Lady Bracknell

The old kitchen sofa looks very empty this morning and the house is strangely quiet..
The pecking order between the dogs has been subtly changed yet again, and this morning they are subdued and quiet as they lie together on the lounge sofa. Their stillness is more a product of my mood than a show of theirs

Thanks to all that left a comment on Sunday's post, I have not read them all, but I will do ......
People are very kind, they say very nice things , but at times like these, as Chris would testify to, I hate fussing of any kind and am best left alone, to be busy..
Businesslike is good......
This may surprise some...after all old queens who blog are supposed to need sycophantic comments daily don't they?...No,not always they do....
So please no more "you're a nice person".....comments...I am no nicer , sweeter or angelic than anyone else on this planet.....believe me! and today I could quite easily strangle the first person who offers up a platitude or a wrong word...


We have now lost three dogs over 6 years. This seems a ridiculous number when you think about it......and this morning I am reminded of Lady Bracknell's comment in The Importance of Being Ernest

"To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."

Finlay died from a fast growing Brain Tumour, Maddie from Vet incompetence and now Constance from cardiac failure.....all on paper have been unforeseen and unavoidable events (for us as owners that is ) but some small part of me feels as though we have done something wrong in all this.....and that feels shitty

Don't tell me that thought is wrong...please dont, I dont need the reasurrance.....I just feel what I am feeling this morning..and that's guilt

You Give Your Heart to a dog to tear

I have blogged before about fate, and how it throws you a curved ball out from left field when you are least expecting it.
This morning I was banging on  comically about Constance's flatulence....blissfully unaware that I would be attempting to resuscitate her in the road outside the Church gates only an hour or so later.
We were returning from our usual morning walk when Constance stopped short pulling all of the other dogs to a standstill. She looked up at me briefly with an expression of mild surprise, coughed  and then collapsed.


I went into nurse mode.
She had stopped breathing and I couldn't hear or feel a heartbeat.
Somehow I blew into her mouth and compressed her chest, and after a minute or so she coughed again, waving her big paws weakly.
I felt her heart beat briefly , but moments later it stopped again.
A woman stopped her car to help.
I gave her the other dogs to hold, and tried to shake Constance back to life once more.
But she didn't move again. She had been with us just 10 months


One minute she was here, the next she had gone. It was as simple and as  final as that.


We buried her in a quiet corner of  the allotment, with all of those platitudes of "she had a good life when she was with us" going around and around in my head.
But when I later went to feed the pigs, I pictured her "smiling" with that stupid one tooth sticking out of her fat wide mouth  and I sat down in the long grass and bawled like a baby.

Sunday Morning

The dogs love Sunday Mornings.
After walks and while I am cooking breakfast, three of the four bounce upstairs to clamber into bed with Chris like children do with their parents on Christmas day. Constance, with his great weight (too much for our Marks and Spencer bed) and rather lax bladder control , always remains in the kitchen, a fact which she is not troubled by. 
The effort of climbing the steep cottage staircase remains just that little bit daunting for a 25 kilo bulldog with a flatulence problem........every step a fart, as it were!


The gossip around the village at the moment is the "changing of hands" of the pub. Suddenly Lee, the acting manager has up-sticks and left and in his place a new young family with children have arrived.to fly the "Crown" flag in these troubled economic times

We were told that the food served was excellent pub grub, and so like many of the other villagers we have made the effort and booked a table for last night.
The restaurant was full when we arrived ( a very good sign), the young wife , who does "front of house" duties was charming and professional and there was something quite valiant in the way she she outlined just how much she and her husband wanted to "make a go" out of the business in this climate where breweries are draining the very lifeblood out of their landlords.
We had a nice meal
and wished them well for the future.
Local readers... try the Crown out for yourselves...and be a good citizen 

An Easy Life

Intensive care has a pace and an order which is rather unique.

Even when a unit is busy, the work always seems structured, calm and for the want of a better word discliplined.

That is the nature of the beast.

The unit is roughly organised into a horse shoe shape. The critically ill patients situated on the outside of the shoe, the most senior nurse occupying the "heel" position,  a vantage where he or she can survey the "workers" with eyes and an all overseeing monitor.

Each bed is allocated a trained member of staff, who takes charge of that bed for a 13 hour shift. 

The bed spaces,monitors, pumps, ventilators,haemofiltration machines and the like are that nurse's domain, and pride,ego and peer pressure dictate tidiness, order and calmness in your own fifteen foot space.

Help is always only feet away. . More often than not the patient is sedated and compliant (though not always)

and terrified at doing anything wrong, family and friends generally are in awe of the proceedings and remain manageable and well supported.

There are huge stressors in this claustrophobic environment...but like a duck, swimming on a lake......everything on the surface is calm.

Last night I was asked to help out on an acute elderly admission ward.

30 patients. Two staff members. The walking senile...the incontinent, the confused, the slow, the distressed, the demanding and the needy.

Welcome to the real world.

As one bottom was cleaned and checked and the sheets and blankets arranged to help with a good night's sleep, another bottom needed sorting. The man with Alzheimer's had to be retrieved from sorting the linen room out, and the lady in bed four was late for her iv antibiotics.

Three buzzers rang out , unanswered as we turned and cleaned a stroke patient in his side room, and as I tried to locate the sluice and fresh bedding, another buzzer sounded, with a shrill beeeb beeb...bloody beeb

The two full time staff, a slightly harassed but cheerful scouser and an unflappable Filipino,  were uncomplaining  and hard working.....they were also resigned to the fact this night was generally "the norm" in our modern, stretched and flagship nhs, however, by working together all of the jobs eventually got done, and by midnight some order was restored.

