Sophia Money-Coutts Let me tell you a shaggy sheep story about the new must-have pet – it’ll end in tears
So it turns out that the new musthave pet is not the latest variety of fluffy dog, or a tortoise, or a very small pig that grows into an alarmingly big pig. It’s a sheep: a Valais Blacknose, to be precise. The lambs of this very sweetlooking breed – black faces, shaggy coat – are now fetching up to £10,000 a pop because they’re said to make excellent pets and can be trained like dogs. (Has the country finally run dry of puppies?)
I have to confess that reading this news gave me slight PTSD, since we had a pet sheep when I was little. She was called 91, because that was the number the farmer had sprayed on her as a lamb, but when her mother died in the field next to our house, we were allowed to adopt her. We fed her with a bottle at first, and she later lived in the dog bed and came on walks with us as a muchloved family member... until foot-andmouth disease arrived in the Scottish Borders, that is, and she had to be taken away to be put down.
My mother sometimes tearfully jokes that 91 thought she’d be OK because she believed she was a dog, but sadly we had to declare her and she had to be carted off. Heartbreaking. A cautionary tale if you are considering forking out for one of those lambs...
h I’m very sorry if you are one of the thousands of people who had to travel through the recent storms and lost their luggage as a result. British Airways is apparently struggling to reunite a good number of passengers with their bags because of the chaos caused by pesky Eunice and Franklin.
As one who thought her own bag was lost recently, I can sympathise with that sinking feeling as everyone else leaves the luggage carousel, but you hang on, hoping desperately that your bag will suddenly appear from the loading bay. I waited for an hour at the airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in December, all hope dwindling, watching one bag that wasn’t mine circle again and again until I was the very last person there. The last piece of luggage on the carousel simply couldn’t be mine, I insisted, because although it looked a bit like it, it didn’t have a large red ribbon attached to its handle, like the one I had tied to mine.
Long story short, after complaining to a nearby member of airport staff, I realised that it was indeed my bag but the ribbon had come off in transit, and I was so tired that I had failed to realise it. And the moral of the story is, if you’re in the market for a new suitcase, don’t buy a plain black one like the rest of us – find a lurid pink or green one instead.
Are you a member of a public library? I have fond Matilda-like memories of them from my childhood. Every few days, I would visit the library in our nearest Sussex town, Pulborough, plonk myself down on a beanbag in the children’s area and figure out what I was taking home next. These days, as a grown-up with more pocket money, I order books online or potter around my local independent shop instead.
But for the first time ever I’ve just registered as an author with the British Library in order to receive royalties every time one of my books is loaned from a public library anywhere in Britain – and have just discovered they’ve been taken out nearly 15,000 times since last spring.
It’s a happy thought that has completely bowled me over, so if you were one of those people, I would just like to take the chance to say thank you very much (and I hope you weren’t too shocked by the rude bits).