Archive for the ‘Walking The Dog’ Category
Was Tony Blair A Force For Good?
My Non-Appearance On Sunday Morning Live
Since Wednesday the BBC had been in touch every day. This morning they started calling me and testing my webcam and sound from 8.30am. They had me sitting at my desk from 9.45am, 15 minutes before the programme started. I was warned I could be in shot at anytime. I drank too much coffee. I did get a little nervous and jittery. I was desperate for a cigarette even though I gave up six months ago!
Who was that suave, debonair, good looking chap in the crisp white shirt on the background screens? Yours truly of course, waiting patiently for my big moment, trying not to sneer or laugh too raucously at the ridiculous first discussion on animals.
I had my notes blu-tacked to the window frame right behind my webcam, adjusted so that viewers would never lose deep, seductive eye contact with me.
“We’re coming to you now Peter”
“Stand by”
I fancy I can see Susanna Reid flushing slightly in anticipation of introducing me…
“Uh, sorry Peter, we’re not going to be able to come to you. Out of time I’m afraid.”
Such are the trials and tribulations of my life! Suddenly the programme was over.
You'll Get Your Chance, Gorgeous
Turning to far more important things, the dogs and I set off for the hills. My mobile rang and it was Anna from the BBC, apologising and promising me dinner and a hot night with Susanna all at the corporation’s expense. “No, sorry, I can’t be bought off. Call me tomorrow. I’m too busy now.”
On the panel in the studio had been Mary Whitehouse’s successor, frumpy Anne Atkins and the utter jerk, Francis Beckett. What a prat? Why would anyone want to listen to his obnoxious, ill considered views, delivered with all the grace of a blind, three legged rhino?
Was Tony Blair a force for good? This was the question I was supposed to be answering. The BBC had come to me as a result of this article. I had, of course, considered my response and this is what I intended to say.
Was Tony Blair A Force For Good?
I do not count myself as a Tony Blair supporter. I never voted for him. In fact, at all those elections I deliberately spoiled my ballot papers writing “no suitable candidate” across them. I am an admirer though.
I think you have to give him credit for a number of things. He rescued Labour from its madness and turned it into a credible and electable political party. That was good for democracy. He finished off the good work that Margaret Thatcher had done on the unions. He was her true successor. Now the only nutters that we have left are Tweedledum and Twitterdee from Unite and the mad and bad Bob Crowe from the railways.
You have to give him huge credit for Northern Ireland, for Kosovo and Sierra Leone. I think he was also responsible for a fundamental change in British politics in that he reconciled caring with competition. For the first time it was accepted that you could have a social conscience but still believe in business and the free market.
On Iraq, clearly it is a good thing that we got rid of Saddam Hussein although, personally, I think we should have assassinated him. If there was a moral justification for war, for shock and awe, then there was for assassination. Even if we had lost thousands of special forces that would have been better than hundreds of thousands of innocents. I do think that Blair became carried away with George Bush and that was a mistake. Bush will be forgotten long before Blair. He was not of the same calibre. All he had to offer was the might and power of America.
Fundamentally, what you have to ask is did Tony Blair act in good faith? I believe he did. I believe he is an honourable man. Look backwards from Blair to Thatcher and there’s noone else until Churchill and then Lloyd George. That is the company in which Tony Blair will be remembered. He is a great man.
I Was There For You Tone!
The one thing I really don’t understand in this man of vision and intelligence is his conversion to Catholicism. I can just about accept his Christianity although why a man with his intellect needs organised religion I don’t know. I really can’t understand why he wants to be allied to the institution that has been responsible for more evil over the last 2000 years than any other. I think it demeans him. He has far, far more to offer the world than that stupid old bigot the Pope, for instance. It seems to me the Catholic Church will benefit far more from him than he will from it. That’s his business though.
Paradise Valley
The latest instalment in the extraordinary story of the most beautiful place on the planet is available here. Don’t miss it!
Heaven On Earth
Paradise Valley
Heaven On Earth
You can read my latest Paradise Valley story here
…and all the other Paradise Valley and Walking The Dog stories.
Man’s Best Friend
Dogs have lived alongside man for tens of thousands of years. Even before our species could be so defined our predecessors made a pact with each other. Mutual advantage was the bargain and so it has been ever since. The relationship is in our DNA. There is a primeval bond between us.
Capone & Carla
Dogs can be dangerous. Mostly this is a function of how they are treated but there is the wild card. I would never, ever leave any breed of dog alone with a child. Thankfully, considering how many badly treated dogs and irresponsible owners there are, tragedies are few and far between. Nothing can extinguish the agony of what happened in Liverpool yesterday but there is a solution.
