What Do I Know?

Friday Horse Blogging

This sign says "exercising dogs" is strictly prohibited here. I assume they don't mean walking sedately with a dog...

I've had some friends visiting from the US, and fortunately they love walking as much as I do. We've taken lots of walks during the two weeks they've been here, and today I suggested a walk around the neighborhood. Fortunately my neighborhood includes Bulstrode Park. 

Bulstrode Park includes a magnificent home, formerly owned by both the Earl of Portland (of Portland Vase fame) and the Duke of Somerset. It's now home to WEC, a Christian missionary organization. A large pasture to the east is home to a herd of horses. Dozens of them met us at the gate as we entered the pasture, and more came running to see us as we walked on the path toward the house. 

We had Sparky with us, on lead, and he behaved himself, even being so brave as to sniff a few horses. These weren't the towering giants we usually see being ridden here; they were all small, some pony-sized, and almost every female had a perfectly matched foal with her. 

You'll soon be able to see this pasture for yourself—it was the location for a film starring Angelina Jolie, Maleficent, an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty. They brought in Scottish Galloway cows to replace the horses, and blocked access to the park for several weeks. 

But today it was just us, a few other walkers, and more horses than I could count—no movie stars, unless you count this beautiful pale horse and her foal: 

More photos of horses: (Click on the picture to see a bigger image.)

Friday Cow Blogging

Frolicking in the Thames

On Sunday we took the dog to Bourne End, a village on the Thames. It's a place we used to frequent with our last dog. But she was cow-friendly—she never bothered a single bovine. Sparky, however, is a different kind of dog, so we've avoided the spot, knowing there were a herd of cows there. (I've featured them on Friday Cow Blogging numerous times, like this prescient post right after we got Sparky.) 

But we wanted to take our houseguests on a nice walk, and it was a fine day to watch sailboats on the Thames. So we parked at the National Trust carpark in Cookham, and hiked around the golf course and through the fields nearby, coming out on the bluff overlooking the Thames. Fortunately, from up high, we could spot the cows before Sparky did, and since they were far on the other side of the railroad bridge, we were comfortable letting him run alongside the Thames until we were much further along. 

Sparky got his first taste of the Thames, and my heart just smiled at the sight. Our last dog used to love to frolic in and out of the water, and I was really pleased to see Sparky doing the same thing. What a fun time for him! 

And then we spotted the cows in the Thames. Actually in the Thames... We quickly snapped a lead on Sparky, and he walked around them while I went in close for a photo. 

These cows also liked frolicking in the Thames. Who wouldn't? 

These cows were pretty patient, and posed for me while I took photos. Our guests remarked how much friendlier cows were here than in America. See for yourself: 

Goodbye, cows. Until next time! 

Sudeley Castle in the Cotswolds: A Castle (and Views) Fit for a Queen

Sudeley Castle, from the top of the garden.

Two favorites on the same day? Yes! My favorite place—the Cotswolds, and my favorite wife of King Henry VIII—Katherine Parr.

Where? At Sudeley Castle, near Winchcombe in Glouscestershire. I've been there before, the first summer we lived here, but with a new set of houseguests who wanted to see a castle and the Cotswolds, I realized Sudeley Castle was the perfect destination. 

As with any of these old places, it's hard to pinpoint exactly when Sudeley was built. Saxon records indicate a "Sudeleagh" manor home from the 10th century, yet before that there were Roman villas at the location. The Domesday Book records the de Sudeley family ownership of "12 Hides" at Sudeleagh. Although the manor house is long gone, there are oak trees from the time of the Domesday Book on the grounds. 

Skip ahead a few centuries, and we find the beginnings of the present castle, begun in 1442, along with St Mary's chapel and the Tithe Barn (now a ruin enclosing a garden). The castle changed hands a few times, but finally in the nineteenth century a wealthy glove making family, the Dents, came into possession of Sudeley, and Emma Dent made the place what it is today. (She was also an antiquarian who explored the Roman ruins and collected an amazing fabric collection, on view at Sudeley's exhibition rooms.)

But what of Katherine Parr? How did the only woman to survive marriage to Henry VIII end up at Sudeley? 

After Henry's death, Katherine married her first love, Sir Thomas Seymour, uncle to the new king Edward VI, who gave Sudeley to his mother's brother. Not long afterward, Katherine became pregnant, but five days after giving birth to a baby girl, she died. Her daughter, Mary, disappeared a couple of years later. History has no idea what happened to her. 

And for a long time, no one knew Katherine lay buried at St Mary's Chapel, either. (It didn't help that Cromwell sacked Sudeley Castle during the English Civil War.) Then, in 1782, a group of sightseeing ladies (not unlike myself) discovered an alabaster panel at the ruined Chapel and then found the coffin with the inscription "Here lyeth Quene Kateryn, Wife to Kyng Henry VIII." 

The tomb of Katherine Parr, now properly buried.

Her body (which was still apparently "white and moist" at the time of discovery) was later interred properly at St Mary's Church in the castle gardens. 

