A kick up the arse

Bloody, bloody bloody!!!!! hell! The rain has been torrential and It's DRIVING ME CRAZY!!!!!

I tried to get out into the allotment this morning to commence digging the new potato patch, but the earth is far too heavy for any effective work to be done. Took the dogs, Janet and Ruby to the beach in the downpour and I had to laugh at Ruby's "bad behaviour". Janet is desperate for the lercher to do as she is told, so keeps a doggy bad full to treats in her pocket to get her to come when called. As you can see from the photo the terriers have all realised that food could be had by following Janet like shadows, only Ruby is galloping around like a mad Alec.

Sold more eggs this afternoon to villagers and a few passing walkers, so I ambled up to the market garden to buy all of my seed potatoes, in between showers I checked the electric fencing and was quite proud of myself as I found the fence repair kit and fixed it myself. I had almost finished my work, when Mildred tottered over and climbed up on my lap to see if I had a titbit or two on me when suddenly Duncan came clucking over and promptly kicked me several times up the arse!!! as if to say "get off my bitch!!!" .He stalked off muttering to himself when I chased him off leaving me with the seat of my pants all muddy.

ps

an old colleague sent me this memory of Marinko by E-mail........

It made me smile

"I also recall that when he was first admitted he spoke no English, but spoke a little German (he'd dated a German prior to his injury), and I remember this was used during his early days on the unit. I rotated 'with' him when he moved to South 4 (?) for rehab, and he also taught me a little Croatian, a phrase that I can still recall: "dobar jutro moj pijetao", which (literally) meant something like "good morning my cock", perhaps (in retrospect) a rather funny and ironic piece of word-play that was lost on me at the time. Hope you're OK,"

Control

Melancholy Music never really featured in my teenage years. I was moody at times for sure, but had non of the deep teenage angst that afflicts most young people. In fact the saying "There is less to him that meets the eye", could have been written about me!, as when my peers were aggressively enjoying the likes of The Sex pistols and and Buzzcocks, I was dreaming of the luxury Liner the S.S.Poseidon, and enjoying Mario Puzo's Godfather II!
Friend Hazel on the other hand, spent hours lying in darkened rooms listening to Joy Division, so she was so excited at the biog film Control (2007) which had a special showing at Llandudno tonight. The film is a sombre and rather thin profile of Ian Curtis, the "enigmatic" singer of Joy Division whose personal, professional, and romantic troubles led him to commit suicide at the age of 23. Now the director Anton Corbijn, must have been a big fan of the group, as you could almost taste his recreation of 1978, but as for exploring the singer's real personality and motivations, the film lacked any real depth of characterization. Mind you, Sam Riley was fairly impressive as the immature and complicated Curtis and Samantha Morton as his mousy wife, is always worth the price of a cinema ticket.
Shot impressively in black and white by Martin Ruhe, the whole thing was depressingly quite beautiful.

Marinko Kapetanovic

In Spinal Injury Nursing, you will always have your favourite patients;the admission to a spinal rehab centre lasts for up to and in many cases well beyond 6 months, so there is plenty of opportunity to really get to know your patient and their families so very well.
In general our unit in Sheffield had on average 100 "new" admissions yearly so in my time there I must have seen around 1600 people coming through the doors and into our lives .
I can think of ten or so patients that will always linger in my mind. Eve, an affable despot and serial socializer from Nottingham, Richard, a difficult but ever so likable teenage quadraplegic that I used to use many unprofessional type nursing methods on to just to get him to eat; Neil , the charismatic army guy with a big heart and courage to match his many injuries; Hatim the 13 year old boy injured in the Iraq war who finally adopted a Yorkshire accent when he left us and who loved Finlay with a passion; Sue, a brittle and hilarious salt-of-the-earth fitness fanatic from Manchester--The list could go on and on and on. Many of these characters I still keep in touch with, and their life stories after spinal cord injury have been many and indeed varied .
Marinko was one of these people. I first met him when he was admitted to us in the early 1990s after a fall from a ship in Great Yarmouth when he sustained a lower back fracture and total paraplegia.
A non English speaker from Croatia, he was a challenge on so many levels to nurse. We had to get students from Sheffield University to act as interpreters ( as I remember,one was not as good as the others and confused the Croatian for pillow with the word for chicken- which in its own way caused much hilarity)
Marinko also had problems with, shall we say , assertive Sheffield women, and had quite an "old fashioned" Eastern European attitude to gender roles, which was a challenge to him and us, as most of his carers were opinionated Yorkshire women.
But he was charming and funny and "blossomed" under the intimate and at times unrealistic environment a rehabilitation centre provides and I considered him to be a friend when he left us to be with his family in a tiny village outside the city of Split
Over the past 16 years or so, we have always communicated infrequently by letter. His correspondence was always charming and on the surface optimistic, but they did hint at the huge adaptation problem Marinko had with his disability.
This last Christmas, I was surprised not to have seen a card from him, and I was saddened to receive a letter from Marinko's brother today.
In a note that sounded very much like Marinko his brother states simply:-

Dear Mr Gray,
I am using this opportunity to inform you that my dear brother and your friend Marinko Kapetanovic has lost a long battle with his disease and passed away on the 29th of December 2007. The funeral was held in the local cemetery on 31st December 2007
I wish also to extend my honest gratitude for all your support,true and sincere friendship you have been providing to Marinko through all these years.
Sincerely

Maiodrag Kapetanovic

There is not much else I can add.

Finally, this year's work starts in ernest!

With only a brief jaunt to the beach with the mutts I have spent 5 hours solid sorting out the allotment. The weather has been glorious (i.e. dry) so lots have been done, which has been so good for me as I had been getting rather frustrated with the weather.

