Tuesday, the 12th August

 Life is quiet at the moment, after the storms of the weekend we potter around quietly, I knit and spin and allow my mind to float over 'things to be analysed' which are completely boring for a blog.  Look through houses for sale, no, have not found one yet we both like. Watched a video as I spun yesterday on 'vertical gardening', an experiment that seems to be very successful in Singapore. 

Looking for houses; not quite true, found one in Minions, cold Bodmin Moor, (9 months winter so we have been told), modern though, opposite the donkeys that LS loves, but the house is dour and the garden is just a great patch of grass.  One of the great problems in downsizing is the contents of the studio, the Japanese stuff  can only go to another conservation studio, and there are only about half a dozen in Europe. The papers and silks are beautiful but only have a limited use.

The question must be asked why do I like bleak Bodmin Moor, we are both attracted, but LS hates the cold, or the rain, in fact he just likes warm summer weather!  For me it must be the history that lies written in the landscape, a place to allow the mind to wander but it is still a long way from my family in Yorkshire.

   

The rain beating down on the green opposite the house, Bertha storm over the weekend

This is Charlie, a favourite dog on the green, I call him Lilliedog because he reminds me of another!  his owner spends hours seemingly just wandering around with him.

Saturday 9th August

With all the talk of war and the suffering of people in Gaza and Iraq, there is no escape from the misery of religious stupidity that engulfs the East, I would use a much stronger word but it only adds to the mayhem of anger that swirls around, and the feeling of complete helplessness most of us feel. Who are these young men on a Jihad, have they fallen in love with an ideology, grown their hair and beards long, wrapped themselves up in flowing scarves, pranced across our screens bringing brutal death and religious fanaticism to people of other creeds.  As America now enters the battle field where will it all end, and which bloody god is sitting up there at the moment orchestrating the death of children?

So enough, I return to quieter moods, the music on the radio, St.Keyne's well in Cornwall, the musical ripple of water tumbling down rocks, the deep green of plants, and another religion picked up by the worthys of their time, The Druids, who a couple of hundred years ago captured the imagination.

Where is R.S Thomas on the subject, doubting vicar that he is, what would he have written about all this, would he have cursed his God as well, did he really believe in him?

Sumner and Hambledon Hill

Chasing ghosts, or at least paintings, the cover of the book below shows a bird's eye view of Hambledon and Hod Hillforts painted by Heywood Sumner. So you may ask, why is it here, well The National Trust has just bought Hambledon Hill for £450,000 to protect the hill fort and the natural world, including the butterflies of this rather beautiful place, and it gives me a chance to bring up Sumner's work once more, also the original painting, which is in a private collection must be very beautiful and for me captures the evocative air of the South West of England.

Soft smudgy watercolours of the New Forest, there is something so homely about his paintings, not brilliant but made with love of the world around him.

An earlier blog

Fruits

What a wonderful summer, the rain falls softly outside, and everything grows in this warm, or almost tropical weather.  This is a tiny garden, everything is grown in pots, but loads of runner beans and courgettes.  One of the secrets is of course compost which I dig out and fill the pots with, one of the hidden extras of this homemade compost is that the seeds of last year tomatoes and squashes start growing everywhere, the tomatoes are always a surprise, sweet and tasty.

I have always fancied trying Masanobu Fukuoka - The One Straw Revolution in which you grow everything in a field, allowing thing to fall to the ground and the plants reappearing the following year. There is no intervention with herbicides and fertilisers.

Starting to ripen

Small aubergines growing much to LS's delight

A new butternut, loads of male flowers, but the female fruits are starting to appear

still they come bold and brassy flowers

Pretty fennel just loves the raindrops

Behind this cutting of a fuchsia, there is a squash seedling growing from the compost the fuchsia sits in

Odds and sods

Well first of all, the family arrived safely to this rather pretty little chalet in the middle of a field, I have just read on F/B that my son-in-law has  cycled 7 miles down to get croissants for breakfast this morning, and is not only having to face cycling up but has lost his way!  He has been cycling a lot lately down the Calder Valley, 30/40 miles cycling does not seem to strain him so his health has returned from the move to Todmorden.

