To all those who disapprove of dogs on the bed, please avert your eyes! Triar was not only on mine this morning, but IN it, as you can see. It’s not as cold now as it was in midwinter, but he’s still much better than a hot water bottle in the depths of the night.
I am finally moving on from the horrors of the Farm of Doom. It has taken me all week to do the paperwork, but I sent the last lot in late yesterday afternoon and felt lighter for it. I will likely get it back for amendments (my new Veterinary Advisor is lovely, but the opposite of slapdash) but the hardest work is over. I have sorted out all the photos into different folders for different dates.
I think it will go to court, so I will have to prepare a statement, but I can face those images now, even if some still pain me to the point of tears. There’s always a great big Why? in my head as I contemplate these things. How did it come to that point? But I guess that’s also something I hope never to know, because I hope I would never reach the point where I could neglect a living animal without reaching out for help or ensuring someone else steps in, but surely everyone normal thinks the same?
On Wednesday, I was tired. Good sleep is still intermittent, but I went to a church meeting in the evening with the possibility of writing group afterwards. At the end of the church meeting, I decided I would drive home while it was still light. I was rewarded with a beautiful sunset as I drove back down the hill near Torthorwald and I stopped to take photos.
There was, I noticed (bottom right in the top photo) an old road sign, telling the distances to Dumfries and “Lockerby” so I took a picture of that too. It happens quite often when I stop to admire something beautiful, that I notice something else to enjoy, that I would otherwise have missed.
I was unexpectedly rewarded, last thing on Friday, with an early, negative test result (work related) which means that a large body of work I thought I was going to have to tackle next week is no longer necessary. There is still routine work booked in (another welfare follow up, but I know it won’t be harrowing) and evidence shuffling from the Farm of Doom. However, I will now (hopefully) have time to tackle a task I will enjoy much more – building towards a training module for an aspect of TB case handling.
Not sure if I’m odd, but I love writing Standard Operating Procedures or instructions that are clear to follow. It seems intuitive to me to explain things, step by step, in easy to understand language.
I had the experience in Norway of taking many courses and doing a lot of training. There are few things more frustrating than having to go back and listen to three minutes of semi-comprehensible speil attached to a PowerPoint slide, over and over to catch the last few phrases that were quickly slurred and not written on the screen. It means that training that should take twenty minutes, takes an hour. Working in a language that is not your mother tongue has many unconsidered complications.
As we have many new starting vets who have (as I did) done slaughterhouse work until their language skills improved enough to do something a bit more challenging, I think understanding that will be very useful.
Anyway, I suppose I should get up and do some painting. The new bedrooms are not going to paint themselves and work has stopped until I do them. Hopefully this weekend should see that particular job completed. I’ll leave you with a couple of shots from Blackbird Lane. Have a lovely week all.
I’m hopelessly short of photos at the moment. Sometimes it’s been because of the weather, but for now it’s because my life has shrunk, I think. For a while, I was forever away on courses, or sent out west. I will expend what extra energy I have to spare this weekend on painting rather than exploring. I feel, in some ways, that everything in life it at a standstill. There are some hurdles I need to get over, and once I do things will start to move again.
One of the hurdles is the building work upstairs. I asked to paint before there were skirting boards and wooden windowsills and lights and plug holes, because it would be easier, and it is. But what that means is, that until I have painted, all those things can’t be done. Once they are, and I’ve got real rooms back again, and all the workmen have left, I can start to clear my bedroom. I’ve been living in a room that’s clogged with inaccessible boxes for almost a year now. I don’t want it to become a way of life.
And then there’s work. I have started to call my nightmare farm, the Farm of Doom. My fellow blogger Penny, who writes the Walking Woman blog (https://icelandpenny.com) has commented now and then on the presence (or usually its return after an absence) of my sense of humour. When I’m rested and well, it comes to the fore. It never really leaves, but it seeps more into my writing. Black humour is how I deal with the negative stuff that comes with a career as a vet.
Anyway, I’m hoping to put the Farm of Doom behind me shortly. My line manager offered to take me off the case on Thursday afternoon, but frankly, I want to take it to some kind of conclusion so I can get closure. That will be another river crossed. The offer came in the wake of me telling him I had been suffering from nightmares, to the point where I had phoned a counsellor on Tuesday.
My workplace has twenty four hour counselling available and I felt a bit apprehensive as I picked up the phone, but it was actually a huge relief. I haven’t really talked to anyone, beyond the absolutely necessary people working on the case, what I saw that day. That’s partly down to confidentiality, but even where I could talk to colleagues, I mostly haven’t. They don’t need to share my horrors. Having checked the counsellor had her own counseling available, I poured most of it out, though something still held me back from mentioning the worst detail. I don’t know why, but perhaps nobody else needs that image stuck in their head.
Yesterday, I talked to someone from Safety as I have reported my experience with the Farm of Doom as a “near miss” or whatever the terminology is. She discussed my most recent absence from work with me and told me I should record it as work related, even though I have a pre-existing condition, the fatigue was caused by my experience at work. She will advise that the three days I had off should not count towards my absence record. She doesn’t control HR, unfortunately. She has been arguing for years with them, about the awful wording in the formal absence warning letter, but she can certainly give advice, and as my line manager generally follows such advice, hopefully they can make things better for now.
