Tag Archives: Government vet

Here and There, This and That

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One of the things I enjoy about working as a government vet is travelling to different places. It hasn’t happened yet, but at some point, I will be sent to do detached duty, where I can be sent anywhere in the UK to deal with any emerging notifiable disease. Even in my region though, I get around a bit. On Monday, I am going to Ayr to accompany a colleague on a welfare inspection. She has only been out to one such inspection so far and I’ve already done my three, so hopefully I can help her to do a good job.

I’m also going to be one of APHA’s vets at the Royal Highland Show next weekend, which is exciting. If nothing happens, it’ll be a lovely day out. It’s a long time since I’ve been, but it was always an enjoyable day out. If something happens that I have to deal with, it will be… interesting. Imagine how the day would change if we discover one of the animals is showing signs of foot and mouth. There are contingency plans, which I should get next week. I will make myself familiar with them and keep my fingers crossed that the most exciting thing to happen will be visiting the freshly cooked doughnut stand.

Not that I will be doing that. As I mentioned last week, I have been signed up to a weight loss program called Second Nature by the NHS. So far, it’s been very good. Its focus is on changing habits and not on counting calories, which is appealing to me. I can’t get on board with weighing out food for the rest of my life. It relies on encouraging exercise, eating more vegetables and cutting down on carbs, without cutting them out altogether.

I was meant to do lots of meal planning this past week, but bought pick and mix salad every day from my local supermarket, which handily is a ten minute walk from my office. In the evenings, Andrew and I have been using a delivery service called Hello Fresh. Both Anna and Donna recommended it, so we decided to give it a go. Each week, we select four meal plans, they deliver ready prepared ingredients, and we cook the food together when I get home from work. It’s been quite easy to modify the Hello Fresh meals to fit the Second Nature recommendations, so it’s all been very easy and I love not having to decide what to eat while standing in the supermarket.

I also signed up to an online service called Borrow My Doggy and this week, for the first time, someone new took Triar out for a walk. It did make me realise that he’s not the easiest dog to handle. He’s never been placid – quite the opposite. Also, I’ve not taught him very good manners on the lead.

It went off fine though. I’m hoping to find someone who would be able to take him at short notice if I have to go away unexpectedly for work, but I’m going to have to engage more to do that. I’ve just booked a holiday in November, so perhaps I need to concentrate my efforts more. Triar has never been in a kennel and I’m not sure I really want him to start now.

These are some photos from the bottom of my garden, which is running absolutely wild. The garden is full of insects and birds, which I love watching from my kitchen window. I made my way down the broken steps this week and was pleased to find that the overgrown roses have the same, wonderful scent that I remember from the roses in the garden when I was a child. So many these days seem not to have any aroma. “Stop and small the roses” is a good principle in life, I think. We’re down in Yorkshire for the weekend, so I’m going to start with a cup of coffee and take it from there. See you next week!

TB, Cairn Holy and a Tasty Tart

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Andrew and I were in Yorkshire last weekend, which feels like a lifetime ago, but it was a lovely warm day on Saturday and we went on an ice cream hunt, which on the face of it wasn’t very successful. The firstly place we went to was styled like an American Diner, but it was so noisy and there were so many children leaping about that we turned and walked back out. The next place we tried, after consulting the Oracle of Google Maps was a small, village shop, but the only parking we found was in a field, which some canny farmer had mown and was charging £10 per day to enter.

We ended up doing a big circle back to Grassington, where fortunately, we bought a cone, but it wasn’t quite the ice-cream parlour experience we’d been searching for! Grassington is very pretty though and the drive back was too.

On Tuesday afternoon, I met up with some women I met on social media. We’d been chatting online and they were part of a women’s group I wanted to join, so we met for a coffee. I’ve been worried about Andrew being here for the summer with nothing to do, and to my delight, it turns out one of the women owns a small media company in the area. She does some work with young people, so later this morning, Andrew has been invited to a scriptwriting workshop in a cafe in town. He’s read the script they’ll be working on and has some ideas, so hopefully he will enjoy it. If Andrew wants to work in film, the most difficult part might well be finding a way in, so any experience and contacts he can form are a good thing.

I was through in Stranraer again this week, on one of my TB farm cases. We’re still waiting to see if TB is confirmed, but it’s looking more likely and so my Veterinary Advisor and I went to the farm to assess the boundaries and history of animal movements on and off the farm. If TB is confirmed, we will need to move quickly to start tracing where it might have come from and where it could have spread to, so now we are prepared to move to that stage without delay.

I was driving back to Dumfries, when I found myself in a queue of traffic. It’s a fairly difficult road for overtaking long queues, and this one was particularly frustrating as it was going slowly round the bends and speeding up for the straight parts. Seeing a sign for “Holy Cairn” I made a snap decision that this might be a good moment to go and explore one of the historic monuments that are scattered along the A75.

