Disability Rights for Mice

Now I could never be accused of over sentimentality when it comes to animals. I feed the birds, chase squirrels out of the garden and sometimes pick up the pieces my spiteful old moggy brings home. Not birds, they’re not his scene, he catches mice, in all shapes and sizes, but as far as I’m concerned there are only two sorts, the very quick and the dead.

If alive, he drops them on the kitchen floor, and then calls me. That distinct yowling noise has me running for the cardboard tube, the mouse scuttles up the tube and within minutes is back in the garden, bragging of its adventures, ready to be caught another day.

Dead, they’re picked up by the tail and slung out of the back door, a salutary reminder to others of their kind that, if you’re a walking dinner and only half way up the food chain, gardens are dangerous places. Only this time the dead mouse hanging by its tail about to be slung out, wriggled. If not dead, then maybe injured, fainted, shocked? Into a box for observation and a bit of apple, death anticipated within the hour. But it didn’t do the expected, and we forgot the granddaughters were coming.

“Can we keep it,” they squealed, donning metaphorical doctors’ outfits as they rushed through the door. Two blond heads together over the box, much discussion, a few sunflower seeds and a peanut later,
“We know what’s wrong. It’s sprained a leg.”
“Maybe we should…” I was reluctant; the word euthanasia was left hanging in the air.
“But you can’t, it’s disabled,” they wailed in shocked disbelief at my callously practical solution.

Heads together once more and soon, blu-tacked to the freezer, our instructions.

Anyone know what a wood mouse likes for dinner, ‘cos this one’s no longer stuck half way up the food chain? It fallen on three of its little feet, and busy resting the sprained one. I’m hoping for a miraculous recovery, otherwise it looks like we’ve got a pet.

P.S Grandad is at this moment up the workshop, making a cage.

Diana and Actaeon

Well a spot of good news in these times of financial crisis, the painting Diana and Achaeton is now jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and England. A sigh of relief all round then, the cash strapped 7^th Duke of Sutherland is better off by £50million, a snip by all accounts; he could have asked for more.

Now Titian does a powerful painting, and I’ve no objection to us all owning the divine femme fatale and her doomed youth. It’s not the purchase of the saucy picture that smarts, but the irony that, in 2009, the year of Homecoming Scotland, when Scotland is doing its utmost to encourage its own diaspora to return to the motherland, it pays a large fortune to the descendants of the very family that helped to kick my lot out in the first place.

I’m talking Highland Clearances now, in particular the scattering of the Mackay’s of Strathnaver, from whom I am descended.

It seems a lot of dosh to pay to the descendants of the family who burnt my ancestors out of their homes, dispersing the Mackay’s of Strathnaver, Sutherland, far and wide across the world. O.K. my grandfather’s grandfather didn’t move far, to Betty Hill to be precise, but everything his family cherished and had worked for over for countless generations, was torn from them. Even the roof of their house was burnt over their heads. A piece of charred roof timber remained in the family for years, a harsh reminder of what cruelty and exploitation, in the guise of land improvement and agrarian reform, can do to a tenant people.

Starting in the early 1800s, the idea was to clear out the slothful, self sufficient, peasantry to make way for sheep, thousand of Cheviots, the profits of wool and mutton a far more tempting prospect than the low rents that could be squeezed from the tiny townships that nestled along the River Naver. Over a period of less than twenty years, the thriving population numbering almost two thousand, was reduced to 257, and many of those were shepherds brought in from the borders, hardly a Mackay was left in sight. They were all dispersed to Canada and other New World settlements, or crammed into tiny allotment plots on the coast, with quaint names like ‘Betty Hill’. There these oat growing, cattle farming, drovers were told to be fishermen, off a coast with some of the roughest seas in the world and with no natural harbors.

Countess ‘Betty’ Sutherland is reputed to have written to a friend, after being told of the plight of the people who’d been cleared from their homes in her name,

“Scotch people are of a happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals.”

When this outrage was carried out, the Sutherland family owned one and half million acres of land, the Mackay’s of Strathnaver were left with little more than the clothes on their backs and a few charred belongings, and the unfamiliar smell of sheep in their noses. So you can see, art lover as I am, I won’t be visiting Diana and Achaeton in their new home in the near future.

There's little left of the once thriving townships.

St Columba Parish Church. From the pulpit of this church the Mackay's were told they had to leave their homes. It's now Strathnaver Museum

Mystery Attacker Bumps off Pigeon

Mystery Attacker Bumps off Pigeon

Sometimes bad luck takes more than one form and what is mild irritation for one, turns up as catastrophe for another, as in the case the unwary wood pigeon, tempted by the peanuts in my garden. For this unlucky bird, bad luck took the form of the bolt from the blue. Well I think it did but I can’t be sure, you see, I didn’t see it any more than the pigeon did.
Not very clear? I’ll explain. Last Saturday was the RSPB bird count day. In my case this entailed an hour at the upstairs bedroom window, cat firmly by my side, peering out at a laden bird table.
The usual everyday stuff flutters in, a handful of chaffinches, the customary squabbling greenfinches, and then five, or was it six, long tailed tits dash past, nothing to excite the rabid twitcher. The only rarer visitors are a pair of brambling overwintering in the plum tree, and a rather cocky bull finch.

