"Hellloooooooo Trelawnyd!"

Poster and venue.......who needs the O2 Arena?

I have noted with some interest that Trelawnyd's Memorial Hall has been rapidly becoming a sort of alternative venue for National and indeed international folk performers over the past 24 months or so
This week Heidi Talbot arrives, and the publicity machine posters have proudly proclaimed that the New York Times viewed her as having a "voice that's both awestruck and tender!"
Impressive stuff eh?!


When I was in London visiting Nuala earlier in the year I noticed a poster advertising tour dates for a folk singer ( sorry I forget her name) which Included Trelawnyd in the line up!!! LONDON, LIVERPOOL,  HULL NOTTINGHAM and Trelawnyd!
How cool is that...
Anyhow after a bit of digging I have found that a village based Record Journal has been responsible for this folk "explosion" at The Memorial Hall, and although folk music isn't quite my cup of tea..I will make an effort and go to at least one concert

There is even a mega "day concert" planned for 2012.......

  

The Saga of Beatrice...the hen with a stroke

One of the last hens, walking homeward

Dusk tonight.

With the nights drawing in and the weather deteriorating , "locking up" the animals for the night can be a bit of a chore. With the turkeys, ducks and geese all safely bedded down and the pigs fed and watered, all I have to do at dusk is to wait for the hens to totter back to their houses in the Ukrainian village before locking the doors for the night.

You cannot hurry hens, if you do they will invariably run in exactly the opposite direction that you want them to go, so I have got into the habit of sitting under the Churchyard trees with the guinea fowl chattering gently above my head listening to Radio 4 Extra as in groups of two and three, the hens head homeward.

Stanley

Just as I switched over to The Archers,  I noticed that Stanley the cockerel was still outside his hen house. It was getting dark,and instead of roosting, he was stamping outside the coop door clucking loudly with concern into the wind..

As I walked down towards him to see what was up, he suddenly lifted himself up and galloped across the field some fifty yards into the long grass, where he danced around for a bit before racing back to the coop door.

He did this three times before I reached him and he was still clucking loudly when I found out just why he was so excited, for lying in the grass was one of his hens, a Rhode island red called Beatrice.

She was alive, and was manfully trying to hop her way back to her roosting coop before dark,  However her left leg and wing were dragging uselessly on the ground for she had suffered the common affliction that chickens often suffer from, she had experienced a stroke.

Generally when hens stroke out, the best thing to do is to put them out of their misery, they can never be left with other hens as their fluttering and odd behaviour always illicit bullying. Left in the open with the more aggressive turkeys,  a disabled hen will be pecked to death within minutes, so generally it is kinder to "do the right thing"

But  with, her heroic effort to return to her coop and the concern of her rooster, to save her, I decided to give the old hen a chance and set her up in an old rabbit hutch for the night....

I have just checked on her,  she is still paralysed , but ate a  load of corn well and looked bright enough even though she couldn't walk........another lame duck (hen) to care for me thinks.....

I'll never make a proper farmer will I?

What's wrong with these Movie trailers?

A slightly brighter blog today me thinks

x

watch this

and this

and tell me what is wrong?

Yes.. there is absolutely no indication that either film is in Fact French and subtitled!

Clever marketing by the Americans no doubt as subtitled films in the US never EVER do very well at the box office.( did you notice that the only word uttered was "Amelie"?)

This "subtitle snobbery" is rife in this country too..even down to the renting of dvds at our local video shop.....as the few "foreign" movies for rent ( always on the bottom shelf) have huge red stickers on them "warning" the poor unfortunate shopper that they are not in English! (and should therefore be avoided!)

Gawd help us

If Only Life was like a Movie

I was going to do a mini review of the Audrey Tautou farce Beautiful Lies tonight, after all any movie with her in it, is always worth a visit to the cinema for me.
As it turned out Beautiful Lies is not a good movie, but Tautou, with her big brown French eyes and unwavering ability to cry believably, gave it her all, and I enjoyed it, basically because she was in it!
Films have always given me pleasure, for me, they are an easy fix to all the ills of this world and you know what, I am damm grateful for their never-ending ability to bring a smile to my face.


I visited my brother today.. it wasn't an easy visit


Mentally he is in a very dark, depressed place at the moment ; a place that normal chit chat, platitudes and socializing cannot reach him. He obtains little pleasure from day to day things and it breaks my heart to see him stare away into the middle distance when you try and engage him with the banality of everyday news.
He has lost the ability to take pleasure from things.
Motor Neurone disease is a bastard .
Briefly I saw him smile... just the once... it was when I put Meg on his bed and she sniffed and prodded him and his noisy suction machine with the gentle curiosity typical of a nervous Welsh Terrier.


