Fox Chapel District

It's Halloween and so I should dig deep and share a ghost story should I not?
Well I have not ghost story to share but I do have an odd little tale of coincidence
I love a story of coincidence.

Around 26 years ago I found myself on a specialist six month work course at the Spinal Injury Unit in Southport. It was expected that for part of that course, I  was to organise an elective placement somewhere else and after weeks of organising I was lucky enough to wangle work experience in  the US, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to be precise. Much of my experience centred upon the spinal injury rehabilitation hospital in Harmarville.
Like many rehab facilities, Harmarville was located out in the sticks, so to get to and from my lodgings which were back in the City, I was provided with a volunteer driver, who happened to be a very elderly black guy called Norm. Norm insisted that I sit in the back of his large black car, and so I( and many others)  was reminded of the movie Driving Miss Daisy when we turned up at any event. The film had only just opened in cinemas that summer.
Anyhow I digress.

Fast forward a decade or so to rural Lincolnshire, to an antiques emporium at a former RAF station to be precise. In a dusty, junk filled room, I spied an old map with art deco writing in a battered frame and on a whim bought it. It looked American, in period with the look of our former house , and it filled a spot in the hall.

The map travelled with us to Trelawnyd and until recently it has graced the wall on the upstairs landing, more or less unseen by all.

You may recall that recently I painted the living room, hallway and landing, and after this, I rearranged the paintings in the cottage and moved the map to it's present position by the front door.
There , I looked at it again with fresh eyes.

The map, I noticed , had small illustrations on it. A golfer in plus fours, a hunting hound, a whole series of huntsmen and women  in full livery, and written in the right hand margin in faint deco script was the name Harmarville.

I looked closer, and spied a road called Fox Chapel Road and I suddenly recognised where the map was of. Of all of the places in the world that  a 1930s map could have been from, I had bought an old map of the very place I had worked two decades before!
The map was of one very small far suburb of the city of Pittsburgh. A suburb where the Harmarville Rehab unit was to be built some fifty years later.

The Face At The Window

The Prof is asleep under a warm blanket on the couch

I have just hollowed out a pumpkin

Transvestite Vampires

Our vicar covers three parishes. Trelawnyd, the much larger village of Dyserth and the tiny hamlet of Cwm ( Pronounced " Come")
Every year, to raise funds for Cwm's minuscule village hall  a local woman ( who happens to be the daughter in law of Sylvia our previous Flower Judge secretary ) holds a murder mystery supper night. 
The format is sort of full proof. Eight locals ( including the vicar!) play the parts of the cast and read out their lines with varying amounts of skill and acting ability. Clues are given to who is the murderer, as the paying guests ( some fifty of us) make notes, buy raffle tickets drink varying amounts of wine and have supper.
It's old fashioned and hokey but rather good fun, so on Friday we invited my sister and her husband to come with us this year and the evening started as it meant to go on by the appearance of an elderly man who was smothered in lipstick , dressed as a vampire and who was carrying a woman's handbag.
You have to be there to understand the gist of it all.
Anyhow it turned out that a rather dreadful actress who went by the character name of Ellie Gant ( elegant....... geddit?) was the killer and I won a bottle a putrid aftershave in the raffle.

I am going to approach Jason the affable despot , to see if we could hold something similar in our village hall....he likes murders, and serial killing....oh and he's a good little actor!

I'm Carving our Halloween pumpkin today! 

Thought of the day

An Apology

Someone I know, came out to me as gay recently.
She dropped the fact into the conversation as causally as you like, but both of us knew it was done anything but casually.
I picked the information up carefully.
I will say no more about her, it's not my place to
But I was asked ( eventually) how I coped with bigotry or discrimination in the workplace.

