Bullying

My first blog today was centred around the extremes of bullying behaviours that we sadly see in our human world...but bullying happens without rhyme or reason in the animal world too .
Yesterday two of the turkey poults ( females) suddenly turned on the smallest bird which is the slate grey poult. Viciously the little stag ( I am still quite not sure of his sex) was pecked and harassed by one of the females even though he constantly ran to the performing Boris in what resembled a plea for protection.
The attack was sustained and completely out of the blue, and in the end I had to intervene and remove the little guy from the enclosure to walk safely around with the hens and ducks (above)

Last night I replaced him into the turkey house with the others, in the hope that things would settle down overnight, and this morning the aggression ( although still there in bursts) is no where as pronounced as it was yesterday..
I am digging out the veg beds today, so I can keep an eye on the little fella!

Tonight there is a community council "open" meeting at the memorial hall to discuss the proposed building of houses "outside" of the village envelope in greenbelt land.....I suspect a large proportion of the village will be in attendence and the whole thing will be a bit of a bunfight!!!
I shall be there!!!

The Death of hope

It was with great sadness that I read that Jon Venables, one of the killers of the baby Jaimie Bulger, had been returned to jail after breaching the terms of his release.

It is unclear just what this man has in fact done, (by not knowing the press and the general public's imagination has run riot), but I cannot help worrying that the biggest victim of this re hash of the infamous "children that kill children" trial of 1993, will be the death of hope in the judicial rehabilitation process.

I thought that the only good that came out of the the prosecution of the 10 year old Venables (right) and his friend Robert Thompson was that when the boys were "imprisoned" the general public was reassured that they had been removed from the "toxic" home lives that may have helped to shape their destructive behaviours and had entered a more supportive, educationally superior and structured environment.

To the lay person that perhaps did not just want to see vengeance,the boys had some hope to grow into more balanced and productive members of society, and the news of today has gone along way to perhaps shake that beacon of positivity, which is a great shame.

I just hope the hysteria in the press can be balanced in some way

Let The River Run - Carly Simon

I was going to post this when I reviewed Working Girl....another blast from the past......doesn't Carly look pleased with herself?

Yazoo 'Don't Go'

Now I found myself humming this blast from the 1980s past today and It took me an absolute AGE to remember just what the song was................it was NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AGO!!!!!

Graveyard at Dawn

I have always loved old Churchyards, which is a good job really as I spend much of my life in and around one! Now it is not a morbid fascination that I have....( I never spend any time at my parents' or grand parents' graves), but I do find the slightly run down, ancient Churchyards to be interesting, comfortable and, well homely.
This morning at dawn I took my camera for a mooch around St Michaels.
Above this the "hooded" tomb of the Wynne Family which dates from the 1700s , but there are also tombs with "table top" covers that date from 1674 (the year that our cottage was originally built)

I only found out recently that our village of Trelawnyd (or "Trevelesneu", as it was known as) was recorded in the Doomsday Book of 1086 and that the church was first referred to in the 1291 Pope Nicholas Taxation documents.

(Above) Albert sitting quietly on the graves, (Below) the famous 14th Century Churchyard Cross in silhouette

Another day of jobs lie ahead. The weather looks a little brighter

Little man syndrome

I have six cockerels. Four of them (Rogo, Stanley,Scotty and Jesus) are large full size fellows, each with their own group of hens, while the remaining two (Pirrie and Roger) are tiny bantams, that live alongside the heavyweights in sometimes an uneasy kind of existence.
Pirrie ( a wyandotte) roosts in a small brooder box with a single hen of his own (Ripley a black rock). Ripley was a single hen out of seven cockerel chicks I hatched last year and after they left the field she was left alone and isolated, unable to join any of the 10 hen coops because of the shirty behaviour of the existing hens. Pirrie soon teamed up with her, after a little manipulation on my part, which helped, while Roger ( above) was set up with some of the bullied hens in their own run.
Now Roger is quite a handsome little cockerel ( he is only 9 inches high) and like most male animals he has no conception of just how small he is. He also has the most aggressive nature of all of my cockerels and will fly and posture against me every time I enter his enclosure.
Now I find all this quite amusing especially as I can usually swat him away with my little finger, but today his bouncy nature did not serve him at all well, as he slipped out of his enclosure and got cornered by a somewhat irate ( and considerably larger ) Jesus.

Jesus is the most junior cockerel and even the guinea fowl give him a good bashing from time to time, so I am sure a sudden contact with a small bantam gave him the opportunity for him to flex his testosterone muscles so to speak, and he well and truly battered Roger before I saw the final pecks of the battle from the bedroom window.

Cockerels when they are beaten, freeze on the ground with head down, almost as if they are waiting for the "coup de grace" to be administered, and I just got there in time, before Jesus went in for the kill. Poor Roger, covered in blood and fairly lifeless on the ground was, I thought , a gonner, but after I ran him under a warm tap to clean him up for a bit, he came round just enough to give me a few weak but painful pecks on my fingers.
The above photo was taken a hour or so after I returned him to his enclosure

The third lesson in my Chicken course takes part tonight.....Chris is away working in London again

Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus

Happy St David's Day!
(Remembering Welshies across the ocean)
x

You can take the boy out of Rhyl........

.......but you'll never take Rhyl out of the boy!
(for those that don't know Rhyl is a grotty seaside town 5 miles away)
The "stunt double" for actor Benicio del Toro (aka The Wolfman) is no other than local boy Spence Wilding, and at the cinema tonight he was there at the Scala (supposedly answering questions about the film and signing autographs for a quid!).....mind you, when we entered the cinema he was sat down in a cinema seat chatting to someone on his mobile phone!...so we missed any interesting insights he might have shared about this uneven, cut-to-hell and rather miscast horror movie.
I can understand why del Toro was chosen for the lead. Craggy faced and mean and moody looking he has the "look" of wolf even before all the CGI kicks into gear, but unfortunatly he sorts of sleeps through the mayhem and gore which is set in and around a rather untidy and decaying Chatsworth House ( that doubles for Blackmoor house). It is a long time since I have seen such a lacklustre performance from a leading man.
Emily Blunt and Anthony Hopkins fare a little better as del Toro's chaste love interest and father respectively, while Hugo Weaving gives his chief inspector Aberline, a rather lugubrious and pleasing twist. And rather surprisingly an ancient looking Gereldine Chapman even pops up briefly as a gypsy wise woman ( with some dreadful looking dirty nails)
Having said all that, non of the impressive cast can save this rather unoriginal and at times rather boring movie which obviously suffers from a bit of over zealous editing, which is a shame.
Mind you, some of the action sequences are truly horrific and rather suspenseful to watch, especially when the wolfman runs amok against the obligatory Yorkshire villagers! ( and better still a Gypsy encampment), but in general I was disappointed by the whole Gothic romp thing.
Sorry Spencer! in the end I am glad I didn't fork out a pound for your autograph
6/10