This is a hit and miss activity. Sometimes you can follow side roads for miles and find nothing, or you do arrive, only to find you’re looking at two stones on a hillside. This time, however, I found a good parking space and went through a small gate to find what looked initially like a circle of standing stones…

… but which on closer inspection, had been the spectacular entrance to a chambered cairn.

There was an information block in the corner of the enclosure, which told me a little bit about the cairn and its excavation, but the best thing it told me was that there was another cairn, further up the hill. I followed the track up, to find another, rather different cairn. The entrance to this one was a little less spectacular, but it was sited in such a beautiful place that I could only stand and gaze.

I read the information here too. Long-time readers might remember my trip to Stonehenge where I was amazed to discover that animal herders came down from Scotland to celebrate the winter solstice. I found myself wondering whether the people who used these cairns were among those who made that trip.

The plaque told me the cairns dated from 4000 BC. When I looked up Stonehenge later, it is thought to have been started in 3000BC, so these beautiful cairns were in use a thousand years before Stonehenge was begun. As ever, I felt the wonderful calm feeling that I always get when viewing something ancient or ageless. It’s always a wonderful reminder of how short and insignificant my life is in the grand scheme of things.

And finally, I had been gradually gaining weight, ever since I moved to Arctic Norway. Winter hibernation is all very well, but when winter lasts from October to May, it’s a large chunk of the year to take a break from walking, which was something I had done to keep myself healthy for years. I had hoped to break the bad habits when I came back to Scotland, but there is far too much temptation and I haven’t lost anything at all.

I asked at my GP clinic for help and they have signed me up for six months on an app called Second Nature. It tells me it’s going to help me break my bad habits and form some new and healthier ones, so I will be starting that on Monday. My main hope is to lose enough weight so I can start to go up hills again without creaking to a standstill within a few yards. There’s no weighing and measuring foods or calorie counting, which is good as I can never be bothered with all that. I’m also glad they didn’t offer me drugs. I want to improve my lifestyle, so hopefully this will help. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Of course, I am back in Scotland, and true to form, my colleagues in Stranraer, on hearing this, convinced me that it was essential that I should make the most of the last few days before I began, so this was the result. Have a good week all!

Surviving Duty Vet

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I wrote, last week, about my frustrations around the non payment of relocation expenses. They haven’t yet been paid, but K, my line manager, has told me that the big boss I sent my complaint to is now trying to get it paid from the local budget, rather than continuing to fight with DEFRA HR. I will try to keep you updated. Another colleague has suggested I contact the union I joined when I arrived, so that’s another step to consider, though I am hoping it will all be resolved soon and I won’t need to.

For most of this week, including last weekend and the (Scottish) Monday bank holiday, I have been working as duty vet. During the weekend, that meant the APHA national phone line went through to my work phone, or at least any and all calls from the north of Scotland came through to me. In the north, a second vet was taking phone calls for the south. Not many people call the emergency line (thank goodness). I had only a few calls on the Monday, most of which were easily dealt with. The counter to that is that, if something does come in that actually requires me to go out, it is likely to be something serious. Possible reasons would include a suspected outbreak of a notifiable disease (think bird flu or foot and mouth) or a welfare case that’s so bad it can’t wait.

Anyway at least, with mobile phones, being on call no longer requires me to stay in the house, glued to a landline, so Andrew and I decided on Saturday that it was time to go and explore our local ice cream emporium. There are a couple locally. Farmers in the UK have been encouraged to diversify and so we took a short drive out to Drummuir Farm where they make their own ice cream. There were loads of choices of flavour, from biscotti to battenberg, and Andrew and I ended up ordering two glorious fruity sundaes.

We went for a drive afterwards, including through Dalton, where I stopped to take a photo of this lovely pastoral scene.

Andrew’s eye was caught at Drummuir by the full Scottish breakfast on the menu, so we returned on Sunday for an early lunch, which I can also recommend!

I don’t know if I’ve written much about being duty vet through the week before, but it’s not an enjoyable part of my job. Part of it is dealing with any queries that come in, either in emails or by phone. We don’t actually have to answer the phone during the day, but the calls are logged with a summary of the question, so then we have to look at what’s being asked and decide what action to take.

Some of these are quite straightforward. If a cow dies suddenly, the local private vet should go out and check whether it died of anthrax. An APHA vet has to okay that, then give them a reference number. This mostly involves form filling and it happens often enough that I already know the ropes.

But APHA covers a lot of ground on the animal front, so I might find myself with a query about an imported horse whose health certificate wasn’t filled in properly, or a farmer who failed to update his online records properly and has now found his farm is under TB restrictions as his test couldn’t be verified. These can take a lot of sorting out and require solid understanding of all the different computer systems we use. The main problem for me there, is that I don’t have a solid understanding of those systems yet.

