I missed posting last week as I wasn’t feeling great. Happily I’m feeling better, but I was asked to go out yesterday afternoon to a report case (suspicion of notifiable disease). I couldn’t rule out disease, so we have sent off samples to be tested. Today, I will likely have to work again – there’s a lot of history to be taken about movements of animals/birds, people, vehicles, feed sources and so on, to be ready for if it comes back positive. So I’m going to post a few lovely pictures, mostly from Blackbird Lane. I hope you enjoy them.
Where are the sticky willies, you ask (or perhaps what)? They’re those little round seeds that have been sticking themselves into Triar’s coat for weeks now. They’re rife this year.
Hoping my samples come back negative! Have a good week all.
I’m a day late in writing this, mostly because I am experiencing what could probably be best described as lassitude: described in the online Oxford Dictionary as “a state of physical or mental weariness; lack of energy.”
Don’t get me wrong, I am still able to function, on the surface. Yesterday and Friday, I met friends and today, I will go to church and walk the dog, but my body feels tired. There is a feeling in my feet and lower legs, as well as in my fingers that is probably best described as if they are fizzing, like I should imagine a glass of cola would feel, if it was able to. If I try to move fast, my body reacts by jerking. That feels similar to the effect you get if you touch an electric fence: the movement comes and there is no control over it. It’s not painful, nor is it alarming these days. It’s just a bit of a bore and rather tiring.
I wondered, for a while, if the fizzing was an anxiety attack. The occupational health doctor told me it wasn’t, one day when I was speaking to her and I said I felt it now. I was speaking and breathing normally, she said; it’s not that.
Looking for patterns, I think this attack is the result of being woken at two in the morning, working a twelve hour day, then having a very hot, hour long walk on the beach, without having any real opportunity to rest afterwards.
Should I have cancelled the friends and going to church? I took Friday off (flexi time) to rest and I would probably feel better now if I had spent a long weekend resting in bed or in front of the TV, but I am reluctant to cancel the things in my life that lift me up, to preserve myself for work.
What didn’t help was that I also spent Friday morning composing a long letter to the neurologist I saw about a month ago. His promised letter reached me on Tuesday and I read through it to the end, including the final paragraph that left me metaphorically gasping.
To go back to the appointment itself, we spent a lot of time discussing history, which inevitably took a while. I was in Norway 15 years, so everything medical that happened there is missing from my files. That part of his letter was reasonable. He didn’t get it all right, but the discrepancies probably aren’t significant enough to be worth arguing about it. As an aside here I will add, that FND is seen by many doctors as akin to hysteria, so I am wary about being seen as fussing too much. If I say that being diagnosed with FND messes with your mind, I hope you can understand what I’m getting at.
He then did something of a physical exam. I’ve had a lot of neurological exams over the years, so I know that he missed a lot out. If I took a positive view, he was concentrating his examination on what our discussion had highlighted as likely areas for assessment. A more negative take would be that he was looking for what he hoped to see, having already decided it was probably FND and needing a positive sign upon which to hang a that diagnosis.
I suspect the latter is nearer to the truth, because as soon as he saw something (head shaking during various exercises where I had to close my eyes to assess balance) he announced the diagnosis and quickly drew the appointment to a close. There was only the briefest discussion on why I was there. I mentioned being sent by occupational health, the problems with having only six sick days before formal proceedings, and how I had been much better in Norway where that didn’t occur, but not really anything about what is actually happening at present, for example as I described above.
His last paragraph then, described what he had heard during that last brief discussion. To my shock, what he wrote was “the biggest problem she has found is that employers in the UK only give six weeks of leave and she had the pattern in Norway where she would work for three weeks, her jerks would start to aggravate and then she had a week off and the jerks settled.”
Having written my response on Friday, I decided to send it on Monday, partly because Friday afternoon is not the best time to send anyone a letter at work and partly to allow myself more reflection time, which has actually been useful.
The real situation is that, in Norway, those physical and mental stressors that trigger the exhaustion (which can eventually require complete rest and absence from work, if I push on too hard) just didn’t happen that often. The job was much more reasonable and we were not chronically understaffed. I took a week off work to rest perhaps four times in three years.