What has has caught my imagination, well not the migraine of yesterday, I do tend to panic and worry about problems, probably the headache is due to worrying that the family would arrive safely in Switzerland, and also the wretched television going wrong at the cottage.  We had a phone call on Sunday from the present  rather nice Yorkshire occupants saying they could not get it work. It had gone wrong a couple of months ago, something to do with the S** box (Rupert Murdoch's name is banned in this household), so another bill is not welcome.  Anyway, come Monday and Peter at the holiday agency had called the relevant man and it was fixed.  Now if that had been us in Whitby, we would probably have to wait weeks before someone turned up!

What else, the news is sombre, not helped by me turning to Al Jazeeri news channel yesterday, as I watched scene after scene of war and fighting - Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria,  it seemed like the world was going up in a flame of fire and that we in our  cosy world have no comprehension of the suffering and sadness, yet here we were remembering our own terrible tragedy in the first world war. War falls beyond our comprehension sometimes, it is useless to ask why, only that it is ingrained in the souls of men from time immemorial.  Nostra Culpa

To happier things, a funny but rather bad poem by the great grandfather of my grandchildren will not go amiss on this sunny morning...

The Tourist's Lament by C.J.Opper

A rainy evening in Vevey,

Fills me with intense dismay,

The faded splendours of Montreux

Leave me feeling rather blue;

And if we must stick to verity,

I don't go overboard on Territet.

And, I must say,

Whoever got hooked on La Tour de Peilz?

For Corsier, Blonay, Chebres and Corseaux,

I'm unequally unmoved or even more so;

If there's a place I'd rather not be on

Its the top of the tower of the Chateau de Chillon.

In Southend they would'nt have the cheek to serve,

That cupper tea we got at Villeneuve

We got fish and chips just beside the church

But you have to ask for fillet de perche.

So..... you just ask your mother why we're here,

When we might have been on Wigan Pier.

Update on Sekhemka;

There I was going to start on the latest news about the Sekhemka statue and the perfidy of jumped up councillors, and then links started to connect in my brain.  It was the fault of Melvyn Bragg yesterday evening in his documentary about the Peasants Revolt in 1381, when Wat Tyler  had argued for equality and that 'the commons' should be shared.  Well of course that came to an end pretty quickly with his death as he stood before young Richard 11 on the battlefield asking for written royal papers granting him his wishes. According to the tale, Tyler was hit on the head fatally by the mayor of London as he sat on his little horse before the king, and as he lay dying was publicly decapitated, and his head displayed on London Bridge.  

The saying above comes from a contemporary of Tyler, the priest John Ball who was also radicalised by the revolt, and of course received the same treatment as Tyler.  Thus history is written, those in power keep it and fine thoughts of a just an equal society, though they may be seen as exceptionally naive, are thrown out the window.  

But to return to our common heritage, which we all thought lay in our museums, the battle is far from over for such perfidious councillors as Mackintosh who saw fit to sell the statue, Northampton Council has had its wrist slapped by the Arts Council who are refusing to fund or pay out grants for their two museums for the next few years.

Northampton Museum and Art Gallery and Abington Park Museum will be excluded from a variety of Arts Council grants, funding and loan agreements following the controversial auction of its 4,500-year-old limestone Egyptian statue, Sekhemka, which raised £14 million at Christie’s.

Mike Pitts has come up with an idea for protecting - Blog the National Collection...  maybe he had his tongue in cheek when he thought about the idea, but we all know in these days of capitalism, that there is an awful lot of  public stuff the conservatives want to sell off, think about the forests last year and the public outrage made the government back off pretty quickly.

Tell people about the hidden gems in our museums.

At any one time, the bulk of any reputable museum or gallery’s collections is not on display. Most of what’s in store is known about only to a handful of specialists. If a museum has no qualms, it could slip things out onto eBay hoping no one would notice (over the years, it’s not unknown to hear of things that have disappeared behind the scenes for one mysterious reason or another). Many museums publish catalogues, of course, detailing all they have, a professional responsibility. But not all do, or have catalogued their entire collections. And, like the stuff itself, these publications are typically seen only by specialists.

Actually there were six young swans messing around on the Chelmer here in the middle of Chelmsford

The old mill, now pub in the centre of Chelmsford.

Miniatures

Miniatures, where did it start? years ago is the answer,  I still have the small lathe, drill and fine files to do such work.  The scale you work in is 1/12, but probably what started me off was a gift of 2 Georgian silver chairs and table in 24 scale many years ago and I became intrigued by tiny objects.

