Finally, we have baby goats. It’s taken a while and we were beginning to worry about continuing lack of kids but last night one of the two pregnant does had twins. They are doing well and the mother is much more relaxed. The other pregnant doe still looks like a square piece of furniture and is sitting in a corner glowering at visitors.

Something I’ve never thought about before is the ability of goats to scowl, I’m not sure they have the facial dexterity to scowl, but then again, I’m not sure if faces can be dextrous. Or if scowling and glowering are that different. I just checked it up and see that a frown seems to be a large part of scowling though not mentioned in glowering. I then checked up some more and found that “scowl” is given as one definition of “glower”. All in all it’s probably better to stop now instead of rambling on. I don’t want to lose my audience and while people like baby animals most people couldn’t care less about the facial expressions of goats.

I’ve put in a photo of one of the other goats for the time being as I forgot my camera today and my phone is resisiting all attempts to make it disgorge the picture of mother and babies which I took.

Update: Here are some photos taken in what is ‘today’ to me as I write, but would have been ‘tomorrow’ when I originally wrote the post. Both terms are, of course, relative to an international readership. There are actually two kids but they wouldn’t cooperate by standing anywhere near each other – in contrast to lambs who tend to sit around next to each other at this age. Hopefully the other pregnant doe will have hers soon.

The presentation last night was interesting in parts (by which I mean the parts where I’m going to steal the ideas!) and the sausages were excellent and really well cooked (even though I’m clearly biased on that last point. We served the chorizo and the lightly herbed ones with leek, as those were the ones we had most of. The lightly herbed ones are similar to the Newmarket sausage but when you have Lincolnshire sausages all over the place I don’t see any need for the Newmarket. Three Newmarket butchers and the EEC clearly disagree as it is a product with a protected geographical indication. Now that I’ve started reading about Newmarket sausages I’m going to have to go down to Newmarket and buy some. Fortunately, though I’ve just finished reading about cooking badger, I’m not feeling any compulsion to eat one myself. I don’t mind travelling for sausages but I’m not ready for roadkill just yet.