Here in the UK, those events are perhaps coming four times a year and because I haven’t dared to take proper time off to recover, I am probably more susceptible as well. In the last six months, I have probably felt relatively normal for fifty percent of the time. The rest, I experience this weariness. I can still function, but it’s not pleasant and I tend to forget things and make stupid errors, that sometimes I find later and feel glad that nothing serious happened because I couldn’t concentrate properly.
So although I am shocked by what the doctor said, working through what is happening and why has been a useful exercise. I suspect, with all the frustrations in my current job, it is not going to be compatible with my health to continue in the same role, long term. I would add that I know it isn’t me. Many others are circling the drain or (as the health and safety officer corrected me) approaching burnout.
What I am going to do about it remains undecided. I quite like my job and I’m good at it, but my body and mind are not fit enough to tackle it and the risk of staying is that my health could worsen. I am considering reducing my work hours to four days a week, perhaps as a trial. Other alternatives obviously include trying to find something else, either within the civil service or elsewhere. I briefly toyed with the idea of returning to Norway, but I returned to the UK for various reasons and those remain unchanged.
Anyway, enough of that heavy stuff and self analysis. We had another fun training session on Wednesday with Josephine. She sadly only has two months left in her temporary role and they’ve only just started to advertise for a permanent replacement, so it looks like I may be left again without a veterinary mentor/guide while the civil service procrastinates. However, for now, she is a breath of fresh air and great at building up the team.
The exercise involved toy animals again. She set up various scenes, where there were disease outbreaks and we had to look for information and describe how we would go about diagnosis and putting the information onto the inevitable forms.
At the top of the page is a scene where there is an outbreak of avian influenza. That was slightly complicated because of these guys:
I assume that group had to discuss what to do about local wildlife, but my group had to investigate and record a possible bluetongue sampling at this lovely farm:
I got extra brownie points for querying the assorted carrots and other vegetables in the yellow box. This farmer may be feeding kitchen scraps, which is illegal in the UK!
There has also been some amusement at work this week, because of some seagulls which have been nesting somewhere on or near the building where I work. Perhaps others have not been so amused as a couple of people have been dive bombed or poohed on, but a theory of mine was confirmed when we had a number of extra staff visiting on Wednesday for a meeting. These are sexist seagulls and while I have passed out of the door, watched over by a relatively benign beady eye, all the actual attacks have been on men. Clearly there are some advantages to being female!
I’m not going to finish without giving high praise to The Boathouse restaurant at Glencaple. Regular readers may recall a lovely Christmas meal Donna and I had there back in December. I suggested a revisit, having seen an advertisement on Facebook for afternoon tea. It would be an understatement to say that it did not disappoint! As with the Christmas dinner, I took home enough food to last me until the next day and it really did taste as good as it looks!
Anyway, I shall go now. Thanks for reading and have a good week!
I made a happy discovery yesterday evening, when I was travelling to Yorkshire. I like to break my journey at Tebay, but when it’s hot and I have Triar in the car, I tend to push on. Last night though, I was tired enough to stop. On entering the car park, instead of going straight ahead, I turned left up the hill, hoping to find some shade behind the trees. What I didn’t expect to find was a lovely shady dog walk, set among the trees. So as well as crunchy cheese and mango flavoured fizzy water, I got in 1,000 steps and a very pleasant woodland wander.
It’s been an unexpected type of week really. The only visits I had planned were to a farm where I was to TB test eight cattle. They had tested before as inconclusive, following a move up to Scotland from a higher risk area, so they were being retested. That was booked in for Tuesday/Friday (inject and read) so when my line manager sent out a message asking for volunteers to do night duty on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I quickly offered.
Usually, being on call is not too onerous. Sometimes there are phone calls in the evening, but it’s fairly rare, so I was quite unprepared when the phone rang at 2am on Wednesday morning. Quickly gathering pen and paper, I spoke to a vet about an owner whose dog had been in contact with a bat. The dog was now unwell and she wanted some advice. As both bat and dog were in central Scotland, the chances of rabies infection were small, but having been phoned, I had to make sure. Most of the form filling was left for the morning, but I was still up for a couple of hours recording the situation, so the vets taking over in the morning knew I was dealing with it.
