My May 2026 round up

Well, May has gone by fast and finished as a very hot one, setting new temperature records. I was hotter in Cardiff than in Kefalonia the week before!

Cooler in Kefalonia 

I have blogged multiple times about the two big events in May: the Senedd election and my Three Seas Cruise. You can catch up here:

Election

• Senedd Election post
• Celebrating the election win (and seeing my friend Sara get sworn in as member of the Senedd)
• Plus, if you're nerdy, my updated election leaflets graph

Cruise

• Dubrovnik to Malta
• Sicily and Kefalonia
• Corfu and Kotor
• The Red Museum in Dubrovnik

I also had a cinema trip to see The Mandalorian and Grogu with Cathy, and posted a Japanese novel as my Book of the Month.

I had a fun return to work after the cruise. On my first day back I drove to the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford to learn about how the team there are using a natural protein that dampens inflammation to protect insulin-producing cells, which could potentially open a door for a cure for type 1 diabetes. 

It's very early days in the science, with loads more work to do. I put on a white coat to lend a hand.

Towards the end of the month the time had also come round for another diabetes check up. My blood test was booked for the week after the cruise.  I will find out in June how much high seas living has affected me.

(Funny note - when I checked in for my blood test the screen told me I was booked in with "Mrs Phlebotamist", which is a very odd case of nominative determinism!)

I was unable to attend the Keep Grangetown Tidy litter pick this month as I was away that weekend. But the local church, St Dyfrig's and St Sansom's invited KGT volunteers along for a special environment-focused service on 31st May. I heard Fr Richard talk about the history of the church at Grangetown Historical Society last month and it piqued my interest.

The service was high church anglo-Catholic with lots of incense and some of the liturgy was sung. Fiona from KGT did one of the Scripture readings. It was also Trinity Sunday and Fr Richard admitted he was going to dodge the question of explaining how the Trinity works in his sermon. Sensible move there. 

After the service we were invited to proceed outside for an additional prayer for the environment by the statue of St Francis of Assisi. It felt like a post-credits scene in a movie.

Later, Cathy and I took advantage of the good weather to visit The Meadows Wildlife Park. Back in November we went there for Cathy's birthday and met Roly the armadillo. It was nice to go back when it wasn't so cold. 

We didn't see Roly, but I got to pat some friendly pigs and goats.

And I met a fabulous chicken!

Sports-wise it was a football-free month. I did get some free football stickers, despite my personal World Cup boycott. I drew my monthly Blood Bowl game with Bryan. And I played some rounds of mini-golf on the cruise ship. 

I can't promise these will be the last photos from the cruise I post on my blog, but they are the last ones in this blog post!

New philately phocus - pangolins

On Saturday 8th June I went to the annual general meeting of the British Thematic Assocation - the stamp collecting organisation I've belonged to for almost 15 years now. It was held in Swindon at an annual stamp fair called Swinpex, attended by several stamp traders and collectors.

Along with the usual AGM business, I saw a presentation about Sudan - in this case, not  the country! Sudan was the last known male Northern White Rhino whose death heralded the practical extinction of his species. The presenter, Jan, used a range of philatelic material to tell Sudan's personal story (he spent most of his life in Czechoslovakia after being captured as a calf in Sudan) and the story of how his species was hunted into extinction. 

This inspired me to make good on an idea I had to develop a presentation about a creature I've developed a fondness for - pangolins. I visited a dealer's stall and found some nice, inexpensive stamps to start a new collection. 

Pangolins are the only mammals with scales. They are also the world's most trafficked animal because their scales are used in "traditional medicine". Poaching levels are therefore high and pangolins are endangered as a result.

This sheet of stamps from Macau shows the Asian pangolin, which tends to be a tree-dweller. The pictures include a pangolin using its prehensile tail to hang off a tree branch.

The other stamps were from a mix of African countries and show the ground-dwelling pangolins that live on that continent. 

Rio Muni was the name given to Equatorial Guinea when it was a Spanish colony. The stamps show a chameleon and a pangolin. The other small set was used across French West Africa when they were colonies too. The Tanzania sheet includes a rhino on one stamp and a giant ground pangolin, that walks on its hind legs. 

I bought the nocturnal animals sheet because that's an important aspect of pangolin life. And Namibia is another country where pangolins live. (Also it had cool hexagonal stamps.)

I'm going to try and acquire some more stamps that explain a bit more about these fascinating creatures. 

Snack of the Month - return to the biscuit zoo

Back in December, I posted about Leibniz Zoo animal shaped biscuits as my Snack of the Month. Since then I've eaten some more biscuit animals...

First up, Dream Animals by Ginbis, a brand I have only ever seen in Home Bargains.

