"It's all in your mind"

When I was a psychiatric nursing student, as part of our "reading list" we were asked to watch two movies. The 1965 film Repulsion and the 1948 American production of The Snake Pit.
The Roman Polanski film Repulsion chronicles the mental deterioration of young Belgian woman ( Catherine Deneuve), who is shut away in her isolated London flat, and features some striking sequences that outline  paranoid delusions and visual hallucinations suffered by someone who is experiencing an acute psychotic episode.
Even by today's standards, it is truly a disturbing piece of work.


The Snake Pit , which was more melodramatic in style, was a film that was instrumental in reforming in patient mental health treatment in the United States, for it graphically outlined abuse by ill- trained and damaged nursing staff as well as the more archaic aspects of asylum treatments. The film also looked at the inpatient experience through the eyes of a patient, which was revolutionary for the 1940s


Both films provided invaluable talking points during our nurse training.

Olivia De Havilland giving it "large"

The lone " unstable "woman who is caught up in a "is she really mentally ill or is she speaking the truth?" kind of drama has long been a bit of a Hollywood cliché. It is perhaps a more palatable way of presenting the true reality of a mental breakdown, a reality which has seldom resulted in box office gold and/or indeed critical acclaim
The realistic depiction of mental illness on film, by the very nature of the beast, is painful, hard work and can be intensely frightening...

Last night I went to see the Scandinavian film Babycall, a film that brought into play every "is she really a nutter?" cliche known to man.
The story centres upon the mentally fragile Anna, (Noomi Rapace) who has just escaped an abusive and violent relationship. She has been relocated into an isolated high story flat in Oslo with only  sparse contact with social services as company.
So that she can constantly monitor her troubled 9 year old son, she sets up a baby alarm in his room and during the night she starts to hear the screams of an unknown child being abused.....

However, things are not quite what they seem..........


Noomi Rapace

As a study of a woman that could be suffering from delusional schizophrenia, the film is a cracking watch, thanks primarily to Rapace who captures perfectly the brittleness and blunting of effect the abused Anna would show, but unfortunately the whole thing veers from an interesting psychological study of a mental breakdown into a somewhat confusing supernatural chiller.......

Rapace, I will give 9/10
The film , I would give a disappointing 6.5

Fields Of Dreams

I am always moved by people that have dreams, people that aspire to something.
You see it everyday in the High Street when another shop opens.
A livelihood that has to face the gauntlet of recession and hardship.
That shop is someone's dream.
A passion and a hope.

Last night I went to the Trelawnyd and Gwaenysgor Community Council meeting and in passing had chance to read a photocopy of the Prestatyn Weekly Newspaper dated the 23rd of October 1909.
In it was an article discussing an initiative by Mr Michael Antonio Ralli,who was the Greek Consul in Liverpool, to build our village Hall as a way of giving jobs and motivation to the local unemployed.
Ralli was a somewhat colourful character to be found in a predominantly Welsh village. He was a Greek from Odessa who made a small fortune importing cotton from Russia when American could not export it's own during the American Civil War and I find it fascinating that after a period living in London and Liverpool
he and his wife Polynmia, would end up dominating an insular and quiet backwater village.
A Ukrainian Greek as Lord of the Manor
How Exotic!

Polynmia Ralli

Trelawnyd ( or Newmarket as it was formally known) was Ralli's dream, he clearly wanted it to develop in status when he gifted the Memorial Hall to the village
The newspaper cutting eluded to that fact when it stated that Ralli's wish was to make Newmarket a "Garden City", a rather grand dream for a village of 600 simple souls, but a rather sweet one nevertheless.
 I wonder what Ralli would have made of the fact the Newmarket title was renamed Trelawnyd in 1954...
The "new" name was in keeping , I suppose, for it has a name that Ralli might of liked
.....Trelawnyd  literally  means " a town full of wheat"

"Cheese!"

I have always liked this wartime village photograph.

It depicts Trelawnyd's Civil defence volunteers in the 1940s, and I find it amazing that at least one member is still alive and living in the village today in 2012

Pat over at http://weaverofgrass.blogspot.co.uk/ talked recently about the Jubilee celebrations in her village which included a photograph being taken of the entire village population.

and that initiative coupled with my interest in the above photo has sparked a bit of an idea in me .

Next Year, I would like to organise a village "Group" photo.

The how's and why's all need ironing out but as a social document I think that it would be lovely to record forever the young and the old of Trelawnyd.

Auntie Glad, the Friendship group members, The Church Congregation, The Flower Show, the farmers, the people from the new estate, The Pub regulars,The School kids,  the villager elders, Uncle Tom Cobley and all would be invited to attend and the event could be an opportunity to raise some money for Charity or a village based initiative especially if it was part of our Open day which will be running again next year.

After a chance discussion with Pippa who lives in the Rectory, I now have a potential venue for the Photograph if the weather is good. She suggested that the ideal situation for any photograph would be on the lawns in front of her house with the Village Church in the background.

The photo could be taken from the first floor window.

Documenting history of places like Trelawnyd is becoming a bit of a passion for me.

The Characters I have interviewed for http://trelawnydhistory.blogspot.co.uk/ will be gone very soon, as will the next generation of characters which is snapping at their heels so to speak.

Things need documenting,

They need to be remembered

And perhaps, and more importantly to me,

I have a need to do it.

****************************************************

This morning , while I was picking the slugs out of the recycling bag ( don't ask) I heard a call from a neighbour singing out "Bunty's back!"

And there she was strutting around with the hens, helping herself to corn from the feeders, the phone has just gone from a woman in Holywell who has a small goat that needs re homing and I have a old dead hen to dispose of. The one that Leo and I worked so hard on when Chris' brother was visiting recently.
Lots to do.... and it looks,for a change, like it's going to be a nice day

Leo administering antibiotics 

" and..WHAT Time do you call this???"

23.00 last night I was scouring the field borders with one of those solar garden lights in my hands searching for two lost runner ducks.
I could have done without it all, I am full of cold at the moment...a product of a wet, depressing week here in one of the wettest June's this side of the Pennines
For some strange reason two of the older girls have been flitting off to God-knows-where for God-knows-what and have been strangely absent for much of the day. Only after dark have they finally appeared anxious and appearing rather contrite at the front of the duck house, where I have found them quietly waiting for muggins here to use my opposable thumb skills to open the house door.
Last night it was going on 11.30 when the two appeared, a stupid time for a surly teenager to stagger home let alone two stupid ducks with brains the size of an average peanut.
The two girls were ripe for fox bait, and I told them so, but logic and anger is lost on ducks that spend most of their lives screaming and running around if you fart in the wrong direction, so I had to shut up and put them to bed with a kiss.
As I was giving the ducks a ticking off several surly teenagers walked up the lane for the cottage. It happens quite a bit as they tend to occasionally congregate at a "picnic area" in one of the sheep fields so that nefarious teenage activities can take place.
Seeing me standing in the field holding a solar light  up in my right hand, I heard one hiss to his friend

"Fuck.... it's the statue of liberty", which I thought was quite a witty statement to say after a probable 2 litres of cheap cider and a couple of large spliffs
I always thought that waiting up, late a night for the kids to come home from a fun filled night out, was something that would never-EVER happen to me.


I knew I would never experience that gut wrenching anxiety that parents have to go through when they think that paedophiles are hiding in every phone booth, just waiting to get their grubby little mitts on some teenager's knicker elastic but what is happening in reality?
I am finding myself,standing at the lounge window, chewing  my fingernails to the bone-willing 2 ducks that look like upright wine bottles to come home before curfew........what will I be saying next?...I ask myself
Will I catch myself yelling at Boris "You treat this place like a hotel!" when he drops his grain all over the floor of the turkey house or perhaps I will resort to the tried and tested " well if you don't like my rules you can get your own place!!!" when the geese nip another field visitor....
We all turn into our parents.......it's only a matter of time


ps Bunty has flown the coop so to speak! She has left a small space on the cottage guttering and a load of shit on the tiles....I wish her well

