I managed the May Walkfit Challenge: 15,000 steps, three times in May.

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.