Fortunately I have lovely colleagues, so I managed to get through, but ex policeman Tommy, who shares an office with me, saw that I was so stressed on Tuesday , Wednesday and Thursday that he arrived on Friday with a bottle of Malbec for me! Next week should be better, I think, My ongoing cases were mostly put on hold while I was on duty, so there’s a bit of catching up to do, but at least I have a better grasp of where I’m going with those.

In the meantime, I’ll finish with some pictures from my daily walks down Blackbird Lane. We’re into summertime now and my little green lane is full of colour and birdsong: a daily oasis to sooth my soul.

From Nostalgia to Duty

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My son John and his girlfriend Yoana visited me last weekend. Though it was raining most of the time (in true, southwest Scotland style) John suggested we could go to New Lanark for a visit, so that’s what we did.

New Lanark holds a special place in my heart. For those who don’t know, it is a former 18th century cotton spinning mill village located on the banks of the Falls of Clyde, where social reform became very important. The lives of those who worked in the mill and their families were improved through schools, education, reasonably priced food and medical support. It’s a living village too – there are still tennants living there, and apparently very long waiting lists to get an apartment.

New Lanark

I think I might have visited with my parents, a very long time ago, but my fondest memories are from when John and Anna were young and we went there every year at Christmas time. There’s a ride you go through, where you sit on moving chairs and are taken on a trip back through the darkness of time. At Christmas, it gets set up like a kind of magical grotto and the filmed clips of a child that grew up in New Lanark, are replaced with an elf-like girl called Holly. At least that’s how it was back then, though that is twenty years ago now.

Millworkers’ apartment block.

The site has been undergoing improvement for a long time and it was lovely to visit again. Some things struck me, now that hadn’t really done so before. One was that the classroom, where the millworkers children were taught was a very large, airy room, with a high ceiling and lots of natural light. The contrast between that and the small, low ceilinged apartments, where large families occupied one or two rooms, must have seemed incredible to the children when they began to attend school.

Robert Owen’s house is on the left.

The other was a comment in the film, where the mill workers’ working day was described. They “only” worked ten hours per day, potentially from ten years old, but there were evening classes so that they could be educated if they wanted. I only work eight hour days and am struggling to motivate myself to write in the evenings. It’s incredible to imagine a world where working ten hour days, six days a week, was considered humane, but there it is.

A beautiful roof-garden has been set up on one of the old mills.

Robert Owen, the social reformer, who brought in the improvements for workers in New Lanark, eventually left to set up a new project in America called New Harmony. This project fell apart within a few years. Reading between the lines, a lot of the people they attracted had lofty ideals, but weren’t necessarily hard working.

View from the rooftops.

It’s easy to see with hindsight, but it’s obviously much easier to improve the lives of those who started out with very little and were used to hard labour than it is to form a new community of truly equal people. If Owen had really wanted a socialist paradise, he could have considered whether it was possible to make all those in New Lanark equal. I think then, he might have realised he couldn’t achieve that without reducing his own circumstances to close to those of his workers, and I imagine that was why he set off on an unrealistic vanity project, rather than really setting out to achieve equality.

Back to work and I am unexpectedly working this weekend as the duty vet for Southern Scotland. This means that if there are any reports of suspected notifiable diseases, such as foot and mouth or bird flu reported, I’m the vet who will be sent out. Equally, if there’s an urgent welfare issue that’s so bad it can’t wait, that will be my job to tackle as well. My car is currently loaded up with boxes full of all the kit that I might need, which is quite eye opening as there’s so much of it. I know that in an outbreak situation, I would have to arrange clean and dirty areas in my car and, as I didn’t have much warning, everything has just been thrown in. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for now. Complicated routines take time to organize and I had less than a day to find everything, without anyone local to help me out. Roll on Monday!

The steam engine that drove the mill when the water in the Clyde was low was housed in the building on the right. The ropes that drove the machinery would have been inside the glass bridge. The mill race goes underneath the building on the right,

Tripping

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I finally made it out of bed on Monday, just in time to go back to work. By Tuesday, I was on the road again as I made my way to Edinburgh for a conference, where APHA staff from all over Scotland came together to meet and learn.

When I drove over to Stranraer, I was craving memories and was rather disappointed at the lack of familiarity. Although I grew up in Penicuik, which is not very far from Edinburgh, and that I went to university in Edinburgh, it hadn’t crossed my mind to hope for something similar. It hadn’t crossed my mind that our route wouldn’t take us on the featureless motorway network, but rather through a load of places that were embedded deeply from my childhood.

We passed through West Linton, then Carlops: familiar names and places from long ago. But it was when we reached Nine Mile Burn, where you can turn off to drive to Penicuik, that I had that sudden feeling of nostalgia.