I had high hopes from the packaging. The cartoon animals looked cute although the blobby looking biscuits in the background looked less promising.

The foil packet inside the box also had cute animals on. 

But the biscuits themselves were so poorly defined they all had to be labelled to help you work out what they were meant to be. I think "M.DUCK" stands for mallard duck, but it gave me an unfortunate Hanson earworm. 

Taste-wise these 'butter biscuits' tasted buttery and weren't too sweet. They also had a smidgeon of salt on them, which offset the sweetness. But overall they weren't as nice as the Leibniz animals. 

As a nice touch, though, the back of the box was educational.

Did you know the German word for hippo was nilpferd? I didn't.

I fared better with another Home Bargains purchase, Koala March biscuits made by Lotte. The box is bilingual.

The koala shaped biscuits inside have different characters printed on them. The foil inner sleeve is cute too. 

The biscuits had a chocolate filling. The biscuit was crunchy and the filling had a nice chocolate taste. It was a very sweet combination. No weird saltiness here!

To add to the excitement, there is also a 'message card' included.

The mystery message card in this box was of Fluffy the astronaut koala.

I'm afraid the message for Fluffy was that he (or she?) was getting recycled along with the box.

Snack of the Month - we're going to eat the zoo, zoo, zoo

My final "Snack of the Month" for 2022 is a packet of cute animal-shaped biscuits that make up the "Leibniz Zoo". These are another Snack of the Month that was sourced by Cathy, who nabbed the last bag on the shelf in our local Lidl. 

The cute giraffe on the front caught her eye. Packaging design for the win!

There's a cute design on the back along with a recommendation for deer snacks - which is a tenuous enough link to Christmas to make this a seasonal snack!

There is a decent volume of bite-size biscuits in the bag. I was reasonably impressed by how many were in there. 

And the variety of shapes was impressive too. A proper zoo of creatures, including ducks! This is one of each type - but there were three or four of most of them. The duck was the rarest as the one in the picture was the sole one in the bag. There were lots of horses. 

As plain biscuits go, these were nice. They tested like a more buttery version of a rich tea biscuit. They weren't very sweet and they were good dunked in tea.

I won't be rushing back to the zoo, having tried these once. But I did really like the rhino biscuit - here's a close up to close the review!

A day at Dartmoor Zoo

On our recent holiday we had a slightly chilly day at Dartmoor Zoo in Sparkwell not far from Plymouth. It's the zoo that the film We Bought a Zoo is based on, although in the film the zoo is in California, not Devon.

On the way in we saw the tapirs eating their breakfast.

Tapirs are some of my favourite animals. Unfortunately the chilly wind deterred them from staying outside and once they had polished off their meal they went and hid in their little house.

The tapir's neighbours, the capybara family were also a bit chilly but were happier to stay outside.

Although it's quite a small zoo (which makes it really manageable and good for young children or older people), Dartmoor Zoo has an impressive array of big cats. It feels like visitors can get quite close to them and the design of the enclosures makes it easy to take photos. 

Of couse, it also means the cats can have a look at you!

I learned the difference between big cats and lesser cats from the talk by the cheetah enclosure. Big cats roar, and lesser cats purr, but no cats do both. Cheetahs are some of the largest of the lesser cats and we heard them purring in anticipation when the zookeepers brought out their food. Because they are lesser cats, they have kittens not cubs. 

Just across from the cheetahs they have lions and tigers. The tiger was putting on a show, doing adorable tigerish things like grooming.

But at one point he yawned revealing a set of fangs that could rip a human's throat out and it was a reminder that these creatures are deceptively fluffy.

The reptile house was small but well laid out and the lizards were visible. The geckos were fun. I told the volunteer staff member working in there about how my family used to have geckos living in the house when we lived in the Gambia. (They were very useful, eating flies and bugs. Even my grandma liked having them around and she wasn't keen on critters.)

There were a few smaller animals as well. Some were hard to photograph, like the potoroos. They are small marsupials that look like a cross between a big rat and a small wallaby. There were also some meerkats, which seem to be mandatory at zoos now. I found them amusing, particularly as it looked like one of the keepers had left a welly behind and the meerkat was colonising it in the name of meerkat-kind.

The following evening we watched the film of We Bought a Zoo. There was one bit which was a dead giveaway that the story was based on a tourist attraction in the UK - just before the zoo is about to open the weather turns into nonstop rain potentially preventing anyone from attending on opening day. That felt much more likely to have happened in Devon than in California!

Turning 40: My friends filled my virtual farmyard

I like virtual gifts. For a small sum of money a person who needs a sheep or a chicken or blankets gets what they need and I get a nice card saying what's been given.

As I have just turned 40 and I wanted to throw a party I wanted to avoid ending up with a ton of presents that I don't really need. I have more than enough stuff.

