As time passes by ......

It's ages since we blogged. Time has so often been sucked into other priorities; living, studying, other pressing writing tasks, trying to keep ahead of the garden, staying as healthy as possible, that I've overlooked the blog. And of course there's the all important dog walking. In my unhealthier moments (of which there have been too many of late) this becomes DIY exercise for Wigeon. Open the garden gate and tell her she can go and, boy, can she go! Being lucky enough to live on a hill farm (Wigeon soon had to learn that sheep are 'out of bounds.')  there are acres of space just by the cottage where she can run full tilt and free her long muscular legs.

Wigeon at full tilt

I'm so envious of her, the speed, the sheer joy she gets from running. I always longed to be able to run easily, to run far and if I wanted to, to run fast. Quick 100 metre sprints at school were my best; long distance runs never my strong point. That was reserved for 'throwing things,' discus, shot or javelin being the athletic disciplines I excelled in. Maybe years of chucking bales of hay and straw around on the farm or years of catching and turning sheep at home gave me the extra advantage?

There's a grassy bank (obviously its all banks on a hill farm!) just north of the cottage, now punctuated with the summer dots tormentil and interspersed with colourful wild pansies, where Wigeon habitually goes into sheer cracker dog mode, running flat out making it into her 'wall of death' run. It often ends with her belting straight at me, do I keep my nerve and stand still or take a step out of her way? So far better to stand still and pray she gets it right as she comes off the bank, overshoots and has time to turn round and come back to me with her sides heaving and her tongue flapping.

 

Having been run over and felled, quite literally, by a high speed Puffin, my wonderful whippet of years gone by, I understand the maths and physics behind velocity hitting stationery objects. Some years ago my mother was run down by two of her lurchers one snowy morning as they played carefree, overtaken by the joy of running in fresh snow to notice where Mum was standing. She heard a crack as they impacted against her legs. My brother found her hanging onto a field gate, desperate to catch him on his morning sheep rounds and take her home, or as it turned out, to hospital - with a broken leg.