My adult life has been interesting, but I was fortunate enough to have a very happy childhood. One of my sweetest memories is of climbing onto a low hanging tree bough and sitting in dappled sunlight with my friend, Sharon. We had been watching Robin of Sherwood, Sharon had pictures of Michael Praed on her wall and we were at the age when everything still seemed possible. If there was one moment in my life that I could go back and relive, I am fairly sure that would be the one I would choose as it is so unsullied. A young man fractured my mind at university and by the time I was 25 I’d had skin cancer twice and I think that’s why that memory of unsullied innocence is so precious. I’d love to relive it with Sharon, but she also got cancer and she didn’t make it.

Goodness, I hadn’t expected this to take such a sorrowful turn, but those sweet, sweet memories do come with a hefty dose of melancholy. Anyway, the road carried on past Nine Mile Burn and we passed Silverburn, where my parents once considered buying the farmhouse. It was run down then, but now looks very smart. And then the Pentland Hills were on my left and those really were my old stomping ground. I remember some names: Carnethy, Scald Law, East and West Kip. Scald law was the highest hill, but we more often walked up Carnethy, or took the path over between the hills to a wonderful waterfall, though I don’t remember its name.

Pentland Hills – I think this one is Scald Law, but feel free to correct me!

The hotel in Edinburgh was very pleasant, though very much a typical, identikit modern hotel, with no distinguishing features. I’m still at the stage where there’s lots to learn, so there was plenty of new information to pick up. I enjoyed the evening meal, although the milk chocolate cheesecake, which I expected to be a sweet and fluffy concoction was more like a dark chocolate brick of solidity that even I couldn’t finish.


The conference ran from lunchtime on Tuesday to lunchtime on Wednesday, then on Thursday I had to go to Ayr to have a mask-fitting appointment. This was to check whether I can use the FFP3 masks at work safely. This involved having a mask on, which was attached to a tube which monitored the air I was breathing, while performing various manoeuvres. As this involved marching on the spot, while moving my head around in various ways, and then counting out loud, while trying to breathe normally, it was quite a challenge, given that I am still coughing after being ill, but I survived without falling over, and now I am officially allowed to use a mask if I have to check out any sick chickens.

Much as I love travelling (especially those identikit hotels) and consider it a definite perk of my job, I am rather looking forward to next week, when the most distant visit I have booked in is to Castle Douglas.

I’ve probably gone a bit quiet about my house buying. Compared to an international move, it’s very low key, but I’m now at the stage when all the papers have to be signed, I have to show where the money for my deposit is coming from, and I have to arrange to shift my accounts with all my providers from one house to the other, while leaving an overlap as I don’t want to move everything on one single day. I’m quite excited about buying a house, but it doesn’t quite seem real yet, even though the intended date of exchange is less than two weeks away.

You know, I write these blogs mostly to keep in touch with people, but I sometimes think they will end up being a bit like a diary. Maybe one day in the future, I’ll look back and all the memories will come flooding back. My mind feels odd at the moment. Part of me is chugging onwards, being quite competent, learning lots of stuff, but it’s overlaid with a feeling of there being too much going on. It’s not perturbing me too much, but I do have a sense that there is chaos rushing all around me, while I just wander through it, waiting for everything to settle. I write this weekly and I can’t tell whether any of that feeling is coming across, or whether what I write is as scattergun as it sometimes feels. This week, I volunteered to work as a vet at the Royal Highland Show, and I can’t yet tell if that will turn out to be a marvellous opportunity or a daunting responsibility. Maybe both! Still, you know me. I tend to grab what comes my way and worry about the consequences later.

Anyway, as usual, thanks to anyone who made it this far. I hope you have a good week, and I will leave you with a couple of pictures of Biggar, where we went on school trips to the street museum. I was intrigued by the tiny scarlet door in the first building. I presume the road and pavement have been built up over the years, but anyone using that door would really have to watch their head! See you next week.

Tuberculosis

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The rain is hurling itself against the window as I write this, having returned home after half a week in Stranraer. The wind there was relentless and felt like it was filled with icicles. Not quite the balmy, maritime climate I might have hoped for. Despite the chilly wind and the sleet that fell, the fields were still green and many animals are still outside. So different from the months of snow and ice in the far north. I finally found the time to take a few photos when I was out and about, which I’ll share in between the streams of reminiscence!

It was strange being back. A lot has changed in the last thirty years, although one thing that hasn’t changed much is the little lodge house I lived in back then. It now has oil central heating, where once the only warmth came from a coal fire, and the wheelie bins are out front, rather than tucked away at the back door, but other than that, it still looks much as it did when I lived there. I swore, after those eighteen months that I would never again accept a house without central heating.

The practice I worked in is long gone. The younger of my bosses sold it to the neighbouring practice (now Academy Vets) years ago. I went into Academy Vets as I had to chat to them about a case. I thought I didn’t know any of the staff, but I discovered that one of the senior vets had seen practice with me when he was a student, which illustrates how long ago it all was. My older boss is still around, apparently. Hopefully I can visit him, next time I’m over.

