What are the words to music in relation to sheep that most immediately come to mind? I think these four titles/first lines are contenders: ‘Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep’; ‘Baa baa black sheep, Have you any wool?’; ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night, All seated on the ground’; ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’.

Is there anything ‘telling’ to these, about sheep and their world and context?

The essential uses to which sheep are put in the activity of farming are the delivery of wool, meat, skin, and milk. In modern times, however, they are being deployed in another way too.

Animals have been used by humans down the ages for their sport, often cruelly, as for example in bear-baiting, cock-fighting etc. Animals are put to race each other. Betting is often a driver of activities. Parades and shows of animals take place, before large, often noisy, crowds. Animals have for very long been collected for status by private individuals into menageries. The age of science gave start and acceptability to gathering wild animals from their native habitats for professional study, and also putting them on display to the general public who paid for the experience. The name of the endeavours is zoos - the full name being zoological parks.

Can there be a better job title than shepherd?

The word, strengthened by its long-standing associations with Christ, immediately denotes someone who guides, leads and cares. That Jesus was born and lived in a part of the world where sheep were part of daily life and landscape must have naturally encouraged the link to be made. People of the area, the audience, would have automatically grasped and understood the qualities of care etc being attributed to Jesus by association; from their having close daily-life familiarity of what constituted a shepherd, and of what characteristics a shepherd had to display in looking after a flock of sheep.

Farming as an activity has been in existence for around eleven thousand years. Sheep, having been early domesticated, have been farmed for about the same amount of time.

Industrialisation began in the eighteenth century, and arrived in a major way - and with its result of huge change to life and lifeways - during the nineteenth century. Farming formed part of this. Mechanisation, improved transport methods, increases in farm sizes etc, brought an alteration to traditional farming practice.

This website is a ‘new beginning’. This is the first Journal entry that I am writing. Additionally, and deliberately, this website launches at the beginning of February, the time of the Celtic festival of Imbolc which was seen as marking spring’s arrival and the beginning of the season of lambing.

Across the world, spurred by the now very noticeable, and bad, effects of climate change, together with the sudden shifts of behaviour and viewpoint the Covid-19 pandemic has caused, humankind is waking up to a need to re-consider and alter its activity, and to make it more benign. Acting as a point of focus is ‘The Great Reset' initiative of the World Economic Forum.