When I started to explore the photos I remembered old internet friends, Claire in the East End of London, who would make vignettes of East End market stalls and another friend who lived in Carew in Wales, she collected old clocks, took the insides out and made little tableaus of kitchens, etc.

The first thing I bought from the really good toy shop called Tridias was this hat shop, and made the hats from felt (hardened with wallpaper glue round a screwdriver handle), the budgerigar feathers from the outside aviary in Victoria Park,  Lillie has the hat shop now and it has fallen into disarray, children now days sadly are more into electronic goods, computers etc (don't ask me what the etcs are because I got lost years ago).  But the Tridias shop at the bottom of Walcot street was a beautiful old fashioned toy shop. 

A lot of the background stuff you can buy, there is a whole cottage industry out there, and I learnt to make larger boxes to fit the scenes in as they took my fancy.

Still always needing a dusting

This hat has been sprayed with gold

The dollshouse came later, a typical Bath Georgian house, so familar in my day to day life, walking down to Bath through The Circus and Queens Square early morning was a great pleasure.

Its door must have been missing for 15 years! still mean to fix the hinges

Farleigh Hungerford Castle

The hall that Tom hung the dolls from

The kitchen in the d/h has not changed much, note the blue tac, detail is all important.

None of these  scenes exist now, a hobby given up years ago, but the little cake and pie I see in the above photo was made by a friend years ago, and in the end I sent her all my books on the subject. 

Dusting

Cleaning the dollshouse;  It had not been opened since before Xmas so it was a tad dusty. Could do with some work I notice especially the curtains.  I am often to be found virtuously stating that I don't collect stuff, all lies, just looking at this house I realise it was miniatures I collected at one stage.

It has been in my household for about 35 years, bought for an uninterested daughter. It  has acquired bits and pieces, and I seem to know everyone of those bits and pieces, witness the frantic search for the two tiny Victorian dogs yesterday, which of course had fallen and hidden themselves.

Some of the furniture is quite expensive, the desk, tallboy and dining chairs, all had to be put together, other furniture I have made myself years ago. I can see the dusty hallways which have never been attended to, the front door was wrenched off by Tom when young, and still has not been replaced.  In the box of small things are silver swords, spears and shield, these became part of a Tudor Hall, took me ages to make  recess windows (you create a false wall). Tom would hang the dolls above with chains from the wooden hooks I had so meticulously made, in his defense he was only about three at the time.
Most of the things I made no longer exist, below is the Prittlewell Saxon burial, a royal burial part pagan, part christian.  The two bags were made out of fine leather from an old purse, and the little Roman chair folded up, pinning such work required patience.  In the second photo are two tiny silver Persian salt pots, which seemed appropiate for storing food.  The wood surrounding the burial was balsa wood, easy to score into planks and age.
I have of course, according to LS, a morbid fascination about death, of course I don't agree, but having visited such places as the Sutton Hoo burial, the Hochdorf burial in Germany, the Bartlow Roman burial mounds and the great Neolithic burial long barrows of Wiltshire one has to say, they did death magnificently....

A reconstruction, I think it figured in Britarch.

Reflecting on death;  We are blessed in historic terms that before christianity the 'after world' figured in belief systems, inheritance today is of course passed on to children but way back  then you took your wealth, food and drink with you to a better and braver world and in doing so left some sort of record behind.  The Prittlewell Prince by the way was hedging his bets with both christian and pagan belief systems, and his sons who buried him respected his wishes.
I have mentioned the Hochdorf burial mound in Germany, gold platter, a great bronze cauldron and various gold trimmings for the prince who was buried are also part of  the reconstruction of the museum there.  It took many years with work by skilled conservators to remake the bronze settee (and also the chariot) he was laid on and to set up beneath the museum the wooden chamber he was buried in. With good Germanic precision,  the great earth mound was also constructed in a field about a mile away, and over the museum itself a great metal arch denotes its size.
The Hochdorf Burial

Hochdorf Celtic Burial

Plates and cauldron but no food is exhibited.

 The Saxon Hoo Boat Burial

Finding something new to do!

I have just finished a quilt, which to be honest I am not happy with, neatness is not my absolute goal sometimes, or at least I cannot achieve it. But it is finished, found the squares half price at Hobbycraft and it is a pretty pink so shall give it to Matilda for her 'dowry' box, as it was meant for her in the first place.  They all off to Switzerland, in a day or two and the familiar worry 'nag' starts in the pit of my stomach as I contemplate their journey but I'm sure they will have a marvellous time.

