Bucolic Plague 2

Farmer Broon has been preparing the fields for the herd. Posts have been driven in and pastures dressed. When we arrived some years ago the herd was grazing. We spotted a very large bull. It was impressive, with huge shoulders, but perhaps rather too thick round the middle and rear, reminded me a bit of John 'two cormorants' Prescott. That was not the reason we called him John the Bull. It was probably the faded English quality of doing one's duty that he dragged around with him servicing the cows.
Two years later and half a ton of not so prime hamburger gone, replaced by a younger, more active, and who knows if you are a cow, a more attractive proposition. This beast had the look of a Spanish fighting bull so, of course, we called him Pedro! He pranced about very full of himself pursuing the cows but would then stop with a pathetic look. One of the older cows with a huge udder got fed up with this and showed him what to do. She mounted him and gave him what for with her udder!
I have never been to a bull fight. I'm not interested in making a sport out of cruelty to animals. That aside one of the things that I have thought about it is the basic unfairness of it all. Even if the poor beast gets his retaliation in first and tramples all over the matador or spins him a few times on its horns it still gets taken off and slaughtered!
If the English had invented bull fighting, and they have done worse, at the point where the fellow in the funny hat and tight trousers lies bleeding on the sand a man in a long white coat festooned with caps, sunglasses and white pullovers would come out and cry "Over!"
The crowd would clap politely and rise for tea and the bull would be led off to live the rest of his life in green pastures, stuffing his strut, with a small herd.

Alice Yazzie

One of the really joyful things in this world is the weaving of the Dine.
I recently had a birthday and this reminded me of a present I received for a past birthday when we visited the American South West.
It was a print by Alice Yazzie showing some pots and a rug thrown on a table. There was only a partial view of the rug and I wanted to reconstruct an image of the whole which is what this shows. It is possible to locate where a rug was woven if it is of a particular style. It could be Wide Ruins or Crystal who knows.
Tony Hillerman's books fascinated us so much when we read them that we traveled to New Mexico and Arizona just to see the country. We only got the tourist view of the Dine but that did not matter as we had absorbed so much from Tony's books. I had forgotten about that time and our understanding of it. One of the key elements in life in such an environment is balance. The whole of the culture and practice of it is to maintain a balance. Difficult enough to do at the best of times but when you live in an area where there is no water and all water for you and your stock has to be hauled in 80 gallon drums in the back of a pick up truck you get to appreciate balance!

Bucolic Plague 1

The A 14 has received an early morning bashing from both of us this past week.
My partner has offered an observation which caught my imagination.
We assume that nature is every bit the early bird.
The cock crows at some ungodly hour.
The lark ascends into the dawn chorus, coughing and spitting,
with the start of bird flu.
But I am assured that this is not the case with all beasts.

Pigs are fond of a lie in.

Beside the A14 the serried ranks of little tin homes for pigs
are undisturbed by any activity at the relatively late hour of 8 or 9 o'clock!
Occasionally a pig lies outside in glorious repose. How different from myself.
I make no assumptions about others but if I crawled home from the boozer at some indeterminate hour I know my limbs would be spread in some fantastical contortion as I collapsed on the doorstep. The pins and needles and the lack of circulation would leave me moving like Quasimodo for a good hour or two.
Your pig, however, is a late but a tidy sleeper and despite not making it back into the old homestead sleeps in perfect symmetry; legs together, trotters pointing in the same direction.

Diversions on the A 14, 1

This is nothing to do with me.
I offer it as an example of what people are driven to!

Eddie Stobart, Debach, Bartrams, Neil Bomford = 1
Norbert Dantressangle = 2
Murphy, Canute, Joda =3
James Irlam = 4
Prestons of Potto = 5

All are cancelled by Bernard Mathews but only if it has

Bootiful Family Food

on the side.

Max score by my racing demon 99.

You should have heard the noise when BM hove into sight.
It was the sound of many turkeys being twizzled!

Blair's Children

Article in the Grauniad 4/3/06 by Rose George about theft from libraries:-

... £150m worth of books are filched from local libraries every year.

Saddest part of the article for me was the report from Hackney :-

"We think a lot of it is that people feel excluded," says John Holland, Hackney Libraries' operations manager. When McCree, a full-time librarian, caught up with one lad who'd nicked a book and asked him why, the boy said, "because I can't afford to join".

I see this as a small expression of the tragedy of the commons.
Thatcher's children were told that there is no such thing as society. The order of those days was grab what you can and run.

We have created a generation who believe they can't afford the commons.
Are they Blair's children?

Sex will get you in the end

The English believe they are a great civilising nation. Having brought tea, cricket and queuing to the masses they declined into post empiricism! Markets in Spain are great places for life, culture and developing tools for conviviality. In the north of Spain we learned the art of civilised queuing the hard way.

Arriving at a stall one asked who was the last in the queue and were told by that person. In turn when the next customer came along and asked it was your duty to indicate your lowly status. I was arrogant enough to believe I had the hang of this and a sufficient smattering of Spanish to pass for a native of Cantabria. One day I sauntered up to the vegetable stall and seeing a gaggle of senoras in front of me called out who is last. There was a pause which stretched into a silence. If there had been a thermometer on this silence it would by this point have been heading south, fast.
Eventually, an ever so polite voice announced that she was the last. The titter that followed this declaration was unencumbered by any muffle.

Yeah, yeah I thought. Is it cos I is Brit? So you don't find many Cantabrians that are 1.8 metres with red hair and the sartorial awareness of a dead camel, what a surprise, just trying to be friendly and fit in!

The dialogue I had just had slowly replayed in my mind, in Spanish, with a slightly heightened awareness.

I had approached a stall where there was an exclusively female queue and asked in my best Spanish who was the last, el ultimo (mixed or masculine) and been firmly and frostily told by the lady in question that she was the last, la ultima (feminine!).

I knew sex would get me in the end.

Spanish Roulette

Spring is unfolding here in the foothills of the Suffolk Alps. We lived in the Cantabrian Cordillera for a time in a town at the entrance to a magical valley where there were more cows than people. This photo of peppers reminded me of a game we used to play when we came down from the mountains to hit the bright lights of Santander or Bilbao.

Going to a bar, our favourite had barrels for tables and wooden floors with sawdust, we would order our poison, beer or tinto, and a portion of Pimentos de Padron. The game was to eat the peppers, which were brought to you hot from the frying pan, one each in turn. They were delightful, in the hands of a good cook the sugars developed in the peppers without being reduced to a mush. This still left something to bite into.

In turn we took a pepper by the stalk, bit off most of it, looked each other in the eye, and savoured the flavour. Most of them were sweet, dulce, but you could always be sure that during the course of this roulette you would hit one that was fiery hot, fuerte! After this they were all fuerte and beer or tinto needed to be applied to the affected part.