Proud member of BT Posse.Love the seaside,chikkin and snoozing!Sometimes mum's allowed to tweet herself,but not often!
Robin Hood County
Joined December 2010
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borderbertie1 retweeted
A man came on Tuesday to take soil cores out of Gerald's field for a carbon survey, and he had planned to be an hour, and he was there until dark, because the bull would not stop following him.
He had a steel auger, a bag of tubes with lids, a tablet, and a grid of forty points on it that he had to hit in order. He had done the lane field in the morning. The lane field was easy, because the lane field is bare and there is nothing in it, and he came through the gate into Gerald's forty acres at one o'clock with the confidence of a man who has read that beef cattle are docile.
They are. That is the problem. A bull who has never been frightened of anything has no reason to leave, and a Hereford has no reason to stand still either when something interesting is going on, and a stranger kneeling in the grass turning a steel rod into the ground is the most interesting thing that has happened in that field since the hot air balloon.
Gerald came over from the south corner at the pace he goes everywhere and stood four yards off and watched the first core come up.
The man stood up. Gerald did not move. The man walked to point two. Gerald walked to point two. The man knelt. Gerald stood over him, nine hundred kilos of mild interest, and breathed on the back of his neck, and the man said afterwards he had taken that core faster than any core in his career.
Forty points. Gerald attended all of them. He did not touch the man, the auger, the bag or the tablet. He stood four yards off, then three, and when the man moved, he moved, and when the man stopped, he stopped, and the robin rode the whole survey between his ears and sang at the man from there, which the man had not been trained for either.
The cores were the thing. The lane field's came up pale, a few inches of brown and then yellow clay, the way a field looks when it has been turned over every autumn for forty years and everything that was ever alive in it has been let out into the air. Gerald's came up black. Black to the bottom of the tube, every one, forty of them, and the man held the two side by side at the gate for the farmer and did not say anything, because he did not need to.
Then the man said he had never been followed before. The farmer said Gerald does not follow. He supervises.
The results are coming in a report in the new year. The farmer does not need the report. He has had the report in his field for four years, lying down in the south corner at noon on it, putting his dinner back into it, and he could have told the man which tube would come up black before the man had got the lid off.
The man asked, packing the van, whether the bull was always like that.
The farmer said he had never seen him take that much interest in anybody, and that he thought Gerald had wanted to make sure the man got it right.
borderbertie1 retweeted
Ian McKellen reciting Shakespeare's writing on racist anti-immigration riots in London during his time.
It is excellent.
They have been banging the same drum for 400 years.
🥰
The clocks went back on Sunday night and not one animal on this account has been informed.
Hector was at the field gate on Monday at the hour he has presented himself at since the day he came off the lorry, the hour the farmer once looked up and has never told anybody. By the kitchen clock he was an hour early. He stood square in the dark, ears forward, waiting for the day to be explained to him, and the farmer, who had been handed an extra hour by the government and had planned to spend it asleep, spent it at the window instead.
Nelson came out of the shelter when the light came, as he has every morning of his life, and found the hay hung an hour late by his reckoning. He ate it with the expression of an animal who has noticed, and has decided not to raise it, yet.
In Wester Ross, Isla was at the byre door at the time Angus has fed her for four years, which is to say the time the sky said, and Angus was in the house in his socks being told by the radio that it was earlier than it was. She stood there in the drizzle. She has stood through a blizzard. A clock was never going to shift her.
In Yorkshire the man opened the pop-hole at seven by the kitchen, and the sun had been up the better part of an hour, and four hens came out of that coop like a dropped tray. Beatrice first. She looked at him on the way past in a manner he has described, to nobody, as pointed.
In Monmouthshire Marged issued Grunt Three, which is the one that means she is awake and this is your notification, at precisely the usual time. The farmer's wife, for whom the usual time was now an hour earlier, has lodged an objection with the only authority available, which is the pig, who has not acknowledged it.
Gerald was in the south corner at first light. First light did not move.
A cow, a hen, a horse, a pig and a donkey keep time by the sky, the same as they kept it before there was a clock in the country, and on Sunday night the entire nation moved its watches to catch up with them for the winter and called it the clocks going back.
Nothing in those fields went back. They were already there.
🥺
In November 1941 the richest man in America drove his twenty-three-year-old daughter to a hospital in Washington without telling her mother, had two surgeons drill holes in her skull and cut into the front of her brain while she sang God Bless America to them, and when the singing stopped she had a mental age of two and the family did not speak her name for twenty years.
Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and the first girl, and she was slow. A nurse at the birth had held Rose Kennedy's legs together for two hours while they waited for the doctor, and the baby had been starved of air. She learned to read and write, but late, and in a family where the boys were being bred for the presidency and the girls for the right marriage, she was the one who could not keep up, the one who had to be coached and watched and given the simpler part in the photograph. She was also, by every account, the prettiest of them, and when the family went to London in 1938 she was presented at court in a white dress and curtsied to the King without a mistake.
Then she was twenty-one, and the trouble started. Moods. Rages. Slipping out of the convent school at night and coming back in the morning and not saying where. The nuns said she might be meeting men. For Joseph Kennedy, who was managing his sons towards the White House and could not have a daughter who might get pregnant or get talked about, that was the end of it. He had read about a new operation. Walter Freeman had promised the newspapers it calmed the agitated, and Joe Kennedy had never in his life been told that a thing he could pay for would not work.
Rosemary was given a mild sedative and kept awake. Freeman and his surgeon, James Watts, opened the skull on both sides and Watts pushed a blade into the frontal lobes and swept, while Freeman asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer and sing, and count backwards, so they would know how far to go. They went until she was incoherent. Then they stopped.
She came out of it unable to walk or speak. Years of therapy got her a few words and a limp. Joe moved her to a private hospital in New York and then to a convent school in Wisconsin, told the family she was teaching the retarded in the Midwest, and never went to see her. Rose, her mother, was not told what had been done until long after, and did not visit for twenty years. The brothers and sisters, including the one who became President, were told she was away. When Joe had his stroke in 1961 and could no longer manage the story, Eunice went to Wisconsin and found a woman of forty-three who did not know her, and came home and started the Special Olympics.
Rosemary lived to eighty-six, in the convent, and died in 2005 with her surviving sisters at the bed. The brother who became President had signed the first federal mental health law in 1963, and the family has said she was the reason.
Freeman kept operating for another twenty-six years. His notes on Rosemary have never been released.
That is what the expert's confidence looks like when it meets a powerful man with an inconvenient child. The science was published. The father was certain. The daughter sang to the surgeon until she could not.
Every institution that has ever decided it knows what is wrong with you and how to tidy it has the same two ingredients in the room, and the person on the table is still the only one who pays.
Long live Keith 🥰
Keith got on the 7.40 bus on Thursday morning, rode it two stops into town, and got off outside the butcher's, and the bus company has written to Dave.
He had been at the stop before. Entry 46 in the notebook has him under the shelter in the rain with two schoolchildren who did not think to mention him. This time the children were there again, and the bus came, and the doors opened, and the children got on, and the goat got on behind them.
The driver says he did not see him. The driver says you look at the pass, not the passenger, and a goat does not carry a pass, and by the time he looked in the mirror the goat was sat down.
Sat. Not standing. Keith had gone to the back, where the seat runs across, and got up on it with his front feet and then his back feet and folded himself down, and he rode two stops looking out of the window with the serene air of a man who has caught this bus for years.
The children sat next to him. One of them took a photograph, which is how the parish knows.
He got off at the market square when the doors opened, because the doors opened, and stood on the pavement outside the butcher's for a while looking at the display, and then walked up the high street and ate a geranium outside the bank, and was collected by Dave at 20 past 9 from the memorial garden, where he was lying down.
The letter from the bus company says that livestock are not permitted on board, that the driver has been reminded of the policy, and that the company would be grateful if Mr. Dave could ensure it does not happen again. It is signed by the depot manager. Underneath the signature, in biro, in a different hand, it says: he was no trouble.
The farmer's wife has put the letter in the notebook.
Keith was at the stop on Friday at 7.35. Dave was there as well. The bus came, and slowed, and the driver looked at the goat, and looked at Dave, and Dave shook his head, and the bus went on.
The goat watched it to the corner.
Dave says he will be at that stop every morning now until the goat gets bored, and that in two years the goat has not got bored of a single thing.
borderbertie1 retweeted
Tax the rich?
Everyone is against it until they find out how it actually works.
Watch and find out how Wealth Taxes actually work.
borderbertie1 retweeted
Delighted to be launching our valet parking service for private aircraft! Just going to check out the webcam now to see how it's working out. Oh ffs...
