Manipulated By A Five Inch Hen, Singing Locals and Claire Danes

It's a mixed bag this morning.

Yesterday, two of the ULB cockerels left the field for pastures new

( ULB = useless little bugger)

I have decided to keep Big Bertha, the pekin hen who is just five inches high and five inches wide.

She is laying well, and provides a regular supply of " gift eggs" to people in the village.

She is a real sweetie with more chutzpah than a bus load of Joan Rivers...she can wrap me around her little finger

note... no feet!

That bloody awful manipulation of the emotions

BRITAIN's GOT TALENT is back on the telebox again.

It's not something we watch , but I must admit I did give two local lads  a few minutes of my time when they appeared on Saturday night.

Described as sandwich makers Adam and Richard, these two hail from Holywell which is a tiny town   a few miles North East of Trelawnyd....

And I must admit that I kind of delight in the blatant manipulation of the emotions by the production team's clever editing and use of music and the crowd......

I doubt they have a career but I wish them well..

Trelawnyd needs a couple of young voices in the choir!

Anyhow speaking of manipulation and emotion

Yesterday afternoon, we sat down to watch the 1994 film version of Little Women

If you have not seen it, do so, for it is a cracking masterclass in good acting and emotional free falling.

Take a look at this scene, where the ailing Beth is given her Christmas Piano

Claire Danes is wonderful in the role.... 

And I blub every time I see it...

WHAT FILM SCENE MAKES YOU CRY.?

Catching Up With Sleep

ok time for an "arrrrhhhh" moment

I have not been sleeping well at night with all this sciatica lark

So I have been sneaking off to bed in an afternoon for a sneaky few zzzzzzs when I can

Chris snapped this photo this afternoon ....

And yes Meg was fast asleep on my head.

Youth

I am looking after a neighbour's house at the moment while he is in hospital. I will also keep an eye on him when he returns home tomorrow, it's a rum deal to have a knee replacement in your mid eighties.

I am sure my neighbour won't mind me photographing a trophy which sits in his hallway, pride of place on the telephone table. This is the "Hogarth Cup" originally dated 1925' and was presented annually to the best Billiard player of The Newmarket Young Men's Club.

( for those that don't know Trelawnyd was formally known as Newmarket)

Back then the village was busy, self sufficient and " younger" than it is today. There was a youth club, girls' friendly society, young wives group, Village  Welfare Committee and drama group. There were three village stores, a sweet shop and even a fish and chip shop with tables and chairs! Two pubs, a football club and league . There was a WI, the choir of course and the chapels and church, but the Flower Show , which I am such a part of, did not start until the early 1970s, a later addition to village tradition.

As Auntie Glad recently said " The village had less houses , but more people back then"

And so like most rural communities of today, Trelawnyd is now a place with an older population, sure we still have the committees, the choir, the friendship group, the flower show, but apart from a sporadic youth club, the village does not really have much to offer the teenage population .....but I guess that was always the way of the world....

Now I am banging on about all this by way of a big up. last week my allotment supervisor, village elder and all around " organiser" Islwyn turned up on the field unannounced with two of the village teens in tow.

I don't know just how he did it, but in he space of two hours the lads had shifted a huge amount of dirt from one side of bosoms to the other, actively preparing the beds for planting, and saving me a huge amount of work and effort....

The lads were polite, and hardworking and I was totally shocked by what they achieved in just part of an afternoon.... Islwyn mentioned at he would like to mentor one of the lads, to teach him some skills such as dry stone walling and this little gesture on his behalf , seems to have been taken up by the lad,

It is a laudable project me thinks.

I gave each lad some eggs for their moms and will bung each a tenner when I next see them.....their help couldn't have come a better time.... for my sciatica seems to be getting worse

Hey ho....

Below is a newspaper clipping of the "young wives club"from a few years ago....( love the poncho by the way) several ladies from the front row still live in the village today!

2 Seconds Later.........

.....he took out a huge clump of my hair.........