Simpson’s the bakers is still there on the main shopping street. I remember Anne, the kindest receptionist ever, asking if I wanted anything from Simpson’s at lunch time on an almost daily basis. I bought a sandwich: coronation chicken on white bread and they must still be using the same recipe as they used, all those years ago. It was as delicious as I remembered, though it now comes in plastic, where once it was in a white paper bag. The cakes haven’t changed either: very traditionally Scottish, all intensely sweet, no fresh cream and some very garish icing.

I was quite surprised (and rather saddened) by how unfamiliar a lot of it seemed, though I did keep tripping over memories over the course of a few days. I thought the Morrisons supermarket was new, but when I went in, it dawned on me that it was the precious supermarket that was built when I was there. It was Safeway when it arrived in town and was a wonderful addition. Before that, there was only a dim and narrow W.M. Low’s that I would walk around, looking for something for dinner, finding no inspiration. Morrison’s was closer to the centre than I remember and I don’t recall using a roundabout to get into it, but maybe I’ve just forgotten. A colleague who grew up in Stranraer reminded me that the old cattle market was knocked down to build it, and I do recall that as well, but only in the vaguest of ways.

Mostly I drove around, thinking how unfamiliar it all seemed, though when I drove away from Academy Vets (where we used to take dogs for x-rays as my practice didn’t have one) I knew exactly how to get to Lewis Street, where McTaggart and Williamson used to be, and for a few moments, I felt as if time had shifted.

Though my time in Stranraer wasn’t particularly happy, it is where I met Charlie. He took a job in my practice, having spent time as a student doing extramural studies around the corner in Academy Street. We were married twenty three years and have three wonderful children together, so it was a significant time in my life.


Anyway, enough reminiscing and back to the present. This week I have been learning about tuberculosis. It’s important that I do as I will be taking over several TB outbreak cases in just over a month’s time, when my Stranraer colleague goes on maternity leave. Although I’m learning a lot at high speed, I am now reaching the stage when I can see just how much I don’t know.

There’s an online course I need to take, as well as having time for the cases to be handed over. I am finding out where to look up case handling and I’ve an offer of help with the tracing and epidemiology, but I am still going to need a lot of guidance. Each case is different, depending on whether there were signs of TB found when an animal went to slaughter, or whether it was picked up during a skin test, and beyond that how exactly the case progresses, once a positive skin test occurs. There are a multitude of pathways, depending on those factors. I did the skin testing thirty years back, but there were no positive skin tests back then, so the rest is new to me.

Now in addition to skin tests, they can take blood tests and are beginning to understand some of the genetics. Tracing where it came from (and where it might have spread to) is now becoming more clear. You can sometimes tell where a strain might have come from, because it is genetically similar to a separate case. When I was testing, thirty years ago, there was no TB in the area. The aim is to return to that situation, but I think that will take a very long time, if it’s possible at all. Only time will tell.

Yesterday, R and I visited a farm where the investigation is just beginning. One of their cows had a small reaction to the injection during a routine skin test. When tested again, sixty days later, she reacted more. Now she will sadly be taken to slaughter, where they will check her for visible signs of TB and also do a PCR check, where they look for TB DNA. After that, whatever the result, the whole herd will have to be checked again. Until they get the all-clear, with no reactors, they cannot sell any of their animals, or move them off the farm, other than for slaughter. It’s a huge blow to any farmer to find out some of his cows will have to be culled and that there is disease in the herd that can spread to humans. I hope, for their sake, that the tests all come back clear.

I had left my car in a car park in the middle of nowhere while R took me to the farm, and on my return, I was quite surprised to see a van parked beside it. R headed off and to my surprise, the driver of the van came over to chat to me. He was wizened as if he had spent a lot of years battling the weather, but he seemed cheery as he told me he was a mole exterminator! He is seventy five, he said, and still tending to over seventy farms, though in his heyday, he cleared a hundred and twenty. I confess that it had never crossed my mind that the job of mole exterminator existed, but he seemed very upbeat about it and was obviously very efficient. It did cross my mind that perhaps I should consider a new career, but he said he thinks he has someone lined up to take over his patch when he finally gets too old.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with some food pictures. I ate every night in the North West Castle Hotel and would highly recommend it!

Sea bass with creamed potatoes, prawn and chive butter and seasonal vegetables
Breast of chicken with mash, haggis and peppercorn sauce

… and the piece de resistance…

Strawberry cheesecake

Delicious! See you next week.

Cross Compliance

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On Friday, I headed out to meet S. S is a locum vet, currently working with the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) and she is being sent out over half of Scotland to cover welfare inspections on farms. Many of these visits are what are called cross compliance visits.

