Geography lesson
Once upon a time, there was a giant bubble of chalk all around where I’m sitting now. Eventually, the top of it wore off and left a broken ring of chalk hills, now known as the North Downs and the South Downs. ‘Down’ from the Old English dūn, meaning hill. This terrain is now mostly soft, undulating chalk hills covered by a thin cream of short grass.
The white cliffs of Dover you know — that’s the chalky terminus of the North Downs, where it enters the sea. Along its length there are various hill figures made by scraping away the grass to reveal the chalk underneath, like the Long Man of Wilmington.
In the middle of the Downs is the Weald, another Old English word, means ‘forest’ (but it’s not, as you might expect, the related to the word ‘wood’). Most of it was cut down thousands of years ago, but the word “Weald” is still used to describe the area and is incorporated into many local placenames. It must have been a hell of a thing.
All of that was a completely unnecessary setup for this lovely view Uncle B shot this weekend (he’s got a little point-and-shoot camera that does especially good panoramas). It was kind of on the edge of the North Downs, looking due West across the Weald.
The way these country lanes work, there are hedges on either side. Sometimes you can drive for a very long time and see nothing but hedge. And then there’ll be a gate or a break and suddenly — a view! We stop and gawp at this one every year.
You probably have to be there.
July 19, 2016 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 11
Uneasy lies the head that wears the goose
Shhhhh…Gromulin is on vacation this week and we’ve promised not to harsh his mellow with current events and filthy politics.
And so I give you: the Goose Master.
It was a three fete weekend, and the last of the three was in a village noted for its flock of geese. They peck around the village green and occasionally impede traffic and somehow have managed to avoid Meester Fox all these years. Or, at least, made babies quicker than he can eat them.
The highlight of this village fate is therefore naturally goose-related. To wit, goose-shit bingo. They don’t call it that. I’m not sure what they call it. We used to do something similar with cows back in Rhode Island, but a goose is more exciting as it generally shits itself shortly after being placed in the arena.
Mark the field off in a grid, sell grid positions, release the goose, the square he poops in first is the winner.
But this grid has upwards of a thousand positions, I heard someone say, and the prize is the not inconsiderable sum of £500. Serious bidness.
So enter the Goose Master, whose word is law. That’s him. In the hat. With the goose on it.
It’s more exciting than it sounds, at least the first-catch-your-goose phase. They aren’t tame. The poor goose always looks completely gobsmacked to find itself in an arena ringed with clapping humans.
And it shits almost immediately.
But that doesn’t necessarily count — only the first whole and proper poop counts, not some panicked half-hearted evacuation. This year, the poop fell across grid lines and the prize was split.
And a lovely weekend we had for it, too. We’re having a spell of warm weather (at last! We had the heat on repeatedly in June and early July). In a little while, we’re going to crack open a bottle of wine and sit outside under the stars. We can see the Milky Way out where we are.
*raises a glass to Grom*
July 18, 2016 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 9
Did I mention the tractor show?
Yes, this is a regularly used airfield. There’s a wonk in it halfway down that tossed the little planes back up in the air on landing. I’m amazed there wasn’t a bird strike, as clouds of gulls ascended every time a plane went over.
Well, of course I’m going to give it to you in color. Bonus cloud shot. Those skies! All images courtesy A. Badger.
So Corbyn is hanging in there, despite losing the no confidence vote 172 to 40. More than 50 people in his cabinet have resigned.
He was elected leader by a large majority of party members — sixty percent, I think — and he’s insisting that has more legitimacy than a vote by MPs. Which may accurately reflect the current populist mood of the electorate.
Orrrr…it may be that he’s hanging on until the Chilcot Report is published next week. He’s vowed to use his position as party leader to push for prosecution of Blair for war crimes, if anything in the report will back it up. Many of the MPs voting to oust him are, at the least, Blair sympathizers if not actual Blairites.
Wheels within wheels, eh?
June 28, 2016 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 9