Listening to the Animals – becoming the supervet.

Being asked to review Listening to the Animals was a no brainer. I LOVE this bloke. The very thought of him makes me smile, and this memoir by the fantastic Noel Fitzpatrick is imbued with the man we see on the TV. Whimsical, fast talking, full of memories, full of love and strangely full also of self-doubt.

I had the impression this was written as he darted here and there in Fitzpatrick Referrals dodging from one operation to another, and stopping, breathless, to write the next few pages. it is written with immediacy, and honesty. We travel with him from his beloved parents’ farm to school where bullying of this ‘culchie’, a lad from the bogs,  was unremitting.  Noel Fitzpatrick decided early on, though, that he had a choice – to make the most of this education in order to achieve his dream of working with animals in spite of the agony of his day to day existence, or to accept the general opinion that the culchie would come to nothing.

So on he struggled, and no wonder self-doubt became a dominant emotion, in the face of this behaviour. Nonetheless, at this school he received a good education, one which allowed him to strive towards his dream, a dream sustained by his  dog Pirate who was his comfort during his lonely struggle, and of course, his family unaware though they were of the bullying.

Fitzpatrick’s writing is lyrical, raw, humorous, heartbreaking and inspiring. I couldn’t put it down, and hardened book reviewer and author though I am, I cried, and I cheered, I was awestruck.

Is there anything this amazing man can’t achieve?

As the founder of a charity for ill and injured veterans Words for the Wounded I long for this orthopaedic excellence – a prosthetic limb fused directly into the bone of an amputated limb – to reach our veterans as a matter of course. Indeed, I noted in the Bucksfreepress.co.uk recently that  a young man found just this treatment in Australia. Please may it soon reach here, and if Noel Fitzpatrick has anything to do with it, it will. God bless the man.

Becoming The Supervet by Noel Fitzpatrick. pub Trapeze hb £20 ebook and audiobook available.

Read it, love it.