Stop For A Chat & Bake Off Blues

The death of the Red Faced Welsh Farmer earlier in the year has meant that great chunks of my weekly routine have been left somewhat intact and gossip free. Once you caught a glimpse of his familiar red landrover,bouncing towards you you braced yourself for at least a 45 minute chat, whether it be a gripe about community Council antics or a lively debate of the ins and outs of village life.
I often see others from the village, out on their daily walks , but our conversations are never as convoluted and detailed as the ones I used to enjoy with the RFWF and I can now catch up with the jobs of the day.
I now miss those 45 minute times.
Yesterday I noticed an old chap leaning on the gate of the field. I don't see him often, so I went over for a chat, giving him a couple of spare eggs for his pocket. He asked me about Mary's hutch and I told him of her story and he was intrigued by the sheep who kicked their feet sharply at Winifred who bounced around the field like a puppy with that awful lurid purple plastic bone in her mouth.
He was in no rush to move on.
Eventually I left him to fill the water and pellet feeders and when I returned a good while later he pointed at the Mary's hutch and asked " is that rabbit all right? It hasn't moved for over half an hour"
I had to laugh a little
The eyes can play tricks on you when you are 80.
He had been carefully watching a small cabbage.

Another of the nice characters was voted off  The Great British Bake Off  last night. Grandmother Christine ( the one with the calm voice and the winning smile) left the show amid a flurry of contestant tears. Ruby ( less pouting last night I thought) will I suspect win as the chirpy Welsh girl Becca and the mousy but talented Francis got a real mauling from the judges.
I am also becoming a little sorry for Kimberly, who is being manipulated by the producers into a kind of " baddie" role. Her confidence is not a virtue in British tv competitions.
The programme seems to have lost something since Howard and Glenn have left.......the men seemed to have given he whole thing some heart.

Going light

A light Sussex " going light" this morning

Some hens just fade away when it is their time to die. They don't really look ill. They just stop eating and sit themselves away . It is a phenomenon known as " going light".
You can give them antibiotics, you can tempt them with titbits such as scrambled egg, but the outcome is always the same, like sad little ghosts, they seem to disappear gently into the ether.
Usually I cull these poor birds but only do so when they go completely off their feet, before that,they are placed with the gentle blind cockerel Cogburn, safe from the bullying general flock, and they spend a few days in some semblance of peace and quiet.
Dying birds are often pecked to death when the smell of death is in the air

I have seen patients fade away in a similar way, it is as if a light has been switched off inside themselves, and like the " going light" hens, they are in desperate need of being somewhere safe. A place where they can just be still.

When I eventually " go light" I want it to be at home.
With my own pillow under my head.
And with a dog at my side.

Shelling Peas

Chris has been suffering from a chesty cold, and so disappeared back to bed yesterday afternoon for a sleep. The dogs had been walked, the household jobs completed, the dinner made and the animals sorted out,
Even Winifred had stopped her fanny rubbing and had fallen into an exhausted sleep in a heap on the floor.. So I found myself pottering around the cottage without any tv, radio or music baring away looking for a job to do.
I picked the last of the peas from bosoms and sat quietly in the living room, shelling peas from their pods for an hour or so
In minutes I was transported back to 1972.....and I was working away with my grandmother at the kitchen table.

Repetitive jobs can be strangely soporific. When I was a student nurse, our clinical teacher was an elderly ex matron called Mrs Hinds. She was well known ( and well loved ) for her storytelling and always incorporated tales of her wartime nursing exploits in a way of educating and supporting her students.

She always maintained a healthy respect for a mundane, repetitive job.

I always remember her instructions for coping with a particularly stressful shift.

" find a minute away from the clinical area and clean something until it shines" she used to say with a smile

She was old school. 

There was non of this " talk about your stress" thing, even though we all worked in a psychiatric hospital.  self help was a flick round with a damp cloth back then.

I think that this " self help" thing is making a bit of a comeback in today's busy world. 

