Keith is a three-year-old Anglo-Nubian goat in a field in Devon.
Keith has opened 7 gates, occupied a barn roof for 11 consecutive days, cleared an entire knotweed stand worth ยฃ4,000 to remove chemically, eaten Steve's bindweed, been in the churchyard twice, been in the road an estimated 14 times, eaten the water heater instructions, been in Dave's kitchen (standing there, not eating anything, just standing), and filed the structural details of every fence on the farm into a memory that has never once been cleared.
He has done all of this while also being the single most cost-effective conservation intervention on the property.
These are not separate facts. They are the same fact.
Keith does not distinguish between the work and the escape. The escape is work. The work is escape. The fence is a project. The project is completed. The project leads to the next project. The knotweed leads to the churchyard. The churchyard leads to the road. The road leads back to the east ditch. The east ditch was cleared in one season.
There is a man named Steve who has filed twenty-nine formal complaints about Keith.
Steve's bindweed is gone.
Steve does not yet understand that these are the same story.
Dave has ยฃ387 in gate receipts, a positive net outcome column on every row since entry seventeen, a churchyard booking for next month, and a corner post with a 4mm flex that Keith has known about since Margot's visit and has not yet acted on.
Not yet.
Keith is not done.
Keith is never done.
Keith is ten thousand years of Zagros Mountain goat compressed into a Devon field, and the fence between him and the rest of the world has always been a negotiating position rather than a boundary.
Be ungovernable. Do the work. Leave the field better than you found it.
The knotweed is at 6%.
Keith is thinking.
@BBCMorningLive Can I suggest a pice of strong folded cardboard for the lights and wind them on to it as they come off the tree. Then they wonโt slide off the roll, and donโt get in a tangle!
Victorian antiquarians called this type of dagger, of which 65 were found on the Mary Rose, a 'kidney dagger', as the lobes on the handle "uncannily" resemble a pair of kidneys.
The Tudors named it after a different body part, but we donโt see it ourselves.
#Museum30 - Uncanny
@JeremyClarkson Itโs my most favourite film ever too! We walked up the aisle to the slow version and back down the other way to the fast version of Going Home 32 years ago on 11/12/93, and still just as much in love today ๐
@RevRichardColes My favourite poem, still quoted from Down with Skool:
I come from haunts of coot and hern
I make a sudden sally
And hem ahem ahem the fern
To bicker down a valley
Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Brook