The power of cheap white bread

The weather has been wet and windy for most of the day. It has precluded me planting my seed potatoes and asparagus, which was a real shame. It was so wet, I felt it wise to stay indoors, so I did some baking and made a chocolate cake and a large flan.
At midday I noticed that George was perched on the back of the sofa gazing out on the field, having a look at what he was watching, I saw several chickens running up towards the graveyard followed by a rather excitable squealing pig! Nora had somehow escaped her pen and if she escaped further amongst the graves, then bang would go my year's lease!
Grabbing a piece of white loaf, I galloped over to the allotment to find Nora chasing off Boris and Gloria from their feed bowls. Waving the bread madly (Like Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children) I called her, and even though little piggy eyes cannot see very much they certainly recognised a slice of white from 400 feet!
She stopped dead, squinted to make sure what she was seeing was in fact food and sprinted after me at remarkable speed! (scattering hens and spit all over the place as she came) and with me jogging ahead, she chased me back into the pig enclosure where she scoffed the bread with huge rapture!
I checked the fencing and found a small broken area where she had escaped and fixed it with some spare wire.

The duck eggs in the incubator have started their pre hatch "pipping" and the kitchen once again is filled with the tiny cheeps of ducklings not yet "born". I expect them to start hatching tomorrow night!
Not much else to report today......oh Albert fell in next door's pond this evening and raced into the house soaked to the skin. He is curled up with Maddie on one of the sofas as I type this. steaming gently to himself.
The above photo is the view of the East side of the village from the Llanasa Road

Geek Alert!

Now I do rather like PRIMEVAL, the ITV science fiction series which is a cross between Jurassic Park, Star Trek and Fame (the tv series). The whole thing is glossy,knee deep in CGI dinosaurs, has a very pretty cast and is , camp as Christmas! (well as camp as any dinosaur chasing caper can be).
Pimeval chronicles Strange window-like "anomalies" which keep popping up all over the UK. Through these portals keep leaping an unhealthy collection of dinosaurs, which cause a bit of havoc before being disposed of by the obligatory secret Government team headed by grumpy "daddy" Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall). Also in this maverick group is Busty home office clothes horse Claudia Brown(Lucy Brown), peroxide haired Zookeeper (?) Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearritt), cute student Connor Temple (Andrew-Lee Potts) who is a hat wearing genius and gorgeous soldier Captain Becker (Ben Mansfield). More eye candy is provided by a raven haired Egyptologist (huh????)Sarah Page (Laila Rouass)... Her job appears to be to investigate ancient myths and legends involving creatures to see whether any of them can be explained by anomalies......like you do.......
Yep the whole thing is a huge pile of tosh! but it is a rather entertaining one; apart from enjoying the schoolboy thrill of monsters that chase pretty people I absolutely love watching the baddie of the piece Helen Cutter (Juliet Aubrey pic) flashing her phenomenal cleavage (squeezed unbelievingly into a size 10 leather creation) to all that cares to take a peek . If Aubrey had a moustache, she would twirl it with gay abandon!, I have never seen such overacting since Faye Dunaway ran amok in Mommie Dearest!...She is wonderfully bizarre!

Allotment fever, a footballing pig & almost spring

I have become friendly with Sandra on the other side of the village. She has the only "official" allotment in the village apart from mine, and has today started the long hard job of bed preparation and composting. Sandra used to have hens and ducks in her large village garden but sadly lost them to a fox one evening, A bubbly and lively personality, I have conscripted her onto the Flower Show Committee, (The above photo is Sandra and her family on their alloment in one of the gardens of the oddly named "Bonk terrace" behind the village High Street. The house in the background was a small school in bygone days. Auntie Gladys now lives there.

Nora has been rather hyper today, no more hormonal absences but plenty of football playfulness.She is certainly more robust and confident than the diffident little Gladys.

I have spent most of the day around the field and typically there has been no more cockerel fighting. The young buff cockerel that had been so battered by Stanley yesterday, still looks pretty ropey today. I have cleaned his comb wounds again this morning

The clocks go forward at midnight, and I am working tomorrow morning, which is a bit of a bummer. It is only a short 6 hour shift, so Chris will be on Cockerel watch. Tomorrow is the start of British "Summertime" which is a laugh. The view from the cold hill above the Village (above) reinforces just how miserable and "unspring-like" the weather is at the moment.