So I decided to ask people coming to the party that if they really, really wanted to, they could help me fill a wall with home-produced art or fill a farmyard with virtual animals and things.

Some people combined both - my niece Joy drew me a sign for my farmyard.

Every farm needs a sign

And people were incredibly generous. Most people turned up with some little envelope, or my inbox pinged with an email the day before, to say that donations had been made and virtual chickens, sheep, goats, bees (lots of bees!) and even donkeys had been 'bought' on my behalf for people who really needed them.

I was able to display all these by clipping up the cards and by the end of the party my virtual farmyard looked like this:

A full farmyard

For people who like knowing this sort of detail, here's the run down of what ended up on the farm.

• A queen bee and four other lots of bees
• At least 4 chickens (2 single chickens and a further gift of chickens plural)
• 2 donkeys
• Ducks (at least 2)
• 4 goats - one of them a nanny goat
• 3 sets of piglets (so a minimum of 6 little piggies)
• 5 sheep
• 3 vegetable gardens
• One lot of drought resistant crops
• 2 clumps of useful worms (good for the soil)
• A pile of poo (useful fertiliser)
• An adopted manatee (to go in the pond with the ducks)

I was also given a $25 microfinance loan to be loaned out to the person of my choice in the developing world. I'm going to sort that out and blog about it later but it sounds like a brilliant idea.

In a future post I'm going to blog about the art wall that got filled. But I wanted to show off my farmyard first. I'm very grateful to all the people who came to the party and who have helped so many people who are living in challenging situations around the world.

It's funny when it's not your upholstery

I wiped most of the zebra drool off the interior of Viv's car after our safari trip for Irony Boy's birthday. Later Cathy said 'I don't think you're supposed to feed the zebras. Fortunately, it's not as if there's any photographic evidence of you feeding the zebra (checks camera), oh, wait...'

But you have to admit he's a cutie...


Even when he's got his nose in the car trying to mug me for treats.

Beanless

Went out last night after building furniture and shunting boxes round at Dr Nicholl's behest to Nandos, only to be greeted by a sign that said: 'No bean patties today'. So I had to have a veggieburger instead, which wasn't too bad actually.

Now you might be asking 'Why didn't you just have the piri piri chicken and be done with it?' And I guess that's the thing. Since coming back from the States, I've harboured a secret. I've become a vegetarian.

There were plenty of reasons to do it. The farming industry is notoriously cheap and animals are mistreated badly. And I actually quite like animals. Sheep and cows not so much, but pigs are cute. Maybe I like grunty, snorty creatures who don't care much what anyone thinks because they remind me of me. Is it hypocritical to think pigs are cute and feed them in petting zoos and then chow down on some bacon? And, incidentally, what is the difference between eating pigs and eating dogs? It all seems very arbitrary to me.

So, reason 1: I like animals.
Reason 2: I'm fortunate to live in a society where I have a choice in what I eat, and I believe when you're given a choice it's your moral duty to make an ethical decision. I disapprove of people who prioritise their own tastebuds over the human rights and dignity of tea-pickers (in fact, deliberately choosing not to drink fair trade tea or coffee is a good reason why some people will go to hell). So, if I have the choice, and I should make an ethical choice, surely the ethical choice is to not eat meat, on so many levels.

And then there's the third reason. As I've already said the farming industry is shabby and cheap. We'll feed animals dead animals and then watch people's brains turn to mush. We'll pump our chickens full of oestrogen and wonder why men are growing boobs. I've put on some weight, and my man-tits are getting weighty. But they've shrunk since I stopped eating chicken and turkey.

And finally, in New York we met up with Dan Piraro. He's an artist I respect and he's passionate about animal rights. We chatted a bit around the subject (he's a vegan) and much of what he said made sense, but unlike many vegetarian prosetelysers, he didn't try to put me on a guilt trip, he didn't try and disgust me by telling me jelly babies are made from horses' hooves, or that pork sausages are full of pig eyeballs, and he didn't judge me. And that convinced me you can be a vegetarian and not be a swivel-eyed loon.

Plus you have to look at the ridiculous things people say to justify eating meat:
1) Hitler was a vegetarian. No, he wasn't, unless vegetarians eat Bratwurst. But it is true he was prescribed a vegetarian diet in order to treat his chronic flatulence, presumably because his doctors wanted it to get worse...
2) The Bible says we should eat meat. Really? Who's got the theology degree here?
3) Biologically we're built to eat meat. I'm not a biologist, but I have seen proper carnivores and we don't look much like them. Sorry, at best we're omnivores. Like hedgehogs.
4) Vegetarians are weird. Well, I was weird a long time before I became a vegetarian. If you don't believe me go for a trip through my blog archives.