A walk down to the river the other day, watching two people in a rather noisy long boat pick blackberries from the bank, the berries are so early for this time of the year. Great striped dragonflies darting around, always too quick for the camera, but it has been such a beautiful summer, the insects multiplying happily.  The first photo is of the studio, here I finished my patchwork in a rather disgruntled manner (knowing it was not working properly) under the eye of this god - his serenity did not work on me, who I may add was bought in Whitby so he is definitely not original but I do like the little hare underneath.

The old mill, now divided into houses

Gathering theories

So where am I going with these Celtic spoons, not sure, but this pair of spoons below were found not far from my old house in Bath, down the lane following the fierce little brook (Locksbrook) that would eventually join up with the River Avon. I remember chasing the literature at the time, a friend had given me an old article on the subject and at the end, it was just one of those mysterious Celtic puzzles.  My mind had become locked into the silver baptismal spoon my daughter had had as a baby, no answer.

"Celtic spoons found at Loxbrook; One other interesting fact is that near the end of the brook before it joins the River Avon a pair of “Celtic” spoons were found. To quote (taken from Rev.Preb.Scarth 1870). “they were found while clearing the ground for quarrying stone to form a new road, and lay near the stream, at the depth of about 7 feet”. These spoons, of which other pairs have been found in England, Wales and Ireland, are considered by Scarth to be early christian spoons, probably dating from the 3rd or 4th century. Its interesting that they should be found just outside Bath, and near to a local stream. This leads one to believe that they were used for a baptismal rite, one spoon normally has a small hole in its bowl, also they are often incised with a faint cross in the bowl. The other characteristic is distinctive celtic curvilinear patterns that are found at the top of the spoons."

Then on checking the Westmoreland spoons, to be found at the British Museum, I found this written about them..... appertaining to the Druidical nature of the spoons....

"The spoons were found by a farmer digging in a bog near a natural spring. They were buried under 30-50 cm of peat and were about 200-250 cm apart. Objects were offered as sacrifices in bogs, lakes and rivers in the Iron Age and the spoons' location suggests that they might have been used in rituals. Spoons like these are usually found in pairs and one spoon always has a small hole on the right side. The other spoon does not have a hole, but is always decorated with a cross which divides the bowl into four quarters. Why? It has been suggested that something, perhaps water, blood or beer, might have been allowed to drip through the hole in one spoon onto the other spoon during attempts see into the future."

There is no sense to making the cross in the centre of the right hand spoon for measurement as  liquid dripping through would on the whole take the pathway of the lower r/h quarter.  Always I see the spoon as an anointing spoon, but this is because of a strong Catholic upbringing when I was young and the association of baptism and water, the 'ritual' though whatever it was has a more symbolic nature to it.

There are quite a few pairs found, as one can see from the above illustration

Romilly Allen - Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian times 1904

The Welsh spoons and those from the south of England are of the best workmanship, with embossed concentric or curvilinear designs on the handles, the reverses of which are in some cases engraved with curvilinear designs. In one Welsh pair (1 and 2) and in one English spoon (5) the junction of the bowl with the circular handle is strengthened

by wide lateral wings. That this junction was a weak part is shown by a small ornamented plate riveted on the back of a spoon found in London (8); the only other evidence of repair is a small gold plug inserted in one of the Cardigan pair (2). The spoons from the north of England, Scotland, and Ireland have engraved designs on the handles and are not embossed; the bowls are less circular than those from the south, the Irish spoons being specially elongated. In the Irish and Westmorland spoons the cross radiates from a small engraved circle; this might suggest an origin from a spoon with a central perforation similar to the French spoon, but the design is probably purely decorative....

Decoration aside, I shall have to read Romilly Allen's book, but their distribution points to a purposeful ceremonial use, the meaning of which has been lost in time.

Past and Present Tensions link;

Today the 25th July

Farm Garden with Sunflowers by Gustave Klimt

Yesterday I sorted through my books for a story, and still cannot find it.  It is a Japanese story about a fisherman bemoaning his fate of poverty, and then a stranger comes along and outlines the folly of becoming rich, and that in the end it is better to be poor but happy, but the telling of the story itself is much better than that! so be it.

