A bog standard Saturday me thinks
I have been somewhat impulsive however because after giving the dogs a two mile walk
I have just brewed myself a cup of tea, donned my Mrs Hopkins' homemade slippers and
have just eaten a whole box of coconut macaroons,
One after another
Sometimes the reading of a little golden nugget of a blog post will spark a long distant memory of one's own. This is the joy of having such an eclectic library at the end of your fingertips.
This morning Cro's Meanderings (http://magnonsmeanderings.blogspot.com/ ) told a rather bittersweet story which outlined a tiny moment in time when he suddenly matured as a young man.
And this rather gentle post reminded me of a painful growing up moment of my own from when I was a boy of around eight
When I was little, it was acceptable that housewives like my mother had a little help at home .My grandmother called up three times a week during the holidays and she would cook, clean , iron the clothes and provide a steady humorous environment for her bored grandchildren and her naturally anxious daughter.
When my sister and I was having lunch with my mother and grandmother one day, something rather funny struck me about this ' arrangement' and feeling rather pompous I chirped up at the table
" when Gran comes here she always gets all of her dinners for free"
I didn't get a reaction to what I thought was a clever comment so like a little smart arse I repeated myself several times , that was until my mother very quietly said
"That's not a very nice thing to say"
By that time, like most little boys with questionable social skills, I had already dug the hole and jumped into it, so as I was incessantly chipping "why? Why?" I was suddenly stopped by my twin sister who was looking at my grandmother.
I followed her gaze and was suddenly quietend when I saw a quiet hurt on my grandmother's face. She said nothing, but with her eyes never leaving her plate she silently and carefully ate her lunch with care and precision..
I think I learnt more about life in that one second than I ever had done in all of my eight years on this planet.
To this day, some forty two years later, I still remember my regret and shame at this silly little remark as if it only happened yesterday.
The quiet dignity of my grandmothers behaviour and the sad shame and uncharacteristic calmness shown by my mother at that dinner table will always be with me.
It's only a quick blog today I have been extra busy and have not even had my usual ' breakfast blog moment' with a cup of milicarno as yet : the wind has demolished the duck house during the morning, which gave the hysterical runners something else to get their slimlined knickers in a twist about and
I have spent most of the morning repairing it, then had to go down to Prestatyn to walk my sister's dog before walking my own in between preparing supper and retrieving Camilla from the riding stables field yet again.
The gale force wind has unsettled her, even though her dreadful crash landing of yesterday has not quite put her off from spreading her wings, so to speak. I wouldn't mind as much if she had the sense to fly back home.... But she's a classy Canadian gal ( like so many are) and prefers to be carried back home, wrapped in an old woollen overcoat.
(Listen I'll the take the compliment in the spirit it was given)
It also got me to thinking just who do others 'here' resemble from the world of celebrity ? Now I know I have mused a little about this before..as we have already debated that Tom Stephenson is the spit of John Hurt with a hangover...but who do YOU think you look like?
I would be interested to know
Anyhow, I am already late...I have not had time to even wash my face, so disguising the awful windswept hairstyle with a hat and covering up the spilled coffee stains down my front with the same coat I wrapped camilla in.... I am off out
Forgive this second blog which supplements my Mary Berry love fest
I bumped into Auntie Gladys in the village at 10.20 am when I was out with the dogs. she was walking down towards the church and she reminded me that today was Tommy 'Gop's' funeral day Tommy Gop was a much respected farmer from the village. He farmed the prestigious Gop farm for many years, a farm that dominates the approach to Trelawnyd from the West.
Gladys is an old hand at funerals, especially farmers' services, and so she quite wisely had planned to arrive over an hour before the service was to start.
This is not as bizarre as it sounds, for at the very same time, a whole gaggle of villagers were making their way down to the church to make sure they managed to get into the Church.....an hour later over seventy people were sheltering against the south wall of the Church out of the gale force winds.
As the Church bell rang out, I took this brief video, before I took my place by the graveyard fence to give my respects to the arriving family. You can tell just how windy it has been today, if you look carefully you can see one of the hen house roofs lying messily on the ground.
The wind increased in it's intensity throughout the day, so much so, that when I started to round up the geese as the light started to fade, a sudden sharp gust of wind caught Camilla's outstretched wings and the Canada goose took off like a remote controlled plane.
Now Camilla is the only animal on the field that has the capacity for self propelling flight, she has never done so because her flock are domesticated geese which have lost their free flying abilities, so her sudden 'freedom' was I suppose as much as a shock to her than it was for me.
Up she went, flapping and panicking to perhaps sixty or seventy feet, before another few gusts of wind buffeted her away over the riding stable fields.
I chased after her.
She glided downwards for a bit, got caught by another gust then after shaving some hawthorn hedging she clipped a telephone line that crossed the field and crashed heavily to the ground where she lay still.
I was convinced she was dead, and galloped through the horsefield like a mad Alec until I reached her.
She lay with her eyes open, and was very still, but she was very much alive and blinked at me with a somewhat surprised look on her face.
I wrapped her in my coat and carried her back to the field where the rest of her little flock honked noisily at me as I placed her inside the goose house to recover.
Out of all of my field animals, the geese are perhaps my favourites...I couldn't quite bare it if I lost one to a freak gust of wind.
A funeral and a wayward goose...
A normal Wednesday.....not.
