A Positive Crisis

Wot? No blog in April? I've managed to do one a month for fourteen months, and then... We had a positive crisis in April.

You need a string of disasters to properly appreciate a positive crisis – it's just like an ordinary crisis, or a negative crisis, except that everything goes right at once. It's just as tiring as the bad sort, just as demanding.

We were in the middle of re-painting the kitchen on a place we let out. Near enough to deal with as a 'day job', but far enough away to precluding 'nipping home' to deal with things. We also had Amber, our best broody hen, sitting a clutch of Light Sussex eggs. The chicks started hatching on the Sunday, so we went decorating Monday and all was well. Fine on Tuesday, no problem Wednesday, and Thursday we moved Amber to the greenhouse and a fresh nest box. Everything still going fine, chicks emerging from under her to have food, all looking good, so we went back to decorating.

It was a bit of a worry – would the chicks be OK? Normally, we monitor closely for the first few days, but this was Amber the Superhen, in the greenhouse, safe from our cats (who mostly know not to tangle with a broody hen), so what could possibly go wrong? We were late back, another worry, but the chicks were absolutely fine. Well, almost fine. Standing around, cheeping, wondering what the hell mum was up to. It never occurred to us that our ageing super-broody might just drop dead.

Plan B swung into action – we had other broodies and had previous success in fostering chicks. Not this time. Not only were these orphaned bundles of joy rejected, but one hen hurt several of them.

Plan C... our neighbours raise chickens and offered to foster for a day or two whilst we got ourselves sorted. Problem over, except for the smallest chick that wasn't eating or drinking yet and needed checking every hour or two, day and night... So now only one of us could go painting, with the other on chick-minding duties.

And finally, our former alpha-cockerel You (evening count... two black, four brown, two white... and You), who has been looking droopy for a while, went into sudden decline and died in the night.

String of disasters complete...

And then the positive crisis. Four in the morning, littlest chick started pecking at food! Not fixed yet, not actually eating, not drinking without the aid of a dropper, but a huge step forwards and the prospect of getting a full night's sleep in the near future. Then, just after breakfast, I went to check our borrowed cat-trap – we have been trying to catch Pure Black, the latest feral tom moving in to the barn, and check over any of the others careless enough to walk in. Instead, I found Black&White, one of our long-term resident ferals waiting for breakfast, meowing insistently, hissing furiously, and so desperate for breakfast that he was waiting until I put the food down rather than running away and coming back later... except that the food bowl was still in the trap as bait... and Pure Black was inside.

Welcome to feline DefCon One.

For a bit of peace and quiet, I tipped cat biscuits into the lid of the tub and put it down for Black&White, who hissed some more, meowed briefly, and then ate. That was a startlingly sociable reaction. A minute or two later, my wife came past on her way to feed the sheep and, as I told her what had happened, Black&White came out, wrapped himself around her ankles, then mine and demanded to be stroked...

Our positive crisis was complete – way too much going right at once. Pure Black with wife to vet for check-up and testing for a microchip; wife to painting; me to supervise chicks and slow-mo cat fight as Black&White immediately tested his new privileges and explained to Oatmeal that he was moving in...

Writing it down, it doesn't seem much, but that was our positive crisis – a whole day wiped out and aftershocks that kept rumbling on. Three weeks later, sitting in the greenhouse and watching a second batch of new chicks (courtesy of our youngest broody) have their first proper outing, there was finally time to write it down. So many good things happening at once is exhausting.

Now, our late lambing has started. So far, so good. One small positive crisis after another.

The Virtual Cat-Basket

Oatmeal the cat has discovered string and, as with most things, his approach is off the norm. Cats chase string – that's a given, a part of nature, the spawning ground for a profitable business in cat toys. The obliging human tugs the string/ribbon/clever-elasticated-cord, the cat leaps on the end as if it were prey. Cue biting, patting, tossing and general balletic exuberance as if the string were a devious, fighting member of the local rodent population. Then, the cat releases its prey and the obliging human starts all over again.

The most obvious question at this point is what does the human get out of it? The fun seems to be mostly on the cat's side. Tug string, wait, tug string again... ad nauseam.