Found the above painting on Facebook, the one thing people can do beside make war is paint, write and make music. and Klimt can surely paint.
To the more humdrum things of the day, a glut of courgettes and runner beans, welcomed of course.  Finding a butternut growing on one of three plants that have been producing sterile male flowers, my aubergine plant has grown to a great size but also refuses to fruit perhaps it needs a companion, and the tomatoes are green but fruitful as are the sweet peas which I have to pick each day.
Today is my grandson's birthday, Ben, who is 13 years (I think) is growing up fast, and is off to Brighton early this morning.  The family are getting up with the birds to take him down to York station for the trip, so I shall worry till he safely arrives, though Tom the eldest has decided to stay in London and work through the university holiday, so he is always on hand.  Next week they all, except Tom, head off for Switzerland, they were going to stay the night but have to drive straight onto their Eurotunnel booking, so we shall probably see them on the way back.
The cottage in Whitby has been booked for two weeks by us in the middle of September, it is full till then, and we will probably do a bit of house hunting up in Yorkshire, still undecided where to move to, but Whitby will have calmed down slightly from the summer visitors, and I notice LS is getting a bit homesick for the fish and chips down Silver Street.  Our Indian friend Mohammed's restaurant has disappeared, so no aubergine bhajis, but Botham's bakery delicacies are always there, and a quick whizz round  Boyes, the shop that sells everything but the kitchen sink, and of course Yorkshire Trading Company, which probably sells more...
Words of course always brings us back to our own rhythm of life, they are soothing as the world rages around us and I suspect we should be grateful for the calmness of a blackbird squawking his message across the garden.
Also grateful to F/B occasionally for keeping me up to date as my grandchildren travel.....and the image of little Lillie who always speaks her mind on the train back from York; my daughter - "Squashed on very packed train with hen party complete with blow up doll and particularly obscene cake .... Just waiting for Lillie to start making comments!!" 

Off on their great adventure, Ben in the middle with what looks like Matilda's case!

My Precious

Gollum is vanished for his ugliness, Tolkien makes an appearance!

"Thanks to Cllr Mackintosh and Northampton Council, it looks as if Sekhemka may have been turned into the Egyptian equivalent of Gollum’s “precious” to be hidden away and even gloated over as a secret fantasy object.”

The sale of  of the Northampton Sekhemka statue is still ricocheting off the walls with fury, Heritage Daily latest hits out with the ugly face of Gollum, at this moment I should go on to describe my love of this fantasy by Tolkien but I shall stick to the anger that reverberates round many heritage establishments.  It is the sheer brazen face of Counciller Mackintosh   that is getting up people's noses, selling off a statue that 'by right' belongs to the museum.  

Normally I would put on a photo of some relaxing countryside, but there is an under current of anger in this country against 'the fat cats'.  It creeps into the literature, the 'sense of unfairness', anger against the greed of the bankers, politicians and of course councillors who rule in their petty fiefdoms and make the people cross.

We also have a 'crook' councillor/lord who has even gone to prison for his misdeeds over expenses.  To collect these expenses back from him which are about £50,000, Chelmsford council reckons they would have to spend a £100,000 in lawyer fees, so the case is dropped. House of Lords expenses (something like £350 a day) and you only need to spend a few minutes within its illustrious corridors and you are quids away! that is not to say that many lords don't do a marvellous job, I am quite happy with a second chamber monitoring legislation, but our Lord Hanningfield is also guilty of claiming money he does little to earn.

Enough of rogues and fools, they exist everywhere, but there was something very nefarious in the hiding away of this statue for four years by Northampton Museum, so that they could claim ' no-one wanted to see it', and hopefully their status will be downgraded as threatened by officialdom.

One small Chinese teacup goes for $36 million

This and that

A Game of Henge - Stonehenge

Phillip Gross

A game of Henge, my masters?

The pieces are set. We lost the box

with instructions years ago.

Do you see Hangman? Or

Clock Patience? Building bricks

the gods grew out of? Dominoes?

It's your move. You're in the ring

of the hills, of the stones, of the walls

of your skull. You want to go?

You want out? Good - that's

the game. Whichever way you turn

are doors. Choose. Step through, so...

And whichever world you stumble into

will be different from all the others, only

what they might have been,

you'll never know.