Dinnerladies

Shelagh Openshaw ( the actress Lil Roughley)  appeared in DINNERLADIES for part of only one episode
but writer and performer Victoria Wood very generously gave her one of the best lines in the entire sit come
Don't worry , you don't have to trawl through all ten minutes of it, just go to 5 minutes 33 seconds and play for a minute or two)
Enjoy

Frankenstein and dinner with the Vicar

Now I have never really been a fan of the film maker Danny Boyle.
I liked 28 Days Later...
But the other movies he has made, I can generally take or leave. Having said this, I had heard good things about his stage production of Frankenstein at the National Theatre, and so last night we went to the the encore screening of it at the Scala which starred Jonny Lee Miller as the Monster and flavour-of-the-month Benedict Cummerbatch , as Victor.
The play surprised me.It surprised me because of Miller's performance which dominated the stage with a physicality that wavered impressively between child like exuberance and menacing horror.
And it surprised me because the innovative staging which amongst other things, incorporated a massive steam locomotive whose moving parts were made up of actors ,a massive, fluid chandelier light show and an odd drum-like womb out of which the monster is born, naked and helpless.

Boyle's design is , at times, breathtaking and I couldn't help wondering just what he is going to pull out of his bag with the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
If indeed it is on a par with what I saw last night, the whole thing is going to be thoughtful, slightly quirky and visually very VERY punchy!



Apparently Boyle is using live chickens in his opening ceremony production
So it can't be all that bad!!!!
Tonight we are off out again!
(yes it's all go in Trelawnyd)
I am accompanying Chris to a church dinner in the nearby village of Cwm ( where the three parish congregations in the area get together for a bit of a bun fight)

I am driving and have promised a few villagers that I will give them a lift.....and I had to laugh yesterday when Mrs Trellis called around to see if there was room for her.

I told her that there was and that I would make sure the car was a bit cleaner before I called up for her and after slyly looking at the dog snot smeared windows of the berlingo parked in the driveway she said wryly

"I'll bring my own towel to sit on"

ps Bunty is still sat comfortably on the cottage guttering this morning

Bunty's Little Life

 

She was there again this morning.

Just as she had been over the last four days

A weak homing pigeon sat quietly on the guttering of the cottage

Waiting patiently for some food.

All the neighbours and neighbours grandchildren  are aware that she is about

They all spare her a quick look as they pass,

and we gossip briefly about her when they see me scattering corn on the road where she has realised food will be left

One of the kids has called her Bunty.

In the great scheme of things , a little life of a knackered old pigeon means absolutely nothing,

But do you know what?

to me, who it could be said shares a quiet village based little life

The fate of  Bunty has become quite important

 

In Darkness

Real life heroes are ordinary people that make extraordinary decisions in life.
This certainly can be said of the little known ( well in this country anyway) Polish Sewer worker called Leopold Socha. During the German occupation of the city of Lvov during WW2, Socha found by accident a group of Jews hiding away in the sewers beneath the Ghetto. He agreed to help them for a price, eager to supplement his meagre wages, but over their 18 month period of captivity his mission to protect the small group of survivors became less mercenary and much more personal in nature as his risked his life and those of his own wife and child to care for, what he later termed as "his Jews"
For people that have seen Schindler's List, the story of the reluctant hero will be all too familiar, but director Agnieszka Holland in her film In Darkness has closely followed Socha's emotional  journey which runs  alongside the harrowing subterranean experiences of his eleven charges rather than to concentrate on the German brutalities of the Ghetto Jews.
It is a difficult film at times to watch, especially as we don't have the soaring emotional finale of Spielberg's film to "enjoy" (There is merely an exhausted sense of "getting through things", when the final reel has run)
But, it is a film with some incredible power and dramatic punch all of it's own.


Robert Wieckiewicz gives a convincing and non showy turn as the Leopold, as does Benno Fürmann (right) who plays, Mundek the leader of the Jewish refugees. Both actors give their characters a depth and believability without resorting to the tried and tested  bouts of emotional romping.
A moving, atmospheric and worthy drama
9/10