One shift a week on Intensive care!

Bloody hell..how lucky am I?

Fairy Tales

I absolutely LOVE cinematic fairy tales

This clip from the early 1990s television series Ally McBeal... was pure slush!

But having said this.....I have to admit that it always made me smile.....especially when Ally walked through the deserted Boston Streets at the end of each episode
(my second fav scene was always the staff of the law firm having early evening drinks at the suddenly busy nightclub every weeknight!

How many out there remember it?

Maura's request

As Requested by Maura
This is the link by Google Street Map........you can see me by the chicken coop
Maddie is sat stiffly by the shed
Small world
Google Street Map Trelawnyd Church Field & me

Where are you?

Gop Hill (centre) taken from Liverpool Bay.
Trelawnyd lies in the shadow of the Gop which is around 800 feet above sea level

Another day, another e mail question from Mrs Fickle from the American Mid West.
She asks
.............."Now I know you live in the middle of the Welsh Countryside but when I have re read some of your older posts  you very occasionally make references to visiting the beach.....are you close to the Ocean?
can you clarify things for me"
Warm Regards,
Beatrice M. Fickle (Ret)."


Beatrice It does sound confusing I agree as when I post photos of the village, the whole place seems completely landlocked. Trelawnyd is only perhaps a mile and a half South of the sea.  In the satellite photograph below which shows Liverpool bay Trelawnyd is just inland of the centre peninsular
The coastal town of Prestatyn lies between Trelawnyd. There are some lovely beaches there but I tend not to go in the summer months as the beach car park is extortionate and the nearby Pontins holiday camp is filled with a great number of poor people!

Liverpool Bay , which is the body of water which enters into the Irish Sea

ps/ I have just recieved this email from the lovely Maura @ Lilac Lane Cottage

Hi John.....I just read your post with the satellite photo of your area so with coffee in hand I decided to look it up on Google maps. As I was looking I noticed the name of your little village so zoomed in and had a little 'walk' around the streets...isn't Google grand! Anyway...I noticed a church so I continued on ground level past the church lych gate?...and around the corner down the narrow winding road (I see chickens in the churchyard) and lo and behold what do I see on the left.....critter houses...buckets with water...veggie gardens with wire fences protecting them...at least one white chicken...a yellow chicken...what looks like a turkey and what looks like a little black Scottie dog sitting by a little green building and a man with a rake or hoe in one of the little gardens and what looks like a couple of wheel barrows laying on their sides. The road is called Cwm Rd. Well I nearly spilled my coffee I couldn't believe it....this looked like YOUR 'allotment'?! I decided to see if I could find a few pictures on your blog to see if I could recognize some of the buildings and what do you know....in the picture of Winnie and Jo and the magpie ducks I see a cottage...partly stone and partly white stucco in the background and then in one of your newer posts there's the picture of Camilla with badger and I see the metal gate behind them that I saw as I followed the road on Google. In the picture of the Allotment 2009 in your side bar realized this was taken from the upstairs window looking across the road into the allotment with the tent pitched right where the metal gate was. Don't be afraid John ....I'm not a stalker I promise hehehe but I can't tell you how excited I was to come across this on Google. I felt like I was right there walking that narrow winding road and then it all seemed so familiar...the pens and the fences and gardens and critters. Well now I know I'm right.....I just looked back at some of your earlier posts and I came across one that I missed called "Everyone has a film in them" and at the bottom I see the picture of the village and there written on the picture is ''my field'! I guess if I had been reading your blog more regularly lately I would have known for sure this was your field...duh!
Anyway John...I enjoyed my cup of coffee wandering down your little road and admiring your field and cottage. I had it pictured all wrong in my head....I picture the field running behind your cottage and the church running along side you on the other side of a stone fence. Now I know exactly how things line up. How lucky you and Chris are!!!

Anyway...I hope you, Chris and the critters have a wonderful day!

Maura

Growing up clumsy

As a child I was always falling over. Consistently I would be the kid that banged his head on the corner of a fence, drop something breakable and splatter my jumper with the remnants of my breakfast, lunch and dinner!

It was a "given" that at least once a day, something destructive would happen.

Typical of the time, I was diagnosed by my mother as being a clumsy boy. I was a " klutz ", "awkward" and "stupid", and every time I would clatter untidily down a staircase or walk into a door, she would always sigh in that overly dramatic way of hers, as if to say, "There he goes again"
Today, I am sure, I would be diagnosed as being slightly dyspraxic
for my childhood clumsiness has indeed never left me.Only yesterday when I was clearing out ash from the log burner, I couldn't quite fill the rubbish bag without staining the carpet with ash and the day before the flower show I burnt the back of my hand when bumping into hot crockery!



That burn that caused me to curse myself,just like the way my mother used to do!
"Stupid boy!" ( or words to that effect)............strange that!
Last night I went to see the Spanish thriller Julia's Eyes at Theatre Clwyd. (don't bother going to see it...it's dreadful!)
It's summer season time, so the Theater itself is all but deserted as only the tiny cinema is open.

I bought myself a coffee, so arrived slightly late, but as I always sit in the same seat ( how f*cking sad is that?) I tip toed past the small audience and promptly went flying over my feet down the aisle slashing hot coffee all over the wall whilst shouting out "oh bloody hell!!"

A couple of people sniggered when I wiped up the mess with the sleeve of my coat, and red faced and still clutching a quarter inch of coffee in the paper cup I tried to look invisible for the rest of the film.....
Postscript:This morning I have just delivered eggs to a woman in the village with strawberry jam from by breakfast all down the front of my jumper!

I am a classy date