Travelling Alone

Rachel has impressed me.
The thought of travelling alone  around a vast country like Russia, would have filled me with paralysing  dread.  even the thought of it has me sweating like a Hooker in church! So the fact that she is presently crossing the frozen wastes by train in nothing but a fur hat and the faint smell of vodka fills me with awe.
I couldn't do it.

I have only been away by myself once.
Years ago, after one of several messy break ups with a psycho boyfriend, I took myself off into Sheffield city centre in order to buy a vacuum cleaner. ( like you do) I ended up buying a cheap ticket to Seattle and just a few days later, I took myself off to the city of fish, clouds, rain and frazier without really knowing just why I was going.

It did me good for Seattle is a friendly city.
I mooched around the harbour and the antique shops, drank copious amounts of coffee, had a wet and rather eerie trip on the Puget Sound Ferry and visited the cinema time and time and time again.
I talked to people daily, had a chance encounter with a Japanese/American lesbian called Hisoka who gave me a gift of Alan Bennett's book " Talking Heads" and I recharged my somewhat frayed psychi which had been battered somewhat by a relationship that was in essence ....shit.

1001!!!!

Thank you my followers xxx

Sharing Your Bed

This morning's pile on...

There are times during the day when stressed new mums have some " peaceful time" in order to get on with jobs, have a bath, talk with a friend uninterrupted, or just to chillax.

These times are often snatched when the baby is napping.

" My time" is early mornings after the first walk of the morning has been completed, as the household  retires " en masse" to bed.

This morning I left them all to it. I had my nursing reregistration paperwork to complete at the kitchen table

Sharing your bed with dogs for a few hours is one thing, sharing your bed with a six foot academic is quite another, and it has always struck me as interesting just how normal sharing an all-too-small duvet, a square of mattress and a few pillows actually becomes when you have embarked in a relationship.

In our early salad days, the musical farts, the teeth grinding, the pig snoring ( me) would often cause a sleepless night and a  fractious morning at work. Now, those noises, the half arsed, middle-of-the-night- tussle to cover every inch of cold body with warm duvet and the get-up-in-the -night for a wazz are just a reassurance. 

Now don't get me wrong.....I do occasionally enjoy the bed to myself when the Prof is away and indulging myself in a bout of horizontal star bursts remains an incredibly satisfying thing to do, but the stillness of an empty side of a double bed ( the right side----I always sleep on the left) remains rather troubling after two decades of bed sharing.

I shall leave you with a cute photo of Mary ( shamelessly posted to encourage those last few readers who haven't officially followed me to do so) AND a cute photo of the wonderfully cool Selasi (who I have just seen on a re run of Bake Off ) 

I am sorry to see him go.

The cream on the nose is adorable

Aberfan: Cantata Memoria

I have just been watching Welshman Karl Jenkins' incredibly moving Cantata Memoria.
It is a multilingual choral work with a special importance for all Welsh people of a certain age for it commemorates the deaths of 116 children and 28 adults in what became a mining disaster that shocked the world
Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan disaster.
For those that may not be familiar with what happened, back in 1966, after a period of heavy rain a coal spoil tip which had been mismanaged and neglected by the National coal board disintegrated into the small Welsh village of Aberfan. The slurry overwhelmed the village and practically destroyed the village school where the children had just arrived at their desks for registration.
I was just four years old when the disaster occurred but it has always had a certain resonance with me as I remember when , as an older child of eight or so,  I and my fellow classmates were reminded by our own teacher that most of the dead where younger children of similar ages to us.

The Jenkins' work is a stunning piece of  National and indeed international remembrance for Children lost in such disasters. It's been a long long time since I have been so moved by such an event

Fuck off Sweetcheeks !!!!!!

Now I feel, I may need to clarify something here
I'm not always a nice person.
When the mood takes me, I can be a real c*#t , especially when I am tired.
It's almost as though my inner gay drama queen/waspish bitch troll-from-hell takes over from that skipping Mary Berry/ Laura Ingles persona that I like to think I am for most of my waking hours.
Earlier today I felt like a real knock-down, gouge out yer eyeballs slap fest.
I was tired, this morning.  On my break at four am, I had just fell into a doze over a peanut butter-on-toast sandwich, when a visiting colleague entered the coffee lounge and proceeded to tell me all about their new kitchen ( completed with a boiling water  hose for washing the friggin skin from tomatoes!)
I covered my face with a Hello magazine and prayed for death!
Suffice to say my break turned out as restful as the latest Trump/ Clinton  debate.

When I got home I caught a very large beer Lorry stuck at the corner outside our cottage. The driver had ignored signs stating very clearly the unsuitability of the road and had taken a chance to shortcut his journey.
He was scraping the top layer from our wall when I marched forward like Bodicia, with hypertension.
" BRING DOWN ONE PIECE OF THAT WALL AND THERE WILL BE TROUBLE!"
I yelled holding onto a yard brush
The neighbours came out to watch!
" Keep your wig on grandad ! the driver yelled back just before his tattooed co driver cooed out the killer blow of " Calm yourself sweetcheeks"
WIG? G R A N D A D ? 
FUCKING SWEETCHEEKS! ? 
I thought I was going to have a stroke I was that angry.
Luckily , Mike, who lives down the lane intervened and with his guidance and with millimetres to spare the Lorry pushed forward, just as I hurried into the cottage for my iPad camera to record the debacle.