I guess the other big hurdle is the NHS waiting list. I spoke again to the GP who tried to bring things forward for me, but he had no success, so the expected date for an appointment is still July. In the meantime, I will continue monitoring myself, looking for patterns and trying to work out triggers. I was sent a course about BSE in cows recently and was reminded of how similar my symptoms are to theirs, but I know I don’t have Creutzfeldt–Jakob because, if I had, I’d be long dead.
On that cheery note, I shall take my leave! Even if I’m barely going out, there’s a lovely view from my garden and Blackbird Lane will be waiting for me. The daffodil at the top of the page was taken there. The birds were singing when I stepped put into the garden this morning, and a beautiful day was dawning. I’ll leave you with a couple of photographs of that! Have a lovely week all.
To continue what I started yesterday, Tuesday and Wednesday were broadly taken up with meetings about Monday and follow-up actions. When faced with something complex that requires careful handling of many different aspects of care, there are always things missed that need to be rectified, and follow up questions and investigation.
Not entirely coincidentally, I had an appointment early on Tuesday morning with the doctor from Occupational Health (OH). We had a good chat and discussed some things that I found helpful. For example, she suggested using flexitime to take days off when I am tired in the immediate aftermath of something that takes a lot of energy.
There were other suggestions my mind rebelled against. For example, she suggested I could try anti-depressants, partly on the grounds that they wouldn’t interfere with any neurological examination because “half the population are on them”. That doesn’t strike me as a good thing. I know some people find them very useful, but I’m not depressed.
I said as much and she suggested some of my symptoms mimic anxiety symptoms. She also said the tingling in my hands and feet (which I was experiencing during the meeting) were not due to anxiety as I was speaking (and therefore breathing) normally. That’s quite a useful observation actually, because it’s been suggested before that some of my symptoms might be anxiety, but I have never been breathless in that way, even when my symptoms were at their worst.
Anyway, having driven through Tuesday and Wednesday on adrenaline, I woke up on Thursday and my mind and body rebelled. I had noticed, on my flexitime sheet that the extra hours I’d worked on Monday and Tuesday had taken me over eight hours, so I called my line manager, explained what the OH doctor had suggested and, to my relief, he agreed. My shoulders immediately dropped several inches, so I knew, at once, it was the right thing to have done.
I didn’t do much that day. I wrote a bit of my new story and immediately came upon a conundrum. Setting it in Dyrøya is all very well, but if the man who fell in love with Mary McKear is old now, he must have met her some time ago. So I need to know about Dyrøya’s past. It’s now an island, connected to the mainland by a bridge. So knowing when Mary arrived… and how… is important. More than that, what is a young Irish woman doing on a remote island in Arctic Norway anyway? It’s going to be the first thing he asks, surely?
Leaving all that aside, it was time to take Triar out. I set off to go down Blackbird Lane, and halfway there, decided to look if there was somewhere else I could take him in the car, that wasn’t too far away. Google led me to Castledykes Park, which was only a few minutes drive. We wandered slowly round the park. I know vets are meant to despise extending leads, but this was the perfect time to use one, because then Triar can zoom about, while I meander.
It was warm and sunny in the park. We looked at the trees and flowers and Triar did what dogs do on trees and flowers, and quite shortly, I found a nice bench. It was warm enough to sit down and close my eyes and hope that Triar wasn’t eating a dropped bar of chocolate or rolling in fox poo as I listened to the birds singing.
There was, yet another meeting on Friday morning, but much of the day was spent on a refresher course about handling animal welfare cases. It all sounds very peaceful when you’re talking about the legal framework and the form filling.
And so, yesterday I went to another mini-writing retreat and I used the time to delve into Mary’s background. She now has a history – a Norwegian grandmother, who escaped from Norway in World War 2. Maybe she came over in one of the boats that are coming to Shetland when I’m there in May!
Anyway, that’s me up to date now, after my busy week. If you’ve read this far, thank you. Take care!
Hello again! I’m going to start this week’s post with an apology and with thanks. It’s been three weeks since my last post and I know that was unusual enough that Mary, who reads it regularly (and once sent me the wonderful Norge i Fest book) was worried enough to check on me. There have also been others looking out for me, both at and outside of work, and to them, thank you.
I’m not sure if it was Valerie who introduced me to the concept of neurological fatigue, but she works with patients within a physiotherapy and occupational therapy department in the NHS and she has spent some time working through a course to help me deal with it better. Those who read regularly will know I’ve been affected by some odd, undiagnosed neuro problems for eight or nine years.
Most of the time, it’s not visible to those around me, but it never completely goes away and sometimes, it returns with a vengeance and becomes highly visible as I twitch and stamp my way around. Because it means I struggle sometimes at work, occupational health want me to try and get a diagnosis, so I am now seven months into the year-long NHS waiting list.
