Ghost in the machine
I’m not sure I can express this without seeming a bit condescending, but my voyage into shepherding has been a total education in so many different unexpected directions. One thing I’ve been thinking about is the extent to which we tend to think about creative expression in terms of novelty and the arts. But there’s real beauty in seeing a well oiled system running, whatever it is, and that beauty is a manifestation of good design, which is surely a creative process. I’m thinking of this in terms of the flows of sheep at the sale I went to in the autumn, and when I helped my friend worming sheep, putting them through a run with pens at each end. The underlying walls and gates and pens reveal a unity of thought that results in an apparently effortless operation.
I came across some other pens when I was running errands before the snow came 2 weeks ago. They were a strange layout, and it occurred to me that they would only come to life when they were in operation, with animals presumably running through some set of stages. Empty of sheep, they seemed empty of purpose. My pens are a bit of a shambles, made of pallets and with no real process beyond sealing the sheep in. Must do better.
They were only a field or two away, up towards the top of the hill, but up the there the land feels very different – rougher and less well carved up into fields. And one of the farmers up there had a whole mishmash of different sheep – some ryelands, and something that was very weird looking – either Clun Forests or maybe Llanwenogs.
Naming, part 94
I’ve also been wondering about this, which is in a wall near our house. My understanding is that it’s a lamb creep – designed to let the lambs into the new field before the adult ewes, to get the first of the uneaten grass. And there is a design of feeder that acts similarly – lambs can get in under the bars but ewes cannot. And dry food has come to be called creep (or cake, or nuts, or…), I guess as a result. All that said, this hole looks pretty big – I’d expect my ewes would get through it fairly easily.
Naming Part 95
I mentioned The Pillow Book the other day – it would without doubt be my desert island book, but it’s only one in a long line of Japanese miscellanies of different types. One of them takes the form of newspaper columns – the most famous is Tensei Jingo in the Yomiuri Shinbun that’s run for most of the postwar era at the very least, but I’ve come across several in my wider reading. One of them was a column called ‘Snowy Window Musings’, from a local newspaper in the north of Japan, where the snow windows are fairly common. Anyway, I thought of it when I opened up the curtains last week.
This blog’s name, draws from a similar sort of vein. In my language school we studied a haiku, Kome arai mae ni, hotaru ga, futatsu mitsu. Without trying to make it scan or flow, it’s roughly: Before me as I wash the rice/ there are fireflies/ two or three. It’s somewhat famous because swapping the ni in the first line for alternative particles gives a slightly different feel to what the fireflies are doing. And so it reflects nicely some things about Japan and language that are interesting to me, as well as echoing Braudel’s comments about historical events as the flickering of fireflies, if we want to be really pretentious.
Also, when I recall it, I often misremember it as Kome arai mae ni/ Hotate ga… which would replace the fireflies with scallops.
Fireflies 