I Can Be Happy

What things Makes Me Happy? - to balance out my negative list of a few days ago
( not including husband, family, friends and animals)

Sainsbury's Scotch Eggs ( 1£ for 2)
Making Lists
Duck billed platypuses
Lisa Tarbuck
Very cold gin and tonic with ice and lemon ( in a glass)
Lemon Curd in cold rice pudding
Cloud watching
Thinking that The Walking Dead is real
Singing badly
1970 disaster movies
Russell Crowe's Buttocks
Tidy worktops
Watching Movies in an empty cinema
Being kissed by bulldogs
Fresh Flowers in vases at home
Kay Scarpetta novels
Chatsworth House
Clean sheets
Mary Berry
The smell of silver polish
Getting my head and/or feet massaged
Baking
My American coffee cup
Occassional rumpy pumpy
Northern humour
Blog mate banter
Art Deco Interiors
Genuiningly nice people with big hearts

Mad sue bates....a work colleague with a big heart

Great photos ( see above)
A day without any minor trauma
Dogs licking  my toes
Wood burner and low lighting
Working with sweet natured people
The Archers
Kirsty Young
Audrey Hepburn & Bette Davis movies
Popping bubble wrap
Thunder storms
Sheffield reunions
New York City
Reading the news on the toilet
Being married

Old Nurses Never Die, They Just Lose Their Patients -

It always amused me that at the same time that The Prof was liaising with high powered meetings about national initiatives and research about strokes  I was running a " How to Look After Your Chickens " course for beginners at the memorial hall.
Each one of us inhabiting a very different bubble eh?
This week it's a bit of the same. As deputy of the heathcare school he will be welcoming a whole plethora of academic hopefuls into the University at this busy start to the learning year....
This week I have been asked to give a " lecture" to a group of retired nurses at the old " Alex" hospital about blogging.
Hey ho
I cannot remember how the request for the talk came about but I suspect Mrs Trellis was involved in someway, she being an old midwife. Suffice to say that today I am now wracking my brains to work out just what I am going to say and how I am going to pitch it.
I bet a group of knackered old RGNs are a tough crowd!

   

My Head!

I don't feel well......
I only had a banana for my tea at work last night
So I wasn't quite physically prepared for the many bottles of wine that were consumed at the neat little house of the affable despots last night.
I feel as though I have got a first grade subdural haematoma going on this morning!
Now, I think it is evident to all that affable despot Jason is a naturally humorous old bean  but perhaps I have not paid lip service to the fact that affable despot spouse claire is more naturally funny than two Victoria Woods trapped together in a lift....
Her humour is typically northern with it's bite of observational warmth.
I am still tittering to myself about her stories of being a slightly harassed teacher in a primary school
I think the crate of white wine helped too.......especially as we ended the evening with the promise of organising a village pantomime shortly after The Prof tap danced on the dining room floor

......... Back to bed.....

Start as we mean to go on

6am

I am up getting ready for a day on ITU

:-(

The bright thing is that we are off to affable despots Jason and Claire's house later tonight

for dinner....

Unfortunately William has already brought the whole day down again

He had had the runs all over the front of the washing machine

How does he do that?

Hey ho

I'm off to work

Things That Depress Me

• Radio 2 's "Sing something simple" on 1970s Sunday evenings
• Stupid people that enjoy being rude
• David Bowie
• Dog paw prints all over the house on a wet day
• School dinners and the memory of warm milk in small milk bottles
• Being skint
• Arriva trains wales
• 1980s decor
• Dirty hotel rooms
• Tinsel 
• Poundland or ASDA in Kinmel Bay
• 1970s haircuts
• Christmas decorations after boxing day
• Women in sleeveless tops with their bra straps showing
• The daily Mail
• Babies on aircraft
• Caravan holidays
• Sunday nights before school
• Poor management at work
• Easyjet
• A drunk mother
• A poorly made scotch egg
• Rhyl
• Ingmar Bergman movies
• Mashed Swede
• Impersonal readings at funerals
• Choir boys singing carols
• Smelly dishcloths
• People that sit near me in the cinema
• Closet gays
• A  cold bathroom when I'm in the bath
• A gin and tonic without ice

• A watery gin and tonic 
• A gin and tonic in a plastic glass
• Bad nursing care
• People that don't like dogs
• Hershel's death in The Walking Dead
• Being 30
• Farting too much when I bend over
• Feeling old
• Slugs
• International news
• Plugholes

Can Secrets Be Survived ? 45 Years

Second post today!

I had to grab the opportunity to see  "45 YEARS" with both hands as it only had one showing at the Scala  and that was at 1pm in the afternoon. Shame on Prestatyn-ites too as I was the only bloke in the cinema, more fool them as this is one of the most powerfully acted movies I have seen in a long long time.
Set in an Autumnal  Suffolk, the story centres , quite claustrophobically,  upon Kate and Jeff , a comfortably well off , left wing couple approaching their seventies. Kate's world is her husband and the pair fill their cultured days , reading, pottering around the house and preparing for their 45 year anniversary party. A party that was postponed for five years because of Jeff's cardiac surgery. Out of the blue Jeff receives a letter stating that a former girlfriend's body has been found 50 years after she disappeared after a fall into a Swiss Glacier, and in the days that follow we follow just how this news affects the couple as Jeff mourns the vigour of his youth and Kate obsessively explores a former love of which she had little knowledge of.
It's an unsettling and incredibly powerful film and a triumph for Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay who play husband and wife.
Rampling carries the whole film as Kate, a woman who is shaken to the core with the realisation that she was not the first love in her husband's life . Through a score of quietly painful scenes we watch as Kate veers from icy passive aggressive politeness to repressed fury and confusion as she unearths ancient truth after ancient truth . Rampling's control of these scenes  make the whole movie so believable.
There are no histrionics, no emotional romping, just a very believable set of conversations between two people that know each other so very well but who are experiencing very different reactions to old age, dependency and love.
It's rare to see two seventy somethings dominating a film so completely......and Rampling and Courtenay are class acts..........if they don't dominate the BAFTAs and Oscars next year..there is no justice....
9/10

8 lbs

Fat club was a bit of a trial this week
8lbs on!
What was I eating in Australia ?
LARD?
Luckily my fat club leader is one of those laid back, "couldn't give a stuff"  types so no one pointed their fingers at me shouting " BAD SHOW FATTY!".....
" Most of that will be off by next week" she said with a shrug
She's an inspiration !
Anyhow,
Yesterday I did two 2 mile power walks around Gop Hill and already this morning I' ve done one.
At least the weather improved, so my post Australia blues were blasted away somewhat even though the village seemed deserted when I was out on my rounds

I haven't seen Auntie Glad for a few weeks but I knew she was alright as her trusty deck chair was set up outside her front door. When there's afternoon sunshine she's often seen sunbathing.

I'll have to tell her not to scone bake for us for a month or so...

Bake Off

Albert is still hogging his position in front of the tv......and was most upset when I moved him so I could see " Bake Off" at 8pm.........it's getting much better now since the poorer bakers have been booted off.
I like most of the last five competitors .
Flora is sweet and funny. Nadiya gnashes her gums a lot, Paul is a mature gay man's dream and Tamal is a young gay man's dream........only Ian remains the slight outsider....a fact that the producers will be quite happy about....every tv programme needs a baddy.
This week poor Matt left the tent.......he fucked up his " Charlotte Russe" when he baked his ladies fingers too close ..........I hate it when that happens