The Limping Wounded

Something happened to Winnie yesterday afternoon.
It involved the kitchen table, Mary and six goose eggs in a bowl.
Not having CCTV in the kitchen, I will never be quite sure what indeed happend but when I returned from shopping for the Prof's birthday dinner ( I prepared a nice Indian banquet btw), the kitchen chairs had been knocked over , three goose eggs had disappeared and Winnie was limping very badly indeed.
I can only surmise what happened.

There is nothing quite drama Queeny than a poorly bulldog.
They kind of decend into the depths of mental decline, when ill or in pain and need very careful handling if they are to be cajoled into some sort of normality.
As the Prof chomped his way through a Chocolate choux Bun ( a gift from the Affable despots' girls) I gave Winnie a detailed physical, concentrating on her painful leg which she kindly waved in my direction from her collapsed position by the fire.
I couldn't feel anything abnormal, but it was clear that she had banged herself badly as she wasn't weight bearing the affected leg, so I gave her hip a full massage, slipped her an energy boosting morsal of chorizo sausage ( I know, I know!) and made her comfortable for the night.

Not a happy bunny

This morning, she's stll incredibly sore and limping still, I've just taken her out for a wee in the front garden and that more or less mentally wiped her out.
And so I've had to shower her fat face with sympathetic  kisses, spoon half acup of sweet tea into her favourite bowl and have given her hip a gentle once over with warm hands

It's a good job I'm also a trained psychiatric nurse!

After I cut the lawn and weeded the borders, this photo was taken.

Still on her sickbed, Winnie was laid out in the sun to recuperate

There she was fed her dinner and given water, and she has remained

Watched over by George. 

I think she'll pull through

Birthday Boy

It's The Prof's birthday today.....he's forty- something!
Now usually he takes the day off work but today with numerous " Prof things " to do, he has whisked himself off to the University.
I shall bounce around the kitchen later like a 1950's housewife and prepare a nice birthday feast for supper. I may very well brush my hair and wash my face for the event........well it IS his birthday!

Going Gently  is not always fair to the Professor. On purpose he remains a somewhat shadowdy figure who tends to shout a lot when there is a chicken on the drainage board wrapped in one of our best tea towels ...to most he is the Roger Moore eye browed straight man to "my" buffoon fall guy, but the truth is naturally somewhat more complicated than this Welsh sit com version!
I give you a flavour of the dish rather than tablespoon's taste of it so to speak!

So I wish my husband, a very happy birthday.
I drive him to distraction most days but he wouldn't be without me.
And I wouldn't be without him.
Hey ho x

The sense I Was Born With

The Prof wants to go to town today.
So in a hurry I wanted to take Mary for her two mile trot.
Crocs,( no socks) tracksuit bottoms ( no underwear) and a thick sweatshirt was the outfit of choice
( well it was only overcast!)
The heavens opened in biblical proportions by the time I had passed Purgatory ( an apt old name for a house up towards the Gop ) and suddenly I looked lke Shelley Winters at the end of The Poseidon Adventure.
The farmer at Bryn Odyn who was passing stopped his large pick up and told me to get in, He was laughing but it was one of those chuckles that was tinged with " this guy's a lunatic" kind of tone.
An assessment probably supported by the fact that I couldn't cock my leg high enough to clamber up  into the passenger seat. ( and when I did I unfortunately showed too much sodden arse cheeks to any passing car).
Finally , Mary and I rolled into the pickup like two bears climbing into a litter bin but not before  I lost my right croc on the road .
"Hang on I!ve lost me flip flop" I chirped
The farmer started to shake his head in disbelief.
Meanwhile, Mary excited at all this attention,  stood with her paws on the dashboard.
" I'm 54 next month..I really should know better" I told the farmer as he drove me home.
He didn't argue the point.

Cloud Watching

I had a claustrophobic kind of post night shift headache this afternoon.
They always feel like a hangover without the fun evening out.
In my experience the only remedy for this is fresh air and a lie down in damp grass.
Cloud watching in a gentle rain also helps, it's better than paracetamol.
I tried a lay down in the field but the new hens, who have never seen me do this before, crowded around me like poorly controlled diabetics at the Waitrose bun counter, and so I took myself off to the  peace of the graveyard and had a crafty supine moment amongst the graves.
Try it, if you have never tried it.

Our cottage on the corner, the view from a headache busting graveyard

.

The Night Before School.

I've not been in work for three weeks

I am working this evening

The day has a feeling those Sunday evenings did before school.

Hey ho

I'm off to find an elderly neighbour now with a gift of half a dozen eggs.

This morning she found Camilla wandering in the road

( probably after a crash landing somewhere in the village) 

And returned her in one piece to the Ukrainian village 

Hiding In Waitrose

I'm in a rainy Chester today buying birthday pressies.
I hate shopping with a passion.
I've spruced myself up a bit, brushed my hair and have trolled around the Prof's favourite shops with a vacant stare on my face. and I have managed to buy a few items which I hope the Prof will like.
In way of a reward I have taken myself off to Waitrose and am presently hiding in a corner of the cafe drinking a coffee and eating a prawn sandwich.
I have also just had a companion for the past half hour or so.

