Slimy , 6 am Nipples

The 6 am dog walk is no fun.
It's purely a necessity.
Old dogs have small bladders and they need their wees even when it is still dark outside.
Having said this, so do I nowadays.

After abulutions, and as the Prof is tucking into his eggy breakfast we all troop silently through the cottage back to bed.
George now finds the stairs a bit of a chore, so has his own fur lined cushion in the kitchen, but the others with Albert in tow arrange themselves around me on the duvet for a lie in.

There is always a brief " bunfight" where the animals vie for the best position next to me and Winnie invariably chances her hand and carefully lowers her undercarriage onto my fingers in the vain hope for a brief belly rub.
I don't indulge her. The sensation of a slimy mass of bald nipples literally turns my stomach!
A fact that wouldn't surprise any of you I suppose.

Winnie's nipples can often be a talking point when we are out and about, as they almost drag on a floor as she walks. Her belly resembles a plastic carrier bag that's filled with porridge so it is clear to all that she has given birth to at least two litters of puppies.
Bulldog puppies are often removed from their mothers at birth to be hand reared.
Bulldog mothers can be clumsy it is thought, and at up to two thousand pounds a puppy, breeders often don't take the chance of an accidental smothering.
This is such a shame as I think Winnie would have made a super mother.
Her nipples are her battle scars.
Scars of a mother who never knew the joy of her own puppies.

One Hour Of Your Time

This blog entry is mainly targeted at village readers, but I guess it could have a resonance to everyone as it is about collective responsibility and a sense of community.
For many years many of the green areas of Trelawnyd have been tended to by the village conservation group and by individuals off their own bat.
The village green in front of the pensioner bungalows has been a picture , what with it's flowering shrubs and lavender borders and the flower bed next to the Church has looked rather pretty for many years, but the volunteer problems  we have seen so much in Samaritans and other such charities recently has also visited the village volunteer groups too and so some of the green areas of Trelawnyd are now looking a little tired.
I am mindful of not stepping on any toes here, as I know that there is a villager who is thinking of re-booting the Conservation group again, but I have had an idea that it would be useful to call a few volunteers together say one Sunday morning to prune and to weed and to tidy up the beds and shrubs just for one hour only! 
I'll bring cream cakes! 
Drop me a message if you are interested! 

What Do You Smell Of?

My grandmother smelled of cold cream and carbolic soap

Mary smells of clean, clean dog! 

The Prof always smells fresh with the hint of an expensive Cologne

Auntie Glad smelled of baking

I smell of ( on my best behaviour )

Clinique " Happy" 

What do you smell of?  

Big Daddy hated the smell of mendacity as I recall
( and please dont say you smell of fear, sex or sweat!)

Cysgu

According to my fitbit, I had 5 hours 15 minutes of restless sleep

( Incidently the Welsh word for sleep is cysgu -pronounced cus- gee)

I wonder why?

Victoria & Abdul

The Twinkly Eyed Fazal

The " true" story of the 81 year old monarch's "friendship" with her Indian man servant/teacher Abdul Karin is perhaps less well known than her attachment to the brash John Brown but under director Steven Frears' guiding hand the film is a gently comic romp into the absurdities of the Victorian British Royal family and their horror at having a matriarch who is suddenly dependent on a Muslim of lowly birth.
Frears hints that Victoria ( Judi Dench) had a roving eye for the magnificent Karin (Ali Fazal) but he bottles it slightly bigging up the sweetness and the intellectual nature of their friendship rather than to acknowledge the possible fact that the handsome clerk come Guru was in fact an opportunistic manipulator who landed on his feet before a lonely, silly old Queen sick of an arse licking court.
Personally I thought that the real story story lay more with the more pessimistic version of the truth rather than the sanitized take  and the whole thing left me with rather a sour taste in my mouth, which was disappointing.
Dench is wonderful as Victoria and I must say that the whole film builds to a classic Judi moment , when the old Queen faces off her son Berti ( Eddie Izzard) with a bravura speech that she is indeed not insane in befriending a native! ... , so much so that I can see another Oscar nomination on the cards.
Fazal is cute as a button in his, slightly more difficult role but the cuteness does fade when one questions that the friendship was one less wholesome than originally portrayed.
6/10

Technology

Mary is fucked off- she's still waiting for her walk
I am all tech-ed out!
I now have my Fitbit in situ. 
( I've walked seven steps)
My mobile phone is up and running.
And I now have all of eleven contacts in my inbox and actually managed to send an emoji to my nephew without blowing a gasket
Yesterday's shenanigans  reinforced my need to have a phone. The Prof was pulling what little hair he still has after suffering my silence for 7 hours!  So I now accept that it's foolish of me to have kept away from my own smart phone for so long....
Jonney Graybags is now up to date
And that's a first in 55 years!

Knackered

Euston shut
No trains running North
Walk to St Pancras ,
Packed train to Nottingham,
Packed train then to Derby
Stood in train to Crewe ( helped stop fight between two men)
Stood in Train to Chester
Stood in train to Prestatyn
7 hours to get home

I'll leave you with the delectable Alec Secareanu to cheer me up

A Grand Day Out

What could be better? an opening night play with an outstanding actress, a long satisfying gossip and catch up with an old friend, and some Gay Yorkshire rumpy pumpy !

As Wallace would say " a cracking day out there Grommit!" 

I met Nu in Soho and we went to the Curzon to see God's Own Country which is a film of great beauty and some soul. 

It tells the story of a young moorland farmer Jonney Saxby ( Josh O'Connor) who deals with his frustrations of life with a disabled dad and emotionally distant grandmother on a failing upland farm by casual gay sex and binge drinking. 

When the emotionally more mature  Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) turns up to help with the spring lambing, Jonney is forced to deal with his demons as the pair embark on an intense love affair against the backdrop of a Harsh lifestyle in decline.

God's Own Country has been described rather unfairly as the Yorkshire Brokeback mountain.  This is misleading as this movie has a sort of harsh charm all of it's own with the Bleak Moorlands echoing the empty hardness of Jonney's life. Filmed with minimal dialogue   O'Connor shines as the unsympathetic and at times downright unlikable Jonney whilst the painfully attractive Secareanu underplays his role as the emotionally warmer Gheorghe rather beautifully and although the narrative of Jonney's emotional journey from " fuck up" to manhood isn't particularly original, the film does pack a bit of a punch emotionally.

8/10

I wish the play was as good as the movie. Unfortunately Wings at the Young Vic was a bit of a mess! 

Wings is more or less a monologue by an aging stroke victim Emily ( The glorious Juliet Stevenson) who tries to make some sort of sense of a sudden and catastrophic brain injury . Confused and disorientated with motor and intellectual deficits , Emily tries and fails to make real her unreal world where nurses are seen as captors and where her body feels weightless and not her own.

For an hour, Stevenson remains suspended in a body harness and spins impressively around the darkened stage as she she shares a stream of consciousness of her experiences within the fugue state of a CVA and although she is undoubtedly a wonderful actress  the play fails to impress

It was the opening night and it was sad to see Stevenson looking so upset at the lacklustre applause as the play ended. 

We finished the day chatting and catching up. Touching base with old friends  is a tonic for the soul

Accident And Emergency 1990

" And what do you do for a living?" 
I'm on the train to London and the question came from a woman sitting opposite me half an hour ago.
She is middle aged and is dressed well. She is going to visit her son who lives in Chiswick .
I already know that his name is Harry, that he is a successful urban landscaper and that he has a partner called Luis.
She's a chatter, so I am now pretending to work on my tablet. We have already covered a great deal of mutual information swapping and we are only at Crewe!
" I'm a retired nurse" I told her, and the phrase suddenly felt rather odd being spoken out loud.
My companion wanted to hear some nursing stories and I was happy to oblige her.
I, as you know, love an audience.
I told her about Finlay pulling a patient's tracheostomy tube out. The amusing tale of how we nurses used to take our spinal injury patients out to the pub in their wheelchairs to get pissed and the story of how an elderly senile patient died on a minibus outing to Delamere forest without any of us noticing.
Stock stories all well rehearsed .
She then asked me what my saddest memory of nursing was and this brief memory popped into my head out of the blue.
I shared it as we drank our coffee.
My father died in 1990, just as I was in the middle of my accident and emergency placement as a post  registered student nurse. He had a sudden heart attack, so when I returned to work after his funeral I was rostered to work in the minor injuries department as it was thought that " majors" was a little too stressful.
One morning a junior sister from majors rang down to see if there was a nurse free to help her with a job and so I volunteered myself to go. The job, as it tuned out was the "laying out" of an elderly lady who had been brought in dead after collapsing in the city centre whilst out shopping.
I remember that the sister had an incredibly strong Scottish accent.
Anyhow, Our job was to tidy her up before her husband arrived from home.
The husband, who was in his eighties duly arrived and I left the sister to take him behind the curtains to see his wife.
I had only been gone fifteen minutes or so, before the Scottish sister sought me out again.She looked upset but was composed. " I need you to help me ! The husband wants us to do something for him!" 
She explained the husband's request and asked if I was up to it.
I nodded.
We returned to the cubical where the man sat quietly with his wife.
He was dressed neatly in a shirt, tie and pullover I remember
I stood on one side of the bed and the Scottish sister stood on the other and after a nod, the old man climbed awkwardly onto the bed and lay almost on top of his wife, with his head over her shoulder.
The sister motioned to me and we each took one of the woman's arms and gently wrapped them around the man's back as he started to cry.