Now turn to Oatmeal. He doesn't chase string, exactly – he catches string. Once he has it – game over. He holds on, pins it down and waits for the other player to let go. Forget the exquisitely choreographed display of cat agility. The uncharitable view might be that Oatmeal, with his generous figure and short legs (and weighing in at over 6kg) doesn't have agility. However, when he has a mouse (most probably stolen from Ginge, rather than a DIY capture) he tosses it about and performs his own version of Muhammad Ali – float like a bucket and sting like a tree. What he lacks in agility, he makes up in enthusiasm.

So back to the string. He catches it, pins it down, out-waits the human and then... he takes it back to his basket. Our cat is a beige retriever. Fortunately, we have plenty of string, aka baler twine, and we cheat by rescuing string he has already caught. But I have never heard of a cat taking string back to its basket.

Except that Oatmeal doesn't actually have a basket, except in a virtual sense. Currently, his virtual basket is the corner of the corridor from the bedrooms to the rest of the house. Not tucked safely out of the way, but perfectly positioned to trip up the unwary human heading for the bathroom in the middle of the night. For a while, he used the stack of sheep feed sacks against the wall of the corridor (it's a relatively rodent-free place to store 150kg of feed), but we kept taking bags away to feed the sheep. Before that, it was the laptop-case, and before that just a random patch of carpet in the lounge.

The virtual basket is fragile. Adding an old towel, or padding, or something to define the edges destroys it completely and he moves on to a new one.

So Oatmeal has a virtual basket, which can be something as well defined as a bag, or uncertain as a patch of carpet. It doesn't matter. So long as no-one else interferes, the basket is good and safe, and wherever the current virtual basket might be, that's where captured string will be taken.

Of course, I don't have a virtual basket. I just always sit at the same end of the sofa, sleep on the same side of the bed. And that's my seat – I always sit there.

Perhaps the only strange thing about Oatmeal is how often he changes his virtual basket.

Practical Mouse-keeping

A cat is a predator, and even well-fed, domestic moggies like ours head out and slaughter the local wild-life, albeit without the volume and determination needed when living off the land. What a cat will catch seems to depend upon the cat – the late Bitsy was a connoisseur, seeking out the rare, the exotic, the down-right ridiculous. Bitsy brought in a rabbit, a live jackdaw (through two cat-flaps), a woodpecker, a squirrel, even taking a bird in flight... the list just goes on. It was as if he had a book describing all the things a cat could catch and was determined to try them all – he often didn't get the killing/eating thing, leaving us to escort the latest catch back into the wild. On the other hand, his brother Tigger was almost exclusively a small-rodent cat, although he did get deeply confused when a recently caught mouse tried to burrow under him for safety.

Of our three current residents, Squeak is another mouser, but does not go out very often now – something to do with Oatmeal and their on-going feud. Oatmeal himself is a ratter, we believe, although he does do small rodents as well. Maybe. We now have doubts about that.

How do you tell who caught what? I know Ginger is a mouser, because I have seen her catch them, and eat them, and before she moved into the barn, she was living off the land. Now, as we head towards Spring, the rodent supply is picking up. Last night, I was in the kitchen when she came through the cat-flap with a small, bouncy mouse – pretty much the same variety that Oatmeal had apparently caught earlier in the day. It made a break for freedom which lasted several tenths of a second. Damn, that cat is fast...

And then Ginger put it down for a proper look – presumably when one has a fine, fresh mouse, the experience has to be savoured. However, Oatmeal turned up, stared at the mouse for a short while, and then stole it, growling at anyone who came close to his ill-gotten gains.

So now we are not so sure. Is Oatmeal a mighty hunter, or a thieving bastard? Was that mouse earlier in the day a personal triumph, or pilfered? And that rat he brought in – it does seem suspicious that Ginger is the one who goes hunting where the big rodents hang out (and our rat population has plummeted).

Ginger did not seem too put out at losing her catch, and the food-bowl was there, nicely topped up. Meanwhile, Oatmeal defended his 'catch' as if it was the most precious thing in the world. And as if it was all his own work.

