Wednesday, 1 April 2015

End of Month Note.

I mentioned at the beginning of March that there’s an old saying in Britain:

March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.

This year it came in like a lion all right, but it went out more like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. On which note…

I was walking down the hill today, watching the sheep being rolled around the field by a force 9 gale like those bundles of grassy stuff you see rolling around the prairie in old westerns (I am exaggerating slightly, and it’s an odd fact that the only time I ever saw such rolling bundles of grassy stuff was on a dusty track in northern Quebec) when I was reminded of a horrible story from three winters ago.

We had a lot of snow that year, and one night the news programme carried a most upsetting item. A flock of sheep somewhere in Wales had been stranded in a field during a snow storm, and the snow had become so deep that they’d suffocated en masse. The emphasis was all on the farmer’s loss and the poor insurance companies suffering a lot of claims due to the inclement weather. Nobody seemed in the least concerned that a number of beautiful animals had gone to their deaths most unpleasantly.

That’s the sort of thing that makes me incline towards a reclusive attitude and implore the gods to allow me to spend my next incarnation somewhere a long way from here.

Meanwhile, T. Rex is still grumbling aggressively as I write, and the sheep in the field – which were actually braced against the blast and not rolling at all – will be giving birth to their lambs soon. Hello April.

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