In the UK, farmers and land owners can apply for subsidies from the government. In order to receive these subsidies, they have to follow some rules that are designed to ensure that they are taking good care of the land and any animals that they keep. There are a number of different rules, some of which are for protection of the land from pollution and ensuring boundary markers, such as hedges, are maintained. Others are related to identification of animals via ear tags and so on, but the ones APHA are responsible for are the animal welfare regulations.

You can read a bit more about the cross compliance rules here: Cross compliance

When carrying out a cross compliance welfare visit, many of the aspects of care we look at are similar to any welfare visit. We check whether animals are being looked at regularly and fed and watered, whether they have shelter from the weather and from predators, whether they are protected from injuries, and if they are taken care of when sick or injured. If the farmer is found to be in breech of some of the rules, an assessment is made on how serious the breech is and that can depend on whether he or she knew that they were breaking the rules, how severe the effect is in terms of animal suffering, whether the effect might have spread to other farms and whether it is rectifiable.

For example, a farmer who has been warned before that she needs to treat her sheep as they are infected with the mites that cause sheep scab, but has let the infection continue to the point where the sheep are suffering and some have died, and worse, hasn’t maintained her boundary fences so that it has spread to the neighbour’s sheep, has ticked all the boxes for a very serious breech. She should probably expect to have her subsidy substantially reduced.

The vast majority of visits we do are triggered by other events. These can be reports from neighbours or the market or abattoir. Every year there are routine visits to a certain number of farms. A very small percentage are randomized, but most are risk based, depending on past performance and previous breeches. Most of the farms we inspect still have good standards of welfare though and most farmers are doing their best and do care for their animals. Unfortunately, there are a few rogues, and those are probably the hardest to deal with.

As I discovered in Norway though, it’s rarely as simple as that any farmer who allows animal suffering to occur is an awful person. Very often problems arise when something happens and the animal owner finds themselves in a situation where it’s difficult to cope and then things spiral out of control. There’s a risk that docking someone’s subsidy when they’re already struggling financially might actually have a further negative effect on the animals, so it’s a nuanced situation where some of the decisions can be very difficult.

Next week, I will be spending some time in my old stomping ground of Stranraer. Thirty years ago, I worked in a practice there. The practice is long gone, but the farms I used to visit are still there. A few of the names that come up sound familiar, but so far I haven’t come across the double recognition of a surname and farm.

I will shortly be taking over responsibility for a TB outbreak over there and the farmer’s name is familiar, but he is on (to me) the wrong farm. So I don’t know whether it’s a new farmer, or whether it’s the same family and they’ve moved to a different place, or whether two families have intermarried. That is relatively common of course. Farming families are often connected and back in the day, I also joined Young Farmers when I lived there.

My memory is not that great, but of course the few farms and farmers I do remember were the ones I was friendly with, either at Young Farmers or through visiting their farms. When I started, I had to declare any possible conflicts of interest and I didn’t think I had any to declare as I was working in Dumfries. But over in Stranraer, there might be some minor considerations. Should I be dealing with the farmer who was an asshole on a date back in 1993, do I have to declare it? Probably not. He’s had plenty of time to mature since then, as have I. But I’m looking forward to spending some time there.

Viaduct at Glenluce

And last but not least, my solicitor has now made an official, written offer on the cottage I hope to buy. Keep your fingers crossed for me please. All being well, by Easter I may have a house of my own.

In With the New

Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, ,

This week, Andrew and I spent our first few days in the house I am renting in Dumfries. We travelled up on Tuesday amid dire warnings that there was a storm on the way. It duly arrived that night. I had bought some new duvets in a sale in Skipton and had worried that 13.5 and 15 tog might be ridiculously warm, but I was glad of mine as I huddled in bed, feeling the chill of the bedroom on my face. Before I left Norway, a few people asked what I would miss and I couldn’t answer. You never really know which things you will feel most intensely, but I can now tell those people that the thing I miss most so far is having a draught-free house!

It did get better. The storm changed direction the next day and the house warmed up a good deal after I’d adjusted the central heating. We don’t have internet yet (which is why this post is late) but Andrew had downloaded some TV programmes onto my laptop, so we had something to watch in the evenings and it was, in the end, quite cosy and comfortable.


Work has been up and down. The whole IT situation seems very sketchy. A new planning system is coming into use and there seem to be daily e-mails about getting ourselves on board. The only problem for me was that, when I followed the link that should have taken me there, I got a message to say that an app was missing and I should ask my administrator for help. I took a screenshot before I started the Christmas break and sent a message to IT support. I came back to a series of messages, the last of which said the case had now been closed as it had been marked as resolved for three days,

Working backwards, I finally found the message that supposedly resolved the issue. Rather than helping me with instructions on how to get the app, or who to ask, there was a message saying everyone had the app, with a series of links about how to use it and all the different applications it covered. At least that was the topic of the first three or so links. I didn’t open the entire list because none of them appeared in any way related to my actual problem, which was that I didn’t have the app.