Katherine Parr wasn't the only Royal resident. Richard III, who later ended up in a carpark, owned Sudeley for a while. And Jasper Tudor, uncle of Henry VII, was given Sudeley after the Battle of Bosworth. And Henry VIII himself spent some time there with his wife Anne, and Lady Jane Grey, who was Queen, sort of, for nine days, lived there with her foster parents, Katherine Parr (who signed her name such even after two marriages) and Thomas Seymour. 

In 1592, Sudeley was the location for one of the longest parties in history. Elizabeth I visited and the owners nearly bankrupted themselves entertaining her at what had been her home briefly when she lived there with her stepmother.

Would Queen Elizabeth have looked out this window at the pageant in the garden?

Sudeley is a mile south of Winchcombe, a charming Cotswold village. If you go to Sudeley, you can make a day of it by visiting nearby Hailes Abbey, a monastery dissolved by Henry VIII, and Belas Knap, a neolithic burial mound with an interesting false entrance. 

But unlike that other famous castle, Highclere, Sudeley is lived in by the present owners, the Dent-Brocklehurst family. The private family quarters are open for tours certain days of the week; otherwise, the castle tour doesn't include the living quarters. There is a fine exhibit of the textile collection, including a piece of Katherine Parr's dress, as well as Roman finds from the area. 

Sudeley Castle is about a two hour drive from London, off the A40. If you take the back roads, you'll see some lovely views of the hills, views which surely haven't changed since Katherine Parr lived there.

Below are more photos. 

Friday Cow Blogging

Cows, surprised while munching weeds.

Notice the heart on her head. 

The other day Sparky told me the cows were close to the fence, and I better grab my camera if I wanted to get some good shots. 

Well, maybe he just wanted me to scare them off. But anyway, I slipped on my Crocs, ignored my pajamas, and switched on my Nikon and found the cows were indeed close to the fence. I heard a noise to my left, and there was a cow in the weeds behind the compost heap. In fact, there were two cows, and then a third joined them. Whatever those weeds were they must have been tasty. 

Sparky is still put out that I didn't shoot them. I mean, for real. He thinks cows are the biggest menace to mankind, well, dogkind, since bees.

Speaking of bees, it's been a bee-you-ti-ful summer, and yes, full of bees. I've been leaving the doors and windows open and every now and then a bee lumbers in, drunk from the lavender. Sparky doesn't bark at bees; he just leaves the room as soon as he hears a buzz. 

I don't think he's enjoyed the summer as much as I have. First bees, now cows monsters attacking the back fence. 

Friday Cow Blogging

Look who came home!

A strange thing happened with the cows this year. Normally, they appear in the pasture behind our garden (yard, for you Yanks) every spring, sometime between March and May. But this year, for the first time ever, they never showed up. 

I could see them in the next pasture over, nearer to the barn. Since we've been having lovely weather, we've been eating outside nearly every evening, and I'd look beyond the pasture to the cows playing in the next field. 

Well, yesterday, I let the dog out in the morning, and he ran to the fence, barking. He spied them before I did: his old nemesis, the cows. 

I got him in, then grabbed my camera, the hated Crocs, and went outside for some shots. 

They're a new bunch this year, hardly any familiar faces. I don't want to know. 

In the evening, they came nearer to the fence, and I got more shots of them. They practically were in my neighbour's garden, eating the tall, tall weeds near his fence. 

You can see how tall the grass is—normally it would never get that high. But without cows to chew it down, it's grown and grown. 

I'm so glad they're back: my summer is just about complete now. 

This white cow is new; haven't seen her before. 

This cow appears to be eating stinging nettle. I hear it's good in gnocchi. 

Plant-based vs Lab-based Meat

Where should beef grow? In a lab, or in a pasture? (Make mine with plants, please!)

Today the world's first stem cell burger will be eaten in London (right about now, as a matter of fact). The €250,000 project was bankrolled by Google's Sergey Brin, who funded the Maastricht lab that produced the cow muscle fibers used in the burger. That pricetag is only the beginning: other labs will undoubtedly need to be funded and much further research and testing done before anythiing truly resembling and tasting like meat will be available. 

For someone who consumes a plant-based diet, the idea of eating a cruelty-free piece of meat is a yawner. I'm perfectly happy with my diet the way it is, with plenty of meat substitutes available without the high pricetag. The mock meats already available are really, really, good, frankly. I just had a sandwich made from Vegusto deli slices. I'd bet my right arm anyone would find it better than Oscar Meyer bologna or—horrors!—picnic loaf. Other mock meats, available in Europe, the UK, or the US—but rarely all three—are also pretty darn good. 

True, they haven't managed to reproduce the gristle in that Salisbury steak you had for dinner last night—but then that's a good thing! One of the last meat meals I remember was smothered steak I was served at a dinner party. I had to figure out a way to unobtrusively spit out the wad of gristle in my mouth. Is it any wonder I became vegetarian shortly afterward?