He had asked us to help him have a last moment in his wife's arms

Dog's Day Dream

The new kitchen!

I''ve been running around all day
I've taken the car to the garage, dropped sausages, shopped, played badminton ( and won) organised more new kitchen stuff, cooked supper, walked dogs, cleaned cottage,  supported neighbour, visited old friend.
Tomorrow I am off to London to see Nuala. We have gossip, a film and a play to fit in!
I snapped this photo halfway through my day.
Mary, is sitting on the arm of my arm chair.
She is day dreaming about something........and looks serene and just a bit pensive
Sigh
She sat here for nearly an hour

The flowers are from the garden

Slipping Myself A Sneaky Sausage

As I sneaked one cocktail sausage out of the pack I somehow caught the packaging on the lip of my carrier bag and dropped 39 miniature sausages onto the floor.
It would have been fine if I was home, after all the sausages were bought as treats for the dogs, but I was stood at our local ATS Euromaster waiting for a tyre to be changed, and the waiting room was almost full of people.
Now if you drop money all sorts of people will come out of the woodwork to your aid, but I have to say, drop 39 mini bangers in front of 7 people in a grotty garage waiting room and no fucker comes to help! 
I could have died of shame

"Do you flour your finger Paul?"

Tuesday nights are Bake Off nights.
Pru Leith , the lady who had the unenvious job of filling Mary Berry's sensible shoes , seems, in my mind to be doing rather nicely indeed .
Unlike Mary, Pru has a somewhat naughty twinkle in her eye and tonight when Paul droned on about how to make a cottage loaf by sliding a finger between the two bits of dough she playfully dropped in
a comment of " missing the finger treatment" at a sunken entry.
I bet she was a right naughty cougar in her time!
The  contestants, as usual are a sweet bunch. Steven and Tom are fighting for top gay pin up status whilst  stunt woman Sophie and the Russian Julia are the dark horse bakers. Stacey cries easily and Liam, Flo and Yan are the comics.
Perhaps baking brings the best out in people!
Good job I bake well! 

The Ghost Hens revisited

This afternoon I caught a young woman dropping a container of cooked pasta over the field gate.
I didn't recognise her, as she is new to the village.she's divorced, lonely and perhaps somewhat depressed I thought
The hens love spaghetti she told me rather guiltily....I warned her that Irene the sheep loves pasta too!
I love that people " adopt " the animals on the field from time to time...they all do rather secretively , as if what they are doing is wrong which is rather sweet......i think
The bachelors seems to have endeared themselves to many of the locals, which is a common thing for tiny birds to do. They bring the underdog support  nature of people.
It's a British Thing, I always think
I was reminded of my old broiler birds The Ghost Hens because of it all
Now, for those that don't know, the Ghost Hens were five genetically fucked up broiler hens that arrived at the Ukrainian Village as brainwashed , psychologically damaged little pullets. Designed to eat themselves fat in a matter of weeks, these sad little hens had been brought up in a massive barn of a building under artificial lights with thousands of other little fuck ups .
They had never seen the sun, never ate a blade of grass and had never had the room to scratch their own arse without getting battered by another goggle eyed clone.

Faced with their very own warm hen house and a miniature run, these sad little characters continued to eat themselves fat in silent desperation, but they did eventually react to their brave new world, and calmly and very slowly they started to turn their faces into the sun to live a little.
Surrounded by animal drama and chaos, The Ghost Hens always looked unflappable but their inactivity was just a useful way of coping. They were too big and too comical to run around in silly chicken circles.
They just couldn't do it.

Anyhow,
I remember taking the above photo very well.
It was approaching dusk on a summer's evening and the rest of the field was in constant motion.
The other hens were mooching homewards to roost, the geese were bickering over a patch of grass like they do and the hysterical runner ducks were being , well, just hysterical.
Only the Ghost hens remained still. Sitting gently and serenely  in the evening sun until their white plumage tinged pink..........in the warm evening light

Chatty

I bumped into the vicar yesterday. We talked about retiring. He hangs up his cassock next year and is looking forward to it. I always thought that vicars just carried on until their spinster  house keepers found them dead in the vestry clutching a mysterious note ........perhaps I've watched too many episodes of Midsommer Murders? 

Mrs Trellis tottered through the village and informed me that another village character Tinkering Pete had lost his  shihTzu to a nasty bout of pancreatitis this morning. 