We have seen this before. Tinker was an elderly cat we took on from the rescue (Cats Protection), who spent most of his time asleep, but when an escaped mouse ran past him he caught it, smacked it on the ground twice and then went to sleep, using the newly-deceased mouse as a pillow. Or Trudy, our grumpy little tortoiseshell some years back, who suddenly started catching things. We were so impressed, until we discovered that she was mugging Tigger and stealing what he caught. Actually, we were still impressed – Tigger was twice her size, half her age and had a full set of functioning limbs (shame about the brain.)

That's the world of cat-and-mouse: if you caught it and really want it, best to eat it before some thieving bastard takes it off you.

Hands Reach Further on 52 Weeks

Christmas has come and gone, and the writer is getting fat. I like my food, and disapprove of diets, but... there's more of me than there used to be. Enough to push my Body Mass Index into that pesky obese category. Not by much, but something had to be done. I look down, surveying all that lies below and surely there used to be feet down there, or at least toes. Something really, really had to be done.

The something has been the 5:2 diet, or intermittent fasting. Over the years (and in spite of my fundamental disapproval) I have joined my wife in one diet or another (My wife says not, I say I caught the tail end of it). Apparently, trying to diet whilst someone in the house is eating chocolate biscuits doesn't work.
Quite by chance, we happened to watch a documentary presented by Michael Mosely, and the wonders of the 5:2 diet. Now this 5:2 business is supposed to be more than just about losing weight, and there are all sorts of claims about it making you live longer, appear younger... but really, all I need to do is shed a few pounds.

OK. Maybe more than just a few. Let's not get too specific.

The full-blown version of 5:2 is to eat nothing on two days of the week; the more user-friendly approach is a quarter of the recommended calories two days a week. So that means 500 calories for my wife, 600 for me, which has evolved into 750 calories, because that just takes the edge off it.

There is a down-side. The diet days can be a total write-off in terms of getting things done. I find that physically demanding activities are fine to start off with, but I steadily run out of steam and, by the afternoon, I have no energy left. Equally problematic, is trying to do anything that requires mental effort – as those blood-sugar levels drop, so does my concentration.

The thing is, after all those horrible, unsuccessful diets, this 5:2 business has actually worked. Not only have I lost weight, steadily and consistently(ish), but I am now down to roughly what I weighed when I was twenty. The trouble is, those two days a week are still not very pleasant and I really have to ask my self, is the possibility of living a bit longer worth spending roughly 28% of my life waiting for the other 72% when I can have a proper breakfast?

The short answer is no. The longer answer... seriously no. Now that my weight is arriving at a reasonable level, I am going to start experimenting – just how many calories on the two days gives me a tolerable maintenance level? I know the original idea of the 5:2 system is to make your body 'younger' and live longer, but unless someone can give me a cast-iron guarantee that two days a week waiting for the other five is going to add a lot of years to my life, and those extra years are going to be happy, healthy and active, is it worth it?

There is a fundamental problem with all of these plans to live better and longer – life is a lottery. I can eat all the right things, do all the required exercise, and get hit by a bus tomorrow. Or I can drink to excess, smoke like a chimney, still get hit by the bus, and survive... Unless it is all governed by my genes, in which case I need to drink more, take up smoking and dance in front of buses.

Against my natural inclination, I will stick to the diet in some form or other, if only to get the occasional glimpse of my toes without looking like the victim of a yoga class. Forget the living longer, I just want to enjoy living now.

On the positive side, we have both lost weight, waist-lines have shrunk, lower extremities have come into view and hands reach further when we hug. I'm sure I read somewhere that hugging makes you live longer.

Seasonal Visitors

A cat is not just for Christmas... sometimes they turn up on Boxing Day. It lurks in my mind that it is traditional for a lost kitten to arrive on the doorstep at Christmas. We had one this year, but not a kitten, and this one was hand-delivered to us by a neighbour – stray cat plus their big dog was not a good mix, and they assumed it was our ginger cat. We'll look after it... Just what we needed, an elderly stray cat, and it got me thinking about our many seasonal visitors, the arrivals and departures which we often barely notice.

