Notes at 3.20am

I have no trouble sleeping as a rule.
We. like most couples have our own routine, and it is a routine which has become fixed and unchanging over the years.
Chris likes to retire early and will read before sleep. He and George will creep off to bed together, a treat which George absolutely loves, and the cottage is always filled with the scottie calls of "arrrrwwwwoooooo" when George rubs himself excitedly over the duvet and eiderdown when he has Chris' attention all to himself.

The Welsh terriers remain with me downstairs, and unfortunately both have now gotten into the habit of clambering onto the bed in the wee small hours after I retire , a thing which creates some logistical problems when you want to turn over,or even go to the toilet in the middle of the night.
Last night I was forced awake by some rather nasty breath wafting into my face. It was Meg looking earnestly right at me. As usual she had climbed onto the bed, commando style and had assumed her usual position effectively separating me from Chris. Now for those that don't know, Meg has a hero fixation on me, she cannot be out of my sight for the shortest of times ( and will even follow me to the toilet) , a habit which can be a little cloying at times.
Now I usually cope with this infatuation very well, but I must say that before last night's bed reunion she had been indulging herself in her one and only nasty habit! she had been eating her own poo!
It was all a little too much..this poo breath! , so I squeezed myself from under the duvet William, George AND Albert and sneaked downstairs to make myself a cup of tea. It was 3.20 am.
Now, I don't usually have the luxury of sitting in silence with nothing really to do in the middle of the night, and I found it a rather interesting experience.
All houses have a sound, and an atmosphere of their own at night. Unlike our old Victorian terrace in Sheffield, the cottage does not creak and groan when it settles down in the early morning. The only noises that you can make out here is the howl of the wind around the eaves, the faint buzz of the fridge in the kitchen and the very faint "pad,pad, pad" from Albert as he stalks back and forth from Kitchen to bedroom the rest of the time...there is silence.
Your mind can wander at these times and I got to thinking about all of the previous owners that preceded us since the cottage was first built in the late 1700s. Who were they? what did they do for a living? and were they happy?
The cottage , years ago had a tiny byre for a couple of cows and a pig sty located in front of the orchard; at another time it was thought to be some sort of tiny tavern and at another period had some connection to the Church way back in the far and dim distant past: I resolved myself, this morning, to find out all I can about the cottage's previous tenants and owners and to document all I can about the history of the place.
Anyhow, Meg with her toilet breath and her sad needy eyes finally joined me in the living room and we trouped back to bed to face the gauntlet of bodies on the duvet yet again. It was well past 4am when the whistling of the wind lulled me to sleep

I am not downhearted

honest.....( see next blog)

Mildred Pierce RIP

This morning I counted all of the animals out of the coops and all were present with the exception of one old hen.

Mildred Pierce, one of my original birds had been fading for quite a few weeks now.

She had "gone light" months ago and her belligerent manner ( put down to the fact she had been practically bald after a particularly bad moult three years ago) had mellowed somewhat by infirmity.

Recently she had spent her days alone in the turkey enclosure and I thought it only a matter of time before she tottered away to the big chicken coop in the sky.

Obviously she had been taken by the fox either during the day or after her death amongst the tussocks and hedges of the lower field.There would be no feathers to mark her death.. she didn't have any!!!!.

Out of my original 12 hens bought several yeas ago now, only Whoopie Goldberg and Colleen Nolan survive...

Below is Winnie the Gander with his beautiful Paul Newman eyes....... he is watching me lock the hens up at duck through the wondow of his goose house... and does so every single night

National Fear

I am sick to the back teeth, hearing about this recession that we are in. The media seems to be whipping up more anxiety and fear amongst the retail sector and every radio talk show, the BBC news and newspaper report screams of public sector cuts and job losses.
We are living in a time of fear
Our local health Trust has over 70 million to cut from it's budgets at the same time that our Intensive care Unit is being revamped and enlarged....I guess my job ( all 11.5 hours a week of it all) is therefore safe, but who indeed knows just where things will go.
What I am beginning to dislike (in addition to this media hysteria) is that because of the fearfulness of job cuts, people are putting up with bad managerial behaviour and poor HR support, a phenomenon that I am am sure some managers are taking advantage of.

Trade unions ( with perhaps the exception of the RMT(National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) led by the bullish Bob Crow) remain impotent, so I am sure that some employers, under the guise of recession worries, are taking the opportunity to take advantage....

The media frenzy of reporting bad news is not helped by the creeping sense of doom that pervades tv advertising......every few minutes we see adverts for compensation solicitors (you get 100% of all costs!!!!!!!-they shriek!) offers of money by selling your spare ( spare?) gold jewelry and old mobile phones and there is even an embarrassed Barbara Windsor dressed up as a panto queen plugging the virtues of on line Bingo. (money for nothing?)

sigh....what can we do about all this? well we cannot ignore the economic mess that the country is in, nor should we reject certain cost cutting initiatives but I think there should be a national kind of therapy for everyone in these times of doom, doom and more doom.....

