animals – Page 13 – don't confuse the narrator

moving targets

Usually, I take pictures of flowers and plants because they’re pretty and they tend to keep still; just occasionally, though, a moving image is too delightful not to at least try and capture it.

dogs playing in small pond — dogs just wanna have fun

The photo doesn’t do justice to the reality: there were four dogs in total, and for a few brief minutes before their – unseen – owner whistled them back, they chased each other in and out of that muddy puddle with pure unfettered joy.

don’t mention it

There’s an elephant in the room.

duck, goose, swan

Most of the photos I post on the blog are of flowers. Indeed, most of the photos I take are of flowers. That’s partly because I like them, but also because plants are helpful enough to keep still when I point a camera at them.

That said, it’s been very windy recently which means that the plants haven’t been such good sitters. So I was looking back over pictures that I’ve taken in the last month to find something to post, and was surprised to find several quite successful ones of birds, who are normally far too flighty to make good subjects for my scant camera skills.

roaring drunk

I spent an interesting morning on a private visit to Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, where I found the beast in the photo.

The young lady who showed us around told us that the word “plastered”, meaning “drunk”, derives from the habit of adding white wine to plaster to keep it malleable: the artisans who worked with the mix were exposed to the alcoholic fumes all day. What’s more, she said, they were allowed to keep and drink the wine that remained unused at the end of the day.

I’m really not convinced that a drunken artisan could produce the spectacular plasterwork of which the lordly lion was just a tiny motif. I note, though, that the decoration was in the room known as “the saloon”.

positively logical

It’s not all fun spending a week in a house with a pedant whose current reading matter is the biography of a logical positivist (or that of any other philosopher, perhaps). I was told yesterday that describing someone as “a good poet” was meaningless, it was a value judgment, that what I was actually saying was, “she is a poet; hurrah!” (As opposed to “she is a poet; boo!”)

Guard dogs — No dogs or other animals - clustered or otherwise - were harmed in the writing of this post

We did however manage to see eye to eye – or was that hear ear to ear? – when the news was on the other night, reporting on a disease affecting dogs in the UK recently. The disease remains unidentified, but the reporter said that some progress had been made after vets observed clusters of dogs dying all across the country from the south west to the north east.

It is probably sad but true that in the course of their work vets observe animals dying. But to observe clusters of them dying and not take action – as opposed to noticing the clusters of reported dog deaths – seems heartless. I think any vet who did so would be a bad vet and deserve to be booed.