The Buff girls

The Buff chicks are in their second week of life, and are starting to show a little more personality than they did. They are also a joy to look after compared to the shit flinging dirty ducklings, as they remain clean, tidy and rather sweetly "fluffy".(Mind you I had to remove some tenacious clingons from each of the chicks the other night.......lovely job)

The weather has improved today too, so my mood has improved with it.Back to work tomorrow, where I will be taking multiple orders for my new potatoes which are ready to earth.

I have taken an annual leave day on Saturday ( which has angered one member of senior staff........me thinks we will have a lively "discussion" when I next see her! which I am looking forward to), as friend Nigel is visiting this weekend, which should be fun.I need to plan another Sheffield trip too, as I am having withdrawals for a good gossip with Mike, Jonney H and Jane.

The Savages

I knew I would be impressed by The Savages (2007) I rented the dvd while Chris was in Canada, but didn't watch it as it was showing at Theatre Clwyd tonight,and I thought I would concentrate on it better in the formal setting of the cinema. I was glad I waited.
The story I think will resonate with many people approaching middle age, as it centres upon the ordinary and slightly damaged siblings of a remote and fairly unlikable father who is suffering from the early stages of dementia.Brother and sister (a shabby withdrawn unsuccessful academic- Philip Seymour Hoffman and neurotic fantasist- Laura Linney) are cornered into organising their father's institutional care ,which in turn forces them out of their defensive introspection , to take somewhat better control of their own chaotic and lonely lives.
Hoffman and Linney literally break your heart with the realism of their roles.They play the whole thing patiently and without sentimentality. The characters are flawed, and deeply so, but gently engage the audiences' sympathy time and time again, you genuinely believe the two have forged this erratic,lifelong bond and undisclosed history only siblings of dysfunctional parents can have.
Of course the subject matter echoed some of my own experiences. Some of the latter scenes where the siblings face the forced cheerfulness of nursing home life are dreadfully painful to watch, but it is the reality of the relationships between brother and sister that really linger in the mind.
A wonderfully truthful film

Listen to the words

The weather has been terrible all day , subsequently I have felt rather down and out of sorts with everything. In an effort to lift my mood I drove to Llandudno for a mooch around the bookshops and to search for some birthday cards. Had a coffee in Water stones, and a walk on the promenade, but the weather closed in somewhat and I left early for home (listening to the radio in the car).
Listen to the words was the afternoon play on Radio 4 , and although I don't usually sit and listen to drama , this chilling exploration of mental illness and obsession was a lesson in tension and menace.
The radio 4 web site explains the plot much better than I could:-

Tim has a problem with empathy and justifies tapping fellow student Sophie's phone as the only way to understand her. When it all goes horribly wrong, he books the media room of the secure unit where he is being held and creates a broadcast for his college radio station. Armed with one 1991 compilation album, several illicit recordings and a script he has redrafted 43 times, he sets about telling his story.

If any of you get a chance make sure you replay this atmospheric and absorbing story from the BBC website...........excellent

Colleen Nolan

Today started off wet and blustery, so the ducklings were confined to their
house and soon made a real stinky mess of the wood chippings covering the floor. Walter and Harold have been gang raping Nell and Maude to excess over the last few days, so have been dispatched to pastures new, giving the girls some respite from their attentions. Some female ducks have literally been killed by drakes exhibiting this behaviour, so I think this action is a wise move. I intend to keep seven or so females out of the duckling horde, then pick a couple of the best males from which to breed from. The males will be non blood related to the females, so the new ducklings will be not inbred.
The broody hen from out of The Nolan Sisters, is still sat firm on her eggs and has done so with a Blanche-like tenacity. She has not got a first name, so I have decided to called her Colleen, after the talented Loose Woman presenter.....
This afternoon I have planted more radish,rocket,lettuce,mange tout as well as more French beans. Escapee Mildred Pierce has decimated some of my salad crops, so all have been covered and re netted .
Chris has slept in for most of the day, suffering from jet lag. He came over to the allotment for a show round wearing my Canadian pressie....the incredibly huge cowboy hat.......very Brokeback Mountain

Benidorm revisited

£2.99 from Sainsburys, the new "pool" was a bargain. Mind you I almost had a stroke blowing the bloody thing up.
Hysteria reigned supreme in the duckling run for hours..

Walking On Broken Glass

I heard this for the first time in a long long while this morning, and I had forgotton just how uplifting a song it is.
Reminds me of Nuala, Mike, Bev and the famous Sheffield Ledmill nightspot, where we used to take paraplegics from the spinal injury unit on a Thursday night! The young lads in their wheelchairs used to pretend to be tetraplegics rather than paraplegics ( for those that are interested paraplegics are paralysed from the waist down and are therefore more "able" than quadraplegics who have paralysis of all four limbs) By pretending to be more disabled, the patients were allowed to have a nurse/carer to go into the nightclub with them and therefore all the nurses could escape the long queue outside the club and get to the bar quicker!
It would never be allowed now, in the light of multiple risk assessments. God, in those days most of the nurses were pissed ( but to be fair usually responsible), the patients used to empty their urine bags into pint pots ( to be stolen by thieving students (tee hee))and no one ever came to too much harm...
The video is actually Romeo and Juliet with the lovely Claire Danes

The smaller world of Blogging

Now, I have repeatedly had the discussion with some of my friends, that why do I blog?

Many feel that it is slightly "odd" to put down your often private thoughts on line for everyone to see, others feel that it is a waste of time. Others perhaps "enjoy" the contact with me (especially those that I do not see very often), I guess there is no definitive answer to why I enjoy writing this rubbish. Some of me enjoys being "read" by a few people from all over the world, another reason IS the contact it gives me to friends living away. In the main,the whole ritual of putting words down on the blog is relaxing and therapeutic in itself, but yesterday a meeting with some local people who had read the blog was an interesting example of how the blog can open up more local contacts.

As I was filling up the duckling water baths, I spied a family in the graveyard. As many do, they stopped to look at the hens and ducks and I called them over and said that they were welcomed to have a closer look. As it turned out the family lived in Trelawnyd, and the husband Geoff had read my blog and was interested in keeping a couple of hens in the garden himself.Funny that although they lived only a stone's throw away, it took my blog to open up a meeting...

Anyhow Chris is back tonight, which is nice, I know the cottage has been lovely and neat without him, but the novelty wears off after a day or so. One of the Nolan sisters(pic the red rock above) has gone very broody, so I think I will try and hatch a few hens eggs underneath her. They will be my last chick brood this year

Home from home

Up at 6am still has not given me enough time to finish what I needed to today. One of the hen houses has the dreaded red mite infestation again, so I have had to totally strip it and spray every inch with mite disinfectant. After animal feeding,and cleaning out the ducklings and then walking the dogs it was 1pm before I could start on the new shed, but I finally finished staining it mid afternoon.

As you can see the buff chicks have been safely installed inside, as well as all my poultry junk. I have even ( and how bloody twee is this?) tacked up a piece of old net curtain to screen the chicks from prying eyes.