I can see that, in my last blog, I mentioned the welfare case that has, most likely, been the biggest trigger in this episode. With the best will in the world, dealing with sad and difficult cases is always mentally exhausting. I finally got out there two weeks ago on Friday and on Saturday, the whole thing was preying on my mind so much that writing anything here was beyond me.
It’s weird, because my body went on functioning. I went out for afternoon tea for a friend’s birthday on Saturday afternoon, then down to Mum and Dad’s as Mum’s 82nd birthday was coming up. I did comment to Mum that, when I took Triar for his daily walks, I did worry that I would collapse at some point. Not sure what she made of that, not sure how much is wishful thinking (it would push me up that waiting list, at the very least), but I have, twice in the last year, had one of my legs simply give way when I tried to take a step, so I ended up sprawling on the pavement.
I should probably have taken time off work the week after that visit. Had I done so, I probably would be fine by now, but with the prospect of formal attendance meetings, and in the knowledge that I probably could function at work, at least, I pushed on through. I’d actually taken Monday off as a flexi day and normally would have enjoyed the shorter week, but I actually didn’t notice it was shorter. By then, I was on autopilot.
I feel I’m not describing this well. I think, up until a couple of days ago, I was managing to function at work, to the point where most people wouldn’t know anything was up. The noticeable changes were at home. I’ve been working on building good habits: eating more healthily, writing a bit each day, walking for half an hour. One by one, those stopped.
Other things stopped too. Wiping the kitchen surfaces and clearing away is something I normally do as I go along, but my kitchen was starting to resemble a student flat. I didn’t like seeing it, but couldn’t find the energy to do anything about it. It’s really difficult to describe, but work was simply taking everything I had and in between, I was barely existing.
At what point, in that scenario, do you take time off? Logically, and indeed in Norway, the right time to stop and rest was as soon as I became dysfunctional at home, but in the UK, the pressure to work until you literally can’t is quite high. That day came on Wednesday this week as I woke up and could barely drag myself out of bed.
Even on Thursday morning, having spent Wednesday mostly lying down, I was swithering as to whether I should try to work from home. Again with the comparison with Norway – there, if you are on sick leave and feel like doing a bit of work, it’s allowed. So on Thursday, I wrote up some details of what I was working on on Tuesday afternoon, in case someone else had to take over that case, and I replied to a couple of easy e-mails, because that was no hassle and would mean that coming back to work would be easier.
In the early hours of Friday morning, I was plagued with a blinking session. I have looked this up and found out what I was experiencing was called blepharospasm. I’ve had it a few times before, but it’s never been a significant symptom, but it’s disorienting and tiring and it kept me awake, so there was no chance of me working yesterday. That said, by yesterday afternoon, I found the energy to tidy the kitchen, which is honestly a load off my mind, every time I walk in there.
Slightly worrying is that blepharospasm has to be reported to the DVLA, so I guess I’m going to have to go to the doctor next week and ask about that. Just another complication to add to the list. It’s not an immediate suspension from driving, but the doctor will have to decide that one, I think.
My line manager, has been very supportive, thank goodness, though I imagine we are going to have to go through another formal attendance meeting. I’ve already asked him for another occupational health referral as I need to know how I can handle this situation. I want to work, but when I need to rest, I would like to do so without worrying I’m going to lose my job. Preemptive rest twice a year is better than crashing. I know some people abuse the system, but the system needs to work for me as well as them.
So where does the ice cream come in? I went to Valerie’s last weekend and rested there. Getting there was difficult. Even though I knew where I was heading, my mind was plagued with intrusive thoughts (another distressing symptom which I’m not going to describe – my Norwegian doctor told me a long time ago to ignore them as they are not dangerous) as I drove up the road.
It was worth it though, as Valerie and Charles offer me a wonderful haven where I feel surrounded by peace, not least when sitting in the hot tub with a mug of hot chocolate and Bailey’s! Saturday afternoon, the ice cream van drove round, playing his tinkling music, and Valerie suggested an ice cream. We were sitting in the garden at the time. Charles had lit the chiminea and we were listening to the birds and when Valerie heard the ice-cream van, she suggested buying one and I agreed. This is what she came back with! A lovely, whippy ice cream with a 99flake. I haven’t had one for years and it was delicious.
So, I hope that was all coherent and not too weird, but that’s where I am. Hopefully by Monday I will be back at work, though I will need to address some things, such as a doctor’s appointment. I can recommend afternoon tea at the Hetland Hall Hotel, though the bitter soup in a coffee cup was a step too far, that would probably have been better forgotten!
Last Saturday I had an emergency trip to the opticians’. On Friday, or perhaps Thursday, I’d noticed flashes of light in the corner of my left eye. I thought it was a reflection from the headlights of a passing car catching the edge of my glasses, but when it happened again in the darkness of my back garden on Friday evening, then again when writing this blog on Saturday morning, I knew it wasn’t.
Having looked up what flashes of this type could mean, I called the opticians’ as soon as they opened. The receptionist asked lots of questions and said they were fully booked, but that she would speak to an optician and call me back. She did so within a few minutes, telling me they were going to fit me in and to come right away.
