Plastic earrings for sheep, and musing on Radio 4

Pearl, before the plastic earrings

Listening to Radio 4, driving into work yesterday morning.  There was a hard frost, and a blue sky.  Someone was talking about her work with prisoners, and how she saw one of her tasks is to try to help some of these people invent a new life story for themselves.  This is such an everyday activity, but so remarkable.  Every day we all do add dimensions to the story we tell ourselves of our lives.   We try to make sense of it, find evidence to support our story arc, believe in it, develop sub-plots, arrange evidence. And then it can all be changed, sometimes in an instant. And we have to start again.

Later, tagging sheep in near darkness.  New regulations require each sheep to have a standard tag and a matching electronic tag.  (That way the government can tell if they've been trained by Al Quaida).  Poor little sheep have ears full of plastic now, but they're legal.