Hello to Pippa too , my latest Blog reader, and one of my few Trelawnyd readers, nice to have you on board

Disaster

Probably the best train crash since THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH..........

Being Precious

I know I can be rather "precious" about my animal charges, but sometimes my paranoia about their welfare is perfectly justified. Today is a case in point. I got up early to walk the dogs and sorted all the birds before I went to a hospital study day. It was a mandatory training day that was to last for around 7 hours, so I thought the field animals would be ok with me being out of sight for a while (The dogs had been taken to Carole's house)
How wrong I was.
When I arrived home at 3.30, Rogo, Stanley and the young male cockerel in the nursery run were free on the field. It was obvious from the start that they had been fighting. Rogo looked unscathed, but Stanley and the buff male were extremely bloody and battered. I caught both and cleaned them up in one of the water butts, Stanley looked the worst off, as his comb and wattle had been badly pecked but he remained feisty and pumped up, and obviously ready for round two!........Even though all of the cockerels have been physically separated, when they are left totally unsupervised, they always seem to find ways of getting at each other. The quicker the young buff is relocated the better.(below pic)
Anyhow, after sorting out these prizefighters, I did a quick head count of the other animals. The pigs were fine, though had upturned all of their water feeders, and the hens and turkeys looked ok. When I checked the ducks I found Connie (below) tangled in the fence netting. She was quiet and exhausted but looked ok after a pet, drink and feed.
I turn my back for a short shift period and all hell seems to let loose,

Little acts of kindness

This morning there was two plastic bags attached to the kitchen gate. One had a week's collective vegetable peelings; in the other was a small bunch of over ripe bananas. Both "gifts" were left by separate neighbours as treats for the pigs, and were two of many that have been deposited over the past few weeks. At breakfast time, Della, another neighbour rang, She works in a local supermarket and had arranged for a ton of out of date bread to be kept for me for the birds and pigs. It was very thoughtful of her and is one of many such kindnesses I have received since living in the village.
Now I am not getting all saccharine about country hospitality here, but I will mention that if there is one lesson I have learnt during our time in Trelawyd, it would be the fact that being thoughtful and going that extra mile for people does reap benefits in return.
Being sociable and friendly with people has meant them feeling included with the field and menagerie news. In turn I have received extra food for the animals,hutches for the broody hens and offers of practical help when we are away. Delivering egg orders and dropping off the odd freebies has built bridges with some of the older people in the village and the acknowledgement of my limitations when it comes to fence building and practical farm work such as hedge cutting has encouraged a rather gruff, pragmatic help from the farming fraternity.
I guess the whole thing underlines the slightly old fashioned meaning of the word community!

Anyhow, Chris is away in Cardiff overnight, so I have indulged myself with a bout of OCD cleaning. With a tidy cottage, a sleepy, exhausted pile of dogs on the hearth rug and with a glass of Pinot Grigio in front of "Primeval" I can now relax with my blog!

Nora is actually a "woman"

Just received an email from "Gren" a self confessed pig expert who runs a pig sanctuary in the UK......apparently the behaviour I thought was epilepsy....is in fact normal behaviour for a pig in season!............
duh!!!

Pig "absences"

And I said I have no news!
I am convinced that Nora has epilepsy! Very occasionally she will stop dead in her tracks and literally will stare into space for several minutes. At first I thought she was pissed off with me (I was cleaning out her bed in the pig house) but tonight she showed classic symptoms of Childhood absence epilepsy.(Starring eyes, subtle chewing, unresponsiveness)
I dropped some food into the pig pen when I was locking up the hens. As Gladys galloped over, Nora (who had minutes before been squealing hysterically) just stood by the gate and ignored the food I had thrown out for her.
I tried to push her and gave her a slap on the bum, but she didn't react at all. I even waved a few pig nuts under her nose, with absolutely no reaction whatsoever......It took a full three or four minutes for her to come around, in that time Gladys, who is the quietest of the pigs, scoffed every pig nut she could find.....