Head In A Hole

There's a new movie out just now called The Sheep Detectives. In it, a bunch of sheep - alright, a flock of sheep then, if you want to be pedantic about it - investigate the mystery of the murder of the farmer who owns them. They know how to do this because the farmer was in the habit of reading them detective stories in the evening because that's a thing farmers do, just like sheep solve murder mysteries. Frankly the one is about as likely as the other.

I watched the trailer last week and it looked surprisingly amusing. By chance, the novel on which it's based came into my hands at work a few days later. I had a look at that as well and it seemed like it would be a fun read.

Do not let any of this supposed evidence fool you into thinking sheep are clever, though. This are fictional sheep. Real sheep are not so smart.

Not that I'm saying sheep are thick. Most animals are a lot more intelligent than they're given credit for and I'm sure sheep, collectively and individually, have the capacity for all kinds of wickedly canny mischief you might not imagine they were capable of. Anecdotal experience of all kinds of domestic animals suggest that's likely to be true. 

I can tell you a couple of things the average sheep is not bright enough to work out for herself, though:

1. It's a bad idea to put your head through a hole in a fence.
2. How to get your head out again if you ignored rule #1.

When Mrs Bhagpuss and I got up this morning, it looked like being a reasonably pleasant spring day. We neither of us had anything pressing to be getting on with, so we thought it might be a nice idea to take a flask of coffee and a couple of apples and go sit on top of a five thousand year old burial mound, since we happened to have one handy nearby.

Stony Littleton Long Barrow is one of the finest surviving examples of a neolithic stone and earth tomb anywhere in Britain but it's not exactly on any tourist trail. There are no signs to direct you there and even if you have an idea where it is, to get to it you have to drive down a single track road with no passing places. 

When you get there, there's a parking space for about four cars and the enterprising small farmer opposite (I mean he farms on a small scale, not that he's the size of a Borrower.) has put out a couple of benches. You can buy an ice cream from him and sit on one of the benches to eat it, assuming he happens to have opened his little hut that day.

We've been there a few times. It's a lovely walk, over the bridge and up the long hill to the barrow. Once there, you have a fine view of the surrounding countryside, which is to say some fields, some more fields and some more fields after that. 

The barrow itself is amazing. I'd show you a photograph but I didn't take any today and I can't find any of the ones I've taken on previous visits. I bet it's on the internet though. Just hold on moment... Ah yes, here's the English Heritage page. And it's on Wikipedia. 

And up there's a picture of the sign at the site itself. I took that this morning, when I thought I might be writing this post.

Take my word for it, anyway. The barrow's a lot more impressive in person than in photographs because you can crouch down and shuffle inside it and get an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia even if you don't normally have a problem with confined spaces. It's worth the long walk up the hill just for the relief of getting out of the damn thing and back into the sunshine.

But this isn't really a post about the barrow. It's about the walk back. 

We had Beryl with us but she was on her lead most of the time because the entire hillside as far as you could see in any direction was rife with sheep. There are often sheep there but this was way more sheep than usual. 

I quite like sheep. They look decorative, they're non-threatening and they nearly always get out of the way when they see you coming. Not like cows, which sometimes express a disturbing degree of interest and have been know, all too frequently, to trample people to death. My aunt and uncle once had to jump into a hedge to avoid being trampled. They're both dead now, although not from bovine trampling, I'm pleased to say.

As for horses... do not get me started on horses. I grew up with horses in the fields next to my house and
you do not want to go into any field that has horses in it, trust me. Horses have a very peculiar sense of humor, which includes running at people as fast as they can to see how they react. Then they stand there and laugh at you when you run away or fall over. At least they do if you're lucky. If not, they trample you, too.

So much for horses and cows. Sheep, though, sheep are fine, so long as you don't have a dog with you. Not that the sheep go for the dog. More the dog goes for the sheep and it all ends in tears and/or a fatality, usually for the sheep but sometimes for the dog, if the farmer happens to be out and about and has brought his gun and in my experience no self-respecting farmer leaves the house without a gun.

Beryl is not a dog for running after anything bigger than a squirrel and sheep are the size to her that elephants would be to us so we're not worried about her doing them any actual harm. Still, some sheep get scared by any dog, even small ones, the way elephants are supposedly scared of mice and we don't want to scare the sheep or get Beryl shot so she's always on her lead if sheep are around.

