Hatim

You may remember that I used to work on the spinal injury unit in Sheffield.
One of my most well remembered patients was a Iraq street kid called Hatim who was accidentally shot in the Iraq war when he was only 13 years old.
I was the ward manager when Hatim arrived in Sheffield and helped to supervise his care when he was on my ward.... I do recall that the isolated and small framed pre teen had a huge cultural challenge when coping with the rehabilitative process  a paraplegic has to deal with in a rather strange, straight talking Yorkshire City!
I also remember taking him out to Hillsborough park with my welsh terrier Finlay. Fin was always tied to his wheelchair and Fin's laid back and rather sweet personality brought the little Iraqi boy out of his shell when we often "ambled" through the Victorian park.....
Hatim moved on to community rehab after many months with us, yet even today I often think of how he is doing as a grown up man in his new life over in this country....
so tonight I used the amazing google and found that he is now a member of the esteemed  sheffield steeler Wheelchair basket ball team!
I would love to see him participate in the 2012 Para Olympics.......the last tme I saw him he had the beginings of a right Yorkshire accent!


Hatim is second from right

http://www.sheffield-steelers.co.uk/

The War on Smoke

Chris' stress levels are through the roof at the moment.....research bids need to be put in, his Dad has been a little poorly and the cottage fire has been smoking too much filling the cottage with great plumes of  soot!....
I can't do too much with the research,but I can support his dad over the phone and I certainly can get to the bottom of the stove issue...so after looking through the internet DIY  self help pages, I grabbed the sweep brushes and swept the fuckling chimney YET again!
Remember it was only a few weeks ago that a professional sweep gave it a go, well since then I have got down and dirty sweeping it again, and today I repeated the disgusting job, but did so with some gusto , getting into all of those nooks and crannies I might of missed last Saturday.

After an hour with my head up a flue, I had removed another two bin bags of soot  and most of the lining of both lungs....but the job was done and the fire lit without a problem.....and all this after I paid a bloody professional chimney sweep 50 quid to do the job originally!

If I see him again, I will stick his bloody useless brushes where the sun don't shine

This afternoon it was nice to breath God's cold fresh air again. I surrounded half of my large vegetable patches with a new chicken wire protective fence, then delivered eggs around the village. It was home time for the village school children and as we waited for some of the larger kids to walk past us to their parents' cars one mother walked past with her toddler. The little  girl pointed at the dogs and pulled herself forward. and I told the mother that William would be safe to pat if she wanted to.

He stood quietly and interested as the child reached out a pudgy hand and  tapped him firmly several times on the head, then lent forward politely to take a long sniff at her nose. The child and her mother was delighted as he acted just like the teddy bear that he resembled and I,as ever was amused and rather proud of just how gentle male Welsh Terriers can be with little people,

I will end with an apology to Trelawnyd Val ....I am very sorry I flashed my "builder's arse" to you this afternoon when I was bending down to collect eggs..........not the nicest of sights when you are out for a walk eh?

blogitandscarper

I am constantly amazed with the eclectic amount of ,talent and richness of imagination that I find in blogland, it is truly a forum for individual self expression or in my case a daily habit to add to a somewhat teenage diary.
Marathon blogger Phil over at http://blogitandscarper.blogspot.com/ is well worth a visit. His blog is a meandering stream of consciousness, ideas and amusing anecdotes.....give it a look why don't you, but be sure that you have a full half an hour spare and a good cup of coffee with you

By way of an explanation of his blog content...take a look at his last posted video

Aftershock

Terrible timing , I know, but tonight  I found myself over at Theatre Clwyd  watching an Asian Earthquake disaster movie.  Aftershock is the most expensive Chinese Movie made to date, and concentrates its story on the 30 odd years AFTERMATH of a real life Earthquake, namely the Tangshan quake of 1976 which killed over 240.000 people.

Happy Chinese factory worker and mother Yung Ni (Fan Xu ) is caught outside her apartment block with her husband as the Earthquake flattens the city. Her husband is killed trying to save their twins Fang den and Fang da, who are buried under tons of rubble. As rescuers try to save the children,  Yung Ni is given the impossible decision of which child she wants saving, and which one has to be left to die...a decision that haunts her and her family for the next three decades.

Yes it's basically Sophie's Choice with special effects....and within a  few minutes the audience is literally catapulted into one of the most frightening, harrowing and "realistic" disaster scenarios ever captured on film.

Unfortunately the rest of the epic story of how mom, and the rest of the family deal with the aftershock of her terrible decision , doesn't quite live up to the first twenty five minutes.

Having said this, there are some cracking tear jerking scenes (Fan Xu is especially good) but the family drama post catastrophe, for me , just didn't work as well I hoped it would.

Which is a shame

7/10
It was lovely to get back in the cinema !

Sure sexism

Now has anyone seen the tv advert/story that centres around a rich, powerful and attractive women choosing whether to wear a designer black dress for dinner at her swanky hotel.... She undresses ( without any conversation) a male bellhop and tests her selection of deodorants on him to see if that "unsightly" black stain marks his black uniform and then can be seen showing off her unblemished evening gown to the great and the good....

I hate this advert...I hate it was a passion........would it be at all permissible in today's advertising world, to have a man in a position of power, undressing a women who resides in a more a subservient role in order to test a cosmetic out on her?
.......with the risk of being a little sexist myself..and..I can hear a whole host of knickers being twisted here....I think NOT!...so why is it acceptable for a man to be potentially humiliated in this way?.....The answer to this is hidden by the subtle insertion of sex......the bellhop seems to actually enjoy being on the receiving end of this behaviour, a fact that angers me just a little more!

So many adverts now seem to be making men either the butt of a woman's joke, her power , or else seems to be emasculating them in some way..and to me it is just not acceptable...not in this day and age.
I thought we were perhaps past all this........
I guess I was wrong

Nearer Home

Nearer Home, the badgers that live in the field borders have turned their powerful claws and jaws upon the smallest and newest member of the field community with rather devastating results.
Overnight Eric, who had been housed in one of the brooder boxes was attacked....it was a no brainer.....literally nothing was left of him and his enclosure.....

another, albeit small home grown reminder that life can be very cheap eh?

Too Much News

The human cost of the Japanese Earthquake and tidal wave is just now showing itself above the initial stunning and oh-so-not- real visuals we have become accustomed to from several days ago.
The aerial shot of the giant wave reminded me of those CGI movie special effects that we have all have enjoyed , and the camera was just far enough away for the spectacle to be more exciting than  horrific.
This morning, on CNN I watched more home videos shot by the survivors themselves after the impressive early warning system had kicked in and warned the population of the small coastal town to evacuate to higher ground.
Suddenly the disaster is all made very human.

I am not going to bang on about any more about it. What more is there to say?........except how very lucky we are 

Eric

I wasn't going to blog again today. I've had a busy old time being all manly and cutting down fallen trees,building  bonfires and repairing fences.
I have also had another visitor to the field, who appeared carrying a pet basket.. Yeap another mouth to feed I thought,and I was right as the man asked me to take his unwanted silkie bantam cockerel-apparently he was crowing a little too much!

He is a scrawny little red head with a 1980's mullet
I have called the little fella, Eric