Going Gently

Dewi Sant

Yesterday was St David's day.
St David ( Dewi Sant) is the patron saint of Wales who was born in the 5th Century. He was the founder of the monastic community in Mid Wales at Glyn Rhosin ( which means Valley of the Roses) and was famous for his good works and teachings.
Generally the day is marked by the wearing of a daffodil (I noticed all of the village school children were all wearing miniature daffodils) but I always remember wearing a small leek on my school jumper when I was a small child....
Just out of interest, yesterday the Empire State Building was lit up in the Welsh Colours of Red , Green and White

Now I can actually sing the National Anthem!
Working tonight

Someone Like You

Readers of this blog will probably realise by now that I do like my "little moments"

Today I have worked like a Trojan and have completely dug over, weeded and manured my largest vegetable plot ready for planting ( below)

It was hard work but because of the beautiful weather, it was a real joy and I didn't stop until nearly 3pm when I sat and rested in the spring sun with a bagel and a circle of dogs ,turkeys and chickens.

Now I am not generally a lover of "popular music" but by chance a rather beautiful song by Adele entitled "Someone Like You" came on the radio as I was looking for the news.....

It was a lovely, peaceful and rather melancholy type of song and suited perfectly a brief moment of cloud watching ( even though there wasn't a cloud to see in the sky)

Enjoy!!!!!

The veg patch almost finished

The last two Ghost hens sunbathing peacefully in the spring sun

I need two more followers!

Bitch Love

Somewhere under these two bitches is me.
The competition between Meg and Jabba-the-hut lookalike Constance has intensified somewhat as both bitches have a need to be within a gnat's crotchet of my body at any given time. Constance has the power to bulldoze her way into position where as Meg has the agility and speed to out manoeuvre her rival and although all this exuberance of physical affection is flattering.....I am having trouble getting jobs done!

Its going to be sunny today, Chris is working away so I will take the dogs on the field for the entire day and make a start on clearing all of the vegetable patches.

The following "note" did amuse me! (Borrowed from http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/)

At Joanne’s office in Lancashire, , her team had a temporary agency administrator working on-site with them for a few days. Well, “working.” Joanne says her boss was well-aware of what this fellow was actually up to, but rather than report him through the official channels, decided to drop him a little hint instead. (No word about how the lucky employees seated next to him felt about that decision.)

ouch!

Enjoy your day!!!

Happy St David's Day

A lesson Learned

Yesterday I took part in a Supermarket Bag pack with a score of family and friends in support of MND (Motor Neurone Disease)...I wont give details as I will leave Janet to tell all on her blog http://supportingandrew.blogspot.com/ but I will tell you about one little moment that did linger in my mind.

As I was packing , I fell into a brief conversation with a rather tatty looking middle aged guy who was smelling fairly strongly of stale alcohol. In his shopping basket were two bottles of home brand vodka, a frying pan and a large packet of expensive cat food ( you know the sort- the ones in those little foil dishes)....

"Someone is going to eat well later" I said as I packed the cat food...and the man smiled broadly

"That's my Shirley's tea!" he said pointing to the cat food

" and this" he said pointing to the vodka and chuckling " .....is mine"

He paid for his items and dropped two pound coins in my collection bucket which surprised me as he didn't "look" the sort to contribute a substantial donation. (that will teach me to be so snobby)

"It's a shitty illness" he said simply

"I know, my brother has it" I replied

and with another sad smile he dropped another pound in the bucket

"good luck to him mate.." he said kindly tapping me on the shoulder

" ta ra!"

I was almost moved to tears

Night Noise

Sometimes you just have a sleepless night.
Nothing stressful bouncing around my brain to keep me awake
No cheese before bedtime! ( we both have lost more or less a stone in weight by the way so huge cheese feasts are now a thing of the past)
No foul mouthed teenagers having an impromptu party in the sheep field
Just a restless Welsh terrier padding around the cottage
and a bull dog bitch with a nasty bout of flatulence, whose farts echoed around the thick stone walls like distant gunfire.

Night noise in the country can be as soothing as the repetitive grumble of distant traffic. It can also be remarkably startling when you are dozing away in that fugue state between full wake fullness and sleep.

