Tell Me A Joke

Tell me a joke this morning...please tell me a joke....any joke! .....anything to lift the spirits of a man faced with a gaggle of workmen decending on a small cottage on one of the wettest weeks of the year to replace a filthy stove, line a sooty chimney and "  replumb "  pipework hidden away in dusty recesses and under aged floorboards and cupboards.
They only warned me they were coming last night!
The Prof has the car and is away, so thankfully friend Eirlys has agreed to house the dogs for the day. When the workmen arrive, I shall vacate the cottage and walk the terriers up to her farm which is located a mike and a half outside the village, in the pouring rain!
Winnie shall remain..........there is no way, I would be able to remove her from a cottage filled with overall clad men!
Her hormones wouldn't allow it.

So please......tell me a joke , any joke!!!!!!!......Rachel in reply to one of her enigmatic one line posts, had losts of fish jokes yesterday which amused me , so please give it your best shot.. Tell me a joke and when you do think of our tiny cottage being ripped apart by a gaggle of heating engineers, think of the muddy footprints, the sooty fingermarks, the noise , the mess, the stress of a bulldog's vulva being wagged " enticingly" against the bars of her crate, the endless cups of tea and the crisis of the enevitable disasterous problem which no doubt will arise in the middle of it all.
Oh the calamity!

I will start the ball rolling by my favourite Holly Walsh joke of the 2015 Edinburgh fringe
" I was very old when I lost my virginity!  I wasnt as much deflowered than dead headed"

Best In Show

I was out and about in the village at midday after sleeping a couple of hours after work. It was lunchbreak at the school and Trelawnyd was rife with the screaming voices of children at play.

The noise is like the sound of planes circling in their waiting pattern for Liverpool or Manchester or the hum of early morning traffic on the main road. 

You only hear it when you think about it.

I was reminded by two villagers that it was Meirion E 's funeral at the village chapel on Thursday. 

Meirion E and his nemesis Meirion H ruled our Flower Show during it's early years.

Both entered their home grown produce into the vegetable classes and both men were as quietly competitive as any two men could be without coming to blows over their monster marrows or longest runner beans. 

Their rivalry was legendary.

Every year, and as nonchalant as Margo Channing stalking through the cocktail party in All About Eve. Both men would arrive after judging, silently calculating each others' wins and assessing each others exhibits .

One year Meirion E would win the overall winner's cup the following year Merion H would win.

It was a standing joke in the village for many, many years. 

On Thursday I won't be the only representative from the Flower Show Committee to pay their respects at the funeral. 

Part of me wants to take along one of the Show's special rosettes

The ones that say " Best In Show" 

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

This afternoon, I watched episode 5 of The Walking Dead . A true indulgence as I never watch tv during the day.

It was a quiet and rather hokey episode where the grieving Maggie (Lauren Cohen) and Sasha ( Sonequa Martin Green ) team up with the wily Jesus ( Tom Payne) to effectively overthrow Gregory  (Hilltop's leader ) in order to set up a new home out of Alexandria. 

I kind of enjoyed the play and dynamic between the the weak Gregory, and the new leader Maggie and her defacto lieutenants  . 

However it was all a bit neat to see adoptive daughter Enid turn up to complete the new "one big  happy dysfunctional family" 

Sasha and the big blue eyed Jesus! 

Dyspraxia

There is something you may not know about me
It's something I have had to deal with since I was a child.
I suffer from a fairly mild form of dyspraxia.
Dyspraxia, for those that don't know is a disorder of coordinating certain movements.
It used to be referred to as being " cack handed"

I fell out of my crocs this morning. Admittedly it was on a particularly muddy piece of ground during a particularly heavy rainstorm, but out of my crocs I came and down into the mud I went.
I was still in my pyjama bottoms at the time!
Invariably my dyspraxia is mostly confined to clumsy behaviours. I will drop things, fail to judge distances when moving items and will always catch my head on cupboard doors.
I constantly run into shelves when pushing supermarket trolleys, overbalance when trying to get my leg into a pair of underpants and decanting things like rice, peas, flour and  sugar is fraught with the knowledge that at some time rice, peas, flour and sugar will be flung over the floor or the counter tops like confetti!

My clumsiness constantly irritates me as in most cases, a fraction before it happens, I know just what is going to happen. It's almost as if I have a brain fart just before the peas are unleashed or I turn on muddy ground.

Today I was not only irritated but very embarrassed, as I had to totter back into the house with a huge brown arse stain on the back of my pants. 