Bring back the dog licence. Make it cost £100 per year. Give pensioners a rebate of £90. Every dog must be microchipped to correspond with its licence. Enforce it. Guaranteed, problem solved.
Instead we have idiotic politicians who play about with incompetent, ridiculous and irrelevant legislation like the Dangerous Dogs Act – while children are mauled to death in their own homes.
Paradise Valley – Heaven On Earth
Today I started a new blog on Paradise Valley, the beautiful heaven on earth where I am so fortunate to live.
This will be where I write about walking my dogs , Capone and Carla, and all our adventures in deepest Dorset.
Paradise Valley
I’ve lived in Sutton Poyntz for six months now. A mile to the south is the sea. A mile to the east is Osmington and half a mile to the north but up a very steep hill is the “top of my mountain”. Walking my dogs around this wonderful area has fulfilled every dream that I dared hope for when I first arrived.
The Mysteries Of the East
We have perhaps half a dozen standard walks that we’ve learned, each one of which can be varied with diversions, extensions or shortcuts. Usually we walk for about and hour and a half. The one delight that is always there is a succession of dramatic and quite beautiful views. I never tire of these wonderful vistas across the valley, to the sea, the Isle of Portland and beyond.
I believe that being able to see some distance is fundamentally good for your psyche. Even in the midst of our ghastly capital city on the 12th floor of a vile 1970s tower block there was some consolation to be gained from
Go West Young Man
the view. In Paradise Valley the views move me every day as they change and develop with the seasons. Quite why just looking can make me well up and seems to touch my soul, I do not know but it fascinates me that the dogs will do the same thing. We reach the peak of a hill or come round a corner and they will stand on a wall or look over a hedge – and just look.
After one false start, spring is here. In the great national blizzard we got off lightly with merely an inch or so. A fortnight later though and we had our own intense Dorset storm and we woke up to four inches and twelve hours without power.
Taking In The View
Another fortnight on and the daffodils and crocuses are out. There is already some intensity in the warmth of the sun and all around gardeners are beginning to dig and to sow, to dream of runner beans and strawberries. Up on the hill they were burning the gorse. Quite why I’m not sure. Then this week they brought in a formidable machine which seemed to crawl up and down the sides of the mountain completely demolishing the gorse bushes and leaving an apparently smooth and fresh sward of pasture.
This required immediate investigation and so the dogs and I struck out for the top. Up closer we discovered a compact bulldozer on caterpillar tracks with a vicious flail mounted on front. The driver told me that it weighs 
six tons and guiding it across the slope sometimes it would slip and
slide and nearly give him a heart attack. He explained that the gorse needs to be cut back simply to keep it under control. He’s a braver man than me. Perhaps he doesn’t know that others deliberately throw themselves off the mountain underneath paragliders.
So in a deepening wamth, for the first time since winter took hold, I find time to sit. With the absence of movement, without having to worry about negotiating the hills and the fields, with time just to sit and contemplate, the valley bursts into life. It’s like sitting in a huge and magnificent amphitheatre but there’s not just the single focus of a sport or contest. Every single part of the valley throbs with activity. A family of deer watch the dogs in trepidation.
Countless beautiful, big, brown buzzards soar and swoop. A pair of kestrels hover over the gorse bushes. The biggest rabbit warren I have ever seen, a city full of bunnies, teems with bobbing white tails. The trees are developing that slightly misty look as millions of buds begin to swell and fill. The insect population is burgeoning and heading towards a total that must surely be in the billions, surely exceeding even the number of humans across the whole of our world.
Paradise Valley is blossoming and as it blooms with it will come ever more intense beauty and experience. This, surely, is one of the most beautiful places on the planet and I live right here. For me it truly is paradise.
Walking The Dog 12
We returned to lashings of ginger beer and a plateful of scrumptious ham sandwiches. That’s not the actual menu but as we had been struggling in Kimmeridge clay all morning, the Famous Five comparison felt right, particularly as we’d just had a huge adventure, even bigger than we’d expected!
It wasn’t the Famous Five that set off from Ringstead that morning but the Intrepid Three: Carla, Capone and me. We were set on continuing our Jurassic Coast walk and so drove to the end of the last episode – and the beginning of the next!
The White Nothe
We were heading for the White Nothe headland. It’s the tallest and furthest headland you can see from the top of our mountain above Sutton Poyntz.
We left Ringstead Bay but then cut back towards the beach and descended using the sort of steps that are just pegged shuttering into which the hill slides. Onto the beach and the dogs wanted to swim but there was no time for that. I planned to keep along the beach as far as possible and then climb up the fallen clay cliff before we reached the towering chalk cliffs of the the White Nothe itself.
