Horse and I

And Sunday comes round again. One thing I used to enjoy on a Sunday was reading the newspaper. Front page news, then UK news, world news, a columnist or 3, leader comment, letters page, finance, property and sports pages. Forty five minutes later you've finished and put the paper down or in the recycling pile (responsible, me). Unfortunately here it's not unusual to get a Sunday paper on the Monday so I don't bother anymore. Like many people I now read papers on-line. And there's the rub. There's no longer a structure to reading, more like clicking on a link for something that catches your eye. I can live with that, just. The issue for me is that reading on-line leads (for me, at least) to a lot of prevarication (one of my most used words over the last few years). Now, you read the article but then drift down to the comments to read a couple but end up reading a lot, especially if it's threaded. Annoyingly most of these tend to be of the “I ain't being funny, but ….” style. Yes, I'm looking at you Ind*****nt. If one paper has gone down in my estimation over the past few years, this is it. But it's not just the comments. Down the side they (all papers) have other links, some external. “Ooh, that looks interesting”, “hmm, I might read that”, etc, etc. And 9 times out of 10 the articles weren't as interesting as you thought or, worse, they're 5 or 6 years old. And very often you end up wasting at least a couple of hours reading these things. To a certain degree I have the same problem with Blipfoto. So many pictures and comments, so little time. At times I think the Internet is worse than TV where, once the TV is on, you can easily fall into the “I'll just watch 5 minutes” or “this might be interesting” trap or the sign you are a TV addict “the epilogue, my favourite”. I'll just have to utilise some will-power.

Above is Brue, a Clydesdale that belongs to our neighbour. As they were away overnight I offered to see to his breakfast. Brue is not a favourite of mine, in fact I'm not really a fan of horses, full stop. They just don't interest me (if you want to donate some George Stubbs pictures to me, that's a different story). I've often said that Brue is a bully but I actually think it's more of a case that he doesn't know his own strength. Like Stanley the donkey Brue loves extra strong mints so I normally give him 1 or 2 when I see him. But that's never enough as several times he's nudged me very firmly in the back or pushed me to the wall to get another. Still, using a firm voice on him and pushing has no effect whatsoever. I still talk to him, though. Not that he cares.

Look on the bright side, I could have published a picture of me shovelling horse …... manure.

Pic taken by 3M