I told her this story.
Many years ago now I was the nurse representative in a weekly rehabilitation multidisciplinary meeting. Present was a cross section of the great and the good. 2 medical consultants, a social worker, a consultant psychologist, junior doctors, a physiotherapist, occupational therapist and a student nurse in training . Every professional knew the other very well and the forum was often a lively but honest collection of minds.
As we were wrapping up the meeting one consultant ( a man I admire to this day) made an off the cuff remark about a general discussion of being disappointed as a parent by one of your children. Unthinkingly he shared that the ultimate disappointment would be for him, if one of his children came out gay.
The psychologist sitting opposite to me opened her eyes very wide and gave me a look, as did several of the other staff, but as the consultant went on, I said nothing, got up quietly, with my papers and walked out of the room.
I needed to process what I had just heard.

I wasn't angry but I was disappointed and moments later , as I stood at the nurses station with a good half dozen staff, the consultant appeared in front of us.
" I need to speak to you" He said to me carefully
" Go ahead" I told him as all of the staff pretended to be doing things just within earshot.
He indicated with his head that I follow him towards my office but I didn't move and said
" We can talk here"
I wondered what was going to be said , so I was totally surprised when he  unexpectedly gave me the most eloquent and moving apology I have ever received in my life.

Apparently after I had left the room, his fellow consultants and others had rounded on him.

There was a reason that I remembered this event to my friend.
Not only was it the only " discrimination problem" I ever experienced in my entire career,
It was one that I didn't have to battle myself.
I had a whole raft of people behind me.

Learning To Be Kind

I heard an interesting phrase today when a hospital visitor was talking about a poorly patient.
" She taught me how to be kind" the woman said.
I wanted to know what she meant by the statement, so I asked her
" When I was a girl" she explained " she went out of her way to teach me fun things. She taught me to knit and to sew and to cook...her kindness made me want to be kind back"

This got me thinking on my journey home.
Can we taught to be kind.? 
I suddenly thought of a time at school when I had just entered sixth form.
The few friends that I possessed had already left school, so as a shy teenager, I was even more isolated in my chosen A level classes of Geography and Biology where numerous classes of sixth formers were lumped together in antisocial gangs and factions .
I spent great chunks of my time alone and even entering a class would  fill me with social dread and angst, so it was common for me to pick a desk at the back of the class so I could effectively disappear from view.
In my Geography class, from the second or third day, I was joined at my desk by a cheerful boy called Tim. We didn't know each other, but he sought me out and remained as resolutely good natured and friendly as I remained quiet and rather shy throughout the next two years .
We were not friends, as I never met up with him outside that one class, but he always made a beeline for me keeping me company and entertained during explorations of Brazil and the long days studying cuestas and Ox bow lakes.
Tim wasn't my real friend, he had far too many friends of his own,
But he was kind.
He sat next to me because he was kind.

Hunt For The Wilderpeople

 New Zealand is not generally known for it's film industry, so after hearing that the quirky indie movie Hunt For The Wilderpeople had done so well at it's home country box office, I decided to give it a go.
Set generally in the Maori populated rural bush, the story sees troubled, obese teenager Ricky ( Julian Dennison) literally being palmed off on childless farmers Bella (a delightful  Rima the Wiata) and her bad tempered husband Hec (Sam Neill) by burnt out child welfare officer Paula ( Rachel House) .
Ricky is an angry orphan, obsessed with rapping culture and  gangsters, but his defences are gradually worn down by Bella's curious warmth and rather black humour even though Hec remains stand offish and cool.
When Bella unexpectedly dies foster dad and teen reluctantly join forces to embark on a strange " True Grit " journey into the bush, pursued by the police, an obsessed and angry Paula and a set of huntsmen.
It is, what it is, namely a rather sweet fairy tale of two lost souls who find each other and credit must be given to a grizzled Sam Neill who is happy to let his rotund co star hog all of the best one liners.
Having said this, as charismatic as Dennison undoubtedly is, with his spirited haiku renditions and gangster jargon, it is important to note that he is not your typical child actor, and does,  perhaps lacks, the emotional range needed to portray the more pained aspects of the boy's character.

Having said this, the movie is a comedy, and the cast do deliver a whimsically sweet story which pleases even though occasionally it dives into slapstick now and then.