To The Queen and Empire

This afternoon we are off to watch my sister receiving her British Empire Medal.
Later in the year she will enjoy the surroundings of Buckingham Palace at the " official" tea party event, but today is the day her family can watch her " getting the medal pinned" so to speak....I will post photos of the event later this evening!

This is a photo of the village Welfare committee circa mid 1950s three of the committee are still with us. Bryn Davis ( I am not quite sure which one he is..apologies to Bryn for that)  Auntie Gladys of course can be smiling her chirpy smile far left on the bottom row and second from the left on the top row is Islwyn Thomas ( no not the village elder Islwyn but the "older village elder" Islwyn ) I saw Older Village Elder Islwyn this morning, just before he drove out of the village for his lunch. He has just celebrated his 94 th birthday and was looking very chipper.
I told him we were going to Soughton Hall to see Ann get her medal
He reminded me that a million years ago one of the village ladies received a British Empire Medal.
The recipient was the formidable Miss B A Jones, the  tough- as- nails village school mistress, charity worker, church organist and all round paragon of virtue. To the villagers she was known as Bessie " Bryn Teg" and on the Welfare Committee photo she is third from the left on the bottom row.the one with the Nazi  gloves and the thin lips.......not a lady to be trifled with.

I will post some more informal photos of our own British Empire Medal winner a little later.

For Tom Stephenson

Forte's

In 1941 at the height of the bombing of Liverpool my mother and her family fled the city.

She was only a teenager.

They ended up renting a cottage in Gwaenysgor, the next village to Trelawnyd.

My mother's first job was in Forte's Tea Rooms in Prestatyn.

Today We went to Llandudno and found a new Forte's 

Where I had a fat bastard ice cream sundae 

Village Small Talk

Mist over The Village

• Animal Helper Pat called round with a request. After being dropped in the shit by the affable despot's children, the Headmistress of the school has now officially asked me ( albeit through Pat) to give the kids a talk on " blogging" next Friday! .....what the hell am I going to talk about me thinks? 
• Teenage Boffin Cameron stopped for a chat over the garden wall.I asked him how his preparations for his GCE exams were going and he rolled his eyes as I was being soooo last year! This year he is sitting is AS exams and is talking about University!!! Duh!  I remember when he was in primary school! Anyhow He promised to look after the field for me when we go to a friend's birthday in London next month. 
• The Flintshire County council workmen who were packing up their mowers after cutting the grass in the old Churchyard all wolfwhistled Winnie as we passed the lychgate ....she went all slutty at the attention , turned and flashed her big red vulva at them. She's such a slag.
• Trendy Carol tottered passed, on her way to the shops down in town. she was  a vision in black and white and looked very Audrey Hepburn. 
• Dog walking allowed us to meet up with the powerful black Labrador Podrick and his owner up the Marian. He shared  the tale of Podrick's recent vomiting incident and worrying weightloss which is thankfully now resolved and soon after Mrs Trellis was dragged into view with Blue. She looked well though did complain of being plagued by a rather irritating bout of gingivitis !
• I think I saw Gay Gordon waving weakly from the window of his bungalow but I couldn't be sure if it was indeed him or Big Mary-His invalid buggy has been covered by a tarpaulin for months now, which is a little worrying.

Look closely..Mrs Trellis out with Blue

Bin Bag Peace and Three Movies

Not everything in the village is cosy all of the time.
You know that I don't report the unsavoury.
Real life can be so ugly.
Anyhow do you remember the owner of the previously black binned bagged windowed house in the village? The one that gave me a good shouting at after I had given him a piece of my mind about his staffies? Well The Prof sold him some eggs when I was out last Sunday. I suspected quite rightly that the guy had no idea that I lived in the same cottage, so he and indeed I looked rather surprised when he knocked on our door last night wanting more.
I wondered just how the meeting would pan out but decided immediately that it would serve no purpose getting shirty again, so I told him I did indeed had eggs to sell.
to be fair he held out his hand and said he was sorry that "gotten off on the wrong foot" and I shook it saying we both said what we had wanted to say. I also gave him an extra goose egg to seal the deal.
Neither of us needed an enemy in a village of 300 people.

**************

Three Movies in three days !
A Science- Fiction thriller, a true life drama and an Icelandic Comedy.....a nice eclectic mixture for sure.......I wanted to see Helen Mirren's " Military drone thriller too but it's not out until Friday!

Midnight Special, I understand, had received rave reviews, so I was interested in seeing this homage to all of those Hollywood alien-visiting-Earth movies which seemed so prolific in the 1980s.
Midnight Special starts with two men and a small boy called Alton hiding away in a country motel. The boy, we know from snippets of tv news, has been abducted from a ranch housing a strange religious cult, a cult which see him as some sort of divine conduit to salvation.
Slowly ( very slowly) we learn that his abductors are indeed the boy's biological father Roy ( Michael Shannon) and Roy's best friend Lucas ( Joel Edgerton) who realise that the child needs to meet up with his own kind  at a certain spot across the Southern States of America. It is suggested, but not made explicit, that the child is indeed an alien.
Midnight Special poses more questions than it answers, and although the twists and turns of the narrative are intriguing, I was rather frustrated by what was not being said.
The audience does not understand how father and son ended up in the cult's ranch or just how the boy's mother ( Kirsten Dunst)  came to desert him. We understand nothing of the motivation of the pivotal character of Lucas nor it is explained just how and why Alton became " possessed " by the "alien" in the first place.
All these gaps, left me rather let down even though the  somewhat clever ( but fairly unsurprising) twist at the end made a change from ET going home.
Nice performances, some nice tense scenes and the lovely Joel Edgerton made it a pretty ok 7/10