So, at what seemed a sensible point, I turned away from the sea and started to pick my way up through the clumps of clay, each surmounted with a brush of coarse grass. Climb up further and there are vicious gorse bushes and and little trees with thorns like hardened steel. In some areas a raw wound of open clay has appeared where a minor landslip has taken place. This was almost real climbing, all the weight on the feet but still reaching up at head height and above for support.
The Burning Cliff
This, in fact, is the Burning Cliff. In 1826 a landslide uncovered deposits of gas and oil which caught fire and famously smouldered for about three years.
At last, at the very top, the thickest brush of all so, heroically, I rolled into it with my back and the dogs slipped through underneath me. Then a semi-tropical glade, completely enclosed by thorn and flower. A strange, even light and ferns of all sorts rooting in the carpet of leaves. We were trapped. The way back out was prickly and difficult. In every direction was more thorn and bramble. I swung at some branches to clear a path and I was cruelly shot in the eye by a sloe berry hurtling back towards me, an eclipse of the sun seared in my eyeball and I actually felt dizzy and slightly feint. Had she been there, George would have immediately volunteered to go for help.
No such rescue was open to us though. Forcing our way back out through the thorns I picked, slipped and slid a perilous path back to the beach. No option for it but to go back up the way we had come down. That was hard work too. We wearily resumed the footpath but when I saw that we had made exactly half a mile’s progress from our start, discretion proved the better part of valour and and we returned to the car.
Undaunted, undefeated and determined to reach our goal we returned this morning. Avoiding the pull of the sea and the beach itself we stuck to the path winding upwards through an area that reminds me of Fern Gully, near Ocho Rios in Jamaica where are there is supposed to be a greater variety of ferns than anywhere else on the planet. Here, now safely above the Burning Cliff, this area has a similar ambience.
Finally up onto moorland then close to the edge of some truly scary cliffs. This was “Vertigo City” for me and I was filled with that priomordial fear that at any moment I might flip, run and throw myself headlong into space. Concerned only as to who would look after the dogs, I restrained myself and we made the summit. There we sat and communed with nature until that intense moment of peace arrived. It comes very easily. You just sit, look around you and wait. The very moment you forget yourself it arrives.
So Carla and Capone scampered down the hillside with me in close pursuit. Another thrilling and exciting adventure completed! I wonder what will happen on our next visit!
Walking The Dog 11
The lights on Portland are warming up orange in the distance. Everywhere there’s a gunmetal grey murk with a few billowing black threats. It is cold, chilling cold and the wind is biting and penetrating. This is the very nub of dusk and here we are back on the beach after a break of over a week.
It’s been a tough week, travelling everywhere, bad news about my Dad, a disastrous episode with my car. Saturday morning in the valley was a welcome relief. The ground was very very wet but the sun shone strong and as we hit the toughest part of the trek up the mountain a ginger blur up the near-vertical slope, the dogs in pursuit, the healthiest, most muscly fox I’ve ever seen. And on top, two bobbing, weaving white backsides of deer escaping towards Dorchester.
I’m in the little red Citroen loan car from The Cartshed, generously offered as “you’re welcome to put your dogs in there” and I knew I had an appropriate stick stored in the garden. Now I’m slipping and sliding down the grass bank to the beach while Capone and Carla tumble, fight and slither through the shingle to the water.
At high tide a three foot windblown chop is breaking 20 yards out but the undertow is ready to pull Capone 
right back under the next one. Once, twice, three times he is wiped out, thumped in the face and chest with icy white water. He ploughs on like a Chieftan tank, shaken but not stirred and reaches the stick at the very crest.
Around he comes, half drowned, half propelled by another wave, he disappears underneath a crashing cauldron of surf and then he’s back, Carla already grabbing the stick from him. His fierce but playful growl penetrates all of nature’s noise. They scamper away up the beach carrying the stick together and turn to the most satisfying tussle and chew while I give them a few moments to rest.
Carla is no fool and although I throw her a little twig while Capone is busy she frolicks into the shallowest surf but thinks better of it and turns back. It’s much more fun to wait for Capone to go in, do the work and intercept him on the way back.
Man Of The Match - Andy Powell
What more perfect end to a day when Wales have almost beaten the South Africans in Cardiff and shown enormous promise, invention and the usual courage.
In these conditions I have to be careful how much I push him because he would try and try, keep going back, ignoring the cold and the shortness of breath and the sucking, churning, remorseless waves. He tackles the surf like a second row forward and nothing stands in his way.
He wants nothing more than another chance. He would die for me in that seething, heaving water.
This connection with my animals, my countryside, my sea, my sky, my wind is my salvation. When we understand what matters, who matters, whatever happens, then contentment comes a little easier.
Life makes a little more sense.
Peter Reynolds 