Where's my pastry cutter?

It's almost 11pm  and I still need to bake my quiche and sugar the top of a fruit pie....
The kitchen looks as though a gaggle of fat ladies have just exploded inside it
and to complete a slightly surreal scene, a set of vegetables that have been fashioned into a whole collection of strange animals and people adorn the window sills.

I do this to myself every year ( all this pre event anxiety) and I must admit that I kind of love the slightly anarchic build up to The Trelawnyd Flower Show when cooked entries need cooking and flower arrangements need arranging.....
It's the same every year! 
This blog entry will have to suffice, 
Tomorrow I will be far top busy to scratch me arse, let alone put my oh so interesting feelings down on paper
I run around like a headless fart while Sylvia and Irene who are more or less a decade older than I ,do the leg work in the memorial hall! without even breaking a sweat........they are professionals at all this... old village ladies have flower Show organisation in their genes..... it's a natural gift!
Today the Hall has been transformed from 1950 community centre.... into a 1950's community centre with show tables in it..... through low level bullying I have conscripted 113 entries already ( a record for me) and many of those are from readers of Going Gently!
(tomorrow is the official day when locals can enter the show)

It has tickled the Show Committee that today one entry actually arrived from New Zealand! and only a week ago another popped up from Warriwood in Australia..
Trelawnyd Show has gone all global!

I won't blog now until Saturday night!
so come back then to see a blow by blow account of the event...the novelty vegetables are worth the price of admission alone!

9

NAD

I rang the doctors surgery to chase up those blood results that were taken for my M.O.T a few weeks ago.
The receptionist read all of the test results without knowing that I was an intensive care nurse, a fact I found rather odd to say the least.
"CRP NAD"
"Creatinine NAD"
"Fasting Blood Glucose NAD"
"Urea NAD"
"LFT NAD"
etc.etc etc
She read all down the long line without a pause and I thanked her once she had finished
NAD for all that don't know nursing terms, is the thankful acronym of "No Abnormality Detected"




I was thinking about this all before and after a chance meeting with someone I am friendly with. I bumped into them by chance when I was in the supermarket buying cake stuff for the flower show, and it was the sort of meeting where they needed to share some sad personal health news, (which were found through a simple diagnostic test similar to my own)........ while all I could do was to sympathetically listen.

I have blogged about life's "curved balls" before have I not?
One minute you can be tootling along, quite nicely thank you very much indeed.... and the next moment whammo! life's a f*cking bitch and you are treading water in shit.

One phone call conversation and a mild anxiety caused by my middle aged body..and I am feeling mighty fine.
One different kind of phone call, and my friends now face the challenge of their lives.
Fate?,kismet?destiny? accident?........whatever you call it.....life's a fickle son of a bitch sometimes...
Is it not?

The Great British Bake Off

George looks bright in himself but continues to suffer from a jippy tummy. A dog with the runs is not too much fun, especially when everyone has to tip toe carefully past caramel coloured puddles on the kitchen floor. The vet has given him the once over and seems fairly unconcerned with his condition, George came away with a fun ride in the car...
I came away 60£ lighter and with a pharmacy of medications under my arm.

With the Olympics now finished, there is a new competition that has sparked the old imagination and interest and that is the quintessentially British pastime of competitive cake making!

The first episode of The Great British Bake Off (BBC Tuesday Nights) made for a fascinating watch. 12 amateur bakers from all over the UK produce their own very individual set of buns and cakes against the clock and in competition with each other. Silver Fox Judge Paul Hollywood and Virginia McKenna look-a-like cook Mary Berry are on hand to assess the confectionery while the pithy presenters Mel Giedroyc & Sue Perkins eek up the pressure by popping back and forth in the marquee when oven disasters rear their ugly head!Of course the whole thing is contrived as hell. The bakers are not just housewives from the local WI they are "serious" cooks "with a passion " for baking and each has their own back story which is set up to endear them to the general public.... we have an Asian student, and Black midwife, a ginger computer looking geek, some sexy looking young men and pleasing looking women, a vicar's wife and even the obligatory elderly Professor type who plays the cello......I was half expecting to see an Albanian lesbian in a wheelchair cooking away in the back but I think that the producers bottled it.....

Judges Hollywood and the delightful Mary Berry

Having said this, I must admit that I really enjoyed the whole , bunting covered slice of "middle England"
Everything is presented in a Kath Kidston way......of butter icing, doilies and "more tea Vicar?" 
An Ideal panacea to Olympic withdrawals and a resurgence of the bloody recession

Play Our Song Sam

Crap film
Great Gag

Why Do We Do It To Ourselves?

Puppy George (with Meg)

George seems a lot better this morning. He has eaten a bowl of chicken and rice, his panting has subsided (the symptom that was really bothering me) and apart from having a huge wet crap on the floor last night, he seems much better.
I know that the emotional investment I have with my animals ( especially the ones that live in the house), is vast.
and  I perhaps alluded to this fact yesterday, when I hinted that my anxieties do soar somewhat when one of them becomes off colour or unwell.
Only yesterday it seemed that the dogs, all of them, were just puppies. Now, I feel somewhat melancholic when I realise that they all have a firm hold on doggy middle age. 
In a year or two they will be pensioners, and I will be facing that awful time which Kipling described so well in that poem "Power of the Dog". He said   "You give your heart to a dog to tear"
And it's true.

