Nobby the future agility champion...

Today, we are taking part in YAM-aunty's Final Friday Feature, with a special piece in which broader questions about achievement are examined with respect to my progress in my weekly dog agility training sessions. 

Clockwise from left: Einstein, Churchill, Darwin, Rowling

Can you believe that my owner Gail is beginning to doubt I might ever be agility championship winning material?

The accusation is that I am ill-disciplined and lacking in focus during the Tuesday evening training sessions. Clever, yes. Agile, most definitely. Creative in my approach. Too much so, apparently.

Well I guess I am not the first to have their genius go unrecognised in their earlier years. 

Have you heard of the physicist who revolutionised our understanding of space-time but, like me, had 'issues' with school discipline? Yes, that's right, Albert Einstein.

How about the great wartime leader who was said by his school teachers to have a keen mind but a spirit not suited to regimentation. Sir Winston Churchill, of course. Although the description could perfectly be applied to yours truly.

Then there's Charles Darwin, he of theory of evolution by natural selection fame, whose father once said to him, "You care for nothing but dogs, shooting, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family". Surely, it's obvious that an interest in rat-catching correlates strongly with excellence in other areas of endeavour?

Did you know that J.K.Rowling, world famous and phenomenally wealthy Harry Potter author, was at university considered just an 'average' student who prioritised social life over studies? Well I am also renowned for prioritising my social life, I want to point out. 

I could go on, but I think I've made a compelling case. I simply cannot understand why Gail is still wearing her 'deeply sceptical' expression and suggesting how about I just concentrate on actually trying to follow instructions about weaving through the weave poles and not be forever racing off to 'socialise' with my fellow trainees, and then we might actually make progress at agility class..... 

Oh it's hard to be so misunderstood.

THIS WEEK AT AGILITY

While teacher's pet Harrison masters the weave poles...

 ....Nobby and his training pal Breeze focus on scoring yet more treats...

Gail says she might call her next dog Breeze. She thinks 'Gail and Breeze' would make a good pairing. (A joke that works better spoken than when written down...)

Nature (writing) Friday - AN OUTRAGE!

Here's another dual purpose Nature Friday and Final Friday Feature post

Can you believe it? Despite encouragement from Gail's tutor to include me, Nobby, in as many stories as she likes, you'll never guess what my owner went and did this week on her Nature Writing course...

The theme was 'Facts are your Friend'. 

In response to the task of writing a 350 word vignette about a something she sees in nature on a regular basis, enhanced by background reading on the topic, Gail submitted a piece titled 'Granite', in which I do not feature AT ALL!

I post it here only to demonstrate how boring Gail's 'Nobby-free' writing can be*.

PS from Gail: I'm afraid there is a grain of truth to Nobby's assertion that, when he is not included, I struggle a bit to keep things interesting. But then, my intention in signing up for the course was to stray out of my dog blogging comfort zone.

Granite

As the first storm of the winter hurtles against my bedroom window, I’m woken early. Listening to the gale ripping branches off the trees outside, I feel reassured that my house, like so many in my adoptive city of Aberdeen, is built of good, solid granite blocks. 

In an hour or so, the morning dog walk round Duthie Park will take me past a patch of grass where half a dozen offcuts of quarried granite are scattered about, each labelled according to the location from where it was hewn.

Corrennie, Kemnay, Rubislaw, Sclattie, Clinterty, Peterhead.  

Granites are composed of a crystalline matrix, the main constituent minerals being quartz, feldspar and mica. If I look carefully at the rocks in the park I note, beyond the obvious differences in hue, distinct variations in granularity, colour contrast and texture. They have in common a hardness and resistance to wear. Unlike the soft southerner’s sandstone widely used in the Central Belt, this rock is not for crumbling.

The granite of the Cairngorm plateau, described by Aberdonian writer Nan Shepherd as “defiant against frost and the old grinding of ice”, is a close relative of the quarried stones in the park. 

Still in bed, hoolie still blowing, I contemplate the various ages of my house.

Rubislaw quarry, sometimes (wrongly) described as the biggest man-made hole in Europe, supplied the principal construction material for much of the city of Aberdeen, including my early Edwardian era home. Modern dating techniques estimate the granite to have been emplaced during the Ordovician, at a time when trilobites still swam the oceans and dinosaurs were but a distant gleam in evolution’s eye. 

The chemistry of the magma, its depth of burial and rate of cooling determined the precise appearance of these granites. The rocks quarried in Peterhead, thirty miles north of Aberdeen, are a gay rosy-red, the colour imparted by iron-rich feldspars. The Rubislaw granite is more sombre. Aberdeen tourist blurb likes to emphasise the micas sparkling in the sunlight but the point is lost when the city is shrouded in haar. Forget Nan Shepherd. As winter trudges on, the literary reference that comes to mind will be ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.

Cosy under my duvet, there’s something comforting about being further protected by walls built from a material unchanged for the best part of 470 million years.  

Thursday is Abandon Your Dog Day?

Today we're again doing a combined post for YAM-aunty's 'FFF (Final Friday Feature)' and for our friends the LLB Gang's 'Nature Friday' blog hop. 

A Story of Dog versus Bicycle

This is a tale about what happens most Thursday mornings in a certain household in Aberdeen, Scotland. The particular details relate to this week, but the basic pattern of events could be pretty much any Thursday in any year...

The dog wakes up when his human comes downstairs shortly after 6 a.m. He notes she is wearing clothes which are brighter and more close fitting than her usual garments, and this, together with the fact that the next thing she does is check her bicycle tyre pressures, tells him he will shortly be abandoned for several hours while his human goes off to meet her friends for their regular Thursday bike ride.

But wait. All is not lost, perhaps? He can hear rain on the roof of the conservatory, above the noise of his human chomping through her big bowl of muesli and Nick Robinson on Radio 4 talking about the fate of Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

It is still raining quite hard when she takes him for his morning walk around the park, and for a few hopeful minutes he can dream that the wet weather will prompt her to stay indoors, with him, after all.

Fat chance of that. As her friend Anne is fond of saying: "Why did they invent Gore-Tex?" At 8:45 am sharp she pats him on the head and, despite deploying a plaintive look in his eyes together with his adorable - so he's told - head tilt, she wheels her 'wet weather bicycle' (the one with the mudguards) out into the road, and there he is, left all alone. Abandoned once again.

It is six hours later when she returns, all rosy cheeked and happy, knees creaking a bit. She tells him five of them were out today, Anne, Sonia, Sheila, Margaret and herself, they rode out to Monymusk for coffee and delicious scones and plenty of lively chat. The sun came out, the wind blew them home and all in all they'd had a fine time.

But there's more disappointment for the dog, who has to wait a while longer for his afternoon outing. His human claims that having cycled over fifty miles she needs not only a shower but also more food - the yummy cheese scone was insufficient fuel. 

After what feels to him like for ever, she finally puts on his lead and they go out. By now his expectations are low and he is unsurprised to find out this is to be a boring urban walk, less than two miles, and even on the path by the River Dee he is not allowed to roam free, apparently in case he decides to chase any of the baby bunnies hopping about on the river bank. As if there would be anything wrong in that. 

Towards the end of the walk he is made to pose in front of one of the prettier front gardens just a short distance from his house. His human takes a close up of one of her favourite dahlias, saying if he includes this in his post it will definitely qualify for the Nature Friday blog hop.