animals

this horse in a play park must have a few storied to tell. it looks like it may have had as many repaints as it has had riders.
and it’s perfectly positioned to watch all these things passing.

i often see this cat in this doorway, but usually there is a bloke sitting at a table behind the window so i don’t take a photo ! but today he wasn’t there (as you can (or can’t) see)

i see these horses regularly (about every 12 months). The first picture shows them walking carefully through red lights near Paddington Station.
The second picture shows them on Gloucester Place where they were really cutting lose and sort of half galloping randomly down the street. this one was a bit more taxing for the one rider/3 horses ratio

i saw two more dead birds this morning. and now this lost cat sign (don’t worry, it’s about 30 miles away from where i saw the dead cat on monday).
what is the world coming to ?
this poster is quite interesting (if we can get past the sadness). For a start it’s wrapped round a lamp post making it really tricky to read without falling off the kerb and swinging your head round.
but more significant are the pictures which look like they were taken with a security camera. you don’t really get the effect here, but the three pictures show:
1) cat lying down keeping a lookout
2) cat attacking man in red jumper
3) cat on the prowl
there’s more to this cat than meets the eye.

sign and reality rarely match. the sign promised red deers. we got muntjacs

county shows are great for random chatter. the announcers feel obliged to talk non-stop for hours on end. this man told us for 10 minutes how he was about to let his bird of prey fly off in to the crowd and added “I haven’t got a clue what he’ll do as he’s not trained”.
very reassuring.

after 10 minutes of talking up the beast he let it free. it flew straight at where i was standing with the girls, narrowly missing kezia who was standing on a hay bale. it then stayed the rest of the afternoon in a tree looking at the man.
the man said “i thought that might happen” and tried to tempt it down by swinging a bit of chicken round on a rope. it didn’t work and he said “i didn’t think that would work”.
classic non-entertainment entertainment.
esther looked at me and said “i came here to see animals and entertainments, not people talking”. “fairysnuff” i said.
esther and kezia looking for the bird:

at the show they got anyone with a dog to enter the ring and race them all in one go. there must have been about 40 i guess. it was quite amazing to watch. here are the front runners.

a pile of ducks:

a mussled dog:

we went to a very strange cat show this afternoon. it was siamese cats i think.

in this show everyone was a winner and by the time we got there most cats couldn’t see out of their cages because of the amount of rosettes and trophies attached:

The cat-type is breed 32 which sounds like a government feline experiment to me. these strange felines were probably developed during the cold war. the rosettes are won by cats decrypting secret message produced using the most advanced algorithms.
It looks like an innocent cat show but is in fact a spooks convention …

on our recent holiday we went to Monkey World. It’s fab ! Go there. now.
there’s mad violent scarey things:

Free range Lemurs (you can go in to their enclosure with them):

chimps:

and of course (!) chickens: