Lessons learned

Well the comments from Val in yesterday's post made my day when I read them at 2 am this morning
I had just got home after a stint at SAMS.......and had checked Going Gently before going to bed......
It's nice to bookend a blog entry is it not ?
Anyhow
Does anyone remember the movie Airport?
It was the precursor of the 1970's disaster movie and was basically a cinematic " Grand Hotel" with 707s  and George Kennedy chewing on an unlit cigar.
Well the heroine of Aiport was Helen Hayes who played the 70 year old stowaway Ada Quonsett.... And tonight I worked until the wee small hours at Sams with an Ada Quonsett lookalike.
I've not worked with this lady before, so I sat back and listened to some of her interactions over the phone.
It was a revelation
Insightful, challenging, objective , caring and oh so appropriate I listened to a real master of the craft deal with several acutely distressed and potentially suicidal callers.
She looked like a dotty older lady
But what I listened to was pure class.....class that would put the best psychoanalyst to shame

I learnt a great deal tonight

Goodbye To Friends

An infrequent commentator on Going Gently is a certain local character called " Val of Trelawnyd"
Val and her partner Peter have been active members of the community since they arrived in the village six years ago now. They have supported the pub in times of change, entered the flower show with their famous five foot " fucking fuchsia " and caused a bit of a stir in the Conservation group's garden competition by having a small square of AstroTurf in their back garden.
Val has provided cakes for our allotment open care stall, Peter has officiated in my " name the turkey" competition and both could be assured to give anyone a sociable chat and hello when spied at the bar of the Crown at early doors.
They are ideal village fodder........for they join in
They also very kindly have dropped me off a quality scotch egg on more than one occasion

So, yesterday it was with a heavy heart that I heard the news from Val herself they were moving to pastures new in a few weeks. Trelawyd's loss will be the village of Caerwys' gain as the couple downsize.
I am pleased they are happy and I wish them well but I will miss their everyday " Bon viveur"...on my daily trips around the village with my eggs and my dogs......
I did stipulate that they come back to Trelawnyd at the very least one day a year..........and on that day they will have to transport their monster fuchsias to the flower show, on the back of a lorry.
It's become a tradition

Val, Bingley and Peter

Hey Ho

Funny how you can forget things
Tonight we met up with my sister's , brother in law's and sister in law for a very nice supper.
My sisters recalled one christmas in the very early 1970s when my father let a tramp set up home in our garage.
...and try as I may, I could not recall the event at all.......
How odd is that?
But what a nice thing for him to have done

" Work Gets In The Way, doesn't it Alfie Boe?"

Alfie Boe......the noisy fucker

It's Saturday and Chris has had to go into work. He's been away all week, went to bed knackered at 7.30 last night and was up at 6.00 am with the cockerel. Having said this, he wasn't up with the new cockerel for the little bastard was crying lustily at 3.00 am, 4..00 am and again at 5. The neighbours are going to have a fit, at least he slept through it all.
They ( the neighbours)  were very nice about things when he first arrived, for they understood that he preferred to roost in the Beech tree in the graveyard...the one right next to the light in the lane. Subsequently he's awake in the wee small hours, and so belts out a lusty pubescent cock-a-fucking doodle whatever throughout the night. One neighbour, rather diplomatically, described him as resembling the tenor Alfie Boe.
" he's only small but he has a big voice" she explained
Well I am sure she called him something else last night for the bugger escaped from his sound proof hen house ( where I had effectively imprisoned him a week ago)  and back up the tree he went again.
I shall have to recapture him today, for I didn't get much sleep last night.....and unlike Chris who slept  a good eight hours, my eyeballs resemble two fried eggs in a bucket of blood.
I thank goodness that I don't work the hours I once did when I was a ward manager. If I did, Chris and I would never see each other. The house would be left to wrack and ruin, and there couldn't be any animal in the cottage,( let alone a gobby cockerel up in the trees) .....
No my work and it's one long shift a week is the easier work to juggle.....
Having said this....I am mortified to see that I am working Monday night.......
Monday night.....no big deal I hear you cry
Oh fucking no!
It's the night The Walking Dead season 5 premiers in the UK!
I am devastated that I'll have to wait until Tuesday to see it!

Slut

When I was a child I remember asking my mother what a slut was.
I remember exactly what she said......she said carefully " a slut is an unkempt woman"
I have always remembered it......especially as in modern usage slut is a little more colourful.
I was moving a new desk from One of the Church councillors' houses to the church when something odd could be felt down the back of my trousers.
It was my pyjama bottoms going south.
With Chris being away, I had not bothered taking them off for a day or two.
I am such a slut

Alpha Male

Today I have set up a new tv from scratch

Programmed it to sky

Screwed in the top to the base

And connected htnl1 lead appropriately

I have repaired the roof the duck house
Cleaned out the back grid

Had a conversation with the workmen at the house renovation in the village about masonry 

And helped a neighbour shake the apples out of his Apple tree

I've gone all butch

Then I got back to normal

I shampooed the living room carpet

Bought flowers from marks and Spencer's

And screamed like a girl when a spider appeared from around the toilet when I was bleaching the rim

Hey ho

Thunderstorms, Bake Off and Cinema In The Afternoon (Gone Girl)

Last night we had a terrific storm. Around 10pm there was a massive clap of thunder overhead and the electricity went off. Immediately I was covered in frightened Bulldog and worried Scottish terrier. Even Albert hurried over to sit on the back of my chair.
minutes later the electricity came on again, but the surge must have played havoc with the tv, for it was dead as a dodo.
At least I managed to watch Bake Off before the tv imploded........it was the final last night, so there was much emailing back and forth with my nephew's partner on who was going to win.
The final had the bookmakers' favourite, the pencil-behind-the-ear Richard, pitched against the straight talking Nancy and the flamboyant and confident Luis and surprisingly it was Nancy who pulled her baking out of the bag to win.

she was a worthy winner, a good old fashioned baker. Dependable and consistent.
Wednesday's will be just a little more drab without it all.
 Yesterday afternoon me and the sister in law went to the cinema..... She wanted to see the new Helen Mirren but it wasn't showing so I talked her into seeing the "adult" thriller Gone Girl..which she was upset to see was an 18 certificate.
"I never see anything but U films" she said
As it turned out the David Fincher film was an inspired choice for it proved to be an intelligent noir thriller worthy of anything Hitchcock or dePalma  could have churned out.
I wont attempt to precis the complicated and clever plot, suffice to say the film seesaws around the disappearance of a beautiful young wife of a disillusioned, former golden boy in a recession hit mid western town. Did her husband kill his wife? Did the wife stage the whole thing? what was the true nature of their relationship? the film keeps the audience guessing to the very last reel and does so in a glossy, intelligent and surprisingly classy way/ It's a very smart movie.
Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike are wonderfully ambiguous as the couple, and the two leads are backed up beautifully by the likes of Carrie Coon , as Affleck's feisty twin sister. .Kim Dickens as a wily police detective and Tyler Perry as a big shot New York lawyer.

 

Gone Girl is not just a modern thriller of some class........it also has quite a lot to say about the reality of marriage........marriage  behind closed doors!

8/10

The Devil Rides Out

The previous post was just a bit of village news
This one is just....well.......odd
For many weeks now I have been meaning to blog this photo

For outside Gay Gordon's neat little bungalow has been hanging a four foot plastic skeleton complete with lurid purple neckerchief 

Is devil worship rearing its ugly head in the village?

Answers on a postcard