Saving Old Seagulls

Crazy topic, I know, but it is indeed Seagull related.

A few months ago Current Primary Woman put or small dog on to a 'Raw Meaty Bones" diet. This basically involves rejecting anything bought from the supermarket - you know, those foil sachets or tubs with pictures of dog leaping over things positively gleaming with bouncing good health. Instead we purchase what in other circumstances might be termed road kill. Minced chicken and rabbit, turkey necks, lamb ribs, oily fish. The list is endless, and because it's endless there is a perceived need to buy vast quantities so the dog might experience constant variety.

The dog thrives on this, and I have to admit he approaches dinner with great enthusiasm rather than the resigned consumption apparent with the commercial offerings. According to the Dog Whisperer (no I'm not kidding - she consulted this bizarre woman who quite obviously loathes anyone in trousers) this new diet helps to put Bailey (our tiny fluffy Poodle/Lhasa Apso cross - I wanted a proper gun dog but lost) in touch with his "Inner Wolf". Bailey is the least wolf-like creature I have ever owned apart from a goldfish years ago.

Such is the success of the project that the cat has been weaned off his foil sachet slop and onto the new diet. I say weaned, which implies a gradual persuasion, but in reality after one bowl of minced turkey and rabbit the animal point blank turns his nose up at anything else. So more of this stuff is purchased. Which has meant that our freezer is now almost full of a bewildering variety of bits 'n pieces of all manner of animals; none of these are really suitable for human consumption. So the freezer rarely has anything that I personally or my dear good lady can eat. So we must have a new, additional freezer. It will live in the coal shed. The coal shed, therefore, must be cleared of what she calls "rubbish" and I guess you're ahead of me and have realised that my flock could be rendered homeless.

A rather ruthless cull of those odd short lengths of frayed halliards, dried up paint, broken garden tools, chemical toilet and the like has left enough room for the aforementioned freezer, and just maybe that part of my collection may retain its shelter. But my only remaining British Seagull crate must be stored hoisted up into the rafters. I brought it out and started considering the best way to do this when I noticed a recurrence of those little holes bored by the dreaded woowdworm. The thing looks like a backstop on a clay shooting stand. I did treat the odd few holes when it arrived a few years ago, but obviously the stuff wasntt completely successful. I used a Rentokil product then - can anyone recommend something I can buy in a trigger-type spray that might do the job?

I lost my last crate to woodworm, I don't want to lose this one.

My father was a carpenter, so I phoned him about the woodworm problem.

The simplest solution was to saturate the wood with lamp-oil, kerosine, paraffin (depending on the country you are in). In dutch it is called petroleum,to confuse the matter further.

Of course it smells, and no, I wouldn't smoke in the neighbourhood. It will take a few weeks/month for the smell to disappear. According to my father the woodworm wlll never return.

The idea is to make the wood unpalatable through and through for woodworm.

Hope this helps,

Charan

Paraffin it is, then.

Thank you for your replies, I shall purchase some tomorrow from the farmers' stores near where I'm going clay shooting in the morning. That's not really clay shooting, it's clay startling if I'm going to be honest.

Then a sluice of the famous crate, order up a freezer, and animals and Current Primary Woman are all happy.

On a sad note our local pub, which is all of 200 yards away, is actually closing down for two weeks. I want to shout out at the owners "The holiday season has started, you fools! The place is jumping with customers! There's nothing wrong with the pub, just like there wasn't last time you re-vamped it! It's the slow surly staff and the second rate over-priced beer and those awful chairs that you pulled out of a junior school so they're too low at the table!"

Many thanks for your very kind offer of a consignment of red spiders. Having consulted the management I have to regretfully decline. It seems that feeding two varieties of house pets is quite sufficient..

I too am disgusted at the pub's behaviour. You are, of course, quite right about underpaid school-leavers. My step-daughter was one of them - working at this very establishment - until she went off to London to see if the streets really are paved in gold and if she could find a career in show business. No and only very slightly were the answers to those two questions.

Da Woimz appear to be either deceased or they have gone off on holiday. My thanks for the suggestion. I think I have managed to convince my dearly beloved that the smell of the Paraffin is part of thje timber treatment of the roof when it was mended a few years ago.

The freezer itself has yet to arrive. Apparently when you buy these things you're buying something that doesn't actually exist yet, and I have no idea when it will arrive. "Walk away" you may say, quite understandably, but I'm thinking that a delay may help to de-odourise. Clever eh?