Dogs who love to lick, plus London in the palm of your hand
Your face looks like a dog’s dinner… The most enticing question in my Quora feed this morning was: ‘Why do dogs lick faces?’
The top answer comes from a woman called Sharon, who seems to answer a lot of the doggy questions on Quora.
Sharon says it goes back to behavioural instincts in infancy.
Roughly speaking, when dogs evolved in the wild, they’d feed their pups by regurgitating food.
The pups, so as to be sure of getting a full and satisfying meal, would lick leftovers from the parental face.
This turned into an instinct that has somehow persisted as dogs made their way up the evolutionary ladder and into our homes (and beds!).
Sharon says the face-licking is the expression of a primal love bond between mother and child.
A rap sheet measured in nanometres… I got back from an attempt to make a routine 3-month check-up appointment with the doctor (almost impossible these days) to begin the search for my DBS certificate.
I need to prove I have a DBS if I’m to deliver a public monoprinting workshop at the Autograph gallery in Shoreditch next month.
The DBS is more properly the “Disclosure & Barring Service”.
Its job is to spot baddies before they come into contact with the public.
In essence it is a police check that will flag up anything iffy about you, should there be anything iffy about you on police records.
I have what is called an Enhanced Certificate, though it is hard to see what it could be enhanced from since all it says is that I have no known Convictions, Cautions, Reprimands and Warnings.
Plus some other stuff that boils down to me being OK, as far as the police can tell.
For reference, it tells us at the foot of the notice that “This document is an Enhanced Criminal Record Certificate within the meaning of sections 113B and 116 of the Police Act 1997.
For writing this seemingly benign bit of information into this blog post I will probably get a criminal record.
If you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life… I have attached to this post the tag “Living in London”.
I did it because that is often what I write about.
Unless I am somewhere else, in which case I try to write a post about that.
To justify the inclusion of the “Living in London” tag, I thought it best to write something about London.
Otherwise I might be labelled a fraud and expelled from the WordPress community.
Writing about London might suggest that I go out and look at it, then report back my findings to my multitude of followers. All 4 of them.
I’m too lazy for that, and Britain at the moment is very cold.
So to cover my arse I will turn to my favourite London reference book.
It’s the vintage 1960s News Chronicle ‘I-Spy The Sights of London’, price at the time of publication 6d.
The idea of this one-time newspaper freebie was that you’d traipse around London, clock the sights then answer a relevant question, for which you could score points.
For example, the first entry in the ‘I-Spy’ book is for Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
And the question, worth 20 points, is: “What famous saying is inscribed on the monument?”
I have no intention of schlepping over to Trafalgar Square, so if you are desperate for the answer, make other arrangements.
◾Later there was a gripping FA Cup game between Oxford Utd and Newcastle Utd (narrowly won by Newcastle), but at the same time this happened.
Billy's Scrapbook 