I was seen very quickly and fortunately, she didn’t find anything untoward. As a part of the aging process, the vitreous humour (the jelly like substance filling your eye) becomes more liquid and can pull away from the retina (made up of cells which capture the light and send information to your brain allowing you to see). As it pulls away, there’s a risk of tearing. Either the retina can be torn away from the back of the eye altogether (meaning you lose sight over whichever area becomes detached) or blood vessels can tear, with potentially the same effect if the cells of the retina die. Fortunately, my flashes were most likely caused by the edge of the retina lifting a little as the vitreous humour separated. Most likely it would stop in a few days, she said, and it seems to have done just that.
There was another unexpected surprise when I went to pay. I was expecting a fee of maybe £100 as she’d spent a lot of time looking at my eyes and used a lot of sophisticated equipment, but apparently the whole examination was covered by the NHS. Many of its services may be broken, but this one worked exactly as it ought to. A reminder then, that sometimes peripheral functions can be provided by the private sector, even if central services really are better served in public hands.
It’s been a good week at work. I inspected chicken farms on Monday and Tuesday and felt I was beginning to provide a useful service as my knowledge is growing over time. Once I have been doing it for a little longer, it would be a useful experience to recap by joining another more experienced vet on a visit, if I am allowed to. When you first visit with someone else, you pick up some knowledge and can grow your own as you work, but sometimes going back and watching someone else once the basic knowledge is in place can mean picking up on the subtler aspects that you maybe missed in the steep learning curve at the beginning. I’ll have to discuss it with my line manager though. One of the problems with being chronically understaffed is that there is little spare time for anything beyond the basic.
On Thursday, I had lunch with Fran, the minister of the church I’ve been attending in Lochmaben. It’s been my intention for a while to ask her whether there is anything I can usefully do in my (admittedly limited) spare time to help in the parish, but instead, we got talking about Shetland, where she worked for a few years, and then writing. It seems that she also writes and was very enthusiastic when I suggested she could come along to the writing club I belong to. I will ask about helping out later, but in the meantime, I seem to have made another friend.
The best things come to those who wait, or so it is said. Over the past years and months, I have had so many things to sort out (moving internationally is incredibly intense) that all kinds of other things have ended up on the back burner. A colleague and I had talked about getting a coffee machine at work, but somehow, I’d never got round to it. I had a lovely meal round at Donna’s last Friday and it came up that she had one, barely used, that she was going to take to a charity shop. I guess I should probably make a donation to charity now to cover what they’ve lost, but she gave it to me instead. It is now installed at work and I will buy pods and try it out next week. I hope my colleague is pleased!
I’ve also been putting off making any decisions about the garden, which needs to be tidied, but is taking a firm second place to the building work in the house. I had a gardener for a while, but he sacked me as I was never home. I had vaguely looked for another, but they aren’t easy to find. David, one of the local authority inspectors I work with, unexpectedly offered me gardening tools that were left in a rental house he part-owns and oversees. So now, without lifting a finger, I have a lawn-mower, a strimmer, a hedge cutter and various hoes and spades. Part of what put me off doing my own gardening was the expense and time it would take to go out and buy everything I need, and now I don’t have to. Though the last few years have been incredibly tough, and there are still struggles I’m going through, there are shafts of sunshine in my life that are beginning to break through the clouds.
Most of the pictures this week were taken on the way back from lunch on Thursday. The cafe was in Lochmaben and the road back to Dumfries tops a hill, then drops steeply away, giving marvellous views over the plain where Dumfries lies. As I drove over, I got glimpses of the sun, which was shining through cloud, creating a wonderfully dramatic sky. The village of Torthorwald is halfway down the hill and I often drive past it and look at the ruined castle, clinging to the hillside. This time, I couldn’t resist. Stopping the car, I got out, climbed over the gate and made my way over the muddy stream to see the ancient stones in their wonderful setting. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed my wander.
And last, but not least, after the long, Arctic winters, where everything is silent and frozen for months on end, I was amazed to see that, even after the deep chill of last week, there were snowdrops growing in the shelter of the hawthorn hedges in Blackbird Lane. The birds are starting to sing again as well, on still mornings. On Wednesday, blackbirds vied with robins and greenfinch, as well as pink-footed geese and collared doves in a wonderful morning concerto. It was a reminder that spring is not too far away.
Thanks for reading. I hope you have a lovely week.
It feels like ages since I was down in Yorkshire, listening to the Met Office warnings about snow, but when I look back at this week’s pictures, I can see the snowfall was only last Sunday, which coincidentally was my birthday. I know the situation was unpredictable and that snow in the UK causes more disruption because the country is not set up for it, but the relentless warnings felt like they were over the top, not least because it was predicted the whole thing was only likely to last a day. It seems to me that an appropriate response, when the snow is going to melt within 24-48 hours, would be to remind everyone to avoid unnecessary travel on those days, then sit back and enjoy the scenery.
I woke at three in the morning and saw a thin layer of snow and assumed that might be it and went back to sleep. I’d left the curtains and blinds open so I could see and I confess I was amazed to wake again at six to see the entire window was obscured with snow, lying on the windowsill and sticking to the glass. Realistically this meant the snow was warm and sticky. When it’s snowing at minus 8, the flakes are usually tiny and don’t stick to anything, but drift at the slightest air movement. However, it did mean that it had snowed properly and wasn’t just a dusting!
