Meg

Do you know what?......I found yesterday's funeral terribly effing depressing
There are many reasons for this....
and non need to be thrashed out just at the moment.
I just can't  be arsed navel gazing.....well not today anyway.

Suffice to say when I got home,  I could have done with half an hour laughing at something mindless...
In the end, it was two incredibly simple things that brightened my day.
The first was a newsy and chatty phone call  with best friend Nu

The second occurred as I was cutting mushrooms for tea.

After the third bout of chopping, I noticed a disturbance in the back garden through the kitchen window..
Thinking that Albert was chasing sparrows , I ambled outside, wiping my hands on a tea towel as I went and as I looked over the garden wall I shouted a usual " leave the poor bugger alone" shout.

Albert was there, to be sure, but instead of bouncing around after a small skinny bird, he was playing gently and rather surprisingly with Meg.
Now Meg is an old girl. She is a neurotic nine year old terrier , with milky eyes and a bad temper, but in the afternoon  sun,and in the privacy of our back garden, she careered around the garden path, all goggle eyed and vacant...... chased affectionately by a fat black cat with a wonky leg like a puppy with it's silly head on.
I couldn't have wished for a better panacea to the funeral blues...........and watched misty eyed
as our cranky old bitch dropping infront of a wide eyed Albert like a loon
.

Look closely

Albert's wide eyes are just behind 

The Parry's of Prestatyn

Today an old lady from Prestatyn will be buried in the graveyard of the town's parish Church. She will join her husband and her son in the family grave, after journeying from the South Coast of England where she has lived for over two decades.
It was a tragedy that her son died twenty five years ago when he was only 24 for he was one of those intelligent bright spark entrepreneurs that were all the rage in the 1980s.
Ian parry was a good friend. I knew him when he was a slightly overweight, slightly gauche teenager and I knew him after he had blossomed into a fearless, hugely ambitious newspaper photographer.
When all of his friends were battling through University ( or in my case nurse training) he had already moved to London, bought a flat in an upcoming part of the city and made a name for himself amid the cut throat world of hacks and celebrity.
He was always destined for bigger and better things.
Unfortunately with rolls of film in his pockets and his cameras slung around his neck, he was killed escaping from the uprising against Ceausescu in Romania in '89.....
He died only a few days before my father.

So today, my sister and I will be paying our respects at Ian's Mother's funeral.
We will be doing it for Ian.
As another old friend confided in me a day or so ago" it marks an end of an era"

Like so many friends and family who died a long time ago, it's sometimes difficult to picture them clearly, or to hear their voice as you once heard it.
Time plays that awful trick on a person.
Does it not?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Parry

http://www.ianparry.org

PostScript
Just arrived home after the service. and I could tell that my sister felt as uncomfortable as I did.
I am glad we went, but the memories that same place/ same reason  funerals bring forth, are not particularly pleasant ones 

The Kitchen Table

It's going on three o'clock and I am sat at the kitchen table
after picking over the carcass of a roast chicken

One bowl of chicken bits is destined for tomorrow's lunch

The rest will be shared between the dogs and the field birds.

We have just finished lunch

and Chris has gone to Church,

I think he's ringing the bell today. 

It's tolling rather quickly.

The cottage is silent apart from the sound of a bulldog and three terriers licking chicken fat

from some foil bowls outside the back door.

Albert is asleep on the couch, he hasn't smelt the chicken as yet.

I continue with my mindless job.

Kitchen tables are a place for mindless activity.

Shelling peas,

Baking,

Making idle lists on the back of envelopes.

Squeezing dog's anal glands

Polishing silver.

I have a load of washing up to do, the dogs to walk,

the broody hens all need turfing off their eggs for a quick feed

and I still have to deliver eggs to Michelle up the Marian

But I can't be arsed moving,

So I will sit at the kitchen table a while longer,

and continue with some mindless activity

ie. blog writing.