The chain of thought moves from a stray ginger cat, to our ginger cat, currently to be found asleep on the bed... which is odd. I know it doesn't sound odd, but Ginge is an outdoor cat who we rarely saw over the summer. She would turn up for breakfast, for supper, and might say a brief hello as she moved from one shady spot to another, but now the winter is here, she is increasingly in the house, sleeping somewhere warm. It was a change which crept up on us slowly, until the day we commented that Ginge was around more often...

From there, I wondered just how many months is it since the swallows left? How long have we had the starling murmurations? Everything changes here as the seasons roll, and the changes slide by without notice until it has all happened. The trees drop their leaves, but that's just autumn, that's the big change, and because of the wind here, autumn can be abrupt – green trees one day, bare branches the next. The whole pattern of the wild-life (and the domestic ones) shifts with the year, but it does it when we're not looking.

When we lived in Reading, it was easy not to notice the seasonal changes, especially in the winter where we would be out to work before dawn, back after dusk. But down here in Cornwall, it ought to be obvious, and still it proves easy to not notice.

The swallows go in late summer, but not instantly. They gather on the overhead power lines, a few of them squabble in one of our stables as they get the last brood of the summer prepped and primed for the long migration flight, and over a space of days and weeks the number peaks and declines. So we do notice the swallows, but it is as if they sneak out a side-door and you just don't notice that their going, just that they have gone.

It's the same with the starlings – we are under the 'flight path' for their evening and morning commute between the roost and the feeding grounds. Tens, even hundreds of thousands of them. Their passage generally coincides with the daily routine of letting the chickens out or putting them away for the night, but again, they build up slowly through the autumn and trail away into the spring. What we have noticed is the starlings who hang around when the sheep are being fed, hoping to swipe a few sheep-nuts or beet pellets.

We get something similar with the chicken feed – a small, mixed band of birds who turn up morning and evening to see what they can swipe – sparrows, finches, a robin and our ever-present crows. It is only just becoming noticeable due to the mild autumn this year, but the morning audience is there, just waiting for the pesky human to push off so that they can grab whatever the chickens leave. In past winters, when the weather has been harsh, I put the grain out and walk away for a few minutes before unleashing the hens, just to give the sparrows a chance.

So here we are, just past the shortest day, and I find myself struggling to remember the many seasonal visitors that have already left, or yet to arrive. Our oca crop is just ripe for lifting, the elaeagnus have shed their berries and most of their leaves, and there was the first appearance of the robin this morning, watching me very closely until I walked away...

The cycle is about ready to start again – perhaps this year, I will notice them as they arrive, but probably not.

As for our stray ginger feline – we lodged him with our vet whilst we tried to trace his owner. Our own cats meant he couldn't stay with us without a major chorus of hissing and wailing but... he looks like an elderly cat, so hard to re-home if we can't find his owner. We haven't really had the conversation properly, just skirted around it, but if we can't find him a home, how would we look after him here? No chance. No way. But he did have a lovely purr... and then to our great relief, his owners contacted the vet.

The animals come and go, but what we notice is when they are here, not the arrival and departure. And, of course, we notice when they have more of the bed than we do.

Muddled Thinking

A snippet online took my other half to the amazing world of red diamonds – hugely rare and expensive, upwards of a million dollars per carat. That's a lot of money just to hang a bit of sparkly carbon off your body, which set me off on a chain of association which ended in a tangle of muddled thinking.

An undisclosed number of years ago I was taught classical Greek – in modern parlance, my teacher would be called inspirational, but back then he was just great. Most of the Greek has evaporated from my head, but one thing really stuck – he would never wish us 'Good Luck' before an exam, but 'Good Thinking'...

I should be so lucky.

My first, instinctive reaction to the price of a red diamond was just how many people could be fed with that money. People want a bit of bling, and people with too much money need to show off how much they have with the rarest and most expensive bling, but why can't they show off their wealth by feeding a few more (thousand? million?) people in the world?

Then I set off across the fields to do the evening routine – good thinking time. Muddy thinking time.