His smile was like water in a desert.

Trelawnyd Harvest Lunch

Now I have been requested to "Big Up" the St Michael's Harvest Lunch which takes place on the 13th of October .The following has been taken from this month's Parish Magazine

"...a harvest lunch will take place in the Memorial Hall from 12 noon to 1.30. There will be a good hot pot main course followed by fruit pie and custard, and we hope that this will be patronised by parishioners and friends. The cost is a reasonable £5. There will also be a raffle and stall. The rector apologises in advance that he will not be able to be present on this occasion"

It kind of tickles me that I have been asked to advertise the event, as I have a feeling that some people in the village think that EVERYONE reads this blog......but I am more than happy to "big up" any village event here.....perhaps I should develop a whole new blog site that the Church/Hall Committee/etc could access?...now that may a good idea!


Anyhow a few jobs on the field need completing today, I am off to visit my brother who has been admitted to St Kentigan's Hospice for a week or so ( I will take in William who always loves the attention). I will also call in to someone I know who may be able to take in a couple of the abandoned geese......


Off to Theatre Clwyd later for a long awaited Audrey Tatou fix

My Love is like a Cabbage

My ,Love is like a cabbage,

Almost cut in two,

The Leaves I give to others,

The heart I give to You

(Just remembered the old poem, a favourite of my gran's, out of nowhere)

Sex and Violence

Gawd, I have had enough of sex and violence, and it's only 8.30 am on a Monday Morning.!

I was feeding the pigs first thing and noticed that Margie (aka no 21) was acting just a little weird.

While no 12 sat patiently waiting for his breakfast, she ran around their enclosure shaking a grotty bundle in her mouth like a cat with a mouse.

On closer inspection , the "bundle" was the masticated remains of a Plymouth Rock which went missing yesterday morning.Another victim of the steely eyed sow who has a taste for chicken flesh me thinks

I couldn't worry too much about the chicken killer, in some ways the death of the Plymouth was just an example of Darwinian theory as she had been unwell for a while....and therefore unable to escape sharp little piggy teeth..... no I had bigger issues to sort out this morning

The new alpha male  gander remains a bit of a handful. Desperate to protect his little flock, and obviously upset at being "dumped"  in new surroundings , he continues to challenge everything and anything on the field.

I have dealt with aggressive male animals before, and it is important to be dominant with them without being violent in any way.

Aggressive cockerels can be pickled up and tucked under an arm, until they go submissive and limp, so I tried this tact yesterday with the gander.

Grabbing him firmly around the scruff of the neck I lifted him up and tucked his body under my arm.

He hissed at me aggressively for a while, then went quiet when I trundled around the field looking a little like Rod Hull with his Emu!

I did this for ten minutes or so, then I returned him to his pen, immediately offering him a bowl of corn as soon as I placed him onto the ground.

He honked at me with some gusto, but after I shook the bowl did take one mouthful of food from me, albeit reluctantly

This passive/aggressive approach hopefully will reinforce that I am in charge, I am the boss and I can be trusted to fed him and his family but it has to be done every single day, until things calm down....I have to thank Von for the corn idea..here's hoping it will work

The Bells...The Bells!

I fell asleep after night shift at 8.40am.... and was awoken by the Church Bells ringing at 9.45am!

It seems my whole world over the last 14 hours has been alarm dominated.

I still have not gotten used to monitor alarms at work.

The above video is a basic monitoring set up for an intensive care patient, but it gives a little bit of a taster of what life in intensive care can be like..

For those that don't know the alarms on a basic monitor watch over:-

arterial blood pressure, central venous pressure, hearth rate and rhythm, oxygen saturation, carbon dioxide levels, respiratory rate etc etc etc... each "subject" will have it's own alarm, which can be triggered by any one of a hundred reasons.. some big and some insignificant

Add to this "alarm fest" individual alarms for a score of infusion pumps ( some patients can have a dozen or more), ventilator alarms ( which have their own individual "bing bong" quality about them , two phones on the nurses station AND a particularly irritating unit door bell... and you just may understand just why after just one shift, I love to stand in the field listening to a chicken fart in the rain!

My head can be literally "ringing" with the residual noise pollution from work for an hour after leaving......and I am the lucky one.. I only do one shift.......

The Church Bell has finally stopped belting out it's monotone "dong"...and I have now marshalled the dogs in silence and am off out for a gentle and peaceful  walk down gypsy lane

whispering to myself "hey ho" very, very quietly