On the way back, though, we went along a high ridge and the sheep were hundreds of yards away along the bottom of the valley so we let her amble along behind us for a while until I spotted one, lone sheep ahead of us, apparently grazing in the hedge. There's always one that has to be different.

I put Beryl back on her lead and we were about to go around the sheep when we realized this sheep wasn't being different. This sheep was stuck.

The dim-witted creature had apparently tried to reach some particularly tasty leaf just out of reach in the hedge and now it had its head firmly wedged in a square of wire. As we got near, it thrashed about a bit and tried to force its way further into the hedge, which wasn't a great plan. Mrs Bhagpuss took control of Beryl, who was starting to express some interest, and I went to see if I could unstick the poor creature.

Sheep aren't exactly wild about about letting people they don't know come within arm's reach but this one didn't have a lot of choice. I've rarely had the opportunity to test it before but it seems as though, if they really can't get away, they go completely still, presumably in the hope of being taken for a particularly fuzzy boulder. Or maybe it was my soothing tone.

The sheep stood dead still and let me pull her head this way and that, even move her ears about, as I tried to see if there was any way I could maneuver her loose. There was not. I bent the wire as far in all directions as it would go but it was obvious the head that had gone in with sharp end first was not coming back out with the thick end leading. Same principle as a lobster pot, presumably.

We spent a while thinking about it but there was clearly no way to shift the sheep without a pair of wire-cutters. We decided we'd best leave the sheep be and see if we could find the farmer to let them know. We were pretty sure the small farm at the bottom of the hill had nothing to do with the sheep on the hills but there was another big house right in the fields where the sheep were roaming so we carried on down the path to to try there.

That turned out to be a bust, No-one home but a dog. I don't think is was a sheepdog, either, although I only heard it barking.

We worked out way back to where we began and I tried
the other farm. The one that sells the ice-cream. There was someone there but as we'd suspected they didn't own the sheep. Or any sheep. 

Still, even being the nearest person to some sheep comes with its own responsibilities. The chap's face did fall a bit when I explained the problem. "Oh, not again..." he said. 

He cheered up a bit when I asked him if he had a pair of wire-cutters I could borrow. "I don't mind going back up and cutting her loose if you can lend me a pair", I said, although what I was really thinking was "What a jolly jape! I hope he lets me do it!" In my head, I was nine years old and it was an Enid Blyton story...

The farmer (Not really a farmer at all, in fact, just someone with a couple of alpacas and a horse in a field behind his house. Yes, alpacas. Surprisingly common around these parts...) offered Mrs Bhagpuss a coffee while she waited and I trudged back up the hill to the sheep which, when I finally got there, was no more glad to see me than it was before.

Once it had calmed down a bit and resigned itself to being eaten by wolves or whatever it thought was going to happen, I was able to cut through the fence-wire with the cutters and watch the sheep just stand there as if nothing had changed. 

It turned out she wasn't just being extra-specially suspicious or even extraordinarily dim; she'd also managed to get some wool on her head wound round a strand of barbed wire because whoever fenced the field obviously though a thick hedge and a sturdy fence didn't make it nearly secure enough, so they'd run a strand of barbed wire between the two as well, just to be on the safe side.

I can tell you now that you can't cut wool with wire cutters. Or I can't, anyway. Luckily, with a bit of encouragement the sheep gave a mighty shake of her head and tugged herself loose. Then she scampered off, bleating. 

It would be nice to think she was saying thank-you but she bloody well wasn't. She never looked my way once, just towards the rest of her pals, all of whom had abandoned her to her fate without a second thought. She was either yelling at them to ask what the hell they thought they were playing at or trying to warn them about the crazy human with the metal claws.

For me, it was back down the hill to return the wire-cutters and accept a cup of coffee. Beryl and Mrs Bhagpuss had watched the whole thing from a comfortable distance. Beryl, reportedly, was not impressed with my heroism, although apparently she was quite interested to see me go and come back.

Dogs are easily amused. Sheep are dim. Life goes on. 

Taking The Temperature Of The Room...

