Passing It On

It's going to be another fine day again today,  I was up extra early and have cleaned out the pig enclosure for an hour and a half before it became too hot. I am full of a cold today, so am not going  to my brother's house. The risk of giving him a virus is just too high.........It feels weird but I feel guilty.....it is as though I am bunking off from work a little by not going spending the day with him.....

Yesterday I set up Chris' new auction buy into one of the sitting room cupboards, and today I moved some of the extra "flotsam" into the other cupboard,some  items that I have not properly looked at for perhaps  a decade.

It's funny, but we all collect a plethora of things over the years.....each item has a memory, a place in our shared past.....each item having no relevance to anyone but us,

Two tiny delicate glasses with finely etched lobsters and fish all round them bought from a Japanese store on 5th Avenue on one of our first holidays to New York;

.....an old wooden box full of photographs;

.....a set of 1930 champagne glasses, a Christmas present from my sister; 

.....three copies of "Virtue's Household Physician";

.....an art deco lady, bought from a Chester art sale

.....a carlton ware lobster bowl full of dried hydrangea flowers from the garden of our last house

.....a soapstone cockerel...a present from Chris' China trip....

I could go on....

When we are dead and gone, these trinkets will be dispersed to the four winds...some will become the new memories of strangers, others will be thrown away, unloved and uncared for....

We never really "own " something do we?

We just care for it for a while................

A Welsh Terrier In a China Shop

Before

We have not bought anything at an antique auction for an absolute age, the last thing purchased was a grandfather clock that used to belong to a close family friend, and buying that was so fraught with excitement that I very nearly wet myself during the bidding!

Today I went to collect a dinner service that Chris had purchased using a commission on line bidding system, The whole lot was 50£..... not bad for a 176 piece "service"  made up of three or four different but very similar Mekin styles...but it has taken an absolute age to sort the bloody thing out from auction house to cottage carpet!

The mixture of styles is of no consequence to us, as a the eclectic collection of plates, tureens and bowls suits us just fine....I will make up one functioning dinner service and ebay the rest......

Now all we have to do is find enough people to have a dinner party with..

hey ho!!!

And after......

A message for Tom

with affection

Joan Cusack at 8.30 is my absolute fav!!!

Rehab Weather

  October is literally minutes away and it's still 70 degrees at 5pm in the afternoon. I have just had a walk around the Graveyard to gauge what kind of trees may need replanting..The Flower Show Committee has offered to replace some of the native saplings that have been lost to some over zealous strimming over the years.All I need to do now, is to locate some healthy specimens and price them up...
It's just another job to do on my growing list 


Mother-in-law , Sorrel has returned to Broadstairs on the 10.04, so the cottage is suddenly quiet and certainly "Downtown Abbey" free
The weather has brought the village to life. and has proved to be an excellent adjunct to the physical rehabilitation of some of the older , frail Trelawnyd folk . I spied Auntie Gladys striding away for the Rhyl bus this morning with her shopping bag perched casually over her arm., she now looks remarkably chipper for a 92 year old who fractured her pelvis only a few months ago and this afternoon, I caught octogenarians   Olwenna Banks- Hughes and Mrs Jones (Pen-y-cefn) laughing away in the street....I watched them for a while as they carefully negotiated Bron Haul with their matching sticks "clacking"musically on the pavement. and wished I had brought out my camera to photograph them....they looked wonderfully valiant .


They breed them tough in Trelawnyd

Jane Eyre

As a kid I remember thinking that Orson Welles' Rochester would never have fallen in love with the insipid, weepy Joan Fontaine in the 1943 version of Jane Eyre.....she was far too bloody wet!

Having said that, I couldn't also quite work out just why Fontaine would have swooned over Welles...
I always thought he looked just a little bug eyed and rather fat.

The latest version of Jane Eyre is a somber affair. It works, primarily because the characterisations of Rochester,Jane and the morally superior St John Rivers are faithful to the novel and the acting by Michael Fassbender,Mia Wasikowska and Jamie Bell is inteligent and carefully judged.

Fassbender is passionate yet not too cruel in his role of the lusty Squire and Wasikowska's plain Jane is just naive enough to be believable yet displays an innate  resilience....a realistic survivor of childhood abuse. she carries the movie effortlessly and is well worth watching..

