CRABS AND OTHER THINGS

I recently detached myself from a limpet that has been clinging to my back for too long a time. It has since made several attempts to reattach itself, but I really do need a massive break from it. When I was a child we used to take family holidays down in Cornwall where it was a customary pastime to go crabbing, using limpet flesh to bait your hook to snag the unsuspecting crustaceans from their watery homes. To obtain the bait it was a simple task of bashing the limpet off of its rock and gouging it onto a hook… Once in my innocence or pig headed foolish stubborn mind I desired to take my bounty home, my attempts at keeping them alive in the kitchen sink came to nothing with further attempts at releasing them into the local stream even less as the bucket upended onto the road. I later made atonement for my childhood misdemeanors by getting a crab tattooed onto my belly. I hope it hurt me more than I hurt those innocent creatures and even today I find it very difficult to even face the idea of eating crab let alone actually doing so.

Saying that and ever since having shot a Rabbit as a teenager and hearing the wretched thing screaming as it dragged its paralysed body back to its burrow and then  dragging it out by the hind legs to dispatch it. Since then, I have had an absolute dislike of blood sports and cruelty to animals. Sometimes I dream that those people who take leisure in this kind of activity will come back in subsequent lifetimes as these persecuted species and see how they like it then. Better still of course would be an alternate reality where the persecuted get their own back and chase terrified humans to the point of exhaustion and then rip them to shreds. Ideally none of this would happen and everything would live in harmony with their fellow inhabitants of this beautiful planet we all share.

For as long continue to eat flesh we will have wars, each year they go off to fight and kill their fellows, whilst each day animals are lined up at the slaughter factories to satisfy man’s insatiable want for meat, the Nazi death camp being the equivalent in human terms: The only difference being the commodity involved. Its victims worked for every ounce of strength and even in death rest is not found. Their teeth and hair harvested for further gain. Their possessions stolen and used to profit the wrong doers. That wealth is still circulating and benefitting the successors of those criminals today. Except the criminals are now more insidious, more cynical, their greed incalculable. The industry that was set to annihilate a people is now exploited to enrich yet more criminals. The same people who would bomb, murder and persecute the innocent, whilst making themselves to be the victims and demanding the rest of the world bow to their insistence for unremitting international remembrance whilst doing so. The same people who order the  bulldozing of peoples homes in Palestine, Gaza and The West Bank,  those whose ambitions are so low as to seek great power and then remain supportive of tyrants and are otherwise silent when questioned. Indeed they are tyrants too for their silence damns them as much as the actions of the murderers.

What else? Oh yes I am going on holiday next week and apart from a day trip to Wales last year it will be the first out of the country in quite a while. It does not mean this blog will be silent, far from it. I hope to post as regularly if not more, but we shall see. The break will provide plenty to write about over subsequent weeks if not months. Perhaps years. Ultimately that last is down to me and The Great Dog in the sky who oversees all things. The new laptop is behaving as it should do and Ninja the cat is purring contentedly on my lap. His world revolves around sleeping, eating and demanding attention from his Daddy, he does not care for the machines of men.