The most spectacular part of the message though, was the instruction at the end. It said that if you still had a problem, you should refer to the links and that if you wanted to ask them again for help, you must have read all the links. You had to give a full explanation of what you had tried, with reference to which link it related to. If you hadn’t explored every option, you wouldn’t receive a response.

I was close to sending back a snotty message, pointing out that they had just asked a qualified vet to waste several paid hours wading through a long list of articles that (from the evidence of the first three links) were not even targetted for the problem I had reported. My second thought was to send a message appealing to their better nature and asking them to treat me as if I was an elderly relative asking for help with working their newly installed TV.

Instead, I went back to one of the daily e-mails exhorting us to get onto the new planner and check our profiles. Right at the bottom was an address to contact if you were having trouble doing that. Crossing my fingers, I sent a message. The response came back quite quickly. I was, apparently, one of a tiny number people whose laptops had slipped through a crack in the system and hadn’t had the app installed.

I must say that the original e-mail left a bad taste. Presumably the terse message was borne of frustration with their own system somewhere, but it was so impolite that my gut reaction was to abandon any attempt to use the new planner until someone insisted I use it, at which point they would be forced to address the issue that I couldn’t. I’d add that it hasn’t all been bad. I’ve had some very helpful experiences with the IT providers as well, whenever I’ve actually called rather than sending a message, so it definitely isn’t that they’re heartless and horrible. I need to remember not to respond with a knee-jerk reaction when something seems a bit off.

But maybe that’s the second thing that I miss. In Norway, Øivind was often my first port of call when I had an IT problem and he also arranged great parties. I think we need a Party General with IT skills in Dumfries.

Despite my IT teething problems and the weather, it’s been a good week. I’ve been handed my first welfare case, and though my first reaction was that I didn’t know how to tackle it, I’ve had enough help to jump in and make a start.

The report that was sent in used the What3Words system and my first inclination was to follow that trail and see what I found. For anyone who hasn’t come across What3Words, it’s a computer mapping system, where every three square metres of land is allocated a combination of three words. If you are standing somewhere and want to direct someone to find you, the system tells you the words, which then can be used by the finder to trace the location.

So interested was I in seeing whether it worked, and wondering what I would find, I forgot that I hadn’t put my kit in the car. What I actually found was a muddy field and what I now have is a lot more information and a ruined pair of shoes. As G said as he helped me to find out who owned the muddy field the next day, I won’t make that mistake again. Still, tackling my first welfare case was a great reminder that this was what I came here to do.

Andrew and I stopped for lunch on the way from Dumfries to Yorkshire yesterday. Robert Burns’ Selkirk Grace at the top of the page was painted on the wall and I thought it was an apt quotation on a day when Auld Lang Syne – Burns’ most famous song – will be sung in so many places round the world as the year turns. While sitting there, I was struck by another difference between Scotland and Norway. I had Cullen Skink – Scottish fish soup – with crusty bread. In Norway, there would have been two slices of bread and one small pat of butter. In Scotland, there was one slice of bread and two pats of butter. There’s also a lot of haggis on the menu everywhere, which I’m embracing with gusto. Triar and I are going to have to do a lot of walking when the rain finally slows down.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a photo, taken from Mum and Dad’s conservatory, just after midnight last night. For me 2024 is going to be very different from 2023. I hope (once I have internet in my house) you’ll join me on my journey through it.

Happy New Year!

Turkey Calling

Blog, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, , ,


I arrived back at Donna and Will’s on Sunday afternoon and we spent the evening putting up Christmas decorations. They’ve got a real tree and Christmas decorations from different people and places they’ve been. I was also impressed they had even more boxes of decorations than I did before my moving rationalisation, when sadly, I had to cut it down to three boxes. Can’t have too much Christmas cheer, in my opinion. The amazing Lego Christmas Village picture at the top of the page is theirs. Building an entire village is real dedication to the Christmas cause.

Although my online induction continues apace (deadline 24th December for the general program) I’ve been out on two visits this week. The first was to a veterinary practice which carries out some Official Veterinarian work on behalf of the government. Much of this doesn’t seem to have changed too much since I was doing it myself back in the early nineties, though we didn’t use much rabies vaccine back then, before the days of pet passports. We inspected equipment such as the guns that are used to inject tuberculin to check for TB and the practice microscope for looking for anthrax. There was a feeling of familiarity, being back in a mixed animal country practice, though the lingering scents of iodine, vitamin B12 and calcium were sadly absent from the stockroom.

I also went on a visit to a fallen stock plant, where culled animals that are not fit for human consumption are taken. Though they’re not going into the food chain, the animals are still tested for BSE or Scrapie (the sheep version). One thing I’m really revelling in is chatting to people effortlessly. Back in Norway, I’d go out with Birgit and she’d launch into chatting about what was happening at that time of year and perhaps more local news. Suddenly I can do it too!

