Farmyard Fridays #11: One Sheep Five Ways

I've mentioned before in Farmyard Fridays that grown sheep can tend to seem a little boring in comparison to their offspring. They definitely don't have the charm and personality that, for instance, goats or donkeys have, at least on the surface. However, I feel I've been maligning the species for a while now, and it's unfair. They may not have the same quirks and foibles of their caprine cousins, but they do have the edge over them in one way: they are super super useful.

Okay, so pigs are notoriously a useful farmyard feature. You can, so I have been informed, use every part of a pig in cooking. This is a pretty hideous thing to consider and I try not to most of the time. Sheep, however, are equally if not more useful, for the following reasons. I give you One Sheep Five Ways - how you can maximise the use of your sheep.

1. Obviously, there is one thing staring you in the face about sheep, at least for half of the year. They have a seriously epic fleece which has been farmed for perhaps as long as 8000 years. Being able to make clothes out of an animal and still retain the animal does set them apart from pretty much every other farmyard creature; skinning a cow for leather does tend to render the cow null and void. What's more, the fleece will grow back and you can do the same again the next year. This may seem obvious but it is pretty incredible when you think about it. Sheep can go from this:

to this:

in sheer (!) seconds in the right hand. And from that can come so many useful things which we use without thinking about them: jumpers and socks and blankets and sheepskin rugs and this oh so useful and decorative set of figures.

(It's a knitted Archbishop of Canterbury! Like, how useful is that? God bless sheep.)

It doesn't stop with clothes though. Oh no. There's more that woolly fleece of goodness can offer up yet.

2. Lanolin. There's a word you'll have seen hundreds of times in your life, but I for couldn't say where I've seen it until recently. There are so many uses for this grease that it's hard to know where to start. Here's possibly the most common household lanolin product:

However, this waxy substance is also used in a variety of cosmetics, as lubricant for some musical instruments and to break in baseball mitts. It's pretty multi-purpose, and whilst some people are allergic to it, it's an extremely common ingredient in many products.

Lanolin is a grease found in the sebaceous glands of wool-bearing animals. Basically, it's the grease in a sheep's fleece. It can be squeezed out before the fleece is used for other purposes as we've already looked at above. So you can not only clothe yourself using your sheep, you can moisturise and generally prettify yourself too.

Your sheep isn't finished yet though. With a bit of training you can absolutely

3. Race your sheep. I think this pretty much speaks for itself. It's not the Grand National or the Derby but look!

It's sheep freaking racing! And jumping!

If this is not starting to make you want a sheep, I don't know if we'd ever be friends.

Of course, all of this requires some effort on your part. Shearing sheep is a skill and I imagine training a sheep to bounce over barrels isn't really a walk in the park. All of this is bound to make you hungry. So why not try

4. Milking your sheep. I know, it sounds disgusting, but sheep produce milk as any mammal does, and whilst goats' milk has been the increasingly popular alternative to cows' milk in recent years, sheep's milk is used in products such as feta, Roquefort and ricotta. It is significantly higher in fats, proteins and minerals than cows' milk, making it more calorific but perfect for cheese making. You can therefore have a munch on your homemade produce whilst wrestling your sheep around a racetrack. It will definitely give you energy.

And then, alas, the end comes to us all. When you've had enough of shearing and training and milking and generally tending to your sheep, you can always

5. Eat your sheep. Dependent upon the age of your sheep, you can produce lamb, hogget or mutton, and the organs are also popularly eaten as offal. Admittedly, it's not the most healthy meat around, with a nutritional profile to beef, but it is pretty tasty. It's very hard to look at this and not feel a tad peckish

And besides, if you want to raise up your next sheep friend, you'll need some fuel for the task ahead.

Farmyard Fridays Fact #11: Sheep are super super useful.

A sixth use for your sheep has come to light in the last week. Sandwiched nicely in between uses 4 and 5, comes this ingenious use for your sheep:

Shakhter Karagandy threatened with disciplinary proceedings over sheep sacrifice ritual before games

It may have worked for them; they did, after all, beat Celtic 2-0, so never rule this sixth use for your sheep out. It is, however, possibly a step too far for some of us, meaning that this particularly hypothetical sheep will be saved from this ritual.

This week's Farmyard Friday is absolutely inspired by a visit to West Lodge Rural Centre in Northamptonshire a couple of weeks ago which was frankly amazing and well worth a visit for anyone with or without children.

