It is with great sadness that Allan Mustoe my dear husband passed away suddenly yet peacefully on Sunday 23rd November.
Thank you for all your support. Allan was extremely proud of all the reads he achieved.
Sunday, 30 November 2014
Sunday, 16 November 2014
Badgers are Perplexed at the Russian Bear
News announced this week of the recent Badger Cull
costings, showed that each Badger killed was despatched at a cost to the
British tax payer of £5,200 per head. Tax payers’ money totally wasted on disenfranchising
the countryside of one of its noblest inhabitants. You would think with the
government continually rambling on about new austerity measures, the money
would have been far better placed obtaining food for our ever increasing number
of food banks scattered in and around our country. With winter just around the
corner, the demand for this facility has sky rocketed enormously in the last
three to four years.
The G20 meeting in Australia, with President Putin’s fleet of four ships, which include a
cruiser, a destroyer, a tug boat and a refueller, poised in
international waters North of the Coast of Australia brings it home to one on
just how fragile these global meetings have become. The travesty of Ebola out in Africa will
surely be a talking point and so it should be.
Five thousand lives have been lost to this wretched disease so far with
no real sign of containment. A disease
which has been inflicted on the African people for no real apparent reason but
certainly made worse through the years of conflict, especially Sierra Leone
where government monies could have just as easily been put into hospitals and
health centre structures in years gone by rather than armaments that have just succeeded
in ripping some of these countries apart.
How much easier it would have been right back in March if these
facilities had been in place to treat and contain the march of this ongoing
disease. We are in the twenty first
century and lessons are still continually not being learnt. Yet another African
crisis with a Bob Geldof and Midge Ure Christmas tune.
5000 lives lost is 5000 too many lives lost. This is a huge
figure to have lost in such a short space of time, especially when it is quite
apparent that swift aid and education could have averted a large portion of
this. However, far less media coverage and condemnation has been given to the
4000 lives lost in the conflict of Eastern Ukraine. The Ukraine’s only crime
for this misery is wanting independence. The Russian Bear has remained
slumbering since the fall of the Berlin wall but his awakening to strengthen
the hand of the Ukraine Separatists has been really alarming and does nothing
to reinforce a peaceful and stable Europe.
In fact, quite totally the opposite.
In the 100 year anniversary of the 1914-1918 war you
would think that the Russian Bear’s paw along with the rest of the hands of
Europe has been burnt enough.
An interesting interview this week with Jon Snow of
Channel 4 News with Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhinaa,
two girls from the Pussy Riot pop group who were arrested and imprisoned simply
because their views were not entirely in step with the Russian government, reinforces
the view that free speech and any real criticism of the Russian government is
still a long way off from being the norm.
As if the aforementioned crises have not caused enough
devastation and loss of life, this morning we have learnt of yet another
barbaric beheading of an aid worker my militants in Syria/Iraq. Peter Kassig,
an American, was out in the region aiding refugees when he was brutally
murdered. How nice it would be on this centenary year for the Heads of State
around the G20 table to draw up plans for the Russian Bear to turn East
alongside the American Eagle, the French Cockerel and the British Lions to join
together and rid the Middle East of this un stabling disease, Isis, and put an
end to this butchering of the innocents and let the Middle East once again
enjoy the peace, tranquillity and quality of life that every region has the
right to deserve.
Please watch my short film of my Badgers playing and frolicking
over a fallen tree on an August Evening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjMrJ3I_XhM&feature=youtube_gdata
Daddy Cool at his playful best.
Sunday, 9 November 2014
A Badger’s Remembrance of Slaughter
We have been blessed this weekend with a visit from our
son Sam whose weekend break back home from his studying at his university has
been most welcome. However, his sister
was unable to join us due to her ever more demanding diary dates but the return
of Sam’s banter and his sense of humour has been most uplifting and a constant
source of amusement.
The weather across this part of The Cotswolds has turned
colder and wetter. Autumn is most
certainly doing its level best to run into winter.
My Badgers have gained exceptional condition throughout
the summer months and I feel sure they will all be able to withstand the
harshest of this winter’s weather which has been forecast.
Not all British Badgers have been as fortunate as the
ones that I have been honoured to observe.
The Badger cull has wreaked havoc in the culling zones of Gloucestershire
and Somerset where it has been implemented.
For these groups of Badgers who have suffered the full force of Defra’s aggressive,
violent, nonsensical attacks, their winter will be nowhere near as reassuring
for even the survivors who have witnessed the butchery of their families, the
trauma has been shown to last throughout their lifetime and the family groups
seldom re-colonise.
A hundred years have passed since the start of the 1914-1918
Great War. The war that was supposed to end all wars has been marked in a most
spectacular fashion. 888,246 ceramic poppies have been planted in the moat
surrounding the Tower of London. A most
symbolic tribute to lives lost in a blitzkrieg of carnage that affected large
parts of Europe and the rest of the world.
Flanders, Eypes, The Somme, names of places that are totally synonymous
to war and death.
As the ice caps on the two Poles start to subside you are
seeing countries once again starting to stake their claim on the riches that
lay beneath the frozen ocean. The
Russians earlier this year sent out an ice breaker to the North Pole where they
launched a small submersible submarine from which they planted the Russian flag
at the bottom of the ocean to lay their claims to the riches of oil and gas
that they hope will reside there.
Greenland, the United States and the Nordic countries all laying claim
also to plunder this wilderness, probably for the first time in history. The mapping out of this frozen region will be
done in a diplomatic, non-confrontational fashion we hope. We have surely all seen in our history books
which have taught us that land grabs and border changes have been the blight of
civilization. But when you see the
Russian armour amassing on the Ukrainian border one has to ask one’s self what
exactly has been learnt in a Europe that has been ripped apart twice in one
century? Some nations have obviously
learnt more than others. But with all
this oil and gas it will no doubt buy more Premiership football clubs and more
London fashionable property at the expense of an up till now undisturbed part
of the globe, the two Poles. Let us hope
that the extraction of these minerals which will undoubtedly happen have nature’s
interest at the very heart of any exploration and extraction.
Please watch my short film of a female Badger busy
grooming on an autumn evening.
Female Badger in a relaxed manner grooming before her evening excursions.
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