Jim Webster's Blog, page 25

Hitting the beach

  When I say it was a fine day, I suppose I really mean it wasn’t raining. In fact we merely had drizzle in the morning. There again, I suppose it was so overcast we never got full daylight either but you cannot have everything. Still lady wife and I went to Ulverston to hear …

Special relativity and a wet T shirt.

  It’s wet, seriously wet; chucking it down in other words. I step out of the back door and there is no sign of Sal. She’s lying snug under the cattle trailer she calls home. As I walk across the yard she emerges with carefully simulated enthusiasm to join me looking sheep. At this point …

Coming over all autumnal

  It’s true, it is. On this side of the Atlantic, we don’t have ‘fall.’ ‘Fall’ may be poetic but it isn’t really descriptive of how things work when you’re on the Atlantic coast and the somewhat brisk winds of Autumn sweep in. Our leaves don’t fall. They’re torn from the ground and lie in …

Pontifications along a road less travelled. Bearing all!

During the course of a long, varied, and probably inglorious career; there are times when I feel I have pretty well ‘seen it all.’ But yet even I can find myself surprised. This morning I caught a glimpse of pink on the other side of the hedge. Pink, in comparatively large quantities, doesn’t really figure …

Under the mask

There are places where the modern world has been laid over the countryside but the countryside keeps breaking out. At times it’s as if, the more ostentatious the footprint, the less the real world has been changed. Earlier this week I had to go up to Penrith for an evening meeting and so I decided …

Pontifications along a road less travelled. You might believe that, I cannot possibly comment.

I was intrigued to read an article in a leading newspaper about veganism sweeping the world. Certainly you get enough strident propaganda throughout English speaking social media. But what’s the real situation? I read an interesting paper, ‘An Estimate of the Number of Vegetarians in the World.’ https://www.esri.ie/pubs/WP340.pdf   It states “We estimate that there …

Symphony for buzzards

Back when I was in my teens I went on some holidays with a young naturalist group up in the Inner and Outer Hebrides. One thing I remember was buzzards hovering high above. As we were told at the time, they were very rare and you wouldn’t see them elsewhere. (as an aside, the picture …

At least Herdwicks have the sense to get in out of the rain

  Well they say travel broadens the mind. But don’t worry; I didn’t go far, just across into Scotland. We had a brisk look round Edinburgh and then down to Newton Stewart because we’ve always liked Galloway. But we finished off in the Lake District and there I met these, huddling under a tree out …

Pontifications along a road less travelled. How much self-destructive hatred do we need?

  Oh the joy of facebook. Before social media we could cling pathetically to the belief that people were by and large, reasonable, sensible, and decent. Admittedly we clung to it like a drowning man clings to a spar after a shipwreck, but still it was not an entirely impossible belief.   Then I saw …

Best in show – “The Judge is always right”!

Originally posted on The Lakeland Auctioneer:
Some farmers and also some auctioneers thrive in the show ring. That is acting as the master Judge, picking out a class winner or indeed an overall champion from a ring full of cattle and sheep. Many times in my career I have had the honour of being asked…