I wondered last winter, our first back in the UK, whether Triar missed the snow, so knowing there was a good covering, I got out of bed to take him outside. It was a wonderful start to my birthday, watching him doing zoomies on the lawn and burying his face up to his ears.
Later, I went for a walk, but it was cold and windy and the sky was grey. I took a few photos, but didn’t linger long as I hadn’t dressed for the windchill, which wasn’t apparent among the houses, but only on venturing out into the fields.
I headed north on Monday and the roads were fine, though I travelled with blankets, warm soup and plenty of food. The rest of the week has been dominated, both at home and at work, by low temperatures.
At work, low temperatures are often significant as freezing conditions can affect the welfare of animals on the farm. For example, if the water in all the troughs freezes solid, it can be difficult to ensure all the animals have enough to drink. A cow drinks a lot of water. Part of my week has been spent making decisions about whether sales at markets can go ahead when their water has frozen and they can’t cleanse and disinfect. I haven’t personally been out blood sampling, but for colleagues who have, cold fingers are not the only challenge. If your sample freezes before you get it into the insulated, warmed box, it will be defunct. Repeat testing is expensive, so careful judgement is needed on whether to go ahead.
At home, it hasn’t been the best. Though the upstairs rooms in my house are now insulated, they still don’t have doors or radiators. The radiator in my hall has been going full pelt all week, but the passage is still too chilly for comfort. Quite unexpectedly though, the electrician/handyman who is running the project on my house, arrived to do some work downstairs on Tuesday. Back when the initial plan was hatched, it was suggested the ceiling in the downstairs bathroom would be lowered, partly to allow for various waste pipes and fan ducts to be hidden. I wasn’t sure if this was still going ahead, but I came back on Tuesday evening to find that not only was the bathroom ceiling being lowered, with added insulation, but he was doing the hallway in the back part of the house as well. That part is an extension with thinner walls and a flat roof and it was only with the onset of winter that I realised how cold that part of the house would be. All very well insulating the upstairs in the main, older part of the house, when the kitchen and bathroom and all the water pipes were out there and unprotected.
The kitchen is now the only bit that isn’t insulated overhead and that part of the house is already noticeably less chilly than the front hallway. There’s still more to do, but in time, I may not have to watch the smart meter ratcheting up a huge figure daily as I’ve chosen to keep the heating running day and night to prevent frozen pipes!
I shall leave you with some frosty pictures, mostly from Blackbird Lane. There is hoar frost collecting in the places where the low, winter sun doesn’t reach and it’s very beautiful. I’ve tried my best to capture it as well as the golden light against that wide, blue sky.
The storm came last Sunday, as forecast. It wailed around the thick walls of my snug little house and wuthered in the chimney. Despite having no doors on the rooms upstairs, my living room stayed warm and cosy. I grew up in houses where the central heating was in minimal use and one room was kept warm with a fire, so it was nothing new. With Triar snuggling on his sheepskin rug beside me, we weathered the storm in comfort.
Triar seems to have recovered well, for which I am enormously thankful. I was out with a colleague from the local authority on Wednesday. He also lives alone with his dog and we discussed how much a dog becomes part of your life when it’s just you and them. My morning walks down Blackbird Lane are shared with Triar and without him, I might never have walked there. More than anything else, those walks help me stay centred and because Triar enjoys exploring all the scents under the hedgerows, we take our time. As he sniffs around, I enjoy the birdsong.
Wednesday was a particularly beautiful morning, calm at sunrise, with mist rising over the fields and the birds were in full song. It’s a while since I used my Merlin App, but the Dawn chorus was so beautiful that I pulled the phone out of my pocket and switched it on. As well as the inevitable blackbirds, sparrows and robin (his sweet little song always lifts my heart) I picked up the song thrush that breaks snails on my patio, a long tailed tit and a goldcrest, among other things.
I took some photos too… of course I did!
Despite knowing I had a potentially difficult day ahead, there was a true moment of peace, there in Blackbird Lane.
I’m not sure whether it’s the time of year, or whether it’s the fact that the other vet that works with me has been seconded to another department, but the welfare referrals have gone crazy in the last two weeks. My lovely line manager has been away, so these were passed on by other managers from another region and I think there were seven of them altogether. Wednesday’s sounded most urgent and there’s at least one that (in my opinion) isn’t an indicator of poor welfare at all, but it is overwhelming.
When I say it might be the time of year, several of them came from slaughterhouses. As winter approaches, the farmers send off their old stock that will struggle through the cold weather, so inevitably those include animals with problems. Part of my job involves reminding farmers that welfare doesn’t end on the farm, but needs to continue until the end of the animal’s life. If it isn’t fit to travel, or perhaps it is, but shouldn’t go far, then they need to work out whether it should be taken to a local abattoir, or culled on the farm without going anywhere.