80 Books No.69: Z for Zachariah by Robert C O'Brien

In a weird coincidence, like Buddy, this book has links to my own school life as well as being a find in the book cupboard. I didn't read Z for Zachariah when I was at school, but we did do Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH written by the same author. And I hated it. Looking back, one has to wonder why I liked English so much because I pretty much hated all the books I did until GCSE - a trend which is kind of reflected in my own teaching to date. I just remember Mrs Frisby being so stupid and irritating so why I thought this would be any different is beyond me.

This was worse. I couldn't believe it was as bad as it got in the last seventy or so pages. Until that point I had sort of been bobbing along with it, feeling that it wasn't very suitable as a reader at school, but was actually quite interesting. Set in a post-nuclear world, it's the story of a girl who survives when everybody else doesn't and what happens when a strange man arrives. It is a slow starter but when he suffers from radiation poisoning it gets a bit more interesting. After that, it just becomes odd: he becomes all sinister and she is uneasy, but spends most of the rest of the novel detailing her efforts to plant crops and tend the land. I have to be honest in that I skim read the end of this and feel almost no guilt in doing so. I was so bored.

Disappointing and now I have to decide whether we keep the books or not. Whatever, they'll be buried away on a top shelf at the very most.

80 Books No.68: Buddy by Nigel Hinton

This book is a tale of two Bullens, a 13-year-old Bullen and a 26-year-old one. At 13, I hated this book when we did it at school. I remember loathing it and, having re-read it, I suspect I never even finished it, despite having to complete quite a bit of work on it. At 26, I found it in the school book cupboard and decided to re-read it because there's enough there for one class to do it and money's too tight to mention.

Thirteen years give me a bit of perspective and Buddy is not unfinishable. Indeed, in some ways, it is actually an alright book which tells a reasonably interesting story. It is pretty grim, with broken homes and poverty and criminality and general lack-of-fitting-in-ness. It is also reasonably dated now, in terms of situations and some attitudes towards different races (although this is frowned upon within the novel by the characters we sympathise with). It would need contextualising, but then so will the other texts I've ear-marked as being appropriate for year 7. It is now a book I would consider teaching which at least shows progress from when I was at school. It is also, however, yet another miserable book: why are all school set texts so depressing?

Also, check out that front cover. What on earth is wrong with Buddy's face in it? I mean, it does pretty much reflect the grim miserable-ness of the novel, but why is he green? It's such an odd front cover. Especially when you compare it with this more updated version:

Here, Buddy has been made older and, dare I say, more attractive? More like somebody off of Grange Hill circa 2000 than Byker Grove circa 1988. This is admirable in its attempt to appeal more to kids, but is also a little misleading.

There is apparently also a film. I'm imagining it to be something like a cross between Kes and those strange Look and Read BBC schools programmes in the 80s and 90s.

80 Books No.67: Why the Whales Came by Michael Morpurgo

I've spent some time over the last week or so tidying out the book cupboard at work (something that will hopefully be completed this week). It is impossible to believe how many books there are in there, some of them barely touched. Why the Whales Came is a reasonably old book, in comparison to my new purchase of The Hunger Games anyway. It is a Morpurgo classic, and for some reason kids seem to love Michael Morpurgo. I can't say as I entirely understand why, even after reading this book.

It is a short enough book with a decent enough story of two children in 1914 (why always the war, Morpurgo?) on the Isles of Scilly. Tales of curses and scary men had some correlation with things like To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a little fantastical, as I'm still not really sure 'why the whales came' apart from some curse that was apparently on the island. That was a little frustrating, but maybe I missed a key point.

The story was predictable and ended too neatly, but it was interesting enough whilst it lasted. Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm comes from the fact that I was reading it till 4am one night because I couldn't sleep. Bitter, mumble mumble mumble.

It's on my redesigned curriculum for this year anyway.

80 Books No 66: Uglies by Scott Westerfield

Those of you with eyes and a vague notion of the patterns in my reading can probably guess from simply looking at the book cover why this found itself from Asda's shelves into my trolley and to my house:
1) It references The Hunger Games and I loved The Hunger Games. This had several similarities to Suzanne Collins' trilogy, but as the cover says, actually came first.
2) It's YA in general which we already know I'm a little bit obsessed by.
3) It has a black front cover. Oh how I freaking love a black front cover.

So it was likely to be a hit. The general concept was also quite interesting without all of those elements: a world where judging people based on their looks has been eradicated by ensuring all people are turned 'pretty' at the age of 16 via extensive surgery. The Pretties then inhabit a different area than the Uglies and are subject to less stringent laws. Tally Youngblood is looking forward to becoming a Pretty until she meets Shay and is introduced to the world of the Smoke, an outlaw community where Uglies can live forever with the face they were born with.

