owlectomy

Casn't seem to locate link to the article but apparently taking your dog to the movies is a thing these days? YOY? - and apparently one reason is so as not to have to get in a dogsitter for pooch while out at the pictures. What happened, we asked, to leaving one's faithful canine to guard the house during one's absence? O tempora, o mores, etc.

Presumably contra-indicated viewing would be Old Yeller....

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Also in modern-day weirdness, another thing that is apparently A Thing is doing Extreme Days Out, which involves jetting off at the crack of dawn to some touristic spot, doing The Sights (at presumably a brisk pace) and then jetting home again, no doubt to soak in a recuperative hot bath.

Aside from the horrid environmental impact going on with this, how far can anyone be enjoying Tourist Spot if they're going at high-speed clip to fit everything in? It sounds like hell. No time to stop and stare and appreciate. Point thahr, misst.

I was therefore delighted to come across this in Lucy Mangan's column:

[O]ver breakfast I read about the great sunflower fields at Westgate Farm near Walsingham, Norfolk, which for the two weeks that the mighty blooms are in mighty bloom across its 16 acres invites people to come and pick their own for a small fee. Have you ever heard of anything better? Desire – no, need – filled me.
I demanded my husband – the driver of the family, for Walsingham is a short car trip away – abandon his desk, crowbarred my son out of bed and by 10am we were looking out over acres of sunflowers under an azure sky, and do you know what? It was even better than I had imagined. It’s just sunflowers, you see. Sunflowers almost literally as far as the eye can see. All facing the same way, because they are – get this – flowers that follow the sun.
We followed the little dusty tracks that led through the fields and wind about so that eventually you are facing the flowers and they are facing you, and the effect is so joyful and uplifting that even your family hostages begin to break into smiles.
We picked our allowance of five each and were home by lunchtime. They are now in a massive vase I was once mocked for buying but which I must have known somewhere deep in my soul was meant for this, and life is good.

(Actually this also sounds as though it's timetravelled from An Earlier Day and the improving literature thereof.)

‘They’re beautiful’: 13-year-olds lead audacious project to save harvest mice in Devon:

Best friends Eva Wishart and Emily Smith had become devoted to harvest mice, and were upset, a couple of years ago, to find out the species is threatened in England due to farming practices and habitat loss.
The two girls took matters into their own hands and decided to replenish local harvest mice stocks themselves. In the two years since, they have bred dozens of the tiny rodents in their garages and on Wednesday they released 250 of them into a nature reserve near Wishart’s home.

It totally has elements of heart-warming Britflick though -

Wishart and Smith, the two young naturalists, raised the mice in 27 tanks in their homes, with some sourced from a tip by Smith’s mother. Honeysuckle and hazel, plants the mice love to climb, were harvested from Wishart’s garden to place in the tanks.... The pair managed to finance the project, including buying the mice and commissioning the enclosure, with £4,000 crowdfunded from the public. They reached their goal after a boost from the well-known nature presenter Chris Packham, who shared it with his millions of nature-loving social media followers.

Wishart’s first foray into mice husbandry almost ended in disaster: “I was given four mice by ecologist Derek Gow, but we kept them in enclosures outside and the neighbour’s cat ate three of them. We saved the fourth, which was pregnant and had some pups.