Too many farmers rely on someone coming to collect their cull cows and “organize all that,” when they should be making the arrangements themselves. Difficult to change the mindset, when that’s what they’ve always done but it’s a discussion I’ll be having a lot. Getting the best price for the meat or taking the most convenient path shouldn’t be the standard. Given the animal has given them the best part of its life, its welfare in death should be given decent consideration. If taking that cow with overgrown hooves to the local abattoir saves them from me and the local authority turning up to inspect all their animals and paperwork, that’s surely a good thing? Even if that’s their only incentive, I try to make it count.
Anyway, it’s almost breakfast time, so I shall wind this up. Triar and I came down to Yorkshire yesterday evening on the train. It’s not too expensive and as winter comes in, it might be more relaxing than driving, so we gave it a try. Luckily, Triar is an old hand on trains now. Here he is, under the table.
There were two beautiful mornings in Blackbird Lane the week before last that I want to share with you. I took the photo at the top of the page and the one below on Monday the 7th.
Mist hung above the fields, but the light was beautiful, catching the wonderful clarity of the raindrops, left there by a shower.
Four days later, it was frosty and again, I couldn’t resist taking photographs in the sparkling morning light.
I was taken out for a driver training course on the Thursday. The instructor asked why I was there. I must have triggered something when I answered some questions at work about my driving, but the only one I can think of was that I said I drive when I’m tired. If anyone working in field services (as I do) said they never drive when tired, they are not being entirely truthful. After a long day on a physical job on a farm, we all have to get home. That’s just how it is. Anyway I drove the instructor to Tebay service station and had a coffee and a pie, then drove her back. She says I’m a good driver, so no complaints about that one!
Last Sunday, I met an old friend from university and had a meal with him in Lockerbie. We then decided to go and look at a section of the west side of Hadrian’s wall, as it wasn’t too far away. It’s an impressive sight, even now: well constructed and taller than I am, so I couldn’t see over it. It was originally four metres high when it was built almost 2000 years ago. It must have been very commanding and Hadrian must have been very alarmed by all the evil Scots!
This week has been a real mixed bag. I was meant to be heading off to Bury St Edmunds today, to do some bluetongue surveillance, but on Tuesday, I was told that there was tracing work to be done here in Scotland and I couldn’t be spared. I was a bit frustrated as I was looking forward to getting away and doing some outbreak work.
The high point of my week was on Tuesday, when I visited a vet practice for a routine inspection over Wigtown way. It went well and I decided to spend lunchtime in a cafe in Wigtown called ReadingLasses. They had run out of soup and were only serving coffee and cake, so I chose a coffee and martini cake, which really was as delicious as it looks. Wigtown is also Scotland’s book town, as I’ve mentioned before, and as you can see in the photo below, and maybe guessed from its name, ReadingLasses was filled with books by and about women. I read the first two chapters of a book about crofting life with my cake and will definitely return for the following two next time I’m over that way.
Thursday wasn’t so good. I woke up and found that Triar’s breathing was not right. He was obviously struggling a bit, needing more effort to breathe out than was normal. I had woken at six and the vet didn’t open until 8:30 – he wasn’t bad enough to warrant an out of hours call – so I had a frightening couple of hours, during which my lovely friend Lara called me and calmed me down, talking through what to do.
By some miracle, the vet Triar knows had an appointment at 8:45, so I rushed Triar there. I think he has some kind of inflammation in his lungs, or pneumonia, but don’t know what’s causing it. He’s had a steroid injection and is doing a bit better, but for now, I’m waiting and monitoring and hoping he goes in the right direction. Lung problems in dogs can be difficult to diagnose and treat. This is the one time I wish I was working in practice, as I would do way more tests, though of course that can also cause more problems. Patience is very hard though and the realization of how precious he is to me was brought home by the wave of emotion. I was no use for work on Thursday morning and fortunately, my manager was very understanding.
So after all, I am very grateful to not be heading off to Bury St Edmunds today. Triar and I will have a quiet weekend together. The weather warnings say there’s a storm on the way, so we will shelter together here and hope for better things next week.
Last weekend, I made it to Torhouse Stone circle. I read somewhere, maybe at the site itself, that it consisted of a circle of “dumpy stones” but I see that Wikipedia calls them granite boulders, which sounds much better, so I’ll stick with that! There are nineteen stones in the circumference of the circle and three in the centre, and here, for the avoidance of doubt, is the Druid dog himself, who decided he would look very dashing, with his lovely silky ears getting all windswept and interesting.
As you can see, there were cows and a beautiful view, so I shall post a picture of that, without a dog in the way.
The age of the circle is not completely clear. They have yet to be excavated, but Historic Environment Scotland estimates that it is 4,000 years old which, if correct, would make it a bit younger than Cairn Holy (I posted about that here) and Stonehenge. On my online searches, I also discovered there is a particularly stunning looking stone circle in the Lake District, but I think that one will have to wait for the winter months, when all the tourists have departed.
From Torhouse, I drove on to Wigtown, hoping for coffee in ReadingLasses, but the centre of town was so busy with parked cars that I decided that too, could wait for another day. I drove on, down towards the harbour and saw a sign pointing to “Martyrs’ Stake”. The path looked enticing, so putting Triar on his lead, I decided to follow it.