Collins has obviously ripped quite a bit from Westerfield's idea here: the female character, the dystopian world, the burgeoning teenage relationships. However, Tally is a different kettle of fish from Katniss Everdeen, at least in some ways. Tally is happy to conform to society's expectations of her at first and only reluctantly challenges the status quo. However, in quite a bold move, Westerfield actually makes her quite unlikeable as a hero as she begins by intending to betray her friends. Yes, she overcomes this, but things still don't work out well. Katniss, whilst being a bit whiny at times, is at least admirable.

The novel dragged at first as it felt like so many other YA dystopian fictions I've read. It was when Tally left the city for the Smoke that it became more engaging and whilst the relationship with David was a little clumsy, the opening preview of Pretties at the end of the novel seemed to develop the story in a promising way. If I get the opportunity I'd probably read the rest of the series.

Uglies has also been optioned for a film, although it's a slow old process. Would be interesting see how exactly they'd cast it!

80 Books No.65: Until the Next Time by Kevin Fox

The amount of labels I've added to this post will demonstrate how hard this book was to categorise. I've hesitantly called it 'historical', although I'm not entirely sure 1970s Ireland and the Troubles are really consigned to the past; I've called it 'fantasy' due to the beliefs about and occurrences of reincarnation present throughout the narrative. I added 'thrilled' as Amazon categorises it as such. 'Romance' I'm definite about, as certain as I am that this is indeed a 'book'. This vein of uncertainties dogged me throughout the reading.

Sean Corrigan receives his uncle Michael's journal on his 21st birthday - an uncle he never knew about, if I remember correctly. This drags him from New York to rural Ireland to investigate what happened to his uncle in the 70s. The novel makes use of both Sean's 1996 first person narration and Michael's journal in order to tell the story. The author himself has said he found the dual narrative very easy to use as the voices of the characters were very similar and so was their story. This does, however, make it really rather confusing for the reader, an effect which was partially intended as the novel goes on to explore the idea that all of these characters have lived before and are doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes until they learn they lesson. In my opinion, it got a bit bogged down with this.

The confusing nature of the narrative meant this was quite a slow read for me, as part way through Michael's sections I'd have to remind myself that we were in the 1970s and he was on the run from US police, as opposed to Sean who seemed to have upped and left his life in America on a whim and some odd dreams. To confuse things further, Michael was frequently called 'Mickaleen' which was HIS uncle's (or great-uncles's) nickname - he'd been on the run from Irish nationalists. Then Sean was occasionally called 'Mickaleen' by people who'd known him when he was Michael...

I'd really recommend a flow chart if anybody else wants to try reading this. It was a fairly interesting story, certainly in its more 'historical' sections, although I preferred Sean as a character. The romantic element came in the form of Kate/Erin/whatever her name may now be, and Anne, who was a brilliantly drawn character. Fox really captured Irish conversation for me and the characters leapt off the page when they spoke. Definitely a writer who I would read something else from if it was slightly less convoluted and confusing.

80 Books No.64: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

After the less than thrilling read reads in the shape of On Beauty and The Bell, this book was frankly a breath of fresh air. It's a book I've seen in shops and heard talked about on a number of occasions and yet only got around to reading when I found it for 50p in a charity shop. The particular edition I bought was from World Book Night 2013, showing again its popularity. I have no idea why it has taken me so long to read this book.

The basic idea is that this book (and indeed the series which is now running to seven books with an eighth on the way) is an alternative 1985 where Wales has become a kingdom in its own right, the Crimean War has been going for over a century, airplanes have never been invented and everybody hates the ending to Jane Eyre. Special Operations law enforcement departments have been created in order to police things as diverse as time travel (The ChronoGuard) and the distribution and protection of books (LiteraTecs). Thursday Next is one such LiteraTec who finds herself investigating a crime where somebody is intent upon changing the plots of classic novels.

It sounds crazy and too far-fetched to be much good to anybody. What is so charming about Fforde's work is how aware it is of its own ridiculousness and the humour present throughout it. I read Shades of Grey last year (no, not the soft-porn series - though I did read that too), another Fforde novel where the future civilisation bases its class system upon the colours people can see. Another bonkers idea, but made entertaining through the wit and skill with which the author writes. How he comes up with his ideas, I have no idea, as he's included so many neat little details just for the sake of including them: the revival of dodos, for example, an aspect I really enjoyed.

The aspects of time travel and the preoccupation with literature made this a really entertaining read for me, and I'm interested in reading the rest of the Thursday Next series, as well as his Nursery Crimes series, where famous nursery rhymes are developed into real crimes and put on trial. There were probably bad aspects of the novel, but I'm ignoring them: I really enjoyed this.

