All that comes with it

At Amy’s suggestion we went to the train station to meet Kerry coming back to work. Amy was very excited when her mummy stepped onto the platform and she flung herself at her for the kind of cuddle you can only get from a small child. Since it was such a pleasant evening we decided to go out to eat and ended up in the Railway, a very pleasant pub in the nearby village of Marsden. I wont bore you with the menu but the meal was very nice and the fellow patrons were extremely tolerant of an excitable two year old who would rather use the pool cue chalk to make her fingers blue than eat.

Amy and I devised a rather challenging obstacle course in the beer garden outside while Kerry finished off her meal (I, of course, had finished first due to my ability to suspend my breathing whilst I am shovelling food down my gullet. A skill that is possibly genetic as my brother has similar abilities). Amy’s getting increasingly more adventurous in her physical exploits. She no longer shirks at the prospect of pegging it along a bench then flinging herself off a wall into my arms. I appear to be slowly beating her self-preservation instincts out of her, which can only be a good thing right?

Once we had all done Kerry and Amy drove back home while I walked the dogs, who had been in the back of the car, along the 3 miles of canal path back to Slaithwaite. Apparently photographers call the hour before sunset “the magic hour” as the light is so good. I’m no photographer, and my equipment is limited to the battered and scratched lens of my mobile phone, but the light certainly did look beautiful and, combined with the sound bird song and the smell of cut grass, the whole journey back was full of serenity. Aside from the dogs continually rolling in horse shit that is.

Amy seems to have gotten over her fear of farm animals. The fear was relatively sensible She made the logical assessment that cows, goats, sheep and the like are quite a bit bigger than her and, judging by the frenzied way they try to get at the bags of feed at the community farm, they want to gobble her up. We went to Temple Newsam on Tuesday and the sight of the newborn lambs and piglets was enough for her to overcome her anxieties. She was still a little scared of the adult pigs, but she fed the goats, sheep and even cows. She was so proud of her feeding technique that she was still talking about it on Wednesday night (“put your hand flat mummy”).

We are fairly regular visitors to Temple Newsam. We’ve been favouring Cannon Hall recently, but Kerry and I have just got a card that allows us free entry so I think our allegiance will switch back. Despite having been a fair number of times, this time I came across a room I hadn’t seen before. This isn’t really all that surprising - about half of the farm is dedicated to rare breeds and the other is a sort of museum of agricultural equipment. As interesting as the development from horse drawn to mechanical ploughs probably is, I tend to just want to scratch the pig’s backs or avoid getting my shirt eaten by the goats. This previously unexplored room lured me in by a big sign stating “Chicks”. In actual fact this was inaccurate as the room actually contained ducklings and poults (baby turkeys, I had to look that up). I contacted the advertising standards authority about this disinformation but they have so far appeared strangely uninterested.

The ducklings were very appealing as ducklings generally are, but the thing that really impressed me was that the whole room was a huge dovecote. I took a picture on my phone but it doesn’t really do it justice. I never realised how important pigeons must have been to the food supply of these stately homes. I certainly wouldn’t want to eat one but I guess I’m just used to the urban variety.

Kerry and Amy and her parents are up in Scotland visiting her grandparents and associated family. I was invited but I’ve had to work over Easter weekend and besides, I can’t understand a word that they say. There’s an excellent Proclaimers song called “Throw the R away” that is all about ignorant Englishmen claiming that they can’t understand thick Scottish accents. I certainly don’t want to be “full of John Bull” but I have real problems. Even Kerry says that she takes a few hours to adjust.

I’ve really missed them to be honest. Because I work 9-hour shifts and the dogs aren’t used to being home alone for that length of time we decided to put them in kennels. So every night I’ve been coming home to an empty house. Having a bit of space to myself has had a few advantages. I’ve done quite a bit of work in the garden and have been able to entertain myself with my new Vic Reeve’s Big Night Out DVD (which I don’t think is really Kerry’s cup of tea). The biggest adjustment I’ve had to make is trying to remember that if I drop food on the floor the dogs aren’t there to pounce on it. This, combined with my rather predictable nutritional decline from cooked meals to Doritos and Easter eggs, has meant that I’m going to have to get down to some serious vacuuming before they get back.