I am referring you in the first instance to my Jotting about Alba, my special barn owl and then I can tell you about the next chapter. Some months after Alba was settled on her woody perch in our green oak barn, I was horrified to discover that something had been getting at her! Panic stricken I rang the taxidermist Helena Finden Brown to ask what the attacker might be. She was as dumfound as I was.
Helena and her husband were coming up this way and she popped it to see poorly Alba. I cannot bear to show you some of the images – it made me so sad. Helena was horrified and I do not think I have ever seen such a reaction and I was whisked through the house and poor Alba went in the bin. Helena was very concerned that some sort of mite that could get into my other textiles and even my samplers.
The next stage was that this lovely woman had another barn owl waiting for her attention and she would sort him out for me and would bring it to me as a gift as soon as she could fit this in! I was so touched and soppy about it. Helena soon came to lunch bringing with her Barny, my new boy barn owl, complete with his special spray to avoid any reoccurrence of whatever it was.
I was thrilled with Barny, so I sent Helena a kit to make a barn owl I designed for the Cross Stitch Guild to keep her out of mischief last winter. I knew that she stitched in her spare time but wasn’t prepared for the final chapter in the story.
Helena wrote: “I completed the picture of Alba while we were travelling in Spain just in time to present her to our lovely friends Raul and Raquel who run a re-wilding project in Spain near Madrid. Little did I realise that Raquel has also just become responsible for a captive breeding programme for barn owls! Alba is now their mascot.”
You could not write it could you?