80 Books No.63: The Bell by Iris Murdoch

Like with On Beauty, I was trying to lift my literary level with this read as well as get a clearer view of the A Level reading list. From the blurb, this seemed as though it would be slightly more worthy than some of my recent reads, probably better written and perhaps even a 'best read ever' award-winning book.

Oh. Dear. God.

I will start by being positive. The Bell is not unreadable. It's not inaccessible or written in a foreign tongue or talking about things that the ordinary lay-person would not understand. Admittedly I had to use a dictionary for some words ('rebarbative' for example) but I don't understand most of what Irvine Welsh is writing about and I really enjoyed Trainspotting and Glue. The Bell is not indecipherable like so much of these two novels.

But gosh it was tedious. The description of the novel on the back suggested it wasn't quite going to be in Dan Brown territory of constant cliff-hangers, and I can live with that; I quite like an introspective novel. There was no suggestion here that car chases were involved or somebody would be murdered on every other page. The plot was reasonably straightforward: a lay community filled with random misfits set against the arrival of a new bell for the attached abbey. It was never going to be Bad Boys.

The characters in this novel seemed to suffer from a case of the Hamlets, as they dithered and prevaricated for pages. Dora left her husband for months before the novel even began, then returned, then disappeared again for a day, and never actually spoke to him. I know this is set in a very different time from now, but she had no issue with actually walking out on her husband, something I'm sure would have been frowned upon in those days, but to actually challenge his authority was beyond her. Toby was the young ingénue (or at least the male version) who briefly dabbled in more adult things but spent most of the novel capering around like a Labrador puppy. Michael's whole life seemed to be typified by great indecision apart from the terrible decisions he made because he was incapable of connecting his brain to his trousers. The only characters who made any real decisive acts, Catherine and Nick, were denounced as crazy and not really allowed a voice in the novel. Even Paul, Dora's husband, was judged as a bully and frightened her; frankly, he was married to her so was putting up with a hell of a lot anyway.

Perhaps this novel is a case of judging it outside of its time, as with its subjects of infidelity, homosexuality, religious questioning and mental health, it was quite ahead of the game. Likely it may have held some more intrigue at the time, hence all the praise for its author. Against today's offerings though, it was slow and actually lacked the introspection I thought it would have. Dora's (in)actions were never, for instance, really explained beyond the view of another character that she was a 'bitch'. Whole chapters were concerned with her and she never came across as anything other than an airhead. Indeed, it was almost as though the narrator disliked her - something I can't exactly blame them for.

It's not that The Bell was an especially bad novel. It had a bit more depth to it than books such as Once Upon a Prince (yes, I'm still reeling from that one). It was just such a nothing that I'm gobsmacked.

I'm genuinely starting to wonder if it is me and not the books I'm reading.

80 Books No.62: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

In an attempt to raise my intellectual profile in this challenge, and to also expand upon my knowledge of recommended A Level reads, I dived back into the world of Zadie Smith. I tried her debut White Teeth last year. Interestingly, I read it last August, so almost exactly a year ago, and it took me eight days. My thoughts were:

"I enjoyed this for the most part although I found it a bit of a slog towards the end."

 

These thoughts would very much tally with my thoughts about On Beauty, except I found it a slog in fits and starts. It was a pretty straightforward idea, about 2 families who have opposing ideas on life and whose patriarchs especially disliked each other. From here they get entangled with each other. It was, for the most part, a decent book, and given it's won a range of awards, I probably shouldn't deign to believe I know better than literary experts.

 

I think my main issue was that there were no characters I especially liked. Jerome was good but a bit of a drip and so a pretty boring character. His younger brother Levi was entertaining and a better character, but too irritating to be likeable. Howard was pathetic. Probably this is part of the whole postmodern style which Smith is lauded for - nobody is a pin-downable type and all perceptions are fluid and transient. And it's odd, because I am totally loving the TV show Revenge and almost everybody in that is evil and devious and actually rather unpleasant. I think in On Beauty though, the plot wasn't quite entertaining enough to override that. Plus it was billed as being amusing and I didn't find it especially so.

 

Still, it was certainly better than my next read...

 

 

(The Return of) Farmyard Fridays #10: Devil-Cat

Before I begin, a little musical number to celebrate.

Farmyard Fridays is back, perhaps not regularly, but at least for this week and at some stage in the future. It has been almost four months since the last Farmyard Friday, and it would therefore obviously seem appropriate to pick up where we left off in April: cats.