In the old days the Country's monarch would be the centre for some sort of celebration.......( I would love a street party).......and today our communities need something similar, to repair our fragmented and selfish society......Community events are sometimes seen as twee or intensely "middle class" but I think that they are vital in cementing relationships outside the home.......

The older I get, the more I really believe this.

A mouse Tale

Some people find blogging all a bit strange and I guess they could be right....however I ask everyone to go over to Lauren's blog and read this sweet little story about a baby mouse... it kind of gets under the radar

http://scratchandpeck.blogspot.com/2010/09/compact-life.html

The Ghosts and Mrs Muir

Cinema Buffs will understand this.......but the Ghost Hens' new companion has been named....and what else could I call her but Mrs Muir.....

House Watching

Autumn is here
Last night I lit the log burner after the chill from the sea made me wear a coat when I locked up the girls for the night. As the wind increased in the Churchyard elms and the drop in temperature brought Albert in from his nocturnal exploits early to lie in front of the fire's warmth I realised that summer is over after what seems like only a few minutes and winter will be soon with us. The cottage looked bright and strong against the elements when I took the dogs out for their evening walk as the rain set in for the night and the whole scene reminded me again of an illistration from Anne of Green Gables or perhaps even Candleford..
The cottage always looks at its best at night.
I love looking through the front windows from the road at the two rooms that are our living room and bedroom. Both are lit, with the subdued lighting of standard lamps, which make the 1930's decor and furnishings
look just right in front of the fire and inglenook fireplace.

From the lane, I can see clearly our much loved grandfather clock, the watercolours on the wall and the old green door that I hung myself between living room and kitchen.
The regency swirl hand rail of the staircase can just been seen in front of the cottage door and I love the fact that the bookcase that I designed in the bedroom is on full view laden with books and photographs.......The whole scene looks exactly like I wanted it to....it looks quaint, and old and cosy.
Room watching was one of my guilty passions when I lived in Sheffield. At 10pm me and Finlay used to go for our evening walk around the terraced houses of Hillsborough and I used to love the fact that when he went for a wee I would be able to cop a glance at the décor, design and lifestyle of the house that we had stopped at.

Now I was not a voyeur in the pervert definition of the word ( I would always look away if anyone was sat watching tv in their front room)..... but I was certainly a kind of style pervert! ( In the truest gay definition!)
I loved seeing what wallpaper was placed with what sofa...what accessories went with what occasional table and I used to delight ( in that awful snobby but enjoyable way) when I came across a front room with stripy wallpaper and a bloody awful dado rail that shrieked COMMON!! It was like living in my very own production of REAR WINDOW
We used to live next door to my waspish blog commentator Bel Ami......I used to love looking in his window when Fin and I returned home......mind you it was only because he has a wonderful pair of Clarice Cliff jugs on the window ledge!!!

Memories eh?

Gentle finds it's own level and the politics of grief

My pockets are usually crammed with all kinds of shit. I suppose that they have become my version of a woman's handbag, dog treats, bits of paper, some cash (not alot), plastic bags, pens, paper , a small bottle of poultry antibiotics and as usual my knackered old camera, all have been pushed into every corner and crevice.

At 8am a sparrow hawk dive bombed the huge flock of chattering sparrows in the Hawthorn hedge, but he moved far too fast for me to snap a photograph of his successful attack...however I did take a snap of the ghost hens waddling out of their coop. Nothing too interesting in that, I hear you say....well yes AND no, for if you look closely you can see one of the brown hybrids creeping out behind the lead girls.
As a rule hens do not change hen houses. The house they are introduced to, is the house they stay in, but the little brown hen, that was hatched in the spring has taken herself from the main coop ( with 15 other hens) and has effectively moved in with the ghosts.
I have put this down to bullying. She is a gentle little soul and the old lags of the bigger coop do resemble a troupe of knackered old prostitutes that swear and spit, so it looked as though she had packed her bags and moved in with the benign battery hens who have taken to her like Aunt Marilla did with Anne of Green Gables.........
I think that all this was rather sweet
not everything in nature is tooth and claw.


The bickering and fickle nature of hens can be mirrored in the relationships we can see within some families. A friend of mine has recently lost his father, and is at this very moment experiencing that awful family tension where some relatives feel that they have a bigger "stake" in the death than other family members do.
Now I can understand perfectly why the dynamics within families can be tested when a loved one dies. Cracks within relationships can widen, minor feuds and jealously can intensify, that will happen with any major stressor, but I am always baffled by the "one upmanship" that can occur, especially in between friends, when one person's grief is seen as more important or bigger than everyone elses.......
This selfishness within the grief experience is hard to deal with. My friend is managing by stepping back from the conflict and by concentrating upon his own feelings rather than those of the more vocal members of his family. But we all need to have our own grief acknowledged not only by the important people around us but more importantly by ourselves perhaps that is why this "contest of grief reaction" actually occurs..... it is a way of having our pain and trauma recognised and accepted...........

It's easier being a chicken...........