" Groan"

I had a hangover this morning.
A case of too much champagne during the Queen Honour celebrations.
I think I am too old for hangovers. When I was a young nurse, hangovers and early starts went together like  Oscar Pistorious and lying. You just got on and pushed through the tiredness and the nausea, breathed through your mouth and survived by mainlining paracetamol and eating powdered egg from the breakfast trolley.
I also remember oxygen at 8 litres a minute via a facemask often helped with a thundering hangover and on my very early days I was known to very occasionally wash a sleeping patient with an oxygen mask IN SITU
But them were the old days.........

Whats your hangover cure?
I'll make a list...I don't intend to have another

BEM Praise

The family surround the B E M tonight

How lovely

Amateur Dram Lives

Last night we attended a somewhat bizarre but entertaining night in the village Hall. " A Casserole of Comedy" was advertised as a night of humorous sketches performed by the Rhyl Parish Players to raise funds for Trelawnyd Church Funds and over sixty locals turned up at the door.
The Flower Show tables were covered with white tablecloths and were set up in lazy rows in front of the stage and as we sat down we were immediately served with small glasses of sherry by the church ladies.
The usual faces were all there. Auntie Gladys in her finest wool jacket, Irene from the Flower Show, Old Islwyn Thomas, Gaynor the Mad Organist, Mrs Trellis ......all seemed to enjoy little sketches even though some were truly awful and so unfunny it hurt.
My favourite moment was an oddball unfunny " heist" scene where four members of bank staff were supposedly locked in the vault by a robber. One moment, one of the characters shouted that her husband was in a coma and a voice piped up behind me " isnt he the lucky one!"
There was coffee and tea AND biscuits at half time, and a raffle and everything was typical parish council  fare which, as it turned out, was oddly sweet and comforting.

One of the sketches which was reproduced 

Lady night!

British Empire Medal!

What has my sister Ann got in common with Lenny Henry, Kevin Spacey, Eddie Redmayne and Van Morrision?
Answers on a postcard?
Well....I Will tell you..........for she, they and only 1000 other people from this nation have been given an award IN THE 2015 QUEENS BIRTHDAY HONOURS LIST,
How bloody amazing is that ?
Ann has been awarded THE BRITISH EMPIRE MEDAL for services to her community of Prestatyn and for her charity work and I think it's a wonderful tribute to all of her hard work over decades of community support.

Ann Walkden Williams BEM ( left)

Fan- fucking-tastic!

Bush Envy

I was just leaving the field gate with a bowl of eggs when a woman I know vaguely who was walking her dog chirped up and said " Haven't you got a lovely bush!"
She wasn't referring to my " down below garden area" , thank the lord, but my bargain from woolies
Ceanosus in our front garden

A New Experience!

I looked after Jason & Claire's delightful girls today
It was the first time I have ever picked up kids from school and a first time doing girly things with a 5 and a 9 year old.
It was a delight.
I took winnie with me to the school,so I didn't look like a child molester and after I found the right door where each of the girls were let out we all skipped down our lane to collect wild flowers
Liv ( aged 5 going on 35) told me a long story about how ugly Winnie's bottom was whilst Eve told me what a good horsewoman she was...the chatter came as thick and fast as a machine gun going off.
We fed the hens,
Watered the sheep and the girls chased the turkey.
We collected eggs.
I had a panic attack with them walking too near the main road!
And we laughed about songs in school
They Cuddled the dogs. Ran screaming from the geese and told jokes about poo.

I washed dirt from knees, rubbed dock leaves on nettle stings and showed the girls what an onion plant smelt like......
Mum Claire picked them up at tea time
And I had to take myself off to lie down on the couch in the quiet!
I had looked after them for just over an hour!

Village Meet ups

Yesterday proved to be somewhat of a hot and sweaty day.
I trolled around the nearby villages of Gwaenysgor, Cwm, Trelogan, Llanasa and Dyserth opening up the village notice boards with my trusty skeleton key and sneaking in  this year's Flower Show Poster for all the world to see.
In Trelogan, one old boy asked me what I was advertising. When I told him, he snorted
" Fuck all happens in this village"
The rest of the day, I went house to house In Trelawnyd dropping off schedules  but I was hampered by catching up with the local news

• German Bernard has cut his thumb rather badly during a circular saw incident. Both thumb and Bernard do not seem to be doing very well.
• Old Stan is recuperating after a " bad do" I knew a " bad do" was a " very bad do" because Stan said " bad do" around a dozen times. 
• Meirion E was planting out an old wheelbarrow with bedding plants when I dropped off his schedule , he growled and laughed like an old pirate
• The new guy who has bought Plas yn dre Ucha ( the House next to Auntie Glad's) waved and asked me if I was the " history Boy" ( Boy! Yeah right) I told him that I was, and he kindly gave me a look into his house which is in the process of being totally renovated. He has a deep voice like Richard Burton and obviously has a love of history and strangely enough of the village itself. And he asked me if I could dig out any information about his  home (which is  one of the oldest houses in the village dating from the early1700s
• Mrs Trellis caught up with me to apologise that she had forgotten my birthday. She gave me a gift wrapped up in pink tissue paper which turned out to be a four inch garden gnome...." Bet you haven't got one of those" she said triumphantly. I told her that "she was right!"
• Affable despot Jason asked me if I could pick his girls up from school today as he would late home....he laughed that it would be a " first for me" and that I would enjoy standing with all the   Other moms and Dads and talk about " fat club" and recipes . I'll take Winnie with me as the girls adore her
• The conservation group was out too clearing the flower beds for the summer planting. This reminded me that the Flower Show Committee agreed to make a donation towards the cost of the shrubs and plants. So I popped to the treasurer's house to pick up a cheque which I handed over....job done!
• Gay Gordon and Big Mary waved merrily from their bungalow window after I had dropped in their schedule....Gay Gordon may enter the boiled fruit cake class, though he said he may have trouble delivering it on his invalid trolley...I said I would collect it

The large building is plas yn dre

A former old school it is now two houses

Its all go

London Road

Back in 2006 actor and journalist Alecky Blythe interviewed the residents of a small Ipswich Road about the dreadful fact that a serial killer lived amongst them. The murderer, Stephen Wright, was responsible for killing five young prostitutes. Prostitutes that may of walked , London Road, the road on which he in fact lived.
The transcripts of Blythe's interviews were a powerful testament to how the prostitutes were viewed by flawed but decent blue collar folk and underlined how the residents of London Road joined together to upgrade and beautify their much maligned street.
Adam Cork, listened to these recordings and set the words verbatim to music. Every pause, every sentence's cadence was kept within the score and the resulting Musical is like nothing I have ever seen before

Thornley and Coleman ( centre)

Its an unsettling, and at times incredibly moving experience which weaves together two incredibly strange stories. One is the resurrection from shame by the ordinary residents of London Road and the other is the ghostly survival of the area's prostitutes, women that were generally despised by the residents themselves.
Olivia Coleman and Paul Thornley standout of the ensemble cast and Anitia Dobson turns up in a brief but necessary comic role as a neighbour who gets tangled up with her shopping bags in the police tape cordon ( a wonderfully clever slap stick moment)
London Road is somewhat of a strange experiment in film making, and is not an easy watch.
But it's a powerful film that packs an incredible punch in the guts
8/10