Let me begin by thanking Redbeard and and Nimgimli for their kind comments on yesterday's post and by re-assuring them and anyone else who may have thought I was under the weather - in a figurative rather than a literal sense - that I'm perfectly fine! This is what you get for trying to come over all mysterious and enigmatic. It just confuses people and gives them the wrong idea, as I'm sure any goth will tell you.

Let's begin at the beginning of what I'm afraid is going to be a very dull and disappointing story. That's kind of why I dressed it up as a mystery in the first place.

Back in December, a close friend of ours departed on a six-week trip to India, leaving behind her hamster, Captain Flapjack. She's the person who looks after Beryl twice a month, on the Saturdays when Mrs Bhagpuss and I are both out at work, so of course we were more than happy to return the favor and look after the Captain while she was away.

I had a few hamsters as a child and we had a couple here when the children were... well, when they were children... and I don't recall taking any special care or precautions with them, other than trying to make sure they didn't get out of their cages and try to set up home under the floorboards. They always seemed like fairly straightforward, low-maintenance pets. Then again, now I come to think of it, none of those hamsters lived all that long...

I also have no idea now what sub-species of hamster they would have been but I suspect it might have been the Siberian variety because we certainly never made any special arrangements concerning the temperature of their living accomodation. Jack, on the other hand, is a Syrian hamster and they really don't like the cold. (Actually, I just checked and both kinds of hamster have the same temperature requirements so I imagine that explains why the ones I had as a kid never made it through a whole year...)

According to most sources, the approximate comfortable temperature range for a hamster is between 18c-22c. The parameters vary a bit but anything below 15c is likely to trigger a hibernation response, which can be the last you see of them. 

This did seem like a potential problem, given that there's no room in our house that keeps a constant temperature, day and night. We tend to just put the heating on in the rooms we use, when we're in them and my idea of a pleasant, indoor temperature in the winter is anything in double figures. I just put on more clothes if I start to feel chilly.

The only room in our extremely poorly insulated, very drafty house that maintains anything close to a stable temperature is the back bedroom that has the airing cupboard with the hot water tank in it. It's always the room with the highest ambient temperature in the winter, although that generally means more like 10c than 20c. 

Still, it seemed like the best option, not least because it also has a four-foot long, wooden blanket chest, made, so legend goes, by my great-grandfather. It's big enough that I used to hide inside it as a child. 

That would make an excellent base for the large cage the Captain was going to live in, a brand new one with escape-proof all-glass walls because if he ever got loose in our house he would certainly never be seen again.

In mid-December the cage was constructed, the hamster was collected and transferred to his holiday home, and a thermostatically-controlled heater was installed to ensure a constant temperature suitable for his needs. Our friend departed for India and we were left to look after the Captain.

All of this, by chance, co-incided with one of the warmest spells of winter weather for more than twenty years. Where we live it felt more like April than December. We had the heating off most of the time and we were even able to leave the back door open so Beryl could go into the garden when she felt like it. 

I had already moved my own operations from the upstairs room I use in the Spring and Summer to the downstairs room I use when the weather gets cold. The upstairs room is much nicer in warm weather but the downstairs room has a gas fire and gets the winter sun through the big windows. It was so warm though, relatively speaking, that I hadn't even needed to put the gas fire on, most days.

That was the status quo all through Christmas and the New Year until, a few days ago, the jet stream shifted and, after dumping what felt like a month's worth of rain on us in a couple of days, the temperature dropped to just above zero as high pressure established itself over the country, meaning it was going to stay cold for a good while.

This was when I had the bright idea of saving some money by sharing my accommodation with the Captain. Since his room had to be heated anyway, why waste money heating another room downstairs, just so I could sit at the computer screen without getting hypothermia?

I'd already been experimenting with using the laptop as a remote terminal, slaved to my hugely more powerful PC via Splashtop. In the summer, Beryl doesn't like to go to bed too early so I'd been using the set-up to sit in the back garden after the sun went down, doing this and that on the laptop while she enjoyed the cool of the evening. It seemed like a good idea to reverse that for my own benefit , sitting upstairs in the warm with the laptop, while my PC did the heavy lifting downstairs in the cold - which of course is the kind of temperature PCs prefer anyway.

