I went round to the sheep barn again yesterday, braving the face-freezing weather for a glimpse of the two latest arrivals, born on Sunday.

I had apparently timed my visit to nap time. Tipsy was there with her colourful offspring.

And this pair were watching the door.

In other news… Last night I made a batch of Fanny Bay smoked oyster pate (my changes: I used 2 tins of Fanny Bay smoked oysters instead of 1; green onion instead of white; and added a tablespoon of plain yogurt and a good squeeze of fresh lemon juice and a pinch of minced lemon rind) which swiftly vanished into the colony’s creativity machine.

A last swing round the freezing streets of Humboldt yielded an “Italian-inspired” yogurt maker, currently in experimental use (though Carla tells us she makes her yogurt in a much simpler way: using a mason jar, wrapped in a towel and set on the hot water tank overnight). After a crippling second night of badminton I am moving slowly but making what I can of my final two days and looking forward to our finale reading and studio tour tomorrow night.

What’s behind the blue door?

The chickadees have long been friendly,

but this is the first year I’ve had nuthatches in hand.

This little white lamb is a charmer – always curious and full of beans…

..who’s mama’s favourite little mountain goat?

And I hate to say it, but the alpaca babe (Benedict, of course) has a funny face.

As we engage in our annual reflections about food and menu in the monastery’s dining room, it happens that the Food Programme’s latest show was on nursery school food and what toddlers eat: the roots of institutional dining, and part of the programming that shapes a child’s food tastes for life.

There was an observation that parents ought to be looking at the food offered to children with the same care they pay to checking out the qualifications of the staff and the rest of the facilities.

An interesting point made: don’t expect children to take to something you demonstrably don’t eat and enjoy yourself: “It’s no good expecting a child to eat something if you make a face when you feed it to them” remarked Dr Gillian Harris, a child psychologist (interviewed to much the same ends in this interesting piece on ‘supertasters’).

And the French were again held up as a model of good practice; this time for school meals – where attention is paid to the quality of the food as well as the food culture around it. Which is nice to hear, but not what we witnessed being fed to students of business school age, if what we experienced at the Dijon Business School is anything to go by.

I was even happier to have been born liking broccoli and cauliflower when I read this article.