So Wednesday morning was mostly taken up with the aftermath. The afternoon was quiet, but I was glad when home time came. However, I had only just sat down when the phone rang again. This time it was my veterinary advisor. Did I want to go on a report case the following morning. I’ve been waiting to do a report case, which is an investigation into a potential notifiable disease outbreak, so I said yes first, then braced myself for whatever she was going to say next. Whatever had run through my head, I wasn’t expecting what came next.
I was being asked to go to a beach where there had apparently been a number of dead birds found, as well as a seal (or maybe a porpoise). I was to test the seal for avian influenza and to do so would involve taking brain and lung samples, while fully dressed in all my protective gear, including my space-age hood, which circulates air through filters and blows it on my face.
I did double check about the hood. After all, I have tested dead birds in Norway for avian influenza and nobody even reminded me to wear a mask. But the answer was yes, I had to wear the hood. To be fair, brain sampling required a hammer, so spray was quite possible, but what struck me as particularly amusing was that this wasn’t a beach in the middle of nowhere. It was near a relatively popular west-coast holiday resort. I understand there were background discussions going on about whether we should let the police know. I was half imagining television cameras turning up, creating mass panic over people donning virtual space suits to approach dead animals that, half an hour earlier, someone’s dog might well have been sniffing.
Having spent two hours on Wednesday evening, learning about techniques for sampling marine wildlife and refreshing myself on donning and doffing PPE safely, and another hour on Thursday morning, ensuring I had everything in the car I might need, I drove an hour and a half and met my colleague , an experienced animal health officer, at the beach.
Partly because it was already warm, and partly to avoid causing alarm, I had decided that we should plot the position of the animals first, then get our final permission and instructions to test from VENDU (the Veterinary Exotic Notifiable Disease Unit). My plan was to photograph the animal or bird (necessary so that an expert can make sure what species it is) and get OS coordinates for each. All those details have to be recorded, so it made sense to do that before getting all the kit on.
In the event, what actually happened was that we walked onto the beach, made our way to the mark on the satellite image where the seal carcase had been recorded, and found… only tyre tracks. There were a number of dog walkers on the beach, so my colleague began to ask whether any of them had seen anything. None of them had. We walked on down the beach. No dead seal. No bird carcasses either.
I called my veterinary advisor. Was it possible the local authority, or someone, had already been and removed the seal? In the background, she started to make enquires to all the possible agencies and groups that might possibly have done so. In the meantime, my colleague and I walked on, scouring the beach with our eyes. After all, the worst possible scenario I could imagine was that we failed to find it after all the prep and travel, only for it to be reported again the next day.
The tyre tracks were explained – the local council had been out, but hadn’t found anything apparently. Nor did we. Despite walking for half an hour along the beach, the only things we found were a number of dead jelly fish and one, single, very rotten bird carcase, where there was nothing much left except bones and a wing. Eventually, we had to admit defeat and turn back. All that remained was to call VENDU and call off the hunt.
I did that, back at my car. I was just driving off when VENDU called back and asked whether we could go back and sample the bird. I said no. Sampling is from the cloaca and the back of the throat. Neither of those would have been identifiable. Not only that, but it was a good half-hour walk back to where we had seen it and there was no guarantee we’d find it again as, by that time, I’d abandoned all thoughts of OS coordinates.
We’ve been told that in hot weather, we have been allocated a £2 cold drinks allowance, so when I stopped for lunch, I ordered an iced caramel mocha. £2 doesn’t come close to covering it, but it was delicious, as was the goats’ cheese salad I ordered along with it.
I had a pleasant drive back down the Galloway Trail. Really, it ended up being one of those rare days where I look back and want to laugh and feel highly pleased that someone actually paid for me to do that. There are truly awful moments in this line of work, but there are some great ones too. And next time I am asked to go on a report case, there will be things I learned this time that will be put to good use.
I rounded off the week reading the TB test. Sadly, there were some animals that tested positive. Another farm, now under restrictions, with thousands of animals that all need to be tested. If I were in charge, I would be looking at banning moving cattle from high risk zones and into Scotland. I know there’s a lot of negativity about red tape, but the eventual cost of allowing those movements is unreasonably high. Then again, after 15 years in Norway, I’d be on board for massive limitation on moving animals around.