The cafe is crowded, and so I found myself sharing a table with a rather well dressed and well spoken woman in her sixties. Over a period of just a few minutes I learnt that she was there buying food for a dinner party with inlaws, that her daughter was marrying their son on Tuesday at a "society wedding" and that the wedding was not her choice of "do" as it was more about money than about the ceremony itself.
My companion, as it turned out, was a retired senior Police Officer from Birmingham. She and her husband had moved to Cheshire last year and apparently  the husband was called Richard.
All this information was shared before her latte had lost it's froth, but she was incredibly friendly and charming and before my flat white had disappeared I had shared info on the Prof, our wedding and the pros and cons of South Yorkshire's police force, which seems much in the news at the moment.
Such is the nature of these " Strangers on a train" conversations.
The woman finally finished her coffee and said that that she had to fly. We told each other that it had been "nice chatting"
as she pulled on her coat and scarf she turned to me
"I see you have a dog" she said smiling and I suddenly blushed thinking that I was covered in dog hairs
" I have four" I told her "How did you know?"
The woman smiled  and pointed to the edge of my jacket
"The zip has been chewed off!" she noted

Once a copper...always a copper I thought!

A Few Words Away From Greatness

It's been a dreadfully dull and wet afternoon, so I sneaked off to the cinema yet again and went to see the Disney movie The Jungle Book. (The Prof would never EVER pay to see a Disney movie)
He in in London today where it is cold and damp too.

From the get-go The Jungle Book is a stunning experience. With GCI animals, beautiful locations and a confident child actor, actor/director  Jon Favreau has crafted a much darker and faithful looking-to- the-original adventure story, that at times literally transports you into the India, you just know Kipling would have filmed if he had computer software back in 1894)

It is, quite simply, magnificent to look at with several set pieces- a buffalo stampede (stolen shamelessly from The Lion King) and  the opening chase sequence being standouts.

Early on in the movie, even though he follows the 1967 cartoon plot, it is clear that Favreau wanted to be faithful to the original stories which relied heavily on the animal folklore and emphasis on drama and language but when the slightly more comic character of Balooi arrives (The bear being played by Bill Murray), he looses his nerve and brings in a more Americanised feel to the whole movie. The standout set piece songs from the cartoon (The Bare Necessities & I wanna be like you) are reprised albeit briefly, and Mowgli (a delightful Neel Sethi) noticeably starts using words like "Buddy" and phrases like "let's get on with it!"
Even one of the minor animal characters refer to being "exfoliated" after being licked by Baloo, a fact which I am sure would have had Kipling crying into his cup of chai

Shere Khan attacks an unsuspecting Mowgli

 

Having said this, the "darker" feel and look of this movie more than makes up for the sanitizing of the original language and a busload of heavyweight actors lend some dramatic weight to the narrative.
Ben Kingsley gives the panther Bagheera a suitable dignity, Lupita Nyong'o's Wolf mother is surprisingly moving in most of her scenes and Idris Elba is quite superb in his role of Shere Khan, his voice skills mating the stunning CGI version of the damaged Tiger.

Favreau has crafted a fine film here. Rich and satisfying and a total treat for the senses, I truly loved it.
However, if he had held his nerve and returned the entire script to Kipling's  historic Raj language this good movie would have been in my opinion, a great one.
8/10  

Eye In The Sky

Do you remember those " Balloon Debates" at school where the most articulate kids verbally fought for the chance not to be thrown out of the sinking airship? Depending on the strength of the arguements, I always tottered between one and another, swayed by emotion and logic.
Eye In The Sky relies heavily on that notion of powerful arguement as the film is set in the new moral maze of drone warfare.
Put simply, military compounds in the Uk and the US watch a Muslim terrorist cell in a township in Kenya. The cell houses known insurgents as well as two suicide bombers and in real time we watch as the far removed military personnel who make the kill decisions and the politicians who sanction them, deal with the knotty ethical and practical decisions of taking out the terrorists in a friendly county where local innocents ( namely a small Muslim girl selling bread) will be killed in the crossfire.

It's a taut and at times unbearably tense movie that never quite takes one side or another, and it's that very ambiguity that unsettles the watcher so effectively. As the  politicians ( Jeremy Northern and Monica Dolan)  seesaw out of making a decisiobn by referring the decision ever upwards, the hard bitten UK based soldiers Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren,who have been chasing the terrorists for six years, try to manipulate the situation to launch the drone, a drone which is piloted remotely by mortified Nevada based soldiers Aaron Paul and rookie Phoebe Fox, who have never killed before.

Interestingly, as all this angst and decision making ensues in America and Britain , only one Somali agent ( Barkhad Abdi) is risking his life to monitor the terrorist cell and in the end only he tries to save the young bread seller from the ensuing attack.

Eye in the Sky leaves the audience divided and thoughtful.
Modern warfare has never been portrayed so chillingly on film since Dr Strangelove
8/10