Hey ho

Afternoon Drinks

If I lived in Rachel's World this blog would be entitled Saturday and it's white wine Afternoon....we were due to travel over to Sheffield to celebrate an old friend's 50th birthday celebrations but were let down by a dog sitter, so in a fit of sulking we dusted ourselves off and took the trailer trash train to Llandudno for a spot of lunch at Osborne House
After a bottle of wine each we sorted out some of the wedding plans, spoke to the maître d' about the wedding meal and got into the spirit of things.

Giddy as a kipper ....Chris in the tart's boudoir that is  the Osborne house cafe

I had a nice sleep on the train home .....

Group Hug

Sometime in the near future, I am accompanying Chris to a conference in Denmark. On our way to the train station this morning , he started to bang on about booking me on one of the guided tours that have been organised especially for partners, when their academic loved ones are thrashing out their research papers.
Picture the scene
Two local guides ( in traditional " native dress")' a confined and claustrophobic coach, and a captive audience that are strangers to one another.
To me Hell looks more attractive.
Now, I have to say in my defence, that the older I get, the more sociable I have become, but it has to be made known that the thought of organised group activities drag me back to a time when I was a slightly awkward , socially shy youngster who blushed a great deal.
If it was a choice between forcing out a " my names's John, what's your name?" Small talk and sticking needles into my eyes........the needles would win every time.

" I'm sure all the other partners will be going on the trip" Chris told me this morning.. Trying very hard to sell it." There is even a trip to a local museum and a famous stadium!"

I gave him one of those after all this time together, do you really need to ask looks.

" I'll bring some books" I informed him shortly.

Ps.....duh...we're actually going to Stockholm 

Favourite Person Thursday

Just got in and have realized that I haven't posted my " favourite person" blog entry for a while now......consistency was never my strong point.......

Ok so here goes.......... My fav person today is actress, playwright , theatre director and comedian Kathy Burke.
A woman of great warmth, humour and talent.........

I would love to go to a London Pub with her for a whole afternoon....one of those dark wooded ones that look like a set piece from a Jack-the-ripper movie

UFO

In springtime, every spring time, Camilla, the Canada Goose tries to fly.
I don't  know if it is just a seasonal exuberance that makes her take to her wings,
But what I do knows is, that despite a natural ability that could take her a quarter the way across the globe all she manages to do is to soar a  hundred feet or so up into the air before crashing and burning into the neighbours' field.
Where flying is concerned
Camilla has all the natural grace of a skateboarding Winifred.

It's a case flap wings like a loon,
Somehow catch a cross wind coming from the east
And it's up and off .
Three times yesterday I had to traipse over the sheep fields to retrieve her.
And three times Camilla just stood there shaking her beautiful head, stunned and shocked at hitting the wet grass at twenty five miles an hour.

Her last flight was observed by neighbour John, who was busy constructing a home made boat in his drive.after she had honked her way by him, he called over to me and pointed out the direction the ungainly goose had disappeared into......
I had taken twenty or so steps down the lane when I heard Graham , the Shepherd, shout out from his supervisory position above his lambing pens
It was obvious to all that Camilla's third flight was as precarious as all of the others

All Graham yelled was a somewhat sarcastic and slightly excitable World War Two-esque warning of
" INCOMING!!"

Plodding

Last home as always

Last week, at work, I found myself supporting a junior manager. She was having a moan about a bad shift she had experienced, where a few colleagues didn't quite pull their weight as part of the team. 

I took the opportunity to share my thoughts about " the plodders" of a team, every group has them..... Never the high flyers,  never the ambitious ones, but often supportive in their own pedestrian kind of way.

Plodders , I always think, can form the backbone upon which a team can support itself.

I think she got my gist.

The plodder in our house is George.

Physically slower than his fellow pack members , he is always last through the door, last home after a walk and last up from bed in a morning, but it's his character that so amuses and exasperates me during everyday life, for George is a chronic procrastinator. 

In George's world, every blade of grass needs a sniff and every new view needs to be looked at and looked at again. There is no urgency in George World...and why would there be? , he learnt long ago that whatever he does, she could never compete with any other dog.

Being small and stocky means that the bigger, more assertive and faster dogs beat him to the bone every time.

What's the point in rushing?

George is best served in his own little world

It's a world of plodding.