Going Gently

Notes On An Ordinary Day

Snowdrops in the graveyard this morning

Sometimes you just get in the mood for something basic!
A piece of chocolate, a gin and tonic,.....sex!
Whatever the object of desire is.....it's always good to scratch an itch so to speak.
Today I got the urge to cook and bake.
After bog standard jobs first thing, I walked up to the shop to buy some butter, bumping into villagers Wendy, Daphne and Frank, Rowenna with the crooked wave, the wisecracking Barbara Parry and animal helper Pat as I did so. Most commented on the fact that I didn't have the dogs with me. Catching me without the dogs is as unsettling to some as me finding Jimmy Savile sat at the kitchen table in one of his silver track suits.
I bought the butter and as I delivered extra eggs to Purgatory on my way home, I spied Mrs Trellis walking her dog way up the lane. Satan was dragging her so fast up the hill that her bobble hat was bouncing back and forth so much, that she resembled an energetic pixie.
I thought to myself that I should try the homoeopathic medication she had given him the other week, when he had collapsed so dramatically.....
It seems to have worked wonders.
Anyhow the rest of the morning I have been baking

I baked chicken pies, a fruit pie, made custard and spicy squash & Carrot soup from scratch and would have baked some bread if I hadn't dropped the yeast behind the cooker.
The weak winter sun has brought out several sets of walkers, all of whom have stopped by the garden wall to buy eggs. Unfortunately Pippa from the rectory bought them all up a little earlier.
She had her Zsa Zsa Gabor fur hat on I noticed and looked very swish!
This afternoon I polished the silver with tomoto ketchup
It's a trick my grandmother taught me and is useful if you run out of silver cleaner.......Mrs Evans called around for eggs and asked if I had been pickling onions

I've just boxed up the soup for freezing......and as I did so caught Albert with his whole face in the custard. I'll pick the bits of cat spit out, Chris will never notice......hey ho.....

A Pig In A Drainpipe

I was busy at work last night and didn't go for my break until 4 am?
I fell asleep in the coffee room right in the middle of eating a banana, and was only woken 25 minutes later after one of the doctors , who was on his break, coughed very loudly.
I knew I had been snoring
I always do.
I had been dribbling too......with a little line of spit was hanging down from the side of my mouth and what was left of the banana had been squashed flat in my lap.
I'm a real classy chick
" have I been snoring?" I asked the medic
" like a sick pig caught in a drainpipe" he said rather huffily.
It's not a nice habit.
Years ago, I was helping out at the Inter Spinal Injury Games at the Stoke Mandeville para Olympic village, where I had to share a dormitory with an eclectic mixture of paraplegics, quadriplegics and able bodied " helpers"
One night I was snoring so loudly that two paraplegics got up in their wheelchairs and tried to push my bed out of the fire exit in order to get a little bit of peace.

" What's that poking out of your trousers?"

With only a month to go until the wedding. Chris is beginning to worry just a little about how I am going to look like on the day!....I can understand the fact.
Yesterday was a case in point.
I was walking across the railway bridge in Prestatyn yesterday morning when I spied two female joggers just about to bounce up the steps in front of me. One of the women was a girl I know well. she is a lively, overactive character called Sharon who I have worked with for the past nine years and as she jogged up to be with her big breasts bouncing she yelled out her usual greeting of " Hello JG!"
She gave me a brief hug and as both girls continued up the stairs Sharon turned and called to her friend
" He's lovely, even if he wears his pyjamas under his trousers !"
I looked down.....and yeah she was right.....a couple of inches of stripy pyjamas were poking out of the legs of my combats.
So I can see where Chris is coming from......on Sunday I will go and get my dinner jacket for the wedding. This is the one I shall be buying

And I am sure that if I was to stand next to this Marks and Spencer's model, we would look like twins
Yeah..................right.........

Shoah

For those that don't know " Shoah" is a 1985 French documentary film which chronicals the memories and experiences of Polish Jews, and selected Polish and German witnesses of the Holocaust within three areas of Poland during the war,

A mammoth undertaking, the film by Claude Lanzmann, took some eleven years to collate and much of the footage from the German perpetrators was secretly filmed over very long takes.
Lanzmann, who could not speak Hebrew, Yiddish or Polish , had to use translators to capture the smallest detail of the personal experience of those he interviewed, so the subsequent scenes are long, often meandering and invariably painful to hear.
The documentary in its entirety is some ten hours in length.

I had the opportunity to go and see a partial showing of " Shoah" in Sheffield years ago and couldn't quite face the experience , so I was pleased ( was pleased the right word?) when I saw that BBC4 was showing it as part of its tribute to Holocaust Memorial Day ( 27th January)

Last night I sat through two hours of Shoah.
It was a painful and powerful experience.

One interview with Filip Muller of the Jewish resistance from Auschwitz lingers long in the mind. A physically and psychologically strong man described to camera the final moments of some 1600 Czech Jews from the Auschwitz' " family camp". For some strange reason the Germans had kept these Jews all together and alive and for over a year at the extermination camp, so when they were herded into the gas chambers they had a certain strength to resist the guards.
In a matter of fact voice, the former resistance man described how his fellow Countrymen refused to undress before their captors . He described how a small group of women begged him to leave them ( he was a worker in the crematorium) so that he could testify to what happened and only broke down when he remembered how the crowd stood proud and sang the Czech National Anthem before the crematorium doors were closed.

Most documentaries use vintage footage to illustrate the narrative. Shoah used people's faces, and winter scenes of the modern day camp sights to bookend those dreadful stories.

Those living faces , with their dead eyes......their stories need to be heard and heard by every
generation. I wish I had the strength to watch more than two hours of it
I did not.

Sadness

I've just watched well over 2 hours of the holocaust documentary SHOAH
I've cried so much that Winnie came over to give me the once over
I'll blog about it tomorrow
Dreadful

Winnie watching me carefully....with Albert in tow..she never left my side until I stopped crying

Red

Kathleen Byron's infamous lipstick scene in Black Narcissus

I have never liked the colour red. I am a yellow or a green person. At a push I will wear blue, brown and anything mucky but as for red , that's a colour that more suits women, young children and the mentally ill.

A decade or so ago , I wrote an academic assignment entitled " The use of the colour Red in five selected feature films"

I thought it was a pretty profound discussion which covered sex, death,and everything in between, though I did mention Judy Garland's slippers in The Wizard Of Oz, a fact that did receive a curt green penned comment from my very camp lecturer which read " They were , in fact RUBY!!!!! Not red"

The killer midget in Don't Look Now

The ghetto Jewish child in Schindler's List

The Red Shoes

1976 Carrie

I was reminded of this magnificent work of academia today when I was surveying the bleak dirty green brown wreck of the back garden. For, flashing through the drab graveyard, I caught a flash of deep and vibrant red darting between the tombstones .

Was it a Venetian killer midget that I spied?

Or a blood soaked University student?

Hummm...not at all...Just Auntie Glad in her cinematic vibrant woolly coat, who was late for church