And it would have worked too if it hadn't been for those pesky kids a few unexpected technical difficulties. I'd completely forgotten the space bar and some of the letters on the last row of the laptop's built-in keyboard weren't working any more. I mean, the thing is old enough to be in a museum so it's not surprising but it had still slipped my mind.

Worse, I'd also forgotten the only spare, "working" keyboard I had lying around also has a dodgy space bar. It works but only when it wants to. I spent almost as long going through yesterday's post, adding spaces between words where they were missing, as I did writing it. 

Finally, to cap it all, it wasn't until I was playing The Dungeon of Nahelbeuk on the laptop yesterday that I realised the wifi mouse was faulty too! I swear the right button worked last time I used it but it's completely non-functional now.

All of that would probably have been enough to make the prospect of writing a long post like this extremely unappealing but you can add physical discomfort to the list. The room the Captain is in has a double bed in it and along with that massive blanket chest the furniture takes up about 85% of the floor space. 

There's no feasible place to put a desk or a table, even assuming I had one to spare, so about the only option is to sit on the bed with the laptop on one of those bed-tables with the folding legs. Mrs. Bhagpuss bought one a while ago to craft on but never used it because it was too awkward. I can see her point, now.

And that's about where we came in yesterday, when I'd been putting off writing a post all day because of the sheer inconvenience, awkwardness and annoyance of the whole thing. As I explained, I didn't want to skip a day, so I thought I'd bang out a very quick apology, stuff in a couple of pictures and an annoying song and hope to think of a better solution tomorrow.

Even I could see that would make for a pretty thin post, so I added a little mystery at the start and left the details vague so as to make it sound more interesting. I can see, reading it back, that it does sound a bit like I'm not feeling up to posting much due to some kind of health issue (Mention of being in bed, lack of energy...) but in fact it was merely a combination of parsimony and laziness.

As you may have guessed from the length of this post, I am now seated in my usual spot downstairs. I went so far as to put the fire on for a while to warm the room up so I could get this done. Captain Flapjack will be going back to his own home in not much more than a couple of weeks so my new plan, at least for as long as the cold weather lasts, is to use the PC downstairs when I'm posting, then return to the warmth of the upper hamster-room to play games, web-browse, watch Netflix and do all the other things that feel quite comfortable on the laptop.

The whole episode has made it quite clear to me, however, that I really ought to get a new laptop. And a new WiFi mouse. And a new spare keyboard. And a few other things. Saving money by never replacing anything only takes you so far...

Also, that blanket chest could probably be put to better use than storing a bunch of old jumpers no-one's ever going to wear again...

Explorer Archetype

Stupid noobs can't even spell noobs

Mrs Bhagpuss and I are just back from yet another trip to Spain. Spain and France, in fact, since we flew to Bordeaux and drove down into Northern Spain through Aquitaine, the flattest place I have ever seen.

We did a lot of driving, as we always do. Well, I did a lot of driving and Mrs Bhagpuss did a lot of looking out the window. Sometimes when we go traveling we don't talk about gaming at all, but this time it came up quite a lot. After more than a decade of MMOs it seems we're still both pretty keen on them, still ready for more.

That's gnomish technology or I'm a dutchman

We observed once again how blurred the line is between what we do in MMOs and "real" life. When we go away we find it very hard to go to one place and stay there. We're always moving on, looking to see what's over the next hill, what the next town has to show us. It's quite astonishing how radically landscape and environment can change in just a few miles, a few minutes. Almost as though you crossed a zone line.

Three hour quest to find this place half an hour from where we started

Then there are the repeatable quests. We don't kill ten goats (although when you're stuck behind a herd of them meandering along the road for half an hour it's a quest you might willingly accept) but since we rarely book any accommodation in advance every day ends in a quest to find somewhere to stay. Occasionally that turns into an epic.

We see plenty of evidence of non-human races, too.

There's trolls in them thar hills

Parts of Aquitaine were clearly settled by halflings although the endless forests suggest the continuing, elusive presence of elves.

Who might live in a castle like this?

And then there are the castles. So many castles.







I subscribe strongly to the philosophy that we only have one life and all of it is real. I try not to differentiate qualitatively between virtual and physical experiences. In the end, they all happen inside my head. If I had the time and the resources to travel all the time, I'd travel all the time. Wait a moment...that's what I do!