The Secret Life Of Albert

I caught him watching the Ukrainian village very carefully this morning
He was following the rounds of Thor, the oversized but gentle cockerel who is leader of team poultry.
Albert's world is small for it covers two or perhaps three acres of land, but he seems content with his lot of three Gardens, one Churchyard, a bit of scrubland and one lane, areas he patrols at least eight times in one 24 hour period.
He is a good humoured but physically distant cat. He's  not a lap sitter, and has never to my knowledge demanded a cuddle, but he does adore Winnie and can be found often pulling at her fat face- folds of flesh with gentle sheathed paws as they lay nose to nose on the floor.
The bulldog accepts his friendliness with a quiet acquiescence, not typical of the canine race.

He sleeps often, and seldom makes a noise about the house.
He is a shadow...that would always be missed if absent 

Hinterland

This is my saturday post

The world is so bloody small nowadays
This is a brief video of the Welsh police tv  series " Hinterland " ( y Gwyll)
The production values equal anything I have seen in the UK and its strange that the actors have to produce two versions ...one entirely spoken in Welsh and another shot in English!
This obviously is the welsh version.....one sold to many countries in Scandinavia
How versatile are the actors eh? 

Stuff

It started off a rather melancholic morning. I was up early as I had already caught up on sleep over the last few days and was feeling a little better despite having a streaming nose from the cold which has now decided to " ooze"
I culled a hen before breakfast which isnt a nice job at the best of times, but she looked so sick that I felt obliged to do the deed there and then.
I laid her body next to the badger track through the field and later her body will be recycled by them as they scratch out a living in the cold autumn ground. In the meantime some of the other hens and the gentle cockerel Thor gave her sad little body the once over.

I was repairing a Mary ripped hole in a pair of pyjama bottoms when there was a knock at the front door. It was a friend from work wanting coffee. She told me she had tried to come through the back garden but a ugly looking dog had prevented her from opening the back gate.
I told her it was Winnie who had just spent an hour watching gardeners doing the garden at a neighbours house, " she's obsessed with workmen," I informed my friend " she has a thing for
overalls!"
" dont we all?" my friend replied , looking around our living room with interest.
I realised that she had never been to the cottage before.

I think it's a common thing to be apologetic when someone new " checks out" your house, after all you are more than aware of that blotch on the stair carpet left by a menstruating bulldog, or that mark on the hall corner which signified  an old Welsh terrier's scratching spot, but my friend seemed rather captivated by the " old lady" feel of the place, which the cupboards and shelves filled with objects, photos, books and clutter.
She wandered around the house as if it was a museum.

She loved the paintings, the carlton ware 1930s lobster bowl and the wooden dog toy above the bedroom door. She loved the crockery and the glassware and read titles from the books on the shelves and ran her hand over the wade jug on the chest of drawers.
She wanted to know about the history of the art noveau desk in the living room.
" its lovely" she said and it was nice for me to see the cottage through bright new eyes.

Be Careful What You Wish For

This post supersedes the previous in importance
Still feeling run down, have had to cancel a planned overtime shift tonight
So popped into Marks today and instead of a scotch egg
I bought myself an egg custard tart
( feed a cold starve a fever like they say)
As I walked through the ladies department on the way out,
I managed to get one out of it's wrapping ( a feat in itself as the box was still in the carrier bag)
And just as I left the store I took one blissfully cool bite out of the pastry
before  a fucking seagull swooped in and snatched the rest right out of my hand!

I almost wept

The Power Of Laughter

I have never watched a whole episode of I'm a celebrity, get me out of here!
That kind of screaming reality show leaves me all rather cold.
But last night, all wrapped up with a lem sip , a menstruating bulldog and a roaring fire, I turned on the TV to watch a couple of celebs face the "  hilarious " Bush Tucker Trial .
The trial consists of the celebs being faced with consuming various " disgusting " small meals. to the delight of the baying audience. If the celebs retch or God forbid vomit up their cow anus or kangaroo bollocks the screaming front men Ant & Dec curl themselves up with horrific delight.
It's a depressing spectacle for sure.
Last night the two celebs kind of turned the tables on the whole thing by realising just how ridiculous the contest was.
They literally laughed their way through it!
Carol Vorderman and the wonderfully named Scarlett Moffat exuded warmth and good humour in their scenes together and within minutes I was enjoying their interactions and natural mischievousness much more than the fact they were faced with eating some poor animals arsehole!

The programme underlines that we don't need all this " throwing Christians to the lions"  in order to entertain ourselves.
Watching two friends laughing loud and strong is much more attractive a spectacle in my eyes