I am finally inspired to work on my story based on the Norwegian song/poem Tir n’a Noir again. I have decided it shall be a short story – different from what I usually write. I have also signed up for a scriptwriting course and am waiting for that to begin. I think it will benefit me trying out different formats. A novel takes so much time and concentration and I am in short supply of both those things. My day job takes too much energy.
That said, I’ve had a good week at work. On Monday I was out with Lauren, one of our animal health officers, training her to blood sample sheep. With only minor instruction from me, she quickly got the hang of it and took blood from twenty sheep in no time. I enjoy teaching people how to do things I’ve spent half a lifetime learning.
On Tuesday, I was learning myself. I was up at Prestwick Airport again, checking two beautiful horses that had flown in from the US. It was a broodmare and her foal and they were blue blood in the racing world. Absolutely stunning. Another colleague recommended I took the Castle Douglas road on the way back and I did. The normal Ayr road is rather boring, so I was delighted to find myself driving through some gorgeous Galloway scenery. There are mostly rolling hills here, rather than mountains, but I passed through spiky fir forests and by lochans and burns.
As you can see, the sky became quite spectacular and shortly afterwards, it began to pour. I was reminded of a summer long ago, when we holidayed in New Galloway and went walking every morning, but made sure we were back in the cottage in the afternoon as the rain started each day at about 3pm.
On Wednesday, I recorded the training on the Disease Report Form that I had given in front of an audience the week before. To do this, I was told to set up a Teams meeting with my mentor, Josephine. “Mark it, ‘Do not attend’” she told me, so I gave it that title and then began. I muffed it a couple of times and I wasn’t sure how to delete, so I decided to quit that meeting and set up another. This time, I thought I would give her a giggle and gave it a rather tongue in cheek name.
That time, the recording went well and I laid down a perfectly respectable piece of training. What I hadn’t realized was that when anyone accesses the presentation, what they would come to was a video with the title of the meeting it was recorded on in broad letters at the bottom of the page. And so, you guessed it, I have created a piece of training on a serious topic, with the title that will be there in perpetuity – Do Not Attend Again – The Director’s Cut.
I don’t have any real plans for this weekend so far. Last weekend I went for a walk with Belle, who is one of the women who will be teaching me about scriptwriting. Her dog George is very laid back, and he and Triar seeem to get on fine. Triar did shame me slightly by disappearing into a massive field, filled with long grass and rabbits, and failing entirely to return when I called him. Belle and George were fortunately very laid back about the whole thing and Belle even suggested that, as Triar enjoyed it so much, we could come back another day, but bring a picnic instead of aiming to go to a pub for a drink. Sounds good to me!
At the start of this week, I was quite tense. I’ve explained before that I am trying to work towards a bonus payment, which requires a lot of hoop-jumping and I am attempting some of the hoops right at the last minute, given that the deadline for submitting my activities is Monday coming. On Tuesday last week, I was meant to be presenting training on Foot and Mouth Disease and an update on Bluetongue. On the morning of the presentation, I received a message to say it the meeting was cancelled. I confess, I was rather relieved, though hopefully it won’t undermine my case.
On Wednesday, I gave my Disease Risk Form training to some of the vets. It was given at our regional meeting and I fondly looked round the room at the three or four vets in attendance and thought there was nobody there that would worry me to present to.
When the time of the meeting arrived, Josephine, my veterinary mentor told me we were linking in by Teams, and slightly to my horror, I realized that there were vets at all levels, linking in from the whole of Scotland. Still, I didn’t have any time to worry, and apart from wishing I’d thought to bring a glass of water for my dry mouth, the whole thing went off pretty well.
I must say though, that Josephine herself had given some training on Bluetongue (the situation is unfolding fast – we’re trying to keep it out of Scotland) which she made much more fun than anything I have produced. As you can see below, the cow on the Lipton’s tea van is leaving England and crossing the yellow border into Scotland and we were learning about the special measures the farmer would have to undertake. Suffice to say, there won’t be a lot of English animals at Scottish shows this year and vice versa.
Not sure whose the Coke bottle is, but clearly it should really have been Irn Bru for the sake of consistency.
Wednesday night was the summer meal at my writing group in Lockerbie. The hotel we use does food and they are responsible for the sticky toffee pudding at the top of the page. As regular readers will know, I’m a bit of a foodie and the beef stroganoff, for my taste, had too much Dijon mustard, to the point where that was the principal flavour, but it was pleasant enough.