People are baking and cooking more. They are gardening and planting too. Let's reduce all this " tell me about how you feel" stuff...... Go home and polish your silver instead.

Or better still....... Instead of buying a £1.99 bag of frozen peas from Tesco

Get yourself a bucket of garden pea pods 

And get shelling

The Call

Berry with her Houston wig on

It's a while since I have seen a film which has been so badly let down by its second half  than the Halle Berry thriller The Call.
The first half is a corker. Jordan Turner ( Berry sporting a 1980 Whitney Houston hair do) is a talented 911 operative whose actions inadvertently gets a teenage girl murdered when an intruder breaks into her home. Months later as she is fighting self doubt and anxiety attacks , Jordan receives a similar call from another abducted girl who has been shut into the boot of a car, and the gist of the story centres around just how the Quick thinking operator can locate the girl before the killer strikes.
Through clever crossing cutting, and a series of increasingly tense set pieces director Brad Anderson has produced a wonderfully stressful rollercoaster of a story which is ruined completely when he has Berry hang up her headphones to solve the mystery in the field herself ...
Cue every  " woman in peril with a serial killer" cliche known to Hollywood
6/10

Slag!

I don't know quite how to put this.
But Winifred is a bit of an old slag.
Now masturbation is not really a subject for a Sunday morning I know, but the whole topic reared it's ugly head (?) last night when said bulldog was caught rubbing her fanny on the sole of Chris' slipper
just as he was enjoying Sophie Ellis Bexter's wonderful Charleston on Strictly come Dancing.

At first, I think, he thought it was all a bit of innocent scratching, so he bounced the slipper "up and down " so to speak. And before my very eyes Winifred turned into rather an unsavoury  morose looking, fat lap dancer.
It was a little  like watching your mum make a drunken pass at the vicar.
Now Chris' slippers are the hand made woollen ones that were kindly knitted by Kit Hopkins, so after a minute or two of " grinding" and " humping" I thought it prudent to tip Chris the wink ....and tell him that Winifred was " self polluting"
His reaction was measured and calm
" YOU DIRTY FAT BASTARD!" Was the general gist of what he came out with.
The slippers were placed promptly on a cool wash
And Winifred stalked off to sulk in the kitchen

Overheard

I worked half a shift at work this morning

On my home I over heard two medics talking in the lift

One said to another,  a rather mysterious and somewhat worrying

" it hit the floor like an effing jellyfish from 2000 feet!"

I'd love to know what that was all about!

It reminded of the Hitchcock story

When, out of pure devilment , the old guy

Turned to a colleague in a crowded elevator and stage whispered a rather menacing 

" I didn't realize that the old boy would bleed so much"

We Walk The Same Line

I completed my first shift at the Samaritains last night. And an interesting, thoughtful and indeed sobering shift it was too.
I left the centre after an unusually busy evening of calls with my head spinning.
I was not overwhelmed by it all in any way. I am well versed in dealing with distress through work, but it was the broad nature and vast scope of subject matters that surprised me.
It was probably a good night to start,
We all need to offload our burdens do we not?
Over a pint in the pub, over the dinner table, a chat to a friend on the phone, writing a blog......we all find our own confidants in some shape or form whether they be family, friends , or a stranger on a train.
And when I got home ,to a quiet cottage, just before midnight
I sat quietly for a while listening to Chris coughing in bed and Winnie snoring her way through bulldog dreams in the kitchen.
And I thanked " whoever" that my lot is a good one.

" Cheese!"

I am always happy when villagers call down to the field. Affable despot Jason and his girls often call down with tidbits for the animals, neighbor Viv ( who has a soft spot for blind cockerel Cogburn) sneaks around with nibbles and only yesterday, the former owners of Russell the gander popped around to check up on the old guy.
The other day, I looked out of the window to see an elderly lady sat on a chair in the centre of a rainy field. She was waving a blue balloon and was being photographed surrounded by the field population

I was only mildly surprised. Things like this happen every day in Trelawnyd.