Having Robbie in my life means that I am used to strange questions and not to be out done, my son has spent his whole life bombarding me with questions on every imaginable subject. Believe me there is never an easy answer where my son's questions are concerned. Here are two diary entries, my son was 9 or 10 at the time.
...........He was almost back to normal, asking his usual stream of questions. Among several other things he wanted to know how exactly it is possible to kill 2 birds with one stone!
...........My son questioned me in detail about the ageing effect of space travel, it made my brain hurt. He said that if there were identical twins and one went into space while the other stayed behind, one would end up older than the other. Having thought about it, he must be right, I saw William Shatner on TV not so long ago and all that space travel has clearly taken its toll on him!
Usually my older daughter is more likely to tell me the answers than to ask questions but yesterday she was even more 'random' than Robbie. When I came back from work she came into the lounge and said "Mum, why didn't you tell me about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore?" I was lost for words, there are so many things that I have tried to pass on to my children, but I am fairly sure that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were not on the list. She went on to tell me that she didn't know that they used to be a double act, but having come across clips of them on YouTube she had discovered that they are very funny. I don't think forgetting to tell her about Pete and Dud makes me a failure as a parent, but it has left me wondering what else I should tell her about.
According to my husband I have some sort of 'weird magnet' that makes me an interesting target for assorted 'odd bods'. He does have a point even when I visit new places I seem to attract the 'square pegs' of this world. Last autumn I visited the Severn Valley Railway for the first time, as I stood in Kidderminster Station chatting to Robbie a little man (he was considerably shorter than me) entered the station area from the platform and marched straight up to me, shook my hand and launched in to a long explanation of why steam trains are better than diesels. Suddenly he stopped talking about trains, informed me that he had important things to do and marched off in the direction of the refreshment room. Robbie thought it was very amusing that the man singled me out when he had a whole crowd of people to choose from.
I had a similar odd experience earlier this week. I gave my daughter a lift to work, on the other side of town. Her office is located in an area that was once a village but it got swallowed up by the town many years ago. I dropped her off, turned the car around and I was just about to pull away when a middle aged man approached the car and knocked on my window. He didn't look like a mad axe man so I opened the window a little and he asked me if I would like to take him to town. I was rather shocked, I am not in the habit of picking up strange men especially before 9am! I told him that I was not going to town, he said "never mind, I didn't really want to go to town anyway". It may not be a village any more but clearly they have at least one contender for the position of village idiot!
I don't know why I have such a well developed 'weird magnet' perhaps it is because I find people interesting. A friendly smile costs nothing and makes everyone feel better, very often you find that people who seem a bit odd at first are very interesting when you get to know them. The trouble is I seem to attract the waifs and strays of the animal kingdom too. Looking back through the blog I am reminded that we have had a parade of uninvited guests over the years. A toad once came through the cat flap to visit us. On two separate occasions birds have fallen down the chimney - and lived to tell the tale because I went to to considerable trouble to rescue them. One was a collared dove and the other was a huge and rather stupid pigeon. Then there was Dave the cat, he turned up ill and exhausted and set up home in one of our recycling boxes - he is still here! Now there is 'Bernard' the cat who kept coming in and hiding in the utility room, she is still here too.
The problem is that I don't have infinite resources. When Dave found us a few years ago we were strictly a one cat family, but he was so poorly and so much in need of someone to care about him that before I knew what had happened we had become a two cat family. I had no idea how much time effort and money it would take to restore him to health. He is now very much part of the family, in fact he thinks that he runs the house. He and Oreo are good friends and we love them, but they are expensive to to maintain and looking after them is time consuming. Bernard is really sweet and she is becoming less timid but we really can't cope with a third cat. I can't turn her out and all my efforts to find her original owner have proved fruitless, so we really have to find a new home for her.
According to the vet she is about 3 and in good health. She is very clean, we haven't had a single accident since she moved in. She is timid but she enjoys attention, she just needs gain trust in the people around her. She is scared of other cats and she tends to hiss if they go too near her, but she is not vicious, she just keeps out of their way. Please contact me if you know anyone who can offer her a loving home.
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| Photo by nirutha |
There are many tales of strange animals being spotted around Cornwall, but as this story involves Robbie it is a little stranger than most. For 200 years there have been reports of sightings of a sea monster in Falmouth Bay, known as Morgawr it is said to be over 20 feet long with an 8ft tail, scaly legs and a horned head. There have been sightings of the Beast of Bodmin Moor, a panther like creature since 1971 but it (or more likely 'they') have never been caught. So when Robbie told me that he had spotted a very strange looking animal while watching a television program set in Cornwall I was prepared to believe him until we used the rewind facility, the strange animal proved to be a sheep!! I was incredulous, he may work in Birmingham, but he grew up in a rural area so he must have seen a sheep before. His excuse was that he didn't know that sheep could have different faces!