I'll drop in a card later

I forgot to share that If you enjoy bloody, atmospheric whodunnits go and see The Limehouse Golem which is on general release at the moment . It was the movie I saw on Friday and didn't have time to review , suffice to say it's a romp that neatly gets into the psychi of the Victorian poor, with their jet black humour and appetite for gore and it was interesting to see the two police leads ( Bill Nighy and Danial Mayes as Inspector and PC Plod) portrayed as gay men!
I enjoyed it.

I'm presently planning my week. Dinner out and badminton with the Prof, a talk to some retired nhs staff, more work quotes for kitchen work, the garden to clear of dead wood of and a trip to London to see best mate and a trip to see Wings with Juliet Stevenson in the West End !
Oh and I've just bought a smart phone! I'm now down with the yooofff
And that's all before the weekend!

Some of the nursing staff Ive left behind at the bast on Friday! 

Bat 2- The Revenge

12.30 am The Cottage in darkness.
We are in bed
The Prof: " What is that noise?" 
Me ( sleepily) " Huh?"
The Prof: " That noise there! That STRANGE NOISE!"
We listen
There comes a strange intermittent hissing/ squeaking noise from somewhere in the room.
The Prof hunkers up under the duvet " It's that bat!" He hisses
" It's that effin bat!" 
The Prof hates bats, ever since we had one caught in the bedroom of our old house one night, he hates the thoughts of them. I caught the last bat in a pair of my used underpants which The Prof described as a "moment of abject cruelty" 
" The poor little thing didn't deserve that!" As I whipped off my sweaty smalls to cover it
I'm always practical in a mini crisis!

As usual it was me who got up to locate the noise. The Prof pulled the duvet even higher.
"Have you found it?" He hisses as I eventually homed in on the sound
" Yes" I told him " You are quite safe"
The bat was in fact the noise of carbon dioxide gently escaping from a bottle of coke that didnt have it's top screwed on properly! 
Domestic life!

Leaving do

Me pretending to be coy about nice compliments

I noted that during my speech at the joint leaving do ,my former boss laughed long and loudest at my comment that I professionally peaked before I came to Intensive care!
I reminded the room that I was no technical nurse
Four popular nurses have left at the same time, so of course the pub was filled with drunk nurses and doctors all swigging prosecco.
I was sober. I have to pick the Prof up from the airport tomorrow!
It was nice to be sober, and it was nice for nice people to say nice things about me.
Even though many of them were pissed!
What I did like was the " feedback" from a few nurses that ultimately moved me.
Thank you for supporting me
Thank you for giving me positive feedback
Thank you for making me smile and believing in me
Thank you for being kind to me.
Thank you for the back rubs and the stories.
My former manager said nothing to me. It was my peers and the junior nurses that talked the talk
That's all that really mattered, I thought on the way home

Deco

I'm just about to go to the cinema

The lovely old art deco Odeon in Chester has been transformed into

The Storyhouse- an arts centre of some note

The last time I went here was september 1984 

Batty

There is a bat in the bedroom.
I've opened the windows and shut the door on it and have left the little devil to escape but all four dogs are now lined up on the landing sniffing under the bedroom door like drug addicts at a coke party.
I think Albert brought it in but heaven knows how he caught it.
No peace tonight

Disastrous Dates

I am having my kitchen chairs delivered today!
John Lewis has given me a window of 7am to 2pm
Seven hours to kill at home!

The BBC website had a light hearted page on disastrous dates today
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-41173459
It made for a chuckle when I was sitting on the toilet...so much so that Mary tottered in to see what I was laughing at!

We have all had a date that went terribly wrong have we not?
Years ago, I had a date with a guy who suggested that we had a drive into the Derbyshire countryside in order to have a nice pub meal.
Now he drove a new and very powerful car and after just ten minutes I was hit by an overwhelming wave of motion sickness which I tried manfully to subdue as we politely chatted about nice things, like people who don't know each other, tend to do on first dates!

Eventually I could stand it no more and white faced and sweating I demanded that he stopped the car and near fainting I staggered out on the verge in front of speeding traffic and  laid down in the wet grass.
My date got back into his car when I vomited and had to sit there for an age when I slowly recovered still lying on my back as it started to rain!

We did have a few dates after that but nothing came of it , non were in Derbyshire by the way!

Have you ever had a crappy date?
Do tell

Sinking Feeling

James, the Ikea kitchen planner spent over an hour planning my " new" dream kitchen!
Winnie spent the time giving goo goo eyes at him whilst sitting at his feet with her head on his lap
"She's a bit clingy " James noted wryly
" Welcome to my world" I told him as bulldog spittle ran down his pantleg
I nearly cried when he showed me my dream sink!
I'm bloody well easily pleased