Halfpint, the runt of Doris’s litter, has developed a large growth immediately below his right eye.
I first noticed it yesterday morning, when it was not much more than the diameter of a small finger tip and only slightly raised.
By the evening, it was about 5mm deep and larger in diameter. Read the rest of this entry »
I thought long and hard, wrote a few draft posts and then decided there was just one thing to say following the death of Sir Edmund Hillary.
But first, as a boy I read John Hunt’s book The Ascent of Everest, and still remember the little sketch above the first page.
The page was headed, “Background” and showed two small figures, a tent and the waiting mountain.
Two or three pages further on, the tale started along the lines of:
“This is the story of how, on 29 May 1953, two men endowed with skill and stamina, inspired by unflinching resolve, reached the top of Everest and came back unscathed.”
It was an eye-opener for me, what I will say is that Sir Edmund Hillary was a heroic, iconic and gentlemanly role-model of a kind that modern children sorely lack.
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British readers of this blog may well have seen Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s latest series of programmes, Hugh’s Chicken Run, been repulsed by the idea of intensive indoor chicken farming and thought how lovely it would be to keep outdoor chickens themselves.
I’ve already had several emails from people asking me to recommend breeds, how best to keep chickens, if we have chickens available, and where we get our chickens from.
I don’t particularly like intensive, indoor chicken farming—more on which at a later date—but I’m even more against people keeping livestock on a whim, because it looks cute, because it’s fashionable or because a television personality has prodded their conscience. Read the rest of this entry »
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