Not so long ago I was having another rant – global warming, dwindling natural resources and the most pressing problem on the planet, the excessive number of us humans. In the good old days, when people died young (c1964, when the UK "mode" age of death was zero (BBC News Article) – to summarise, the "mode" is the commonest value. In 1964, and preceding years/decades/centuries the commonest age of death was zero, aka, infant mortality), population control was achieved through disease, famine and war. When us humans used more of the natural resources than was available, lots of us died and everything balanced out. Now, we have this insane mentality where everyone has to be saved, everyone has to live, and everyone has the right to produce as many offspring as they like, regardless of whether our environment can support so many of us.

To be fair, every other species does the same. The population grows to the limit of the resources, and if anything disrupts those resources, lots of individuals die. What they call a population crash.

So there I was, standing in the middle of a field, bitching to myself about two contradictory things – there's too many of us, but we ought to be feeding people not buying expensive bits of carbon. Logically, rationally, I ought to applaud this carbon sequestration programme, the ridiculously wealthy of the world doing their bit to reduce global population by encouraging people to dig up rocks instead of growing food. But I have this troublesome, muddled thinking that still wants to throw all those bloody diamonds in the trash and feed a few more people.

There are too many of us, and every time any politician touches close to the topic, they talk about planning for our ever-rising population – feeding them, housing them and making sure there is always food, hot water and bountiful electricity. What they ought to be saying is there are too many of us. Some of us just have to go. That's the real green solution – starting bulk composting of humans. I don't have an answer to my muddled thinking, but our politicians don't even seem to have heard the question.

We're getting rid of infant mortality, sorting out the plagues, cutting back on famine, which only leaves the ever-popular war and occasional genocide. Even those great population reducers are being pushed out of fashion (with varying degrees of failure), so we need something to cut the numbers...

And so back to my muddled thinking – it's great that infant mortality is under control, that so much money is devoted to trying to cure disease and improve food supply... but we still need population control, and my number one favoured mechanism is... I don't have a clue.

Population control, by whatever means, is fraught with all manner of moral, ethical and "what did you just do to my granny?" questions. I know we need it, and I don't want to face it. Not that it matters, there's bound to be a population crash just around the corner, because once there are enough of us squabbling over scarce resources, the traditional lottery will re-open: plague, famine and war are the prizes, and the lucky survivors get to start the whole game again. So we either pick a method, or get one imposed at random.

There you have it – a simplistic rant over a complex problem. Forget all the tricky details, because only a simple one matters – I need to get my thinking straight: save the planet or save all the people, because I can't have both. Then I can think about the rest of us pesky humans who don't get that we have to make a choice.

No rush. Still plenty of decades until doomsday. And I'll be dead by then, so why do I care?

I do care. I don't know why, but I do. But that's a whole new pit of muddled thinking...

Out Of Line

Picture the scene: the hero has fallen off a cliff, broken an arm, been shot twice and still keeps going... really? My other half was having a little rant – standard questions that pop up on writing discussion groups, such as what sort of injury can I inflict on my main character to keep him out of action for a day. How about a headache? No? Not dramatic enough? A muscle sprain, then, will that do? No? How about toothache... no I'm not taking the ****. You think you need more blood...?

Let's hear it (tympanic membrane injuries permitting) for the Campaign For Realistic Injuries.

The whole thing would have passed me by as an amusing comment, but I pulled a muscle in my back – a classic, real injury, with only one visible symptom: I couldn't quite stand straight. It sounds silly and I had to stare in the bathroom mirror for a while to convince myself – I had to concentrate hard to stand with my feet, hips and shoulders in line. It didn't obviously hurt (unlike walking, turning, breathing...), but as soon as I stopped trying, my posture slumped with my hips to my left.

A real and realistic injury – the hero walked a bit funny. It lacks something. Let's face it – there is nothing heroic or sexy about a bad back. All I did was heave hay bales around on the Monday, fire-wood on the Tuesday, trimmed hedges on the Wednesday... and spent Thursday through Sunday unable to move and dosed to the eyeballs with ibuprofen.

