Thursday 17th April 2008

Ok steer clear. My Mistress is in a bad mood and to be honest that is never a pretty sight at the best of times. I don’t think it’s anything I’ve done but I’m torn between keeping well out of the way and going to cheer her up. It really isn’t very easy being a step-mother, she spends her life walking on egg shells. I’m the only one in the house who sees her point of view and it does seem a little unfair that if she’s fed up with one of them, all the rest of the family gang up on her as well. It’s as though the rest of the family is ‘all for one and one for all’ with her as enemy on the outside. The least I can do is stand together with her, but I don’t want to end up caught in the crossfire. I wonder where Bella will fit into all this.

I’ve been observing the different natures of people from different parts of the country and for that matter from different countries. My Mistress has been surprised by how welcome they have felt moving into a village and says that it does seem to be true that the Yorkshire people are very welcoming. She lived in Devon many long years ago and there she found that unless you were born there, you were never fully accepted. She also found that given the choice between more money or more time to enjoy themselves, people in Devon tended to go for the time. Almost everywhere else they seem to go for the money. Then you look at the differences between people who live on an island, in this case Great Britain and those who live on the mainland of a continent. The ‘islanders’ have more of a world view, realising that there are things going on beyond their shores, but on the whole think those things are happening to somebody else. In mainland Europe, people don’t pay so much notice to geographical boundaries and their lives overlap more completely with the lives of other nationalities. By contrast those in the American continent, or The United States of America more to the point, think they can have a ‘world series’ at sport that only involves teams from their continent!