Forty five minutes into the bird watch and I’m getting bored, with nothing in the garden now except three obese woodpigeons, plumped to perfection on the last few greens left in the vegetable patch. Normally their appearance would have me running up the garden waving my arms, but I let them be, and tick them off on my list.
A quick cup of tea is what I need. Stopping the timer I dash down to the kitchen. I swear I was gone for just a few minutes, but back to my post I find a completely empty garden, the only evidence that any birds have ever visited, a pile of pale grey feathers neatly ringing the bird table, one or two still drifting softly in mid air.
And I missed it. Some great big bird of prey snaffled one of the woodpigeons and I wasn’t there. The only bit of avian excitement since I saw the chiff chaff last summer and I was out of the room. How do I know it was a bird of prey? Well for once the cat had an alibi, and on close examination, many of the feathers had definite beak shaped chunks torn out.
Perhaps I should have ticked off eagle after all, but we don’t get many in West Sussex, and there’s the further quandary, should I enter two woodpigeons or three?

Does Everyone Have a Story to Tell About Woolworths?

Does everyone have a story to tell about Woolworths? It's that sort of place.

“Meet you outside Woolworths,” was a familiar cry when I was a child. In the small country town where I grew up, Woolworths, with its distinctive red and white sign, was the place to meet up with friends, catch the bus, even shelter from the rain, but I seldom bought anything, not enough money, until my sister, a sophisticated five years older than me, thought up a cunning plan.

Then, Woolworths had the most wonderful broken biscuit counter. For 9d (less than 5p) you could buy a huge bag of broken biscuits. When we went to Saturday Morning Pictures, if we paid 6d (2.5p) and sat in the stalls along with the rough boys, instead of upstairs in the more expensive circle, with the ‘much nicer children,’ as instructed by our parents, we came out with a full shilling profit, enough to buy huge bag of broken biscuits, with a little cash to spare.

I once had a Saturday job in Woolworths. It morphed into the promise of employment for a whole summer and might have been the start of a wonderful career, except I got the sack.

I missed out on the offer of employment on the biscuit counter, fortunately my hair was too long to stuff into the hairnet, so ended up queening it over haberdashery. Tape measures, lustrous embroidery silks, pins and cottons were my domain. I’d jump off the bus, rush in through the door and grab the drawer to my till, just as the store cleaner finished mopping the wooden boards around my counter.

Tall, slow, harmless and monosyllabic, all us girls were scared of Garth the cleaner. He lurked deep in the stores along with his mop and huge wide broom, wearing a muddy brown overall and he longed to be friendly, but it wasn’t the done thing to be seen talking to Garth. He was considered far too weird.

Woolworths attracted hoards of eccentric customers, but my favourite memory is of a charming woman who sidled up to my counter almost every day and lifted small items, a paper of pins, a reel of sylco thread... Where ever she lived must have been full to bursting with filched stuff, but I never had the heart to report her to the supervisor.

But it wasn’t my tolerance of petty pilfering that got me the sack. I was asked to leave over a boy. My crime? One of the regular girls accused me of trying to get off with her boyfriend. Apparently she’d seen me smile at him, which was news to me. (Would it be too nasty to say he was probably one of Garths’s less appealing close relatives?) Assisted by two of her chums, this young lady trapped me by the staff lockers. I’d have probably been well and truly thumped if I hadn’t been rescued by another member of staff.

Even though I made it very clear that she was more than welcome to keep ‘her feller.’ I wouldn't have touched him with the end of Garth's mop, I was deemed not suitable for the job, told to collect my coat, pick up my wages and asked to leave. I never really felt the same about Woolies after that. It was a long time ago and, now that particular branch is about to close, I'm sorry for all of those who are about to lose their jobs, except for one of course, but I doubt if she still works there.

A Tale of Pink Sheep and the Dispossessed

Should you ever visit the seaside village of Porlock Weir in Somerset, leave time for a very special walk. Don’t be put off by the steps leading up from the back of the Anchor Hotel, or the wafting smells of ducted fat and dustbins, a climb of a few feet takes you onto the edge of a sloping meadow dotted with surprisingly pink sheep.

A short stroll and you meet the toll road to Worthy, but don’t be tempted along that way, to the right is a little gate where walkers, free of charge , may gain access to the darkly brooding Yearnor woods.

Dark secrets cling to those wooded slopes and linger in the shadowy coombs, so it is just as well the leafy canopy also shelters Culbone Church, reputedly the smallest parish church in England. It nestles far into woods that were once home to the desperate and the dispossessed. A place of murky secrets where even the church leaflet tells of a chaplin, who in 1280 was indicted for clobbering a certain Albert of Esshe over the head with a hatchet, killing him.