I had a mobility issue. Walking was fine for short distances in small, slow steps, provided I didn't turn to the right. Left turns were fine, right turns would trigger a muscle spasm and the sort of pain you can't do anything about, just endure until it goes away – impossible to really remember or describe. So there I was, sitting on the sofa, barely able to move, time on my hands (or time on my arse) and a whole bundle of related items came together.

Not so long ago, my other half pulled a muscle in her neck, with a similar outcome – days spent immobile on the sofa. Sitting in the same position, I had a new, intimate and unwelcome understanding of what she went through as it healed. So, you want an injury that means your hero is going to be a few days late for the big show-down with the Avenging Horde of the Evil Dread... go with a muscle sprain. If you opt for broken bones, penetrating wounds or other spectacular damage, that had better be for a few weeks delay... or maybe months.

I mentioned toothache – if you haven't had a proper toothache, you have no idea. I was on a training course a few years back and noticed a twinge on the Friday afternoon. On the Saturday there was pain. On Sunday I started eating a pillow. That helped to distract from the total failure of the pain-killers. On the Monday, with foam-filled furnishing getting scarce in the house, I got an emergency dental appointment – infection and inflammation of the nerve, trapped inside a tooth with nowhere for the inflammation to go... That was one significantly disabling toothache.

As coincidence would have it, we have been following a documentary series on Royal Marine Commando training – if you want a prototype for your indestructible hero dragging himself through hell and into the fight, these are the guys. One particular incident stood out in the context of disabling injuries – the recruit who failed one of the big, final tests (a timed route march carrying a heavy pack) and collapsed just short of the finish line on the retry. The training team were absolutely willing him to finish, and watching it from the comfort of the sofa, it was impossible not to be rooting for him to succeed. He really wanted it, but just missed... because he had a broken leg.

Just in case you missed that... broken leg. Now, if you were writing your hero, finishing a gruelling march with a broken leg, who would believe it? Of course, there is a really serious caveat on this – the recruit was putting everything he had into reaching the finish line in spite of a broken leg, an utterly mind-boggling piece of determination, but even if he had made it across the last few hundred meters (rather than being carried away for medical attention), the Avenging Horde of the Evil Dread would have had him for breakfast. Disabling injuries for your action hero need to stop a bit short of a broken leg.

Realistically, even if you do choose a pulled muscle for your disabling injury, pick the muscle carefully. Lower back is a dicey one, upper back is tricky, neck and shoulder can give significant mobility restrictions...
So, the Campaign For Realistic Injuries. Lets have a few more nasty bruises, ragged hang-nails and troublesome splinters... or perhaps a migraine. I've had one migraine in my life – pain, nausea, visual disturbance, the full works. That's pretty disabling while it lasts...

Let's get real. There's no place for realistic injuries in fiction. Unless you've experienced a good back injury, or a proper toothache, it doesn't mean anything.

Dramatic Licence

We have been watching our favourite medical drama on DVD – all utterly preposterous, all very enjoyable, but seriously... can anyone have that many disasters in their life? I was grumbling about it to my other half... and I was reminded of a few things. If anyone were sad enough to dramatise my life, perhaps pack it into a three part miniseries, just how many crises and disasters are there to draw on, given a little dramatic licence?

I started adding it up – so we have the standard family bereavements, paternal grandfather in my teens, maternal grandfather in my late twenties, all the way through to my mother the year before last. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, although plenty of scope to pepper the script with personal tragedies.

Wait... one more... need to add Jim, the son of our neighbour when I was growing up, only a matter of months younger than me. Jim was a bright guy, degree from Oxford, and a stellar career in the financial sector. Mum phoned to say he had had a massive stroke – now that is a serious kick in the life experiences. All of those 'standard' family bereavements were people in their eighties and nineties, but Jim... thirty-something... if it could happen to him, it could happen to me...

So now, roll on a few years, and changing jobs. After time-served in the scientific civil service, I decided I wanted a job out in the real world. I deliberately took a month break between old and new, just to build a new back door for the house. I thought it would be fun and interesting (which it was) but there was time pressure – a week before the new job, we were going to a convention, so the door had to be in and secure. And there had to be time to cook a whole selection of easily re-heatable meals for a family party just after our return from the convention, and then be ready for the new job on the Monday. And then...