On Thursday morning I woke up feeling a bit more relaxed, with all my training done for now. I’ve mentioned before that I am reading the Bible and I have an app that gives me three readings each day, two from the Old Testament and one from the New. My first Old Testament reading was Samuel and I was bemused to read that, having stolen The Ark of the Covenant, the Philistines were blighted with “‘emerods in their secret parts”.
Of course, I had to look this up. There are sometimes words I don’t fully understand and sometimes I don’t check, but these emerods were coming up, over and over, and moreover, when the Philistines sensibly decided that the safest thing was to swiftly hand the Ark back to Israel, the priests and diviners told them they had to give it back with an offering that consisted of five golden mice and that they had to make images of their “emerods” from gold and hand over five of those as well.
So when I checked, it turns out that the word “emerods” is actually an old word for hemorrhoids. I must say, the Bible does throw up some truly bizarre things now and then! As it was my friend Valerie who encouraged me into the Bible reading, I tried to send her a message, “Golden hemorrhoids? I’ve heard it all now!” But having sent it, I realized a minute or two later that I had sent it instead to another friend. Fortunately, I managed to delete it before she saw it, but I had a laugh and shared that with Valerie too. Let’s face it, that would be quite a message to wake up to, without context or explanation!
I shall leave you with a few, wonderfully overgrown pictures from Blackbird Lane. Thank you, as ever, for reading. Hope you have a good week.
Isn’t it warm? It’s not yet seven thirty as I write this, but Triar and I have been out for our walk early. We stopped to have a chat with some heifers in a field (we stayed outside the gate) which is the high point of our day so far! Aren’t they gorgeous?
I came down yesterday as I had a dentist’s appointment to get a filling. I intended to come down on Thursday evening, but was unexpectedly offered a cancellation appointment to see a neurologist, so of course I jumped at the chance. As the occupational therapist at work wanted, he has given me a diagnosis – FND, which I’m guessing most people haven’t heard of. It’s described everywhere as being “like a software problem and not a hardware problem”. Basically they can’t see anything wrong on a battery of tests, but it fits certain criteria.
I’m still trying to process the ramifications. The tests I had were years ago and he hasn’t sent me for any new ones. With hindsight, I’m not sure we talked enough about what’s happening now and how it will be fixed. Back in Norway, I maintained fairly good health for three years, by resting properly when I needed to. He’s going to write me a letter to take to occupational health, so I will see what it says.
But overall, I think it’s good. On examination, he didn’t find anything new or particularly significant. He seemed certain there wasn’t a degenerative disorder. Having spent years looking up my own symptoms (don’t do this!) I had myself thought FND was the closest fit. Back in 2017 when this all began for me, I found almost nothing online about it. Now the internet is awash with information. It is, I feel the neurological disorder du jour! Hopefully I can find a way to manage it better than I am at the moment. I’m still working full time and doing a good job. I’d just like to have more energy to do things when work is over.
In other news, I’m getting through the paperwork mountain, though the dreaded Framework Agreement still needs some work. I’m giving training sessions next week, on Foot and Mouth disease, to some local authority inspectors on Tuesday and on the Disease Risk Form (investigation) during TB outbreaks to my fellow Senior Veterinary Inspectors. My boss, Dean, has a case lined up for me when those are done and there is some chicken work starting from July, so plenty to keep me going. I may be easily tired, but I also don’t like twiddling my thumbs, so it’s all going right at the moment.
I shall leave you with some more cow pictures and maybe some flowers too. Blackbird Lane is wonderfully overgrown and tangled at the moment, with wildflowers peeking out all over the place. And now it’s time to go make breakfast, so have a good week all, and thanks for reading.
It’s been another week of contrasts. At work, I am chasing my tail a lot of the time. I’m behind on paperwork, some of it complicated paperwork, that requires a lot of concentration and reading around the questions that I have to answer. APHA has what is called a Framework Agreement with the Local Authority, because we work together. We are regulatory, they are an enforcement agency, so complementary.
