Animal Crackers

It has been a strange day here in Norfolk. I always took it for granted that the humans in this part of the world tend to act rather strangely, hence the saying "normal for Norfolk". But the animals, it transpires, aren't much better.

Take, for example, my sister's pets. She has a cat who, having been brought up from kittenhood with two dogs, believes he is a black labrador. Even when he was a kitten he would kill and bring home adult rabbits twice his size. He walks like a labrador, helps the dogs to steal food by knocking it from the kitchen work surfaces, and play fights with his canine friends. When we took the dogs for a walk this morning, he followed us. Perfectly normal stuff. When the dogs took a crap in the field, he did likewise. We threw the ball for the dogs: he chased it with them. Still fairly normal stuff, so much so that I was perfectly expecting the cat to join us on our walk and join in with the games. Then I looked round and saw we were being followed by one of the chickens. The chicken then proceeded to chase and try to attack one of the dogs. Apparently, she does it all the time. She has just taken an irrational dislike to Murphy, who is rather perplexed at being repeatedly stalked and bullied by a chicken. And who can blame him? By this stage, I'm wondering what we would look like to strangers, two humans taking two dogs for a walk, accompanied by a cat who thinks he's a dog and by a chicken hell-bent on beating up a black labrador.

Then I went to see my friend Jo. Jo lives on a big secluded farm surrounded by fields and orchards. She had offered me free fruit with which to make yet more jam. We take a walk around the grounds so that she can point out all the gazillions of fruit trees to me. Her black labrador (Murphy's grandfather, in case you were wondering) accompanies us. He runs ahead, positions himself below a branch of a bramley apple tree and then launches himself virtically into the air, deftly catching an apple off the branch as he does so. Now I know where Henry's apple-thieving tendencies come from - he has been bred from a long line of apple-thieving pikey dogs (and expensive ones at that). We continue our walk, which takes us past Jo's flock of sheep. There in the corner, far away from all the other sheep, is the black sheep of the family. Her name is Ba Ba Black Sheep and she was hand-reared after her mother died in child birth. Hand-reared in a house full of black labs. As we walk past her she runs over to the fence, sticks her head through the fence posts, wagging what remains of her tail as she waits to be stroked by Jo and nuzzled by the dog. This sheep thinks she is a black lab and can't understand why she has to spend her days in a field full of white fluffy animals.

And this reminds me, the first time I met Jo she was living in my parents' village and she was walking her pet sheep (Lollipop, as her friends knew her) on a dog lead. Lollipop lived in the house, liked to get on people's laps for cuddles and also thought she was a dog.

I have one question for the people and animals of Norfolk: what the fuck is going on??