Animals of October

Content warning: Frequent mentions of animal harm and death - skip this post if you are sensitive to such issues Where are we at with that 'No Animals Were Harmed' disclaimer that we get at the end of film credits? The welfare of animals is one of the things that most lifts me out of the 'suspension of disbelief' when watching a movie or TV programme, as I'm sure is the case for many of us. Who else ends up quickly doing various mental gymnastics to convince yourself that what you just saw was CGI, or very good training, or some kind of hyper-realistic model? It's usually not a problem for your big blockbuster where an expensive bit of invisible CGI is more easily and slickly incorporated, but I do worry about some of these 'artier' lower budget films that lean more towards realism and authenticity. Yesterday I watched the 2017 film The Rider , directed by Chloe Zhao, and it was abundantly clear on multiple occasions that the horses were not having a par...

To see the true English countryside, follow a walk from an out-of-print guidebook published in the nineties in a part of the land less visited. We have such a book, bought from some charity shop, centred around the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire. Pendle is a haunted place, the Salem of England, famous for its history of witches. There is a 'Pendle way' signposted by cartoon witch silhouettes and pubs that lean hard into Halloween trade. There are plentiful public footpaths and interesting sights to see, but there is less glamour or preservation here than in the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales. We're north of Burnley, west of Leeds, just shy of the Forest of Bowland, in a curious nook where its easy to sense how a monolithic hill imposed enough psychic force upon locals to convince them of supernatural goings-on.  The countryside here feels angry: we remark upon the sheer amount of signs telling us not to do things: no camping, no picnics, no straying off the path, no f...