Bowlday Sweat

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Believe it or not, it's a year today since the first ever bowlpost. I know, gone fast, huh? No better way to celebrate, I thought, than reporting from the front line of post-run sweat. Mmmm. Birthday sweat for Bowlface, in honour of guilty pleasure song extreme Jeremih, 'Birthday Sex'. I think I'm pretty much the only person who's not fourteen and potentially 'gangsta' who wishes this was my ringtone, but hey, it's Bowlface's birthday and I can make it cry if I want to.

So, up-to-the-minute reportage on the Shire sheep front. I'd say unnervingly placid, but also present were a couple tractors and farmers. So maybe they were on good behaviour. Otherwise, there have been some lamb reshufflings, with new tiny baby lambs in field number three, and bleaty mcbleat lambs having mysteriously enlarged since Monday in field number six. The story continues.

Yesterday, however, saw my feelings to such livestock weaken as a gatecrashing of Stowe (stately home/mega public school) gardens resulted in some suitably posh lamb activity. They were fluffy, apparently innocent and did all the right kind of bleating, as in for their mums, rather than at me. Fortunately, when it came to scrambling over the Ha-Ha (if in doubt, there's an appropriate wiki entry here) there were no sheep nor official National Trust-looking types about to bleat, so a shred of dignity was maintained.

In a similar mode of 'days out', a.k.a, how best to avoid urgent deadlines in the name of family quality time, today the Bowlface family embarked upon Fulham Palace Gardens. Sad to say, no ancient wall activity was involved as it is entirely free and legal to enter the aforementioned, apart from perhaps those doing community service in the flowerbeds. Lambs replaced with small mini-Boden babies, and a fancy cup of tea in an oversized Georgian room later and I was all set for being Jane Austen in a breton top for the rest of the afternoon.

One last birthday treat for Bowlface regulars (because I'm guessing you can't get Jeremih's greatness out of your head) is another fantastically off-the-wall video launch from VBS's Vice Guide To Film.
Basically, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's film-makers went freedom crazy after 60 years of state-approved Socialist Realism. Now known as Parallel Cinema, VBS's Shane Smith travelled to Moscow to interview its founders. There's a lot of pretending to be animals (probably what I've been doing for the last week, judging by the high sheep content) and booze, and as well as being a nice way to pass the time you can impress film geeks in the pub with all your new found knowledge.