An Apology

I don't know what's wrong with me.......over the past few weeks I have forgotton THREE close relatives' birthdays.....brother  in law Tim...sister in law Jayne ( above) and Great niece Evie.
I am such a tight arse when remembering  birthdays are concerned, I just cannot quite believe I have done it.
No excuses mind you....just a big apology to the rels concerned.........belated gifts and cards will be posted tomorrow
Xxxxxx

Tradition!

Ok, so I have lost 14 lbs in just over 4 weeks.......
But I still resemble Tevye just a little,  waving my hands over my head in the village of  Anatevka whilst shaking  my belly and belting out a good Yiddish ditty.....and like  him ...I am a sucker for tradition.

Families make their own traditions.....some are handed down from generation to generation...... Others develop of their own accord .
Traditions maintain continuity and promote stability.
and they can give you the feeling that you have just been visited by old friends
That is the positive aspect of tradition
.......comfort..........

Depressed pumpkin 

Now at this time of year two traditions are visited here in out small corner of North Wales. The first is a family dinner, which my sister  terms warmly as  a " harvest Supper". We are all meeting up tonight for that, each sibling responsible for a course at the dinner.

The other tradition is the making of the Halloween pumpkin which will sit on the kitchen window for a few weeks before the 31st, warding off evil spirits from the cottage boundary.

Now, I am not a lover of Halloween.....it's gone all too Jamie lee Curtis for my liking....but I do like preparing the pumpkin' s sad little face a good few days before the event.....

It sorts of bookends the finish of summer and welcomes the start of winter.

Now what traditions does everyone adhere and welcome?

Grass up my Bumper

I was stopped by he police late last night after I had left the Samaritans .
The policeman was brusque but polite and gave me a routine breathalyser test  which of course turned out fine.
He asked me where I was going.
I told him home
He asked me where I had been
I told him a shift at the Samaritans
He looked around the battered Berlingo briefly and before he gave me the breathalyser tube as a " keepsake" he laughed
" do you know you have grass growing out of your rear bumper? "

It sounded like a typical "carry on " double entendre 

But I thought better 

Of adding " oooo matron"

As I knew his observation was correct.

I am such a car slut

I am not alone

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