If you feel slightly lost at that last sentence, you may have an inkling of how I am feeling. There are about twenty pages to fill in, and sixty three pages altogether in the document. I have to read and digest the forty three in order to understand what they want me to write in the twenty and there are snippets on different pages about how to address each reply. Then I have to assess whether the reply (which is about what the LA intend to do – gleaned in a meeting, so based on notes I took about what they said) meets or exceeds the minimum standard. There was nothing about this in my veterinary degree! I guess the one good thing I should consider is that at least I am doing it in my mother tongue!
On top of that, I’m dealing with a TB breakdown. When we’ve found TB on a farm, we have to do a series of tests at sixty day intervals. Part of it is a skin test – injecting tuberculin (purified proteins from bacterial cultures) – to see if there is an immune reaction. In addition, we take blood samples in the early stages. The blood test is more likely to find animals in the early stages of the disease.
Because the skin test can only be done every sixty days (before that, the tuberculin causes desensitisation, so no reaction) what usually happens is that there are periods of inaction, followed by a massive flurry of activity as any positive reactors have to be culled and checked for lesions at the slaughterhouse. They are under restrictions on the farm, so moving them requires – you guessed it – a whole load of paperwork. I am currently in that flurry, so alongside the Framework, there’s a lot going on.
As if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, there’s a bonus I can achieve if I can demonstrate I have jumped through various hoops to show I have progressed at work and am therefore worth more. The deadline for that is the end of June.
I probably should have been working on this for the last year, to make sure I ticked all thirty eight of the boxes, some of which involve training people inside and outside the agency. As well as writing thirty eight mini-essays, demonstrating my super-competence, I am currently creating a training program for those going out to do a DRF – the epidemiological investigation we carry out in TB breakdown cases – and may also go to a Local Authority meeting to train them on how to spot foot and mouth. All that in the next two weeks.
Really, the Norwegian method of progressive pay, based on assessment meetings with your manager, with the possibility of promotion from first vet to senior vet if you demonstrate a willingness to take on responsibility is much more efficient. The irony is, that used to be the same in the UK civil service. In trying to make everything cheaper, they’ve ended up with enormous inefficiency. Even more ironically, if I was in a quieter region, with less urgent work, I’d have way more time for the box-ticking games. The idea that I’m no more useful than I was on the day I arrived, unless I can tick these boxes is just silly.
Still, there are lovely benefits thrown in. On Wednesday this week, I took a day away from all the paperwork to go to a meeting run by the British Deer Veterinary Association. It was down at Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire, so I was able to stay with mum and dad on Tuesday and Wednesday nights and drive over there for the day. The lectures were really interesting and focused on things that were relevant to what I do. There was a talk on welfare at the time of killing – a hot topic for APHA – as well as information on the levels of TB in wild deer and the risk that represents to farmed animals. I must admit that my conclusion was that the UK is never going to be TB free, but really it was a very interesting day and a lovely break from my day to day activities.
The day ended with a walk around the deer park, which was very beautiful. The deer were mostly just dots in the distance, but it was a lovely end to the day.
The drive back took me over the moors and I couldn’t resist stopping to take a few photos along the way. The light wasn’t quite as gorgeous as it had been in the morning as I drove over, but now I had no deadline for getting to where I was going.
And so I will leave you with my June award for WalkFit, which I have already completed. As I was searching for the icon, I saw there’s another challenge coming up in three days, so I shall tackle that when it arises. Thanks for reading and a good week to all of you.
I managed the May Walkfit Challenge: 15,000 steps, three times in May.
Screenshot
I opened the app on 1st of June, wondering what I would find. April had been 10,000 four times. If it jumped to 20k in a day, I didn’t think I would manage it. Instead, for some reason it’s set the bizarre target of 6,000 steps ten times over. Given my daily steps target is 7,500, which I have been meeting regularly, that doesn’t really seem like anything to aim at. I’m enjoying the app and it is undoubtedly encouraging me to move more than I did, but there are a few things that undoubtedly could do with some improvement.
I didn’t have any callouts last weekend. It’s less stressful than it used to be in practice, though it’s so many years since I’ve done on-call that it’s very different in many ways. Back then, mobile phones weren’t reliable enough for the RCVS to allow them to be used for on-call vets, so you had to stay within hearing distance of your landline. No popping out to the shops if you’d forgotten to get something. Well you could, but you had to phone your boss’s mother (or whoever was covering when you were out working) and ask if it was okay.