And then there's the "grisly" aspect of meat: along with all the chemical additives (many of which aren't even included in the label) you're getting blood, feces, bacteria, hormones, antibiotics, and years' worth of toxins the animal has breathed or injested during its lifetime. Every time I'd drive past a pasture full of cows next to an interstate, I'd wonder just how healthy their meat or milk was, after they breathed in all those petrol fumes day in day out for seven or eight years. The ammonia in the so-called "pink slime" that MacDonald's packages as burgers is the least of your worries. 

And we know how many of you were grossed out by pink slime—I read all about it, admittedly with some schadenfreude, on my Facebook timeline for months. Mass producing animals for food is inherently an unsavory prospect. And worse, the run-off from factory farms affects nearby vegetable farms, too. So even if you eat only plants, you're at risk of ingesting some deadly pathogen from the factory farm upstream from the spinach field where your salad was grown. 

So is test tube meat any worse than what you find in the meat aisle at your supermarket? It can't possibly be any grosser, in my book. 

Yet I don't have any plans to eat test tube meat. I'd eagerly consume Beyond Meat, a non-meat "meat" currently sold in the US, if it ever became widely available. I've had Gardein before, and Quorn (made from mycoprotein) and my kids grew up eating Morningstar Farms products instead of bacon. I use soy crumbles instead of hamburger meat in dishes and eat Linda McCartney Red Onion and Rosemary Sausages on lazy weekend mornings. There are so many mock meats I have yet to try—why would I bother pining for a test tube burger?

I suspect the percentage of the world's population who want to avoid meat have already figured out a way to do so, and the rest, well, they're not going to be convinced by replica meat that's grown in a lab. Like the saying goes, where there's a will, there's a way. The problem is not lack of ways to go about avoiding meat; the problem is lack of will for most people.

But in the future, the percentage of meat-avoiders will increase, as meat becomes a scarce resource and is carbon-priced out of the range of most people's pocketbooks. With 30% of the world's surface already used as pasture, it's just not possible to feed the world any more meat from animal sources than it already demands. 

Maybe some of those would-be meat eaters will turn to test tube meat. But before they do that, they really ought to try a bite of my sandwich...at 33 pence per slice, I'm certain their pocketbooks won't be put off by my deli slices. Or their tastebuds.

UPDATE: The burger has been consumed! One taster said she "missed salt and pepper." I can relate. This is Britain, remember. 

No Lort, Sherlock

After watching The Killing, this is what I want to say to Sherlock too.

We've been glomming on Season 1 of The Killing, the Danish crime drama I've been loving for the last two years. Somehow I missed Season 1 but have the DVD set, so with Daughter Number One home, we're having a fine old time with Sarah Lund, Jan Meyer, Troels Hartmann, and a seemingly unsolveable murder. 

The gritty reality of The Killing is compelling. I almost wouldn't recommend Season 1, since it's so painful to watch the grieving family of the murder victim, 19-year-old Nanna Birk Larsen. The father, Theis, is played by Bjarne Henriksen, who I've decided is one of the best Danish actors in what appears to be a short list. It's almost a joke how every Danish drama shares actors, such as Lars Mikkelsen, who plays politician Troels Hartmann and Søren Ravn in Borgen, and will soon be Sherlock's arch-nemesis in Season 3 of Sherlock. 

Bjarne Henriksen plays grieving father Theis Birk Larsen with virtually no change of expression.

Speaking of Sherlock, the British modern day detective series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, we caught the third episode of Season 2 last night, the one where Sherlock falls from the top of St Bart's hospital. I found it almost unbearable, having watched The Killing just a half hour previously. The contrast between the realistic dramatization of Forbrydelsen (the Danish name of The Killing) vs the slick, far-fetched, lampoon-ish plot had my head spinning (and that was before I closed my eyes for the last ten minutes, due to my vertigo). 

I'm a little tired, frankly, of Sherlock's "ability" to look at a person and divine everything about them in seconds: "I know what you did last night just by glancing at your fingernails." This originally clever bit of characterization jumped the shark by season 2. It's no longer clever or entertaining. And ever since the "mind palace" gimmick in "The Hound of the Baskervilles," we've been forced to view the inner workings of Sherlock's brain rendered as scrolling Helvetica script and some computer beeps.

It's all a bit much, though still entertaining, if for nothing else than to see what new implausible scene the script will bring. I wouldn't be surprised to see Gandalf walk through the wardrobe at 221B Baker Street. He will, of course, promptly have his fingernails examined. 

Mark Gattis needs to bring in some Danish screenwriters for next season (which is, sadly, too late, since they'll finish up filming for episode three in the series shortly). They could even throw in a few of those Danish swear words I've been learning (guess which one I used for this post title?). 

I'd like just a little more reality, and a lot more plausibility, with my Sherlock, please. Until season 3 airs, I'll be contemplating the snowflakes on Sarah Lund's infamous jumper, and trying to figure out who done it.