Category: Books

Quote of the Week

‘Don’t let anyone say to you that nothing exciting ever happens to you when you are old. Because it does. And it’s just as nice to be seventy as it is to be young.’

–Agatha Christie (from the Mousetrap Man by Peter Saunders)

Quote of the Week

‘The most powerful moments of our lives happen when we string together the small flickers of light created by courage, compassion and connection and see them shine in the darkness of our struggles.’

Daring Greatly – How the Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead – Brene Brown

The Joy of Cows, or Bulls, or whatever it was that did that thing

When I was sixteen, I went to a petting farm with my two best friends, Elaine and Renee. We enjoyed looking at the rabbits and the guinea pigs, horses, ponies, goats, lambs and sheep and eventually cows. The cows were in a shed. One cow. Actually, I can’t remember if it had horns, obviously if it had horns, it was a bull.

It was all on its own in the shed and there seemed to be a few waist high metal bars between us and the cow/bull, so it was a casual but significant separation. We gathered round as it chewed the cud, or grass. It was chewing furiously and while it chewed, it focused on me.

We were like fans round a pop star, admiring it while it chewed and stared. It continued to fix its gaze on me and gave me an evil look. Next minute, it opened its mouth and projectile vomited what it was chewing, straight at me, from about two metres away.

The copious vile smelling substance landed on my upper chest, with a splat. It had the consistency and smell of liquid poo, but it was worse than that. It wasn’t like any human diarrhoea that I’ve ever smelled. Did I happen to mention I was wearing a thick mohair jumper?

The smell was so foul my friends immediately sprang away from me, as if I was a leper. They thought it was hilariously funny. The faeces that had come from the cows/bulls mouth didn’t drip thankfully. Instead, it adhered to my jumper beautifully. Thank God for small mercies.

My friends acted as if I’d vomited onto my own jumper instead of being the victim of an oral assault from a psycho bovine stranger.

To be fair, I was ‘allowed’ back into my friends car. They couldn’t very well leave me at the petting farm, it was miles from anywhere but it wasn’t a pleasant journey home.

When I got home my mum was non too pleased about the stains from a sociopathic bull on my mohair but she put it in a hot wash all the same. I don’t even think it was the hot wash that ruined it, although I’m sure it didn’t help. The vomit and the heat had a debilitating effect on the delicate fibres. The projectile was like acid and seemed to dissolve the cloth. If the vomit didn’t kill my beautiful jumper then the hot wash certainly did. The jumper was never quite the same after that. It was rather bald and thin and exhausted where it should have been delightfully hairy. It was a traumatised mohair.

I learned to distrust cows and young bulls after that. The only other time, I was attacked by an animal in such a way was when I was at Southport Zoo many years later, passing by the chimpanzee quarters with my mum and my husband. The chimps threw their excrement at us, among indulging in other recreational activities. It still wasn’t anywhere as bad as having liquid poo spat at me, exorcist style, at a petting farm. We managed to dodge the chimp poo very successfully. They didn’t have the element of surprise on their side like the young bull.

Now, where’s the joy in this you might say, well, it’s all in the anecdote. I realised I haven’t thought about it in almost forty years, not once, until just now and it made me smile and I suppose it might be funny to an outsider, in a schadenfreud kind of way.

What Did You Call Me ?

I’ve always had a fascination for collective nouns for animals. I’ve recently read a wonderful book called ‘The Frog With Self Cleaning Feet And Other Extraordinary Tales From The Animal World‘ by Michael Bright.

At the back of the book he had a list of collective nouns for animals. Here are just a few of my favourites :

Obstinacy of Buffalo

Glorifying of Cats

Intrigue of Kittens

Storytelling of Crows

Flamboyance of Flamingos

Bouquet of Pheasants (Taking off)

Stare of Owls

Intrusion of Coackroaches

Smack of Jellyfish

Piteousness of Turtledoves

Venue of Vultures

Wisp of Snipe

Here are 50 more !

The Great Unread

I tried to read you. Couldn’t get through you. Did I even get past Chapter One?

For some reason we never hit it off, did we ‘Dune’?

It all began when someone I admired said they’d read you.

It was Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It was an answer to a question in one of those pop music magazine bio’s. There were questions like ‘What’s your favourite colour? What book are you reading at the moment?’ This would have been in the mid eighties.

So, I did the natural thing, I went out, saved my pocket money and blew a few weeks worth on Dune by Frank Herbert.

Anyway, couldn’t get through Dune, gave it away in the end. My motivations for having the book were all wrong. I just wanted it because Holly had read it. How shallow. How silly. How embarressing but looking back, in my defense, I was fourteen and smitten.

The same thing happened when I was about eighteen with ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanphropists’ by Robert Tressell. About five different people recommended it to me, including my dad. So I bought it and couldn’t get past Chapter One.

I discovered that a couple of other people I knew had tried reading ‘Dune’ but couldn’t get through it, and they were hard core fantasy/sci fi fans. So then, I didn’t feel quite so bad. Interestingly enough, some of those people were able to get through it easily enough on audiobook.

I’m not an audiobook type of person but I might just buy ‘Dune’ again and this time just buckle down and also read ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ because I’m no longer a teenager, a lot of water has gone under the bridge and I’m not idolizing pop groups anymore.

When I start a book, I like to follow it through to the end, the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ mentality but sometimes, just sometimes in life, there remains the great unread.