A dog is man’s best friend, they say, a sentiment with which David Lindsay from Cambridge would certainly endorse. Napping on his sofa he was oblivious to the fact that his seven-month-old bulldog had been nibbling on his foot, so much so that his big toe had been fractured and was covered in blood, until his wife’s screams stirred him.
His wife wrapped up his toe and rushed him to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where he was told by doctors that had lost the feeling in his feet due to two blocked arteries in his legs, and but for the puppy’s actions he would have had to have them amputated. Instead, they are likely to be saved.
Mind you, another hour of napping and the dog might have removed them for him.
Art has always had the ability to divide opinion. Take a new statue recently unveiled by Farnham Town Council, costing £19,500, and described as a “sensory, tactile, and interactive sculptural installation” symbolising “the enduring role of hands in craft for thousands of years”.
Some denizens of the town beg to disagree, comparing the arrangement of golden cones as resembling a “Dalek’s scrapyard” and “giant dunce hats”.
I will make my mind when I next pay the area a visit.
Creating waves in the southern Italian town of Monopoli is a statue recently created by students from the Luigi Ross art school and located near to a children’s playground, part of a €350,000 redevelopment of the Piazza Rita Levi-Montalcini. It is a mermaid, but no ordinary one.
Unlike Copenhagen’s famous mermaid which is demure and so unobtrusive it can be easily missed, the Monopolian version is big, brash, and bold, boasting two enormous silicone breasts and the largest posterior ever seen on a mermaid. What it would have done to the creature’s ability to swim gracefully under water is not clear, but in this age when diversity in all its shapes and forms is to be celebrated, it is bang on trend.
The statue, which has yet to be unveiled formally, has divided opinion, but might just put the Puglian town on the tourist trail!
The postal delivery service is so intermittent around Blogger Towers, now down to once a week and I have taken to recording each one on a calendar, that I am not sure whether I was invited to the Penny Mordaunt Trial of Strength show held at Westminster Abbey last Saturday or not. I rather assumed (and hoped) not.
Someone who did receive one was Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine. It always surprises me that a war-torn country seems to have functioning infra-structure services and a plentiful supply of fresh fruit and vegetables, but that is another story. So proud was she that she took to social media with a photograph of said invite.
Eagle-eyed observers spotted a massive error in the beautifully calligraphed invitation – her country’s r had been omitted. As if the country had not suffered enough. Someone will be spending the rest of their days in the Tower of London, methinks.
For some reason my thoughts have been wandering towards a coronation that never happened, that of Edward VIII who had the good grace to abdicate before he was anointed with the holy oil. The event still went ahead in May 1937 as the spare stepped in to claim the crown.
The Suffolk brewers, Greene King, brewed a special Coronation Ale to mark Edward’s coronation but their plans were thrown into disarray by the events of December 11, 1936. The ale, with an ABV of 12% and a strong fruity flavour, was made from barley and English hops, had already been bottled and was kept in the brewery’s cellars and forgotten about. It only came to light when the cellars were renovated in 2011.
Several crates of the beer are now being auctioned off ahead of May 6th with the proceeds going to The Prince’s Trust.
windowthroughtime 