Wasps and cruelty

A day without rain!!!...well until 4.40 pm that it!

I cannot quite believe I had around 8 hours dry working time, so I have dismantled all of the coops, disinfected them all (the dreaded red mite it back),emptied the pig latrine then scrubbed the pig hut out and refilled it with wood chippings! By mid afternoon I looked (and smelled) dreadful, but at least all the crappy jobs have been finished,which is good as tomorrow I am doing my first hospice shift and Sunday I am working on ITU

The rain started just as I finished slopping out, so I joined Gladys and Nora and sat in their hut drinking a welcomed diet coke with George also for company.

The better weather has brought some of the villagers out, so I have been stopped by a steady stream of egg customers and pig feeders .

One of my visitors asked if I would take some hens off him as he was too busy to look after them properly, after some questioning I found out that they were older hens that were no longer laying, so where not any good to me, but after I said that I couldn't take them, this bloke stated he would take them into the woods and let them fend for themselves.

I almost lost my temper with his insensitivity, and suggested that the animal rescue centre may take them, but he didn't seem interested,so curtly I told him to drop them off with me rather than abandon them to the elements.

People can be so cruel, when their hens become unproductive!...perhaps I may be able to find them a new home!

I have also been watching the to-ing and fro-ing of wasps in their nest located in the bank next door to Bunny's enclosure, for a few days now. They have taken over a rodent hole and their constant activity has meant that I have had to forgo any activity in that part of the field.

I have found their presence strangely interesting.- if you look closely at the photo , you can just see one of the colony leaving the nest, it looks like a tiny spaceship leaving a mother ship!

For Cassie

The Blitz memorial at Pier Head, Liverpool

Now I blame Cassie for this post, (I should be cleaning the kitchen floor ) but I do have a little time before I take George to the vets ( he has a sore bum) so I will answer her post reply and type out another of my mother's wartime stories (as it was told to me as a child)

I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, that my mother,Uncle and Grandmother were caught in a bombing raid, as they hid in their home in the terraced housing area of Everton. Gran managed to cover the children with a heavy upturned settee before the windows were blown in, and unbeknownst to them all a parachute bomb had lodged itself under the neighbours kitchen floor without exploding.

When the raid was eventually over the family decamped to another neighbours house, in oddments of clothes ( the raid was at night so the children were in their nightclothes) My Uncle apparently was wrapped in a pair of chenille curtains and had on a pair of women's heeled shoes! which must have looked rather bizarre!

The family eventually moved in with their inlaws but the next day my Grandmother (who was incredibly brittle with her nerves) marched up to the now cordoned off street and demanded to be allowed into her home to retrieve certain items of cash and possessions she could not afford to have destroyed.

In our comfortable existence in 2009, I wonder if many of us could actually believe that someone could put their live in danger in order to retrieve some personal items, but I think it is important to realise that times were very hard for my grandmother in the early 1940s and they were in fact fairly poor. As a family, they could not afford to let anything be destroyed, even by an enemy torpedo!

Anyhow, my gran somehow talked the Air raid warden to let her into her home (remember there was an unexploded bomb next door!) and hand in hand they walked into her house reciting the Lord's prayer as they did so! (My mother would confirm this story as she watched the two of them ducking under the cordon at the end of their street) Gran collected the items she wanted, grabbed the cat and together they carried everything out.

She never once saw herself as a heroine!

My mother could tell a good story, but never "over- egged the pudding", when she discussed how she experienced the war as a girl.

I do remember, however how matter of fact she seemed to be as she told the story when she was once caught up in another raid. At 15 she worked in an ammunition factory, and she used to walk home with her friends after shift. As they did so one day the girls were caught in the open streets when the German bombers (empty after bombing the docks) turned for home over Everton. As the planes banked over the city, the rear gunners opened fire and my mother recalled placing a small cardboard suitcase which she used for her lunch box, on her head in an effort to protect herself!. With bullets raining down, my mother ran for home, separating from her friends..........She got home...they did not!

I could recall many other tales of the war as they were told to me, oral history is fascinating, I always think, I just wish that these stories could have been recorded years ago, when the memories were fresher and more detailed.....