Out with anger
In with love..........
Off to bed....
NO ONE RING ME!!!!!!

For Anne Marie

The day before a night shift often feels like a " nothing day"
I grab a couple of hours sleep in the afternoon if I can,.....the rest of the time , I try to catch up with chores.
I prefer the word chores to jobs.

This morning I was worried that blog Rachel had been rather quiet in the middle of her jaunt across Russia. Now I understand she has been drunk and naked on a three day train journey through Siberia.
It sounds all too 1960s for my liking.
But at least she's alive........I did have visions of her being tied up and bitch slapped by some lesbian guard in a gulag somewhere very cold.

Winnie has the shits over the last 24 hours so has enjoyed a bespoke lunch of rice and chicken.
She sneezed in the middle of the rice and has " pebble dashed by newly painted green walls in the living room. (With the rice and not the shit)
I left George removing every individual grain with meticulous care as I am on my third trip outside to retrieve the washing as yet another heavy shower has soaked the garden

I've made curried parsnip soup.

I've collected all of the paperwork, photos and certificates which have been sorted, and have put all away into the living room cupboard whilst watching an episode of the new series of Taskmaster 
( Taskmaster is a comedy show where 5 comics undergo strange tasks set for them by the very funny Greg Davies)

Taskmaster is the only thing that has made me smile all day.....
I shall leave you with some photos requested by Anne Marie
New stove, new Windows, new fridge.....
God help me!

Family Ties

My elder sister is researching our family tree.
I am interested predominately in the maternal branch of the family which seems to originate between Quaker stock from Bristol and poor Irish folk from the back and beyond but my sister quite rightly is collating all the information from both sides.
Yesterday we went to see Joyce, my father's cousin to see if she could furnish us with more information.. Approaching 90 she is the oldest surviving member of his side of the family.

We chatted about this and that , made notes of a long forgotten aunt and had tea and cake, so my sister and I were not quite prepared when our host, with unexpected candour talked about just how dour and bad tempered our grandfather, her uncle, was.
In those days my great grandfather presided over his children with a somewhat iron and controlling fist and each one lived in a house which he had built, the houses set in a row. My grandparents brought up my father and his brothers right next door to Joyce and she remembered just how cruel my grandfather was to my father.
" we heard the beatings through the wall you see" Joyce told us " He used a belt with a.buckle and he never hit the younger boys just Ronnie..Ronnie was the eldest of course, it was always Ronnie that was beaten"
Joyce then recalled that the punishments became so bad that, that her grandfather was informed and subsequently intervened. And it was thought that the abuse stopped although they were never quite sure it did.
When he was alive , my father never spoke of this time at home.
This snippet of a sad part of my father's childhood upset both me and my sister, perhaps for different reasons.
I looked at him in a slightly different light than I had before , for I know, that it is common that the eldest child will often take abusive behaviour from a parent in a way of protecting other siblings.
Apart from the odd 1960s/70s smack , my father was in no way a cruel man with his children. In many ways, especially in later life, he was indeed a sensitive soul.
That's why this news, perhaps sounded so shocking.


* the photo is of the autumn sun glowing on the trees of the churchyard and was taken by teenage boffin Cameron

The Ghost Of Ty Wynne

Having said, only yesterday, that affable despot Jason is in the process of hibernating for the duration of the winter, I caught him outside his house " Ty Wynne" on Chapel Street in a pair of shorts during a break in the clouds.
I had just bumped into Mrs Trellis ( who thoughtfully invited the Prof and I around next Sunday morning for " good coffee and croissants") when I spied him and we fell into conversation about devil clowns running amok all over the country.
" There is a strangeness about this road at night" he added finally, when all clown talk was over
" sometimes you feel as though you are being watched"
A shiver went down my spine.
Now Jason lives on one of the oldest roads in the village. Although surrounded by houses and cottages, there are only two dwellings on the street, his house and Chapel house, both homes separated by the chapel which used to be the indoor market way back in 1700. Chapel street runs down the side of the village Hall.
When I was researching the history of the market Hall, I heard a strange story from Graham, the local handyman and Shepherd.
I quote from my sister blog Trelawnyd: Voices From The Past of his experience

In the early 1970s Ty Wynne featured in a somewhat creepy tale. Local small holder Graham Jones was just leaving the memorial hall one wintry and rainy night.. He had been playing snooker  and as he got on his bicycle he saw a figure of a man standing in the gateway of Ty Wynne.
The man was wearing an old fashioned long coat and hat, and seemed to acknowledge Graham before he cycled for home.
Literally a minute later Graham approached his home along London road and was astonished and frightened to see the same man standing alone outside his own gate!
Graham wisely stopped and returned for the morale support from his friends back in the hall and by the time he returned mob handed the "man" had vanished" 

Before I told Jason the story, he added to his, that he had often " quickened his step" when walking towards home at night because of the eerie feel of the place, something that was compounded one day when his daughter Eve went to play with a girl, whose house backed onto the road.
Both girls ran back home crying. They had been frightened by a strange man standing behind the memorial hall.
He was wearing a long old fashioned coat!