Not a bag of laughs ( I felt just a little depressed by it all when I walked out of the cinema)..... but it is a worthy film

Mrs Hopkins' slippers

Sorrel is upstairs, deep in her morning ablutions. The spare room feels somewhat like a sauna, as she is too frightened to even open one of her windows, just in case Albert drags another small dead body up there for her delectation. 
Her nerves are shot to ribbons.
When she goes to bed, she is effectively "under siege" in her room, and I was sure that she pushed a towel into the crack under the door last night...just in case a dead mouse would manage to limbo through......


So like I said, Sorrel is upstairs and Chris is pottering around the cottage getting ready for the day's events . I have noticed that he has suddenly taken charge of my famous "Mrs Hopkins' slippers"...the very slippers he slagged off with some gusto when I was presented with them last year.
How comfort takes over from snobbery when it suits
We are off to see Jane Eyre today.....

A Good Cry

Dolly's video "slayed 'em in the aisles" didn't it?
.....and it was meant to....as sometimes the best way to get a message over whether it be in a documentary, film, tv programme or even a  piece of art, is to set the emotional juices going.
I take after my father in this respect,  I can cry at the drop of a hat.
Having said this, it is only today that I realise that I have never actually cried in front of my family...not since I was a boy , no I prefer crying in the safety and  anonymity of a darkened cinema or in my own front room...and the floodgates will often be opened full and wide when the subject of my "release" is a sad tale of an animal. especially if accompanied by some emotional music..


yeap cheap sentiment will get me every time


Now at work, I can reign  the emotions in behind a thin veil of professionalism This is  a vital skill for a nurse to possess..especially on Intensive Care, where at times the patients can be literally "dropping like flies" but just occasionally, I feel that the showing of emotion in the work area can be therapeutic to patients and their relatives alike, especially when there has been a bond between nurse and patient.


I have blogged before about the time of how  a diminutive Scottish sister and I were  once asked to wrap the arms of an old lady who had suddenly died around the shoulders of her grieving husband in a last close embrace and I know I have written about the time I shed a tear watching an Alzheimer patient waltzing delicately around the day room with her husband, oblivious to the reality of her situation .


But today, in view of that sad little "Dolly" Video, I was reminded of a "little" moment that occurred almost as an aside , on the busy ward I managed a few years ago now.


The ward was busy,but because the staff on duty were motivated and worked well as a team, there was, as I recall a kind of energy in the air as the late morning jobs were being completed before lunches were delivered. We had received the first emergency admission of two booked for that day and because a junior nurse was practicing being "in charge" of the ward, I had been allocated the admission.
It was not a hard case in so much that the emergency turned out to be an elderly man who had been found by his neighbour at the foot of his stairs. The man had sustained a devastating cervical injury which was ascending. He was unconscious and his breathing was compromised, so put quite bluntly..... he was dying.


My job was simple. I was to make him comfortable,  I was to locate the family and take care of them all before and after the patient's death.
As it turned out the man had no family, only the neighbour who had found him, and I was surprised to see a rough looking young woman in her 20s turn up to the ward asking to see him, after all  , I had envisioned the neighbour to be a vital kind of  spinsterish lady perhaps being in her 60s.It  even crossed my mind that this woman was perhaps this old man's drinking buddy of sorts, especially given the state of her


The young woman, who had, she informed me , three kids of her own back home, called on him daily with a meal, the paper and perhaps a wee "tot" of something and had done this for the past year or so since the death of his wife. She informed me in her thick Barnsley  accent that there was no living relatives that she knew of, for me to contact and asked if she could sit with him for a while which of course I agreed.


When she saw him, by the look on her face, I knew she understood the extent of his injuries and she started to cry, letting her tears splash onto his hand which she held up to her face.
As she did so,I noticed that she had a homemade tattoo stating "MOM" on her forearm
I removed his oxygen mask , so that she could see him properly and sat down next to them both as his breathing became more erratic


" I don' really know him very well at all" she explained after a while,"But I wanted to come in"


I remember looking at her cheap skirt and at the tattoos again and  I felt a little ashamed of myself at jumping to the more negative of conclusions.


"All of  us should have someone there with us at the end eh" she added sadly " someone to cry over us? "
She was nice, she was sincere and she was caring.....


And I had to bite my lip just a little more when I nodded my agreement


I have said this before.....funny what you remember isn't it?

Dolly the Pit Bull

my sister sent me this video this morning

....suffice to say................I am still sniffling