The way is steep and treacherous and, despite the early morning sunshine, surprisingly gloomy as it winds through mysterious tunnels and whispering woods. It is the sort of place where wary walkers, if they tread lightly, look over their shoulders, ‘Just in case...’

As the path climbs upwards, precipitous slopes drop down to a hidden sea that can be heard but seldom glimpsed, though seabirds cry overhead. Occasionally the way is barred by a landslide and, as the detours point up even steeper slopes, the ghosts of the blocked paths twine secretively in the opposite direction with dark hints of fallen rocks and rotting trees, or something a little more more sinister.

These woods were once home to outcasts, those who had so offended society, or the church, that they were banished to a life clinging to these shelterless and inhospitable slopes. Once the homeless rebels had died out their place was taken by a colony of lepers, abandoned without hope or help. Apparently the last one died in 1622. No wonder the woods whisper and sigh to walkers as they pass.

Eventually, nearing the summit of the woodland climb, the leafy canopy opens to reveal Culbone Church. No road leads to this church but the path creeps alongside the church wall. As we opened the gate, two cats eyed us suspiciously from the base of the churchyard cross before slinking off into the long grass. Once inside, the church feels quaint, and cold and very holy, with that not quite Christian feel so common in many ancient places of worship. As we lingered in the nave, absorbing the atmosphere, marvelling at the 13^th century chancel and Norman font, the door rattled. Thinking another visitor struggled to enter, my companion opened the door and in slid one of the cats.

The next fifteen minutes were spent trying to catch the animal as, obviously no respecter of holy places, it scrambled cheerfully over areas where we were not prepared to trespass. At last, after much scrabbling under pews and keeping curses to a respectful minimum, the cat was cornered, caught and carried outside.

It was mid-day and the mood broken; any whispering in the woods banished as a huge party of ramblers announced their arrival long before they could be seen. We left the churchyard to its secrets and walked back the way we had come and lunch in Porlock Weir.

(With lots of thanks to Exmoorjane, who told me about this special place)

Salome up close and personal

I'm not a frequent visitor to the opera, but last Saturday found me at the Met. No I haven't won the lottery and taken to spending my weekends in New York, I saw Salome at a backstreet cinema in Brighton, but she was live and in high definition from the Metropolitan Opera. Too high for my liking. Can you imagine a thirty foot soprano, a hefty woman of over forty, built like a Valkyrie but doing her best to impersonate a sixteen year old temptress. There were many moments when disbelief just couldn't be suspended.

Karita Mattila, with the voice like an murderous angel, sung her socks off. Well perhaps not socks, but during the dance of the seven veils, she did have two of her attendants remove her stockings with their teeth. Excuse me, but I don't remember that bit in the bible; but then it is a very modern interpretation of an old story, where a voluptuous Judean Princess dances for her lecherous old step father, on the promise of anything she wants. The hussy gives up the chance of half his kingdom and a whole hatful of jewels, in place of the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Well I ask you, what girl wouldn't?

Karita Mattila's voice is unbelievable, the production passable; it was the filming that was at fault. It is unwise to give tonsil inspection shots of a soprano in full volume. As Karita simpered and fluttered her false eyelashes in a girlish manner, begging kisses from the ever wrathful John the B, the close ups made her look more like a camp female impersonator, rather than the seductive temptress.

Wardrobe malfunctions didn't help. Whoever dressed the strapping soprano in a figure hugging satin nightie, outlining every cutting undergarment and bulging surface, deserves to be back dressing the Teletubbies. Even the KMB, never one to remark on women's clothing, was heard to whisper cruelly,

'Trapped cellulite.'

At the climax of the dance of the seven veils, the opera lovers in the theatre were treated to a full frontal Salome, presumably on the grounds that they were far enough away not to notice any details, us lesser mortals, gawping in the cinema, were spared. The family friendly version merely zoomed in on a close up of her muscular back, then swung to Herod's lecherous face. Until then, one of the better moments.

It was only when the severed head of the murdered John the Baptist was brought onto stage, that it was possible to forget all the grisly details of the too close camera work. When Salome sang passionately of her dark longings, all the flaws of the production ceased to matter. It was electrifying. Dwarfed by the ominous angels of death, as Salome sang,

' I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan,'

the discrepancy between role and woman didn't matter. No stripling of a girl could have sung like that. I guess the entire audience tingled all over, I certainly did. As the curtain came down, there was a burst of spontaneous applause, and that doesn’t often happen in a cinema nowadays.

(There's a brilliant clip of Mattila performing Salome on You tube, if I had the skills I'd have loaded it for you, but I haven't, so I didn't, Sorry.)

The Garden in September

Tiny golden leaves from the silver birch tree are on the lawn this morning. Soon all this will be gone. How sad.