deezo2

@White1939D True. I’ve got arthritis in places I didn’t know I had places a few years ago.

Old age: Even walking a short distance now seems a very long way.

Dunwich

Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer, volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz in 1940 to gather intelligence and organise Resistance. He escaped after 2.5 years, wrote the first detailed report on the Holocaust, and fought in the Warsaw Uprising. Will you remember him?

@LozzaFox Gone from unfunny to possibly certifiable. She’s borderline barmy.

Unpleasant woman. Would Be spurned in normal society.

@countrymousie @AndyWoodturner @AitkinshareHugs I remember the yellow hammers in full song and lots of different birds. The first time I’d heard a nightingale and a nightjar years ago.

@countrymousie @AndyWoodturner @AitkinshareHugs Yes. So true. The avocets were bred and released there. They’d been extinct here for nearly 100 years. So many summer visitors breeding there. Rare plants. I’ve known it since the 60s

Fuck. Dunwich heath is burning. The smoke is beginning to cover the fields behind me. I hope they get in under control before it gets to the cottages

@GardenerFliss Wool shops not workshops!

@GardenerFliss I’ve knitted all my life, since I was five and there were workshops in every high street or I could buy mail order from the mills. Not easy to find now. Over half the stuff sold as knitting wool isn’t. It’s acrylic or polyester.

Every sheep in the UK has to be shorn for its welfare. There is no choice. Yet the heartbreaking reality is that it often costs more to shear a sheep than the fleece is worth. So tonnes of beautiful British wool are treated as waste, burned, buried or composted, while we fill our wardrobes with synthetic fibres made from oil that shed microplastics into our rivers and seas. It feels as though somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten the value of the things nature gives us so generously. British wool is warm, breathable, biodegradable, renewable and grown every single year by animals already grazing our countryside. It deserves to be treasured, not thrown away. Perhaps the answer isn’t to produce more. Perhaps it’s to remember what we’ve always had, and start valuing natural materials, skilled craftsmanship and the people who produce them once again.

@TaplinMarg1429 @ColinSpenc4257 We used to get the blackboard ruler across the hands. And a hard slap around the head. The whole class if no one owned up for some imagined misdemeanour

@CookO2 @ColinSpenc4257 When you look back some of them were very cruel weren’t they, they seemed to get pleasure from hurting little kids, kids nowadays haven’t a clue what school used to be like,

Who Remembers.

@muddymuddymum I hope blue tongue does not spread. Terrible disease

Stavros, the Suffolk ram has had his blood tests and a ram MOT with the vet today. He's a very sweet, quiet boy and she thinks he's lovely. While she was here, she mentioned there are a lot of suspected cases of bluetongue in Cornwall atm, and a few confirmed cases 1

@AndyWoodturner @countrymousie @AitkinshareHugs Oh how awful for those poor animals. I hope the sanctuary is really safe now. But it’s a disaster for wildlife. Minsmere is such an important place. Ground nesting birds.

@CookO2 @countrymousie @AitkinshareHugs I had a call last night to say the sanctuary was safe, but reports of three horses killed, and donkeys suffered burns...but haven't been able to confirm this.

@CoeurdeFrance_ @ChjaraStella13 Well if they are a breeder they need to be closed down. Several of those dogs look like they have severe untreated skin conditions.

@ChjaraStella13 .

Mais il faut être la pire des saloperies pour laisser ses 14 chiens de chasse enfermés dans un chenil en pleine forêt durant un incendie 🤬🤬! Merci une fois de plus à nos pompiers toujours présents pour sauver des vies 🙏🏻

@AndyWoodturner @countrymousie @AitkinshareHugs Any news about the horses ?

@countrymousie @AitkinshareHugs I hope they're wrong, but I just had a call and was told some of the donkeys have been burnt.

@SamaHoole This stupidity needs to be reversed. It’s very much a welfare issue. Fleeces don’t stop growing. Sheep will be attacked by flystrike. Maggots hatch in the fleece and start to eat the sheep alive. We don’t have time to mess about.

The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave. The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it. Understand what is walking out. Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long. The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour. Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet. Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable. Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers. Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.

@TaplinMarg1429 @ColinSpenc4257 I used to get a hard smack if I didn’t drink it. Horrible teacher

@ColinSpenc4257 I hated it and we was made to drink it and I used to end up crying when I was 5 or 6, teachers were not very nice in the early 50s ,

@ColinSpenc4257 I hated it. It had been sitting by the radiator for hours so had sour lumps in it. I hated milk then as I do now.

@AdeysAlthorp Oh it’s lovely. Happy Birthday

Birthday card from one of my terriers made me laugh today.🤣 Conservation@althorp.com

@NatureUnedited Very light on its hooves for a bull!

Bull sees a show-jumping horse and decides he can do it too

@NetherfieldV2 I had Chapeau di Napoleon. A wonderful crested moss.

Today's Old Rose is the lovely tall arching Old Velvet Moss 'William Lobb' (Laffay, 1855). Heavily mossed buds open to quartered blooms of lilac & magenta which fade with time to lavender grey & purple. A rich fragrance makes it a plant to stop & inhale. Forms lovely hips. 8ft 🌹