Still, I went to church on Sunday and it wasn’t very relaxed. There’s a time limit of 30 minutes after a report case (notifiable disease) comes in. After that, you’re meant to be on the road. As church is a 15 minute drive from home, that 15 minutes would be long enough to add stress to that time constraint.
I had a fascinating day on Tuesday. One of the tasks senior veterinary inspectors cover is import checks of live animals coming into the UK. Obviously how many of those come your way depends on the region where you work. Prestwick Airport is within the area covered by Ayr Field Services and there is a terminal there for horses to come into the country. Until last year, it was very quiet, but because of some problems at Stansted, there are now quite a few horses coming in, so they are increasing the number of vets trained to do it.
So I headed up to Prestwick on Tuesday morning. I probably should have arranged a hotel for the night before or the night after the training, but because of Triar and the APHA restriction on having dogs in cars, I couldn’t do that. I have done a small amount of import and export work in Norway, so the general protocols don’t seem all that complicated and anyway, I was really interested, which always helps when learning something new.
Watching the horse boxes being unloaded from the plane was a new experience. The boxes are actually moved on rollers and pushed by hand, off the plane, onto a platform that lowers them to the ground, then onto a trailer that brings them into the horse terminal. The boxes are then pushed again onto more rollers on a platform, where they are secured. The horses are then given a few minutes to settle, before the doors are opened and they are walked down a ramp and into a stable where they can be checked.
There were two lots of horses, four horses on total and they were coming in from the US. Two of them were owned by a woman who was moving to the UK. One of her horses was 26 years old and she had used him as her FEI horse (eventing, I think). The other was younger – her new competition horse. The other two were from a stud in the US and were coming into the UK as race horses. They were all stunning, even the old boy, and I have made a note of the names of the racehorses, just in case they ever do anything remarkable. I know the odds are that they won’t, but man they were beautiful!
The only other interesting thing I’ve done this week is the homework before I begin a screenwriting course with a small, local, media company, run by a friend. I’ve been sent the first chapter of Great Expectations, along with a shooting script by David Nicholas and a link to the film on YouTube. It’s a 1946 film, so presumably the script is out of copyright. It was interesting to see the changes from the chapter Dickens wrote, to the pared down script, and then to see what the director made of it. Also, films have changed a lot since then, but the opening scene was very dramatic in black and white. I’m now really looking forward to learning more.
I’ve only a few photos of Blackbird Lane to share with you this week, so I will drop those here. Thanks for reading.
It’s been a pleasant enough week back at work. I’m piling up cases slightly faster than I’m able to do the paperwork, but unless something urgent comes in, I should hopefully catch up with the ones I have next week.
Tuesday was spent training a new locum vet how to conduct a welfare visit. Wednesday saw me conducting a meeting with members of the local council. I work with two of them – Scott and David – on a regular basis and we get on well, but as with everything these days, it all has to be fully justified and written down. Thursday I tested a sheep for bluetongue.
And as all that was going on, all the cattle in my current TB breakdown were undergoing their first wave of testing. Until there are two clear tests, the cattle can’t be moved off the farm to another farm, so the farmer is essentially in lockdown. In the meantime, I have to dig into where the disease might have originated and where it might have spread to. All those animals will need to be tested too.
For now, I am actually on call. There are two “ready to go” vets in Scotland at nights and weekends: one North one South. I’m covering the South, so if any suspicion of notifiable disease crops up, or a welfare case that’s so urgent it can’t wait, then I’m the vet that will deal with it. I don’t know whether to hope something comes up or not. I still have to get my first report case (notifiable disease) under my belt, but obviously I don’t want any animal to have anything bad to crop up. We’re still on high alert for foot and mouth because of the European outbreaks.
After a long spell of warm weather, the pattern has now become more mixed, but Triar and I have been regularly walking down Blackbird Lane together. Well be walking there a lot today because I can’t go far from home in case any call comes in, but I want to get in 15,000 steps today.
I’m still keeping up with my WalkFit challenges and one of those is to do 15,000 steps three times in May. I’ve done two days already and this is the last day in May, so I’m going to go for it. My daily step requirement has stopped rising and is stable at 7,500 steps a day, which suits me for now. I often do more, but on bad days, I can still usually achieve that without too much effort.