We received a directive about carrying out welfare visits on turkey farms at the time of slaughter. As regular readers will know, killing animals as humanely as possible is something that really energises me, so I was hoping to get involved, but it seems that there are very few in our region and that most of them either send them outside the area or are already finished. This is definitely something I should write in my calendar for October next year. I was asked to do some of the phoning though. I can see I’m going to be leaping into this job like a pig rushing to the muddy corner of its field, only with more disinfectant involved.

Andrew arrived last night from Norway and will be here over Christmas and New Year. Triar was very pleased to see us both when we arrived at Mum and Dad’s, though it was well after his bedtime when we got here. Anna and Lauren will be arriving later today for a weekend visit, so it’s going to be a full house. I went to Aldi on the way to pick up some party food. Another novelty for me. Vol-au-vents, cocktail sausages and duck spring rolls were in short supply in Finnsnes. I miss ribberull meat on my sandwiches though. I wonder if I could make my own.

My furniture should arrive on Tuesday and I’m hoping to take a couple of days off later in the week to unpack. Donna has offered to give me a hand, which I’ve gladly accepted. It’ll be good to get my things back, though I’ll be sad to move out of Donna’s very comfortable spare room. Her social life is so busy that I will need to make appointments to see her, once I’ve moved out. We’ve already booked Pilates classes including one in January though, so we’ll be keeping fit as well as in contact.

Anyway, I’d better go and get breakfast. See you tomorrow for the exciting third installment in this years advent adventure!

Wading Through

Blog, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, Travel, , , , ,

No trip down Watery Lane this week, but after a colourful sunrise on Saturday morning, Dad, Triar and I took a walk along the bank of the river Ribble. It was another frosty afternoon and Triar enjoyed frisking among the trees and then chomping down on a few flavoursome, frozen cow pats!

I worked from home (in Yorkshire) on Monday, then headed up the road to stay with Donna. She has made me feel very welcome all week. She told me on the first evening that she would be starting a Pilates class on Tuesday. As I was still feeling quite couch potatoish after all those long spells lounging around on trains and boats, I asked if I could join her. I’m admittedly more chewed apple core than core of steel, but we’ve booked again for next week and will probably book up a few new years classes so as to get in there before the amateurs, who will only realise on New Year’s Day that it’s time to tone up.

A few weeks back, Donna put up a winter menu for Carlo’s Italian restaurant in Castle Douglas, which sounded both delicious and very reasonable at £15 for two courses. She was meeting a friend, but added me into that as well. This was the mushroom crostini, which was rich with garlic and cream and easily as delicious as it looked.

I won’t add an image of my main course as it also involved mushrooms and looked quite similar, but we were all full enough to decide not to order dessert. I did have a liquor coffee though, which came with a mince pie and a chocolate mint. Being back in Scotland definitely suits me!

The wading through of the title doesn’t refer to water or mud. Rather it is in honour of my first full week at work, which was bogged down in IT issues and induction. I was introduced to many other members of the team in various online meetings and in a short blurb I wrote about myself, which boss K sent round in an e-mail.

Wanting to seem keen and enthusiastic, I carefully avoided using any hint of implication that the work I was doing felt like slogging through a treacle infested swamp, but on Thursday K herself used the phrase when she asked me how I was getting on. Still, I’m quite good at wading so I’ve already got through courses on Equality and Diversity, Health and Safety, Civil Service Expectations, Counter Fraud Bribery and Corruption and Security and Data Protection.

Having done the last of those courses, I was reminded that I should ask K whether it was okay to continue with this blog. After all, the course had told me, as a newly minted member of the civil service I was ripe for criminals to attempt an attack. Presumably if the farmers pay me enough, they will get through their TB tests with flying colours and I will turn a blind eye to their incipient blue tongue or bird flu outbreaks. The rules did seem quite strict though, and I was concerned that K would ban me from mentioning anything about my new role online, but having read last week’s entry, she thought it would be fine to continue so it looks like you’re all stuck with me for a bit longer!

Yesterday, I met R, my veterinary counterpart from Stranraer and LM, my Veterinary Advisor, who will be guiding me through my first cases. I asked whether I might be able to go to Stranraer to shadow R in some cases and LM suggested I might be able to go for a few days, which would be lovely, both in terms of getting to know other parts of the team better, and seeing a bit more of Stranraer. The most criminal behaviour I came across over there was a farmer, who told me on a date that he didn’t think I could calve a cow if he couldn’t manage it. Perhaps he was more skilled than the average farmer* but as I was only ever called out when they couldn’t manage and had experienced few problems, I wasn’t impressed with his first date contemplations. Funnily enough, we didn’t make it to a second date. Still, you know I’m now old, free and single. There’s always the chance of a second crack of the whip. Bring it on, I say!

*He wasn’t.