I start with Gross's poem, so apt when you try to start to unravel a theory as to the how and why of any particular aspect of the prehistoric past - they did not write it down; today we can bumble around  words such as 'sacred' and 'ritual' and guess till we grew old with age what really happened but never get to the truth of the matter  So reading this interesting paper, with various theories analysed and debunked can be very confusing.  So where do I stand? the answer is simple, I shall for this moment in time say the building of Silbury Hill  is ancestral in that viewing the mound from either the Neolithic monuments of East Kennet or West Kennet long barrows can be one of the answers; it lies at your feet serene in its startling man made appearance on a flat piece of land. Then just a few hundred metres further on where the conjunction of the Winterbourne meets the Kennet river at Swallowhead Springs, this also gives it a special symbolic meaning within the landscape.

The 'cone shaped shadow', in this aerial photograph of Jacquetta Hawkes 50 years ago...

Water in the moated ditch that surrounds the monument, appearing and disappearing as the little Winterbourne does, perhaps that is magical, once someone put a video on of the water rushing down the dried river course in winter, that was magical, the reappearance of water.

"When contemplating the options available to the Avebury monument builders a possibility was  available to them to use the western extension of the Silbury Hill ditch to create the illusion of a ‘full moon’ from the reflection of a fully scoured surface to Silbury Hill in the water of the winter fosse. However, it is not clear that the builders had any interest in such an exercise. There is no evidence of scouring to the whole face of Silbury Hill, although there is to the northern sector of the top terrace. 

Just a paragraph in the paper, this time the moon reflected in the fosse/moat that surrounds Silbury, speculative and not really relevant. A white chalk mound distinct in the moonlight, of course the practical in me says, you have to keep scouring the hill to keep it white.  It is a bit like Julian's Cope theory that as you descended The Ridge Way to the Sanctuary stone circle,  that Silbury would appear on the horizon dancing before you.

Reading Tilley mentioned below and you come to the latest archaeological trick to read the landscape, it is called phenomenology, and I have read the landscape by its ancestral beginnings and by its close proximity to water - clever - or not!

All I know, even now, is the warm feeling of just 'being' within the landscape, a sunny day up by EKLB with LS as he photographs Silbury from afar; following the course of the little stream called the Winterbourne, past the old willows, Moss walking ahead, deer in the field and a hare, its ears poking above the wheat. And I suspect that this is just what the prehistoric people felt, the warmth of the sun, a good harvest, wild flowers and wild animals making up their landscape.  As to their religious beliefs it did not matter, as it does today.

Over the last two or more decades the work of Tilley has proved particularly appropriate for examining the Silbury Hill ‘residual’. Rather than seeing landscape as a Euclidian space filled with natural and artificial features, Tilley’s phenomenological approach discerns active choice on the part of the builders in selecting each place for its distinctive topography and long ­established memories traceable to ancestral forager track­ways and sacred sites. Tilley emphasises how the choice of landscape context for a monument reveals how the builders wanted to manipulate a viewer’s interpretation of its meaning.

Shafts and Wells

An earlier blog 2008

Distractions

Our understanding of megalith monuments are realised in the moment we stand by them and take in their surroundings.  What we fail to understand though is that through time, the stones sometimes become altered, could be through excavation or the farmer moving stones.  So does this funny little stone at Lanyon Quoit still exist or has it been moved?

The old photos were taken by Jacquetta Hawkes, a great favourite author of mine about 50 years ago, though she was wandering round the stones presumably in the 1940s.

Lanyon Quoit

Jacquetta Hawkes

Pentre Ifan

The same can be said for Pentre Ifan, the strange small upstanding stones to the side can either be part of the mound that supposedly surrounded it, though to an untutored eye looks more like a walk way.  This it cannot be because the 'closed door' of the monument is facing to the left, so what are they.  Their disappearance could be put down to an excavation......

Jacquetta Hawkes

Tomorrow, or maybe today, I shall concentrate on Silbury Hill and the 'water' theory, but for the moment my mind is tired, and so to finish with a photo of Chief sitting on a stone at the Hurlers Stone Circle, which our friend in Cornwall this morning has just been measuring! This photo was taken for me (because some would say I am very dog friendly) and as I notice Moss above, perhaps the difference between long haired  collie Moss (with a dash of spaniel) and short haired collie Chief who is a whizz at winning sheep trials can be noted...