There are sometimes cows in the fields lining the lane. I’m working on getting Triar to walk past them quietly. He’s always been something of a barker, but does respond well to bribery.
We did have something of an incident yesterday, not with the cows, but with water. He does love a paddle and there is a fairly disgusting, stagnant looking pool at the far end of the lane. Until yesterday , he had always ignored it, but yesterday he decided to jump in. Despite bathing him for about an hour when we got home, he still retains a definite odour of muddy puddle.
I’m going to finish with a few more photos of Yorkshire from last weekend. The picture at the top of the page was taken from my parents’ conservatory. The rest were taken while out with Triar. I do love a dramatic sky over stone walls and sunny fields. Have a lovely week all and thanks for reading.
One of the highlights of my Shetland trip was visiting the Liberation Convoy which visited Lerwick while I was there. My friends, Melanie and John Arthur came over from Whalsay and together we explored the Norwegian ships which had served in the World Wars and were commemorating 80 years from the end of World War II.
Though it was a fascinating experience there was, as always when thinking about wars, a heavy sense of grief and loss. On the first ship we explored, Hestmanden, we read many stories about the young men, British and Norwegian, who served on board this and other ships. There was devastation brought to so many lives, both those of the young men lost and even of those who came back alive but broken.
One of the most haunting things I read was that many of the sailors who served in WWII were not even welcomed back in Norway at the end of the war. Norway was occupied for most of the war, so many of them could not go home during wartime. By the time liberation occurred, they had been outside of Norway for longer than was allowed, and having not been back, they did not have the right to return. Many did not get back in until 1947 as they waited for papers to be sorted out.
I guess the leaders were dealing with their own devastation, but if there was ever a time for rules to be pushed aside, surely that should have been it? Sometimes Norwegian life was uncomfortable for me as I didn’t really know or understand all the rules or expectations and occasionally, would come up against them and know I didn’t really fit in. It’s hard to explain, but I can’t imagine this particular circumstance having occurred in the U.K.
John Arthur, who is co-owner of a fishing boat and a sailor himself, was particularly interested in the engines. It was incredible to see the machinery from 1911, still in working order and very much still a living memorial. There were oily rags and modern tools to keep everything going.
In a converse to the non-understanding of the rules I mentioned above, there was a sense of freedom in many parts of Norwegian life that doesn’t exist in the U.K. This was reflected in our exploration of these vessels.We were allowed in almost every area of Hestmanden, climbing steep ladders, allowed to poke in corners that I know in the U.K. would have been chained off as too dangerous to enter. I feel I’m talking too much about me and my reflections on living as a foreigner in Norway and not enough about the ships, but it is opening up these thoughts as I am writing this, so you’re just going to have to share them!
Hestmanden was a cargo ship and many of her stories were of sailing in convoys, where many accompanying ships were destroyed and the devastation of how it felt to be a survivor when you had witnessed so much death and lost so many friends and acquaintances. The Andholmen, which we visited next had seen more direct action.
Built as a fishing boat in 1938, she was requisitioned in 1940 by the Norwegian navy up in Narvik in Northern Norway. Germany controlled the only deep water landing place, so small vessels like the Andholmen were used to put allied soldiers ashore.
Later she worked between Shetland and Norway and then was based in Peterhead. It’s not so obvious from that photo, but she was armed and still ready to go.
Climbing down into the cabin, there were tidy bunks tucked away in corners and many more weapons, presumably a collection and not necessarily used on Andholmen herself. The cold metal of the guns makes quite a contrast against the warmth of the wood of which the ship is built. Unlike Hestmanden, which was set up as a museum, this was much smaller, but equally fascinating as a historic part of the war effort.
We didn’t get the chance to go aboard the Arnefjord, but she was one of the ships that worked as part of the “Shetland Bus” service that brought resistance fighters from Norway to the relative safety of Scotland.
The Erna and the Heland were also fishing boats, requisitioned for the Shetland Bus. It was a wonderful experience to see them eighty years later, moored again in Lerwick harbour.
The rest of my week in Shetland was filled with sunshine and coastal views, from cliffs to rocky shores and wonderful golden beaches. Thanks again to Lindsay and Melanie for a fantastic holiday.
Leaving at the end was sad, but I hope to be able to go back. Triar also had a good time, I think.
A Vet’s Life 