http://www.police.uk/

This morning I was out around five thirty, giving the dogs a wee walk. Local shepherd Graham stopped his pick up in the lane. He was out rounding up his sheep from the main road, thieves looking for agricultural equipment had broken into his fields during the night.

Thieves don't care about closing gates behind themselves.

Mercifully, crime has not really touched us in this corner of North Wales. But this does not mean that it's not about. I logged into http://www.police.uk/ to review what crime is prevalent in our

 local area and was surprised to see 

the following table of results for the past year.

Category	Total	Percentage
Anti-social behaviour	26	52.0%
Burglary	0	0.0%
Criminal damage and arson	3	6.0%
Drugs	1	2.0%
Other crime	5	10.0%
Other theft	3	6.0%
Public disorder and weapons	3	6.0%
Robbery	0	0.0%
Shoplifting	3	6.0%
Vehicle crime	2	4.0%
Violent crime	4	8.0%

Apart from a couple of dozen antisocial incidents probably fuelled by cheap cider, I was surprised to see 3 public disorder incidents involving weapons ( WEAPONS!) and 4 episodes of violent crime

It makes for a sobering read.

I wish I hadn't logged into the website now.

It has depressed me.
PS
I have just checked the stats for our previous address in Sheffield. In Trelawnyd there were 4 crimes reported ( including antisocial behaviour) in April. In Hillsborough ( within a mile radius of our old house) there was 141
Yikes

The Real Lena Horne

On the back of this morning's post

I have been reading a little about a performer I am sorry to say, that I knew nothing about

She was quite a lady

Always be smarter than the people who hire you.” 

“It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.”

“you have to be taught to be secondclass;you're not born that way”

In my early days I was a sepia Hedy Lamarr. Now I`m black and a woman, singing my own way

I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.

Could You Just?

How many times have I have heard this over the years?
It is a phrase that is usually accompanied by a slightly pained expression
A tilt of the head
A half smile
and occasionally a bit of desperate flirting
"Could you just?"
I always know what's coming next.
.................this morning there was a knock at the door
A woman with that slightly hopeful expression smiled somewhat theatrically at me
" Could you just...........?"

....and in a cardboard box in the back of her car, was sat a lone, elderly chocolate coloured duck.
" has she a name?"' I asked the woman
She blushed slightly
"Her name is Lena Horne"

No more " stormy Weather"

Bemoaning Letterboxes

Hopefully, very soon, all of the Community Council news will be placed on line and available to all. In the interim, we thought it prudent that the council make a bit of a PR effort and so drafted a brief newsletter for Trelawnyd and it's sister village of Gwaenysgor.
I volunteered to deliver the Trelawnyd newsletters.
Yesterday I completed almost three quarters of the task, and I must say, that after two hours of jamming my hands through a couple of hundred letter boxes, I now have a healthy respect for the hidden dangers faced by the average postman.
The nemesis of the modern day postie must be this new fad for PVC doors.
Gone have those swinging metal letter boxes of old. You remember the ones I mean, wide open slots you could slip a large bundle of second post letters through with a satisfying PLOP!
Now we have menacing spring loaded metal gin traps which are guarded by stiff nylon draught excluder bristles. Pushing a flyer through these objects of torture can be more difficult than doing a gynaecological examination on an irritable pig !
By the time I had slogged all the way up High Street, I was feeling somewhat fed up with the whole operation..... Thank goodness the last house on the hill didn't seem to have a finger crunching post box at all.......I had to jam their newsletter through the bloody cat flap.

Opera Shopping

My favourite Supermarket

( I was given a scotch egg from Waitrose by Camilla's former owner's daughter today

9/10). It was lovely.

Anyhow I did enjoy this little Opera interlude too!

Thanks Megan

A Reunion for Camilla (updated)

This afternoon , an elderly chap will be visiting the field. He lives over 200 miles away, but will be stopping by with his daughter in order to have a reunion of sorts.
He will be coming to see Camilla.
Two years ago, he found what he thought to be a grey duckling in his garden.
He placed the duckling in the conservatory, fed it porridge and panicked when it not only survived, but thrived under his care.
Only then did he realise that he had no real idea of how to look after a duckling who was doubling in size every few days ( or so it seemed)
Luckily his daughter reads my blog, and so, after some minor telephone and email negotiations the ducking was transported all the way up to Wales.
Of course the duckling wasn't a duckling at all. She was a buxom and rather adorable Canada goose gosling with big, black sad eyes and feet the size of dinner plates.
I fell in love with her as soon as she arrived
She was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen
I have a thing for goslings
Readers may remember that I teamed her up with an orphaned chick called badger, whose mother had been killed by a marauding boar badger a week or so previously.
The two birds were inseparable until Camilla eventually joined the other field geese when they realised that she was indeed " one of them" and Badger took over as alpha male cockerel in the Ukrainian Village.

Camilla and Badger in their salad days

I will post some photos of the " reunion" a bit later. Funny that two plus years after the event, Camilla's former carer still has that " bond" with the orphan that so luckily found him in his bungalow back garden one spring morning.

Camilla gave her old owner a rather shy but sweet welcome

World War Z

She may look worried...they are headed to Wales

From the get-go WORLD WAR Z  looked promising.
Seconds after we meet Brad Pitt, his surprisingly vapid and rather plain wife and their  two Hollywood kiddies, a galloping zombie hoard overwhelms the city of Boston ( well its stand in of Glasgow) in a tidal wave of the undead reminiscent of  chilling initial chase sequence in 28 Weeks Later.
Unfortunately things go all tits up after this, as this global " Walking Dead"  disaster movie doesn't really get off the ground., despite its 190 million dollar production costs, which is a bleeding shame, as some of the set pieces ( zombies running amok on a passenger plane ) are really quite good.

Pitt plays a UN trouble shooter who is given the remit to find a cure for the pandemic. He is smuggled into various " hotspots" around the world ( From New York, the Mid Atlantic, then Jerusalem via South Korea) in search for clues that may stop the infection and ends up bizarrely surviving a plane crash with a one armed female Israeli soldier in the middle of the Welsh Countryside!
( Chris was laughing hysterically at this point)

I was hoping that World War Z was going to be a big screen Walking Dead.
It isn't.
It is in fact a bloated, drama-less, and rather uninteresting CGI laden mess.
5/10
I had to eat a Marks & Spencer Scotch egg to cheer myself up.

Guilty Pleasure

It's a late pointless sort of entry today.
By the time I got home after work, locked the animals up safely for the night , walked the dogs, washed the dishes and collected a fish and chip supper ( I know I know!)I KNOW....!
It was ( and IS) a quarter to ten.

Time for some cultured relaxation with Jane Austin and Classic FM?
Nawwww....
I have settled down to watch a crappy tv documentary entitled Finding Bigfoot
Well my usual pleasure that is CHOPPER COPPERS isnt on tonight

What's your guilty pleasure?