Ten days after the magnificent Cumberland Angus Bull was taken to Ayres slaughterhouse to provide the main course for the Slow Food Burns Night dinner (see posting 30th December 2009), a replacement bull calf has been born. The sire is our Cumberland White Bull (aka Whitebred Shorthorn), the dam one of our Aberdeen Angus cows. The calf, which has the same pure black coat as its sibling, is exceptionally large and promises to be just as magnificent. The mother managed to jump the five bar gate of the barn to get to be with the rest of the herd outside, so we are temporarily feeding the calf by hand, as this video shows.
Archive for January, 2010
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
New Born Cumberland Angus Bull
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Paloma Faith “Upside Down”
‘Sometimes life can taste so sweet
When you slow it down’
From ‘Upside Down’ by Paloma Faith
It’s not just the Heroes of She who have failed to make it big in 2009, very few British acts broke through last year. Apart from reality TV acts only Florence + The Machine have surpassed 300,000 sales in the year. 2009’s winner of the BBC’s “Sound Of” poll, Little Boots, was only 120th in the ranking of album sales. The new artist who I adore and who is bound to be a sensation in 2010 is Paloma Faith, whose “Upside Down” from her album “Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful?” is set to become the Slow Life anthem. This video clip show her singing it on the Jools Holland show. Incidentally, since my posting about Paolo Nutini’s “Sunny Side Up” on December 27th his album has shot from No 15 right to the top of the charts- after 31 weeks in the chart , no less.
Monday, January 4th, 2010
Democracy in Action
A massive pile of papers from Defra has arrived on my desk with the new rules for the Electronic Identification of Sheep (EID) which has just come into law. When these proposals were first mooted a year ago they were fiercely opposed and their imposition is a bitter blow to sheep farmers. I have 200 Herdwick sheep at High Lowscales, some of them descended from the herd kept by Beatrix Potter. They are “hefted”, which means that they don’t stray from the land on which they were born. The new law means that all sheep born after 1st January this year must be fitted with two identifying tags, one electronic and one non-electronic. The new law will benefit no-one but will impose a heavy burden in time and money on farmers, auctioneers and abattoirs. This week’s Farmer’s Guardian said: “EID has been branded disproportionate and damaging to the UK farming industry, which fought a desperate battle, backed by the UK government, to stave it off”.
If this proposal was strongly opposed by the UK government how on earth, you may ask, has it become law? It is also opposed by the Conservatives, the Lib-Dems, the National Farmer’s Union and every other pressure group in farming. A letter to our Member of Parliament was a complete waste of time because the law was imposed without a vote in Parliament and because there are no elected representatives of the European Commission who imposed it.
This is depressing, but not nearly as depressing as the thought that the pending election won’t do anything to change this sad state of affairs, whoever wins.