I recently stayed in a disused church in the south west of England - Church Camping or Champing as it's affectionally known. You can find out more at champing.co.uk but in short it's a way of raising money to fund the maintenance of these buildings. 

It was a fairly cordial event really, a camp bed was provided along with a kettle and some hot drinks and candles. The bed was by a large leaded window and hd a row of candles on the sill. I decided before I got there that I might do some recording while I was there, and what better to record than Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven? 

I arrived in the mid afternoon and parked up adjacent to the church. I settled in and took the dog for a walk, and by 7.30pm it was getting dark. By 8pm it was pretty much pitch black in the church. I set up my mic and recorder and recited the poem, and shortly after, the heavens opened - that was probably the best bit, the sound of wind, rain and distant thunder while lurking quietly in an ancient church with just my dog Captain for company!

I literally slept on someone's grave...

Below is a the audio recording and below that is a video I also made while there.

Bayberry Audiobooks THE RAVEN by Edgar Allan Poe

The new arrival here at Bayberry audiobooks is Captain,a rescue dog all the way from Romania in eastern Europe.

He's a splendid little fellow. We've had him for two months now, and he was a timid and nervous chap at first, hiding upstairs for the first week in our house. It's taken time and persistence but he's now a much more confident, settled dog. he comes downstairs to be with us in the evenings, liking nothing more than to be stroked and fussed. 

It seems that there are a lot of stray dogs in parts of Romania. Captain was one of those strays. He must have survived on his wits on the streets of Bucharest, and one gets the impression that he had some pretty bad experiences with people. I imagine stray dogs are considered a pest and treated as such, so it's likely he was subject to some unpleasant experiences. 

He's a dinky chap and looks like a cross between a German Sheppard, a Collie and a Wolf. At first I used to joke about it, but as I learned more about the stray and semi-wild dogs in Romania I also found that there's a large population of wolves, and some interbreeding does happen, creating wolfdogs, a recognised subset of dogs. As I read more, I stumbled upon a blog by another owner of a Romanian rescue, who'd has her dog DNA tested and found that it had a 'high' percentage of wolf DNA - high is a relative term, and it seems that it simply indicates the existence of wolf DNA but not necessarily recent - it could be 100's of years since a wolf was involved in the lineage. 

That said, my little fella does look very wolf-like, something people comment upon almost daily, and he does have some wolf-like habits too, such as his habitual scent marking with his feet, and the deepgrowl he does if he detects another scent has been deposited there. Personality wise though he's very placid and laid back, but notably he is very pack-oriented, he seems to be very much an alert protector and constantly scanning the environment. Almost as a joke I played the sound of a wolf howling on the hi-fi, and he immediately sat bolt upright, clearly recognising the sound.... so we'll see what the DNA test reveals in a  week or two!!