Pirrie and the buffs

Life imitates art.....and Pirrie the six inch bantam has suddenly taken on the persona of a seaside postcard's diminutive male character! Finding out that the four huge female buffs have been separated from from Scotty the cockerel, he has surreptitiously taken up residence with the girls since monday.
They make a real comical set of figures when they came out of their coop this morning. The buffs, four times Pirrie's size, majestically steam out of the coop door like galleons in full sail as he galloped around them like an overactive Jack russell.
From time to time he even makes an effort to mate, but cannot quite make the assertive jump and hold to subdue the buffs, who bale him with a rather bored eye! before walking off to feed
God Loves a trier

Mixed bag during the rain

I have ten minutes before a meat pie is ready to take out of the oven, so will catch up with a short blog and a coffee. Apologies, but I have no real news today (do I ever?)...it's going to be a pretty yawny blog
Socially, August will be a month of reunions, which will be lovely!
Nu and I are meeting up on the 7th and will have a meal out with all of our Sheffield friends together! which will be a first for us since the 1990s! a week later Chris and I will drive over to Liverpool for a night (in) with Nia and George, our old OLD friends who now live in Australia. Both are over for a short family visit and have kindly managed to fit us in amid their frenetic itinerary!
Thanks to my blog, e mail and texts, I never feel that Nia is so far away, but it will be fantastic to catch up. Old friends Ground you, sometimes more than your family can do.

Anyhow the bloody rain is lashing down YET AGAIN!, which has put paid to more strimming and gardening (the back garden looks like an adventure playground), but I am resigned to get soaked later as I need to harvest the rest of the beans before they rot on the plants. This afternoon will be a marathon of blanching and freezing!


pic- thanks to friend Nige who took this photo, I think it's lovely

Hetro night

Sometimes I do enjoy a typical "heterosexual" night!
In Sheffield I used to have a weekly meet up with my married friends Mike or Jonney H and we used to do the straight guy thing of talking absolute bollocks over a pint of beer! With mike I could do the science fiction Star Trek/ Voyager emotional romp , where John H was a typical All About Eve debate or list "all the films you have ever loved".etc etc.....
Tonight I met up with Geoff (above), the affable Scouser, so we had rubbishy conversations about life,Liverpool and the merits of terrier dogs!.....
sometimes you just need a crappy, frivolous conversation..............

Bunny

Its been raining all day, but I braved the elements and have strimmed most of the field and allotment so the place looks neat and tidy.

I snapped the below photo of Bunny during a brief lull in the downpours. She needed to stretch out her deformed hip and leg.

Welsh Roots

Rowena Price, one of the older residents of the Village confirmed yesterday that we are in fact related albeit by marriage! Now, I knew that my Great Grandmother Mary Jones was the only true Welsh member of our family. (She infact hailed from Twysog, which was a huge farm on the outskirts of Denbigh.) whereas my other Great grandparents hailed from Liverpool,Bristol,Ireland and Scotland!
Rowena was married to Tom Price who was a distant relation of Mary's, and reading her hand penned version of "our" family tree, that she forwarded on to me, brought back all of those stories that my Grandmother used to tell us as children.
Mary Jones married my Great Grandfather,James Fry in the late 1890s and they Lived in the city of Liverpool (which was then called the capital of Wales)
They had five children, Hughie,Alf,Lizzy, Louie and my grandfather Jim and all the family lived in close proximity to one another around the area of Everton which is just North of the City centre and overlooks the famous Liverpool docks. My Grandfather married my grandmother (above), who was also called Mary in 1924 and they had my mother Joan in 1925. The entire family remained in Liverpool until the war, and I was interested to see that Rowena's sketched family tree documented the most famous of our family stories, namely the family disaster of the May blitz of 1941. I always remember my Grandmother recalling the time she was running through the streets with my mother (who was around 16) and my Uncle Jim who was perhaps 12. The sirens had already sounded and the bombers where overhead as they debated where to run to. The options open to them, was a reinforced room in the local school or the family shelter located at my Great Grandparents (Jim and Mary's) home, both of them within running distance, and as the bombs started to fall, my Grandmother had a premonition to run to the school.
The family shelter took a direct hit soon afterwards.My great Grandfather was killed instantly and Mary, with Lizzy and Louie were buried along with many others . Fortunately they survived but over 1450 people were killed in one of the worst raids of the war
My Grandmother, Mother and Uncle had already survived a previous bombing raid, when an unexploded parachute "torpedo" (middle photo) actually crashed through the next door house and lodged under their kitchen floor while the three of them were hiding under an upturned settee in the living room!. So the May blitz, was the last straw for them, and it provided the springboard for my Grandparents to move to the safety of Wales. The village where my family first settled was in fact Gwaenysgor, which is located just a mile away from where I am sat now!
It's a small, small world, isn't it?

Today Chicken course tomorrow a Poultry degree!

Well, I have returned home after the first session of my 4 week "Chickens for beginners" course, flushed with success! Out of the ten people that said they were participating , seven turned up tonight, and two more will hopefully attending from next week after their holidays.
Three course members already have hens , but wanted to improve their knowledge base, whilst the others had very basic poultry experience and needed teaching "from scratch" as it were and all seem a very jolly bunch indeed!
The two hours shot by, and I really enjoyed the evening.
I am already planning my next course! and am thinking of how I can advertise it to a wider population!!!