Commuting by train to Slough – not my idea of fun, but scarcely a disaster. By my second week, I was experienced enough to know that something was wrong, just little signs, not enough people at the station, no west-bound trains, and then in the office, not enough people. I had travelled east from Reading and got off at Slough; had I been coming west from Paddington I might have had a front-row seat for the crash at Ladbroke Grove which killed 31 people and injured over 500.

A year or two later, and I was going to Slough by car, so welcome to the game of Russian Roulette known as the morning commute. On my first day, I was fractions of a second from being part of a multiple pile-up. I just happened to be in the outside lane whilst passing the motorway junction East of Reading and saw the vehicle three cars ahead drift into the central reservation, enough to give me warning.

The first and second ranks of cars somehow dodged through the mess, those of us in the third managed to stop. That still left a van parked up on the bank beyond the hard shoulder, a hatchback destined for the scrappy in the middle lane, and the initiator of the whole sub-second crisis parked hard against the central barrier, facing the wrong way. No one was killed, no-one injured enough to need emergency attention, but a tenth of a second or two different and I would have been testing the crash-worthiness of our Volvo.

The list of dramatic (or dramatisable) incidents goes on: near-misses on the motorway, test results to confirm it wasn't cancer, the announcement of a redundancy round the day we were signing the papers for a huge mortgage, the employment hiccup that led to the move to Cornwall, or even just the day that Bitsy, a delightful cat who had been with us for nearly fifteen years, died curled up on my lap (after a short illness, as the press-release might say). One ordinary, run of the mill life, filled with largely near-misses (for which I am very grateful) and still packed with stuff that could be an over-blown miniseries with just a little dramatic licence.

I suspect it would be hard to find anyone who didn't have a similar list. It doesn't all happen at once, there is no music to hint that it's time to reach for the tissues, and no stunt double if it really does go wrong.

Now, I'm off to watch another episode of over-hyped, unrealistic, and dramatic nonsense (only half a step from the stuff that happens to everyone at some point) and ignore the news channel with its snapshots of the people who aren't lucky enough to have the near-miss.

Bite-Sized Chicken Pieces

You can't beat a nice piece of rabbit – the nice pieces are pretty much everything except the intestines and the back legs. For the gourmet cat.

Ginge likes her meat fresh. Preferably barely stopped breathing. And rabbits are in season at present, along with a whole delicatessen bar of small rodents. Oatmeal also likes rabbit and eats any bits that Ginge leaves, apart from the guts. No-one likes rabbit guts. (Or mouse guts – they get left as well, usually in the most startling places. As horrible experiences go, high on the list is the sensation of mouse guts popping between the toes, in the dark, on the way to the bathroom at two in the morning.)

Now we are on to bite-sized chicken pieces. Earlier in the year, the hatching rate from the hens was very poor, so every time a hen has gone broody we have stuck a clutch of eggs underneath. Whatever our brooding problem has been, it stopped about seven weeks ago and, one after another, four hens produced chicks. We now have a total of eighteen bite-sized chicken pieces, who have spent their first week or two in the greenhouse, but four mother hens (translation= ruthless, psychotic monsters) in a confined space does not work, so one brood at a time, we are moving them out to face the world. And Ginge. And Oatmeal.

I am literally chick-watching as I type this. The hens are doing a good job of watching over their chicks, but as we bring each brood out, we spend the day with them, just to make sure. The first one out, Crème Brûlée, launches herself at any cat who comes too close – wings out, claws out, feathers out, attitude out. Today, we have brought out Chicky and Dark Penguin, and are waiting to make sure they are up to the challenge.

The problem is the pecking order. Amongst the hens it is easy. Amber (still in the greenhouse, the newest brood to hatch) is number one and kicks the proverbial out of any other hen. Crème Brûlée is next, then Chicky and finally Dark Penguin. The trouble is, that only counts amongst the hens, and the only way to find out where cats sit in the pecking order is to watch and wait. Crème Brûlée is high above cats, no doubt about that, but what of the others? And how well are their chicks trained, because the other half of the defensive package is for offspring to run for Mum at the first sign of trouble.