A multitude of dragonflies flitted across the path at the beginning and later, there were brambles, filled with fruit. This little guy caught my ear with its drowsy summer buzz, so I took its photo, then carried on.
The stake itself was modern, which I confess disappointed me. I had been hoping for another standing stone, which technically this is, but it’s a newly placed monument, not an ancient artifact. Two women, Margaret Maclauchlan and Margaret Wilson were executed here on 11 May, 1685 for refusing to swear an oath declaring James VII of Scotland as head of the church. They were tied to stakes on the town’s mudflats, apparently, and allowed to drown with the rising tide. I’m not going to attempt to explain the Covenanters, or Scottish history in this post, but it was certainly a particularly cruel fate for those two poor women.
We stopped on the way home at Carsluith Castle. Like several other Historic Environment Scotland sites, it is closed to assess whether it’s safe, but there was a pleasant cafe in what would once have been its yard, where I had a very civilized cup of tea. There was also a delicatessen shop, which I will have to explore another day. It was too hot to leave Triar in the car, so he joined me outside, once I had ordered my drink.
It was good to get home to my nice, cool house. The walls are so thick that, even on warm summer days, it stays cool inside, and Donna assures me that it will stay easily warm in winter. Hopefully once I get the insulation put in the roof, that will be even more true.
A little later, I received a text from Donna, which said “If you’re home and at a loose end there’s a bottle of wine open and the chiminea is on. Making the most of the only day of summer 😂”. Well who could resist an offer like that? I decided on tea, instead of wine, but sat in Donna’s garden until the sun had gone down and it was properly dusk.
And now, a week later, I’m back at Valerie’s. I am attending a church meeting with her and her husband Charles, with a shared meal, for which Valerie prepared some delicious looking, traditional South African milk tarts last night. Tomorrow I’m going to a mini writing retreat with a group of writers I belong to. We meet in Lockerbie twice a month, and the mini-retreat is a little extra treat, which I am very much looking forward to.
It’s been a good week in various ways, but Triar has been telling me for the past few minutes that it’s time to get up, so I’d better go. I’ll leave you with a little gift the spiders in Blackbird Lane wove for me. Isn’t it beautiful?
This week has felt so long, and has been so full, that it was almost a surprise when I looked back at my photos and realised that it was only last weekend I went to the Northern Canine and Equine Therapy Centre in Rathmell, where they do hydrotherapy for horses and dogs. They had advertised it as a coffee morning and we did indeed purchase a lovely coffee from a van outside the centre, but the real attraction lay inside.
The horse hydrotherapy session was due first, so we walked into the part of the centre where the horses were kept. I wish that I had taken more photos, but it was a lovely place and I instantly felt at home. The centrepiece of the covered yard was obviously the pool (pictured at the top of the page) but around two edges there were stables for the hospitalised horses. Some were there for lameness, some for weight loss and conditioning. Others were there, not so much for treatment, but for pampering. Imagine sending your horse away for a spa weekend!
Having swum round, the pony in the picture was taken out, towelled down, then treated with oils to replace the natural oils that would have been removed from his coat. He then was walked into a solarium to dry out a bit.
After we’d seen the horse swimming, we moved through to the dog pool. There. We watched as a dog physio put her labrador through his paces in the pool.
She told us about the different conditions they helped with. Her own dog doesn’t need any therapy, but he does love swimming. It’s also possible to book a half hour fun session with your dog and I immediately decided I’d like to take Triar to see if he would like indoor swimming. I also found myself wishing I worked there, or perhaps was a vet who could refer animals to them. It felt like a very positive place.
We had rather a bombshell last Friday afternoon, which I couldn’t bring myself to mention last week. My lovely boss, Kirsty, unexpectedly sent out a message to say she was leaving and her last day would be early in August. I will be very sad to see her go, and by the outpouring of shock, so will many of my colleagues. Both Lindsay (my Veterinary advisor – one step up from me) and Sue, who has just taken on a year long post after locumming on and off, called me up, mainly to express their sadness. Though it feels very sudden, it’s good for Kirsty and I hope she gets some much deserved time to relax.
Back at work on Monday, I visited a chicken farm with my colleague, Aleks. I have to do three visits with other vets before I can go solo, and this was my third. Because everyone is so busy, it’s difficult to find dates when two of us can go out together, so I’m glad my third accompanied visit is done. I have three of my own to do, so now I can more easily fit them into my timetable.
I can’t even remember what I did on Tuesday. It all feels so long ago! I was due to revisit a welfare case on Wednesday with David, who works for the local authority with animal health and welfare. We often work together and the revisit was to a farm where we witnessed some serious welfare issues before. But when he arrived, he asked me if we could divert to a more pressing issue. A group of pigs had escaped from their field and had turned up in someone else’s farmyard. It wasn’t the first time they’d escaped, but the farmer, quite correctly, now had them coralled in a barn.