Caught Out At Tesco

Yesterday I started with sciatica
I suspect this was caused by a combination of lugging 25 kilo bags of corn, digging veg beds and coping with a body that is nearly 51 ( and a brain that thinks it is only 28)
The pain has been nagging, constant and bleeding irritating
It has also been embarrassing, because the main locus of the discomfort  has been located directly in the centre of my left gluteal maximus ( ie my left arse cheek) so every few minutes I have been delving down my pants to give myself a bit of a rub....or failing that I have been leaning on any supportable surface with my left leg slightly elevated.....it seems to help.....
It's not a good look.....
Anyhow.....yesterday I had the car, so, after buying and collecting animal feed from the wholesalers  ( and rubbing my arse in front of the slightly uneasy shop owner Jean) I took the dogs for a limp on the beach........
On the way home, and realising it was lunchtime, I popped into the new Tescos to collect a couple of items and was just crossing the car park after my shop when a car beeped me from outside the store
it was  Leslie, my elder sister's husband's sister's daughter( think about it) ......and obviously she reads the blog because she yelled
" have you just bought a scotch egg?"
Strangely enough I had ( emergency scotch eggs are an ideal panacea to nerve pain)
And so , despite my discomfort I picked the two pack out of my plastic bag and waved it gayly at Leslie across the car park.......
she laughed her tits off....
It helped me to cope with the pain...........
Strange who actually reads my blog eh?

Anyhow speaking of Scotch eggs..... Fellow blogger Em ( a delightfully talented lady who lives in the far South West)  will be on the receiving end of a quality ( and pricey) Scotch Egg Creation when I send one ( wrapped in bubble wrap) to her today in way of a thank you....
She is sending me some of her artwork of our dogs very soon........
A scotch egg is a small price to pay.............me thinks

Oh my arse.......

" Not For The Homophobic"

A couple of days ago a local village blogsite gave my Going Gently  blogspot

a kind bit of a big up.

Subsequently my viewing figures have increased noticeably 

Which is nice

I am fickle enough to acknowledge the fact but

Something on that blog site sort of bothered me though

And it was the beginning of this statement

( I adored the second sentence by the way)

"Not for the homophobic. 

This man is seriously funny and entertaining, he lives in Trelawnyd."

" Not for the homophobic"  was obviously a way of describing  Going Gently ....and this intrigued me, for the fact that I may have a long standing ( and deep rooted ) obsession with Russell Crowe dressed as a gladiator seems to me to take a somewhat second class position behind my love of anything feathered, canine, zombie-ish, cinematic or indeed anything egg shaped and covered in deep fried breadcrumbs.....

Homophobia has always baffled me somewhat

It never really computes that someone may be upset with me by nature of my schoolgirl crushes or the fact I have shared most of my life with a hairy faced academic with a deep voice

Ok

Dislike me for being a gobshite, dislike me for my ability to be a real bitch sometimes

And even dislike me for my inability to say no to needy bulldogs that need a new home.

But don't dislike me for just being an old poof

That's soooooooooooooooo 1980s

PS to the Previous Post

I was going to add a few photos to the previous post, but for some reason blogger would not let me do it on my IPad ....the high winds didn't just topple the one hen house last night.....they brought down a portion of the ancient Church wall, whipped slates from the Church roof and carried away Pat, the animal helpers garden closhes.
Sometimes I forget that we are perched six hundred feet above the coastal plain.....

As the dogs played

I checked the wind damage to the Church wall

( the rocking of the trees behind the wall

Seems to have brought the wall down)

More repair work for me

Della from Pen-y- Cefn Isa

Braves the wind

Slates missing from the church roof

Troublesome Wind

Now I could bang on for an absolute age about my flatulence problems. Indeed... I once blasted out a fart worthy of the Queen Mary's fog horn in front of a group of shocked pensioners as I suddenly had to bend over a waist high fridge freezer in order to reach a packet of Yorkshire puddings in Aldi a couple of years ago...... But I think I will leave the subject well and truly alone ....
No today's post is a bit of a clear up post, for last night North Wales was subjected to some of the strongest gales of the year so far.

The Ukrainian village took the full force of the South Westerlies. 

But as luck would have it only one hen house took flight at the height of the stormy weather and in the dark it rolled over and over like the passenger liner in The Poseidon Adventure across the field.

Ironically one of the only two residents of the coop was a large lame Orpington called Shelley Winters, and when I eventually went out to check the damage, I found both hens, shocked but uninjured huddled in the remains of their nesting box.
This morning both characters are non the worse for their ordeal.....both have spent the night sat in a cardboard box in the shed.

Shelley Winters and abandoned bantam Buster! Survived the night