Cats are very topical given that one paid a nocturnal visit to my room last week, entirely uninvited and unwelcome at 1.30am. Since then I have slowly boiled in my bedroom at night because I'm now too terrified to open the windows any further than a crack. This is probably now Cats 4 Humans 0, only this time I'm almost irritated by this.

Being afraid of cats is a reasonably common occurrence, or at least a dislike of felines is something I come across quite regularly. People don't like their attitude, their eyes, their general demeanour. It has to be said, they can be very huffy. Gatecrasher Cat, for instance, after falling out my bedroom window sort of huffed around and acted like I was the one being unreasonable. As I covered in April, a perception of cats as being evil can be traced back to Pope Innocent VIII. This view has been developed over the ages to encompass all sorts of things.

This is a Farmyard Friday Fact, but is perhaps rather more tied up in myth and legend than biological fact. However, I think exploring some of the myths around animals is equally as interesting as knowing why goats have rectangular pupils so I am going to plough on because, after all, The Only Way is Bullen.

One myth surrounding cats (and one that did flash through my mind last week when I was inches from Gatecrasher Cat's face) is that they will lie on top of sleeping babies and smother them. It's unclear whether this is actually true or not; I've never read of anybody this has happened to. There have been some scientific(ish) explanations given, such as cats smelling milk or liking the warmth of the baby. However, perhaps a more sociological explanation is possible. To understand it fully, let's go via The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (well it's about a cat, sort of...) where we learn of the background to the White Witch:

"But she's no Daughter of Eve. She comes of your father Adam's...first wife, her they called Lilith. And she was one of the Jinn."

Mr Beaver, Chapter 8.

 

Yes, Adam's first  wife, Lilith. No, don't reach for your Old Testament; you won't find her (believe me, I've tried). Lilith is a figure who first appears in a different religious text, the Babylonian Talmud, a female demon. She sort of ducks in and out of myth and legend until she reappears in Jewish folklore in about the 700s AD as Adam's first wife created out of the earth. From there many myths grow up about Lilith, such as how she mated with an archangel and refused to return to Adam and the Garden of Eden. Suffice to say, the divorce proceedings were edited out of Genesis.

 

In Spain, Jewish folklore developed to see Lilith become a black vampire cat who sucked the blood from sleeping babies. By any standards, she was a busy woman, especially one made primarily out of mud or sand. Also, infinitely more exciting sounding than Eve, but that's by the by. The important thing here, though, to bring us back to the reason we're all here, is that idea of a black cat being somehow connected to demons and the Devil. Here, perhaps, is the reason why people believe cats may smother babies in their sleep. It does sound fairly unlikely, but then so does people burning cats on the say so of the Pope, so never doubt the power of religion in changing  our perception of cats (or indeed any animal - I say again, wait for the Farmyard Fridays Christmas Special).

 

Anyway. Farmyard Friday Fact #10: The suspicions of cats smothering babies in their sleep can probably be traced back to the myth of Lilith in Spanish-Jewish folklore.

 

But, you know, what he says...

 

 

Gratuitous cute cat pic:

 

 





80 Books No.61: The Queen Must Die by K A S Quinn

This book was similar in concept to King of Shadows in as much as a modern teenager (both American now I think about it) whose life is in some way unsatisfactory travels through time to a point he/she is interested in. He/she then interacts with a number of famous historical figures and is involved in some drama before a return home to his/her own life where he/she realises the lessons he/she has learned.

I won't apologise for the spoiler above by the way; The Queen Must Die is the first in the Chronicles of the Tempus series, so of course Katie and co were always going to survive to live another day. This isn't Game of Thrones.

I sound incredibly cynical and I don't mean to, because I really enjoyed this. From the very beginning it was engaging and captivating as Quinn has created a very likeable character in Katie. She did adapt to being in Victorian England even quicker than Nat in King of Shadows but it was a little less noticeable here. I also really liked the inclusion of Princess Alice and James the doctor's son, and they formed a nice little trio at the heart of the story. The big background story involving the Tempus, which will presumably be explored further in the following books, added another level to the novel which Cooper's novel sort of lacked for me.

I enjoyed this novel so much I even tried to get into reading A N Wilson's The Victorians again. This came to a crushing defeat part way through Chapter 5 as I discovered again that non-fiction and me don't get on. This is something I may have to address in 2014.

However, a solid children's/teen novel which I would probably recommend as further reading for anybody who enjoyed King of Shadows for the time travel aspect.

I'm concerned by how often I've googled 'The Queen Must Die' as part of this blog entry though; MI5 will be at my door shortly. MI6, however, I could get on board with.

Oh yeah, Queen of Tenuous, that's me.