Ellen's Selfie

I love the fact that Lupita Nyong'o's brother bounced into the photo

With Russia acting like a knob and more conflict in the Middle East than we can shake a stick at..is it a surprise to anyone that Ellen Degeneres' " let's have a proper laugh" comparing of the Oscars has been seen by more people on earth than all the major bad news stories put together?

I love the above selfie

It speaks volumes

With it, Degeneres, quite cleverly, has stripped away the catty persona of Hollywood and brought a real humour back into a business that is famous for its " knife in the back" Babylon.

What do the Oscars give Joe Public?

Well it gives glamour

It gives escapism

And with Ellen at the helm

It gives a genuine smile

Not a bad result given all the badness in this bloody awful world eh?

Always Bake in a morning

I bake a lot

I hate cooking

But I love baking

Strange that.

Now I always bake in a morning

It's a survival ploy

Always bake before I get my hands dirty cleaning the duck house out

Indian runner ducks are filthy little bastards.

This morning I baked a Mary Berry Apple and cinnamon cake

I watched her last night on tv, knocking it up in her country kitchen

And like most experts, she made it all seem so easy and enjoyable

She is the school teacher that every child wanted to be taught by

Right

The weather is spring like and warm

and as my best layer  Alfre Woodward,  stalks around the cottage garden before she lays

under the small fir tree

I can now wash my cake tins before

Donning my wellies

and getting my hands covered in duck shit!

The Walking Dead - Still

Daryl and Beth " run...run like the wind"

Tonight The Walking Dead went to a place where I have wanted it to go for a long long time......it went into some proper characterisation!
Still concentrated on two of the oddest characters. Teenage good girl Beth ( Emily Kinney) and seething redneck Daryl ( Norman Reedus) think that they are the only survivors after the prison attack. Even though Beth lost her father under the most dreadful circumstances, it is Daryl ( who had no life before the apocalypse ) who is the one who cannot cope with the losses of " team Rick" ...For in the first time in a dysfunctional life he is mourning a brief position of respect and status he gained as Rick's second in command.
Now that has gone, it is up to the slightly gauche Beth to ground him once again into the real and human  world,
Both Reedus and Kinney rise to the challenge of their two hander and their scene of mutual confessions over a drinking competition have a depth and emotion seldom seen on the Walking Dead before.........
I enjoyed it.........I just hope that Beth survives another episode. The series has a bad habit of letting an actor shine just before the zombies scoff em

Three gifts

Yesterday was a day for gifts.

While Chris was in church, and I was busy stuffing a chicken for lunch,

I spied two ladies peeping over the garden wall.

I went out clutching a bowl of eggs

When the elder of the two women burst out with an excited

" we read your blog" comment.

Now they didn't look like a couple of bunny boilers,

but I was put on a bit of a back foot for a minute or so.

( it's always a bit odd to meet two strangers who think that they know you)

As it turned out, the two ladies were mother and daughter who had relatives who lived in trelawnyd

some years ago. They were leaving the area and wanted to donate some old French Church candlesticks to Trelawnyd Church. 

Through Going Gently , I was the only person they " knew" to pass the gifts too.

Whaddu you think Tom Stephenson?

I promised to pass the candlesticks on, made sure I took the ladies names and thanked them with 18 fresh eggs from the morning collection when they gave me a whole pile of
Welsh history books that they had collected, which was a lovely gesture
Amid the titles of local information, there was a comprehensive guide to New York City
" I remembered that you love the city"  the mother said
Power of the blog eh?

The second gift arrived an hour or so later, when a Woolly hatted Mrs Trellis turned up
With a piping hot homemade rice pudding sat snugly inside a cake tin.
She thought we would appreciate the pud on such a cold day
It was a cracking pudding....with a skin on the top, so thick
that it took two hands to break it
Wonderful

The final gift of the day turned up after lunch

Another orphan of the storm 

This time from the Bonny, smiling lady from the Still House.

Her dog had killed several of her hens and the last survivor needed a new home

So meet 

Bodica

August Osage County

We went to see this this evening

and after two hours of bile

Chris was biting the back of the chair in front

I must admit , Streep & Roberts were on excellent form

But the film was an exhausting over indulgence

Into one family's dysfunction

Frothy it wasn't 

I did , however love Robert's line

" Eat the fish bitch!"

Bodnant Welsh Food

Now, there is nothing that pleases a couple of old poofs more in this world  than a classy venue.
Give us the clean, expensive lines of a National trust tea rooms or the sleekly clean crispness of the Ritz cafe ( yes I have been! And in a clean pair of trousers too!).... And we will wander around with smiles on our faces and a spring in our step
Unfortunately in Wales , these venues are rare as a shy bulldog, so when they do surface, we get excited as Tom Stephenson at a Germaine Greer lecture.
It was St David's day here in Wales yesterday, so we drove over to the Conwy Valley to visit Furnace Farm, the Bodnant Centre for Welsh Food.

Lovingly restored, the seventeen century farm boasts a restaurant, tea rooms, farm shop, cookery school,wine shop and bee centre. It's all slightly aseptic, but it's undeniably and reassuringly expensive and classy
We ate cawl in the cafe ( cawl is a rustic Welsh stew) and I came over all unnecessary when I spied a massive pile of BLACK PUDDING SCOTCH EGGS  in the farm shop. At 2£'each , they proved to be somewhat of an extravagance , but they were BLEEDING WORTH IT!
Never has this old poof tasted anything better!
Scotch eggs of the gods!

Hey ho

Good old Camilla knocking back the scotch eggs at the opening of Bodnant food a year back

Era's End

In the beginning of the war, the city of Liverpool suffered considerable and devastating bomb damage. As the windows blew in on the occupants of a small terraced house in Everton, the mother of the household picked up a heavy horse hair sofa and covered her children with it,
After the all clear the family staggered off to a neighbour's house. The mother heavily in shock, the teenage daughter shivering and silent, and the ten year old boy in his pyjamas , kept warm with a chenille curtain wrap and wearing a pair of ladies high heel shoes to protect his feet from the broken glass.
As children we were brought up on this story
The mother of the story was my grandmother. The girl was my mother and the boy was my Uncle Jim.
I learnt yesterday that my Uncle Jim had just died. He was in his eighties.
I have not spoken to my uncle for many years, I always sent Christmas cards, but ill health and family  spats and the fact he lived a long way off, meant that a close relationship was not really on the cards.
Having said this....I am truly sorry that he's gone.
His death has heralded the end of an era.
It has highlighted that the last tie to my grandparents has now been severed and a life in that devastated city three quarters of a century ago seems a little more distant and unreal.
Like I said
It's the end of an era.

Sexually Molested by Buster Keaton

Most dogs crave affection

Scottish terriers like George love an occasional rub

Welsh terriers adore to lap sit

And bulldogs

Well bulldogs will seek out and initiate

a full on, 

No hold barred,

hug, smooch and snog

I have likened it to being

sexually molested by a hairy, four legged Buster Keaton