William & Meg

I still miss my lost dogs dreadfully. Finlay less so because in many ways William has sort of morphed into Finlay's place, but the likes of Constance and especially Mabel still have the ability to pull at my emotions when I remember their quirks and personalities.
When dogs are with you 24/7, they become as necessary to a person as breathing.

Some people say that they could never care for another pet  again when they lose a much loved dog or cat.
I never used to fully appreciate just why they should  need to protect themselves from future emotional pain and grief ,after all animals give you so much more in those oh so short years that they are with you... but now I think , I can understand just where they are coming from., especially when the pets that you keep are starting to show those little tell-tale signs of getting older.

hey
ho

The Olympic Closing Party

I have just finished a somewhat animated phone conversation with Nigel .
We picked the closing ceremony of the Olympics to pieces
and both agreed the whole thing should have been that little bit more camp with Dame Shirley shaking some of her 70 year old butt to an audience that obviously loved a bit of tongue in cheek entertainment
If Wales ever gets the Olympics.....Mr Coe  please note.....my fee is a lot less than Danny Boyle's
ps. Chris Hoy ( I am reliably informed) LOVES Shirley Bassy!

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life..trala,trala...trala

It was a long night
I wont go on about the Olympic Closing Ceremony. Suffice to say I did enjoy Eric Idle performing "Always look on the bright side of life" complete with roller-skating nuns, high kicking Roman centurions and large rugby type men dressed as traditional Welsh women.
The crowd loved this piece of British lunacy too and after three hours of singing and dancing around the Damian Hurst's iconic Union Jack the whole thing was finally ( and thankfully) all over!
I went to bed late and didn't sleep.
I was waiting for Alf the guinea fowl to be dispatched by a passing badger or foraging fox as I lay in bed....and true to form one predator did exactly that at 2.30am when a brief guinea fowl scream echoed around the graveyard in the quiet night
He refused to fly up into his roosting tree last night after I noticed that he had been injured in a joust with fellow male Hughie, and even though I had tried to catch him, he had just enough energy to keep out of my way.
Such is life (and death) on a  0.7 acre field in Welsh Wales

By 3am I noticed that George was restless and unwell, and I was still listening out for him at 4.30am before I eventually managed to fall asleep.This morning I am toying with idea of taking him to the vets later today. It looks like a stomach upset, but I will reassess it all later if he settles after his breakfast

When it comes to dogs and illness, I know I get far too worried far too quickly..... 
I am a product of losing 2 adored bulldogs in quick succession.
Perhaps when dogs and illnesses are concerned

I don't always "look on the bright side of life"

A Strange Little Tale

A couple of months ago I received an email from a chap called Andrew Moore.He had contacted the clerk of our community council for some advice, and the clerk, knowing of my interest in Trelawnyd History had passed my name to him.

Andrew told me that two volumes of an old personal diary had come into his possession. The diary had been originally bought in 1970 at a car boot sale in Nottingham, and told of the adventures of a mysterious chap with the initials JHD as he joined the SS Manipur at Birkenhead on a return voyage to Calcutta a hundred years ago. 

Andrew through some very detailed research which could have put the sleuthing of Miss Marple to shame, eventually found that the Captain of the SS Manipur had an executor with the initials JHD, and through more obsessive digging he eventually found out that the author of the exotic and fascinating far eastern diaries he had been reading for so long was indeed a chap called John Hilton Davies.

John Davies  and his life seems to have captured the imagination of Andrew Moore, who eventually found out that he lived in a village called Newmarket just before his death in 1956. Newmarket became Trelawnyd in 1954.and his email to me, was a sort of last ditched effort to put some flesh on the bones of this unknown Liverpudlian, who had spent his early days in the India of the Raj.

All I had to go on was a name (Davies is, as you can appreciate a bloody common name in Wales) and a house name of "John's" which I thought, seemed somewhat odd.

I immediately went to see Auntie Glad, who instantly recognised the house name...."Uncle John" used to live there, she said without hesitation, " It was a name of a cottage just underneath the Gop"

Seven of the older residents of the village also remembered John well. All referred to him as  "Uncle John" a "kindly old guy who would give you anything if you needed it" One lady recalled him lending  her a bowler hat for a play at the memorial hall when another remembered him always "with a open bottle of wine ready for visitors"....

It was lovely for me to be able to put , just a hint of flesh on the bones of this larger than life character who had become somewhat of an obsession of a guy who had found some dusty old diaries that no one had wanted.

Small world eh?

John Hilton Davies....ready to shoot elephants and Tigers!

I wonder if anyone will "find" my blog diaries as fascinating long after I am dead and gone......?