Eba would be proud

Now to make sense of this blog, you have to read the previous one.
Fired up with memories of Eba "dirtyboys", I turfed Chris out of bed, and grasping my resolve (and holding my breath), I crawled under the bed with a dustpan and brush!
The bedroom was filthy...it truly was and in seconds I was covered head to foot in a thick, smelly film of dust and fluff. God knows when I last cleaned it, but with a bit of hard work, a touch of nausea and a ton of hot soapy water, the ancient floorboards (which came from the original cottage in the 1700s) gleamed as if new and the windows sparkled without their usual coating of dog saliva.

"Dirty Boys!"

We will never have a pristine house, it will never happen.
This little nugget of realisation came to me this morning when I was sat on the loo reading HOME & ANTIQUES. In this glossy, page after page of beautifully arranged Georgian and Victorian “items”, all polished and dusted within an inch of their lives, stand side by side with vases of newly cut roses from the “mature” garden, whilst the pearl draped owner sits comfortably on the plump settee drinking a cup of filter coffee.By her feet, a small border terrier is asleep. He is clean and well groomed (in an untidy designer way) and there isn’t a dog hair or scratch mark to be seen!
I am writing this during our all too brief Sunday lie in. The animals have been fed and watered and the dogs walked. Chris has had breakfast in bed, and all the dogs (with the smiley Albert in tow ) are asleep on the duvet.
I look around the bedroom.
The window seat, is all pulled and marked where Meg bites at it when she sees a passing dog in the lane. The windows have the very attractive smeared and now dried spit marks from doggy faces and the skirting board below is covered in stray dog hairs and dust. By the door, in the hall there is a strange mark in the carpet from where George threw up a stolen meal of cat food and hen eggs, and the window ledge in the bathroom beyond, has a precise set of pawprints all over them after Albert stood in the coal scuttle and then escaped back into the garden.
When I fried Chris’ potato cakes this morning, the cat had a crafty sniff, lick and tap at them when my back was turned, and I am sick and tired of hand washing our “tasteful” scatter cushions, when they smell of overheated Welsh terrier.
Our immune systems must be as robust as a charging rhino!

The cottage, at times is a midden

I do miss those Sheffield days when for a short time we had a cleaner! She was a powerhouse Filipino woman called Eba, who hardly spoke English, was, we suspected a mail order bride and worked like a thing demented. She was a godsend! By the time she had knocked on the door and you had answered it, she had already brushed the yard and cleaned under the plant pots! I loved her!

The only thing that did worry me slightly about Eba was the fact that she pathologically hated dirt ! (She made Joan Crawford look like a pussycat) when she found a particularly nasty stain or mark ( I remember her special reaction to the mess she once found under the microwave!!)- she would mutter loudly under her breath

"dirty boys!!! dirty, dirty boys!!!"

I used to get so embarrassed I used to hide in the attic when when was in full flow!!

Eba where are you when we need you.!!

I am working tonight, and need to write some more handouts for the chicken course for tomorrow , but I think I will give the bedroom a good seeing to!......in the spirit of Eba!

As good as it gets

I have worked today at the hospice, which was fine! I won't wax lyrical about pallative care, as I would like to briefly blog about one of my favourite films. AS GOOD AS IT GETS..which for all it's bad language is essentially an old fashioned wise cracking romantic comedy. I watched it avidly on tv last night!
Some people think that the film is just a showcase for Nicholson's talents... but for me, it is Helen Hunt's sassy Brooklyn waitress, that really melts your heart!!!
In this sequence she hardly says a word......and she steals the scene

Scarlet

I had just come downstairs after a bath, when I saw Rogo streaking across the field with a couple of buffs in tow. A second later a thin Labrador cross bounced into view, and I couldn't quite believe another bloody dog had found its way into the enclosures.
I had already put all of the ducks and turkeys into their houses, so only the hens were at risk, so with a heavy heart, I galloped outside with a snatched up broom only to find the dog clambering up the broken church wall into the Graveyard. The hens were milling around fraught and loud. but I could only see one body lying in the grass outside the enclosures
The victim wasn't one of the slow buffs or indeed Rogo or Stanley, who had run forward to face the intruder, it was the nervous pure breed excelsior Leghorn Scarlet that had been caught and bitten through the neck and back.
Touch wood, I have never had a fox attack as yet, but this is the third dog attack I have experienced in two years! so I was pissed off, big style....I checked around the field and checked on the other hens and pigs, all seemed ok, and I was pleased to find the new young hens crouched together in the long grass with Stanley clucking over them, all of them untouched but very frightened!
I then turned my attention to the dog, but somehow it had got out of the Churchyard,which was strange as the church gates were shut, I debated driving around the village to see if it was around but couldn't be bothered.
It is not the animal I am angry at, but the bloody owners who let the bloody thing run free

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