Spotlight is a worthy and meticulous movie, I have to say that from the get-go. It's a faithful depiction of the lengthy and detailed investigation by The Boston Globe's Spotlight Team of investigative reporters into the sexual abuse of hundreds of the city's schoolchildren by 90 catholic priests over a period of a generation.
Well acted ( Michael Keaton and Paul Ruffalo are particularly good as two of the lead reporters) and forensic in detail, this movie is a compelling watch , a fact compounded by the fact that the reporters took on the power of the entire Catholic Church, an organisation that actively covered up the abuse and was complicit in allowing it to flourish and continue.
9\10

Hrútar (UK title "Rams") was my final film and this Icelandic "comedy" turned out to be the oddest of choices for it turned out to be less of a comedy and more a rather stark and at times moving tale of sibling love and rural degeneration.

This film starts with a charm of the Irish, for we are introduced to two aging sheep farmers who live in adjoining farmhouses on a bleak Icelandic mountain. Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) has not spoken to his brother Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) for forty years. The pair communicate sporadically through notes taken between the two farms by Kiddi's sheepdog but when the dreaded disease "scrappie" appears in the valley and their beloved flocks are ordered to be culled, the brothers need to set aside old slights to save the few remaining sheep hiding in Gummi's basement.
It all sounds rather charming, and to be honest it is!, but the film is not a comedy as I would define one. True there are some sparking scenes between the two old men, especially when Kiddi collapses in the show after drinking and Gummi takes him to the local hospital scooped up by the bucket of a tractor digger, but the film is really a melancholic and rather beautiful study of two isolated individuals who have only two passions......a love of sheep and a shared family history.
8/10

3am

It's 11.30 am and I have only been up an hour!
I feel muzzy headed and am drinking ginger tea out of my favourite American coffee cup!
( it doesn't feel quite right not having proper coffee)
I was up at 3 am and finished a SAMS shift at 7am, so me and dogs went back to bed for a while.
I woke up realising that Mary now needed a fragrance boosting fanny flannel as she has now synchronised her period with Winnie as many females often do when living together ( or so Gay Gordon told me...and he should know)
Multiple fanny flannels on the go !  ....the Prof will have apoplexy

I was tempted to write a blog about my favourite food (as in  Cro & Rachel's blogs) but couldn't be arsed......there would be too many to choose from on my " favourite side" to make any dramatic impact.

I will leave you with an observation...... At 3ish this morning , I was driving through a rather nice suburb of Rhyl called Rhuddlan and had just passed the roundabout when I spied a man on the grass verge having a poo underneath a tree. 

I will leave you with this troubling image ......

What Is Your Best Friend Event?

Who do you spend time with when you want some friendly time?
I don't mean people here.
We all have a best friend who you can laugh and cry with ....no ...I mean who is your best friend when it comes to your own company?
If that statement leaves you scratching your head .let me explain with an example.
My oldest best friend has always been the cinema.
With the Prof talkng research and eating Swedish meatballs all week, I shall be having some sneaky indulgences at the " flicks"
Today it is Eye In The Sky with Helen Mirren, yesterday it was Midnight Special with the strangely attractive Joel Edgerton. Tomorrow afternoon I got the last seat in the Theatre Clwyd showing of Spotlight. 
Escapism a la Hollywood for sure but beggars can't be choosers .....art house foreign movies are not thick on the ground in North Wales.
I will indulge myself with some film reviews tomorrow.
I love movie going in an afternoon. I love near empty cinemas, I love to go alone . I love not speaking with anyone else and I love to get there early without the palaver of clamouring for a seat.
If any of you ever see me in my cinema seat on a rainy afternoon , leave me the fuck alone ...
I'm having fun

What is your " best friend" event?
Answers on a postcard please.....

Old Photos

I have not done alot to blog about today. I've disinfected the goose house out, I've piled high the kitchen table with paperwork that needs sorting through and I've been to a cheap showing of Midnight Special .oh , and I called in to check on Auntie Glad with a waitrose Cherry cake but didn't stay long as she was baking.
I also unloaded the car of some framed family photos, which was given to me by my sister in law. She has downsized since my brother's death back in 2011 and she thought I may like some of my side of the family photos. " There's a nice one of you and Janet ( my twin sister) in the collection" she noted.
I sorted through the photos on the kitchen table and found the photo she was referring to. It was taken in 1973

I hate this photo.

I remember it being taken very well indeed for it was taken by the local newspaper's photographer on The evening of November 5th, Bonfire Night.
My sister and I look both look cold. We were and it was and I must say I look rather pissed off.
I was very pissed off as I recall....I was livid.
As you can see my father is wearing his chain of office.He was chairman of the Borough council at the time, and as I recall, my sister and I had been trundled out to be photographed on one of his civic do's.
Even at the age of  eleven this " cosy family publicity shot" really stuck in my craw.