Other authorities, including the police and the SSPCA had been called out when the pigs had escaped before, but nothing had been done. These situations are complicated to deal with. Animals do escape from time to time, and unless they’re on a road or causing risk, it’s really the farmer’s responsibility to get them back and secure them in the field or barn. For David and me, it was essentially a welfare issue. It’s not safe for the pigs to be marauding round the countryside. All farmers have a responsibility to keep their animals safe and keeping them enclosed within a safe area is key to that.
After the big foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, various laws were brought in to try to reduce the risks of another big outbreak. These included standstill laws on animal movements. If cloven hoofed animals (mainly cattle, sheep and pigs) are moved onto a farm, then the farm comes under a standstill order and for thirteen days, no animals can be moved off the farm without special permission.
So pigs landing unexpectedly on someone else’s farm presents quite an issue to that farmer, especially if they were planning on selling some animals, which our farmer was, and imminently. Our first action was to find out if the sale could go ahead. The pigs had not, to anyone’s knowledge, been near the animals that were to be sold, but equally, they had been loose, so where they had been was anyone’s guess. The movement ban applies to all animals on the farm, so the sale had to be stopped. That was done before we left the office.
Our next action was to visit the farm. It was an hour’s drive, but when we got there, I was able to examine the pigs. They were healthy and being well looked after. The main issue that had to be dealt with (or so we thought) was that they were not where they were meant to be.
Having looked at the entrapped pigs, we then went to visit the pig owner. The remainder of the herd were in a separate field from the ones who had escaped. To get to them, we had to walk through the field where the escapee pigs had been. There were some green boxes that looked like the boxes supermarkets use to deliver produce, but I had walked past them, keen to see if the pigs were okay. David had gone to get something from his van and I expected him to follow immediately, but when I turned to see where he was, he was standing at the gate, looking round.
He joined us eventually and we went and looked at the pigs. They looked well and the field they were in was (in my opinion) the perfect environment, with a small shelter, long grass and rushes to hide in and mud in which to wallow when the weather was warm.
It was only when we turned and walked back, that David told me what he had seen at the gate. Across from the supermarket boxes, there was litter, lying about. And in that rubbish, which was mostly food packaging, he had found empty packages for sausage rolls, ham and bacon, along with bags for bread and hot dog rolls.
I mentioned foot and mouth and the rules created after the big 2001 outbreak earlier. In addition to new rules on animal movements, strict rules were brought in about feeding pigs. Feeding them any kind of human food or kitchen waste is banned. We asked the farmer about the packages. It wasn’t impossible they had been left by someone having a picnic, but he didn’t know where they’d come from and said he thought people sometimes came and fed the pigs.
So now we had a situation, where there were empty packages for pork products that the escaped pigs had access to, and worse, that it was possible the produce, including raw bacon, might have been fed to the pigs.
These are the kinds of situations that have immediately to be sent up the food chain. Even if I had dealt with such a situation before, I would still have to call it in, without delay. The upshot of my phone call, and the work I have been doing for the last three days, is that both farms have to be locked down, with no movements of live or dead animals onto or off the premises, except under special licence. All the animals have to be inspected every 72 hours for signs of disease for a week, then probably weekly thereafter, for another two weeks. There was also the matter of the pigs being on the wrong farm, which was resolved yesterday, after lots of negotiation and paperwork.
So a vist which I thought might be a little complicated to resolve has turned into a behemoth case. One thing I will say is that we have an enormous amount to be grateful for with the farmer who took in the marauding pigs. She did everything right from start to finish, including calling us in. Chances are, the pigs don’t have foot and mouth, but now we have everything under supervision, so if the worst happens, we are already on top of it.
Had she chosen not to trap the pigs and call us, but had shoo’d them away and sent her animals to the sale, the potential for us being faced with another 2001 was there. That was started by pigs being fed improperly processed food and the disease wasn’t spotted until it had been sent all over the country. I may now be faced with three weeks of visits and a ton of paperwork, but this is the kind of work that can prevent a world of pain for farmers and a devastating cull that costs the country billions.
So this is what I am here for. I’m only a tiny cog in a very important chain, and kudos to both the wonderful farmer who called it in and for David for his observational skills. Next time, I won’t be so quick to pass by litter to look at animals.
But if I have one final thought, it is that I wish the government could see what we are here to do and how important vets and animal health and welfare officers are to this process. There should be more of us on the ground and the pay for those of us who choose to do this should be much better. Staff come and go, or work quickly to get promotion as there is no pay progression in our part of the civil service any more.
We need experienced people on the front line, but there is zero financial incentive to come and stay. Maybe saying this publically could get me into trouble, but if so, so be it. The people responsible for removing progressive pay bands for these roles have put the health and welfare of the nation’s animals at risk.
I work alongside a few, faithful staff, who have years of experience, a network of connections, a load of invaluable local knowledge, who are asked to train new entrants on the same wage as them. That is both plain wrong and absolute insanity. We should be making sure those people have an incentive to stay, that they know they are valued and that they don’t have to move to a different job to be properly rewarded.
And on that cheery note (sarcasm alert for non Brits) I shall leave you to your weekend! Have a good week all, and see you next week.
A few “after the rain” photographs for those who love Blackbird Lane.