Even that might not be enough. Last year, we lost a number of chicks to a fox who came through the yard a few days in a row – and then never seen again. Since the food (hen and chick) supply was far from exhausted, we assume that something killed the fox. There were only two broody hens at that point, Silver, an uncompromising drill-sergeant of a mother, and Barn Growler who would be high on the Social Services watch list as an incompetent mother. Silver lost all of her chicks to the fox; Barn Growler lost none, because they were so accustomed to fending for themselves in even the tiniest crisis that they took cover at the first sign of trouble. Silver did what all our chickens do when faced with a fox – flew up to the nearest high-point. Another few weeks and her chicks would probably have followed her up, but... they hadn't learned that one yet, and didn't have the run for cover reflex.

In watching over chicks, we have added a new phrase to our lexicon – chicken-on-chicken violence. Every time we hear the sound of frantic chicks, we rush around to do a head-count, check the location of cats, check for suspicious feathers between the teeth, but it's just another chicken. Ninety-nine percent plus of violence is chicken-on-chicken, and nothing to do with the cats at all.

So, here I am, sitting guard, waiting for hens and chicks to establish their dominance over the cats. As it turns out, Ginge is not the problem: she likes rabbit and they don't peck back. Oatmeal, on the other hand, is a persistent little ****, and catching one of those bite-sized chicken pieces is a challenge he simply won't give up on. He's a bright cat – he has worked out that we don't want him killing chicks; Crème Brûlée has explained very robustly that she doesn't want him killing chicks.

Oatmeal understands. He will wait until no-one is watching...

How Did That Happen?

Lambing is due to start on Monday – it says so on the calendar. Of course, the sheep never look at the calendar and honestly, I don't think any of them can actually read. So when my other half came in and said Tuppence has lambed, my thoughts were mostly that Tuppence was early, and that lambing with barely an hour of daylight left was about par for the course. (Our Soay sheep lamb outside, and this year we have deliberately had a late lambing.)

Daylight going, a lambing ewe to watch... how long is that going to take? How long depends on the ewe. Rosie, a first timer a few years back, was showing signs about lunchtime, then she disappeared, then she walked out of the barn with lamb in tow. In contrast, Cilla was making 'gonna lamb now' signs just after breakfast and kept us waiting most of the day. Not that it mattered – I had misunderstood. Tuppence wasn't just starting, she was done, lamb out, suckling, all going well... except for that nagging worry in the back of my mind: something was wrong. I just couldn't figure it out, and there was that look on my other half's face, just waiting for me to get the punchline.

Oh. Yes. That was it. Tuppence was not supposed to be lambing at all... Now how did that happen? (OK, apart from the obvious – when a Mummy sheep and a Daddy sheep...)

Back to the calendar... there was the day marked when the ewes were put in with the ram... and there, a few days earlier, a note that Tuppence had somehow broken in to the ram field. It was one of those things that gets forgotten over the space of five months. At the time, we probably had the conversation: ewe cycle is seventeen days, only fertile for a couple of days, certainly less than a one in ten chance that she was actually on heat that day...

So, how did it happen? Simple. Sheep don't read, don't check the calendar, and certainly don't have any truck with probability theory. Of course Tuppence was on heat that day. There was a field of rams next door, and she wanted some, wanted it really, really, badly... There was no other reason for her jumping, burrowing, or otherwise forcing her way next door.

So now we have Tippex – a white ram lamb with a few bits of black showing through.

Back on the calendar, the real thing starts Monday. Or Tuesday. Or... Sheep do things when they're ready, not when the calendar says.

We are in charge. But... There's more of them than there are of you, they have all day to plan their next move, you can't watch them every second, and they are driven by those big three biological imperatives: food, reproduction and sheer bloody-minded curiosity. And when I say driven, I mean forty-ton, diesel powered, cargo-truck driven, and the bottom line is us mere humans are the cargo in this arrangement, not the driver. Being in charge is just a delusion.