The Bells Have Made Me Deaf

My latest favourite in the music world is Scott Matthews. The this bloke of the last post.
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Tonight I’m cooking stuff for people I can’t rely on to turn up but as sure as I wouldn’t bother, there they’d be at the door looking hungry. Not having all the ingredients doesn’t help either although I like to improvise as long as the experiment tastes alright and nobody dies in the process of digesting it… all is well.

I’ve been listening a lot to this bloke today. I saw him a while back on Jools Holland doing Dream Song which caught my attention.

Better go whisk the pavlova thingy before all that I learnt from Keith Floyd kicks in.

Normally if I have to register to leave a comment, I don’t but it’s understandable with the number of spambots at large that registration is often a requirement.

Today I succumbed to Flickr registration just so I could leave a comment. What a hassle … now I have to play with it!

In the last few days, the unmistakable stench of ammonia rich chicken shit has been getting right up my nose. I am not aware of any battery houses in the immediate area although they may well exist. I can only assume that somewhere has been doing a clean out of the chicken house and the mess has been spread on a neighbouring field. Of all the slurry type stuff that’s spread on fields, chicken is possibly the worst imaginable smell. Chickens should be free range for this reason alone in order that a mountain of excrement does not build up in any one place.

It takes me back to the days of working in a Greek egg factory in intense heat and dust with that same stench in my nostrils. Each and every day the cages had to be patrolled to check for dead hens and more often than not, rigor mortis had set in requiring the breaking of wings and legs in order to get them out of the tiny cage they shared with four others. I can only imagine the stress this must have caused the ones still alive. Rows upon rows of cages built over a pit with a huge scoop thing that trundled the shit the length of the house and out a door at the end where it plopped nicely into a waiting truck. Until the scoop moved the stuff, the birds had no choice but to breathe in the fumes. When they layed an egg it rolled out of the cage and onto a conveyor belt from which the eggs were packed twice a day.

What a horrible way to produce food.

(This is Cybez idea not mine but I’m on a coffee break so typing should stop me eating extra biscuits.)

Lisnagunogue

Haven’t been there for years. It used to be one of my favourite places to pass through on the way to somewhere else, usually Dunseverick or Ballintoy Harbour to walk the doag. At one stage I looked at a cottage for sale in Lisnagunogue with the intention of buying but was outbid by some greedy sod from Belfast with too much money who wanted a holiday home on the north coast. There went my chance of owning a renovation project with no sea views just sea smells and rising damp. Not too far from Lisnagunogue is an old road which runs across country to the causeway road. I discovered it one fine summers day having taken a wrong turn while in a Skoda. Luckily it was built like a tank, not like the current Skoda variety that people have ceased to point at and laugh. The road, although marked as existing on the OS map, is more of a sheep track than a proper road but highly exciting when you aren’t in an off road vehicle. I would recommend it to anyone who likes to live as close to the edge as I do.

For those of you who have no idea how to pronounce Lisnagunogue here, for your convenience is a recording.
lisnagunogue.mp3