At 3am the geese honked loudly in their house, obviously one of them had seen something out of their tiny meshed coop window, but all was well as the guinea fowl, perched way up in the elms remained silent in their nocturnal vigil.
At 3.20 Chris' elbow sneaks under my pillow, giving my head a jolt, making me swear and George who is all curled up out of the way at the foot of the bed starts his nightly doggy dreams of chasing bigger dogs on the beach and woofs his baby woofs as Constance's snoring reached a crescendo down in the kitchen...by 3.30 I was seriously thinking of buying some ear plugs

Only Albert is silent. He sits on the window seat which overlooks the lane , looking out for the very occasional rat as they make their way from field to nest.

I fell asleep around 3.45...and was up walking the dogs at 7.30.......
now where is that coffee?

Hooters and other such headlines

I was reading Tom's Blog last night and got to thinking how immune we all are with today's gutter press and its constant, incessant barrage of filth, gossip, pseudo celebrity news and rubbish.

Has it always been like this?

Humm perhaps it has.....but I do think that there seems a certain absence of shame with today's response to tabloid "news".

In the early 1970s my brother was involved in a pretty innocuous publicity stunt involving his then rock group which as I recall had been on a tour of Germany. The stunt was a photo call of the group in the nude !( with toilet parts tastefully covered by drum kit, guitar, mike stand!!! and the like) and the resulting pic was no worse than Helen Mirren's boob coverings in the recent Woman's Institute Calender aka Calendar Girls!

But back then, being in the News of the World was a deeply shocking event especially as My Father was Chairman of the town's council! and I recall how seriously the story was broken to Janet and I ( who perhaps would have been 12 or so) as my father and mother gravely put the newspaper dramatically down in front of us.

We children looked at the photo rather seriously,but I do recall that even then I couldn't quite work out just why everyone seemed so upset with it all..........after all you couldn't "see anything!"

My sisters have been toying with the idea of producing a nude calender to raise funds for MND (Motor Neurone Disease)........bloody hell...if my father saw it back in 1974.... he WOULD have had a stoke.....how things do change eh?

Of Gods And Men

Last night I finally got to see the thoughtful, austere and rather grave French movie Of Gods and Men. Based on a true story, it tells of the last days in the lives of eight Cistercian monks, who live in a remote monastery in Tibhirine, an isolated and impoverished part of Algeria. It is 1996 and the Jihadist uprising is claiming the lives of locals and foreigners alike and the monks have to make the terrible decision of whether to leave the villagers who depend on them and return to the safety of France.

Of Gods and Men is a slow, careful film which is reminiscent of the famous The Nun's Story in its depiction of the austerity and dedication of a cloistered existence. It takes an absolute age to "get to know" the individual monks and their personalities as time and time again we observe their pious services and rituals as the tension is slowly cranked up to the terrible conclusion, when the terrorists finally take the monks prisoner.
Generally the wait is well worth it, as Of Gods and Men is an absorbing and at times terribly moving study of fear and bravery under pressure. Not all of the monks deal with the threat of death with a Sound Of Music type of strength! Whereas the nondescript Monastery Leader Brother Christian ( Lambert Wilson ) stubbornly ignores the threat of death ,his fellow Brother, Christophe (a nice performance by Olivier Rabourdin) nearly buckles under the strain. And of course we have to have the cheerful, slightly gung ho monk who waves his hand in the face of danger ( this time is the affable Michael Lonsdale as Doctor Luc)----(remember sister Luke in The Nun's Story?)

Anyhow, the director, Xavier Beauvois, delivers two amazingly camp but oh so powerful sequences in this film that definitely need a mention.
The first is when an army helicopter hovers menacingly in front of the monastery stained glass windows as the monks huddle together holding hands, expecting to be machine gunned at any minute ( you can actually hear the audience take a collective gasp at this one)
and the second is a terribly indulgent but oh so moving "last supper" moment when the monks treat themselves to a glass of red wine whist listening to the strains of Swan Lake played on a rusty old tape recorder----believe me, there was not a dry eye in the house!!! ( I wish my old friend Bel was with me tonight...he would have wept buckets)

Oliver Rabourdin and Lambert Wilson

see The Alex Ramon review also

Dogs and Water

I went up to my brother's today whilst my sister in law did some jobs in town.
He was dozing for much of the afternoon, so I spent a long time sitting in the sun lounge reading the first part of an encyclopedia! which was a bit of a treat as I never do anything so indulgent during the day......I only got through 28 pages of the "A's"
The dogs, given their freedom in the garden spent most of their time playing around the pond, which held a facination for them as it does so often for little boys!