Today I have marked out the second vegetable patch, on the site of the huge bonfire of last year, and have cleared all the rocks,loose wood and weeds from the area.(right picture below)

Then I dug over the entire main patch,manured it and started my hardy broad beans off under the closhes.

I even managed to clear some of the rubbish from the hedges and cleaned out the coops, so the whole field now looks ready for action and neat and tidy.

Last night I made clear working "blueprints" of crop rotation and ordered more cheap seeds.

Ann's allotment group is meeting this week and I am sure I will be able to do "swaps"- eggs for seeds and sets from March onwards.

Duncan is truly a magnificent animal and has spent the day watching me carefully as I seem to be a bit of a threat to his "girls". Getting the cockerels seem to have been a good idea as this morning a stoat ran across the field near the hens. I suspect a stoat could if push came to shove fell a smaller hen, but with the roosters there I doubt that it would ever get the chance.!!! When he shot into view both Duncan and Stanley immediately ran forward to protect the others. I have read of this protection ability the males show but this is the first time I have actually witnessed it.

Kids! and Seraphim Falls

With Chris away in Oxford and London, I only have the dogs and a good DVD for company. Although you cannot really tell from the top photo, all four dogs have surreptitiously crawled onto the couch,each one desperate to be the one that lies closest to me. Is it only a year since George was a tiny puppy (below) I have always liked this picture of George and Meg, the two of them look more like soft toys rather than puppies.

Seraphim Falls (2006) On DVD this evening, was a good old fashioned western the likes of Jimmy Stewart and Van Heflin would have been proud to have appeared in. The story is the age old and well worn tale of vengeance, a vengeance which destroys humanity and reason and we have seen similar tales throughout literature and film. from the likes of Ahab in Moby Dick to Inspector Javert in Les Miserables.

In this film the man of vengeance is a sombre Liam Neeson who doggedly follows a windswept and rather aging Pierce Brosnan through a picturesque Rocky Mountains . The reason for the men's feud should have been left a mystery, as by revealing it in a heavy handed way and hour or so into the movie, the director David Von Ancken flattens the whole pace and tension of the piece.

However the film was an enjoyable DVD on a wet and windy night,and Pierce Brosnan;s performance was quite impressive.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and name that hen

I have always enjoyed the Academy Awards over the years! the false sincerity, the intense speeches, the awful nominees for best song! it is a bit of a tradition with me!

Who could forget Sally Field yelling "You Like me! You Like me" when she won best actress! or the deaf children from the Spencer Tracey school for the deaf signing the words to the film song "You light up my life" ( only to find out later that they were not deaf at all). I will always remember Whoopie Golderg add libbing her way through the 1999 ceremony in that red dress and every year I shed a tear when they play that old clip obituary piece with the names of the recently departed shown one after another!
I was sad in a way that the glitz had been quashed from the recent Golden Globe awards in Holywood on Sunday. The support by actors and other artistic staff of the Screen writers strike is no doubt a good thing but I hope that the Oscars will be safe in April!
Mind you, it is more difficult to actually watch the ceremony anymore as not many tv channels will actually show it, but I am hoping that Sky will come up trumps!


Anyhow I digress! I was glad to see that the film version of the Jean-Dominique Bauby novel The Diving Bell and the Butterfly won best direction for Julian Schnabel. The novel is an amazing unsentimental autobiography of a man totally paralysed by the severest of strokes. The account of his perceptions of his hospital care is sobering, at times shocking and provides lesions to all health care professionals that read it, in a similar vein to the psychiatric care bible Sans Everything by Russel Barton. The Barton book (written in the dark 1960 days of psychiatric care) was a milestone of my R.M.N. training, as it provided me with a horrific glimpse into the abuse that was endemic in the old asylum system.
I am looking forward in seeing how Schnabel adapts the Bauby novel, having the paudit for the Golden Globe members hopefully means that he has produced a great film.

ps Carol wanted to know the hens' names, so to keep her happy, here goes:

The Black hookers (the generic name for 6 black rocks who all look the same)
The Andrews Sisters (4 Sussex-whites)
The Nolan Sisters ( 4 red rockets)
Robina (the oldest hen- a Black speckled)
Glen Close,Trinny and Suzanna and Raquel Welsh ( red/golden hybrids)
Blanche,Beatrice and Rose (black and white hybrids)
Whoopie Goldberg (Grey hen)
Baby Jane (Grey speckled)
and Mildred Pierce (white speckled)

Hope that answers your questions!

A Movie Phantom

Now we did enjoy The Phantom of the Opera when we saw it a few years ago in New York. It is all spectacle,moody lighting and average songs, but it was dramatic, showey and thoroughly enjoyable in a fairly forgettable sort of way. Joel Schumacher's movie version (Channel 4 this evening) is an interesting interpretation that only works on a few levels for me.

I did enjoy the main set piece of the crashing of the giant chandelier onto the stage which was truly spectacular, and I did think that Gerard Butler made a sexy and strangely Scottish Phantom! but Christine (a rather vapid Emmy Rossum) was sadly lacking in any depth as was Patrick Wilson as pretty boy hero Raoul. The most effective acting came from the supporting cast which was surprising!
Miranda Richardson was great as Madam Giry,Minnie Driver hammed it up with gusto as Carlotta and I hate to say this but tit laden Jennifer Ellison was very effective as the virtuous Meg Giry!

However in general the whole film left me rather bored, and near the end I was praying that Butler would hurl the psychotic Rossum off the Paris Opera House roof!

I will stick to the stage version in future