Oh Brenda

With the cottage full of workmen, I spent yesterday out and about.
After a trip to the animal feed shop, pet store , B&Q and walk on the beach . I called into the local supermarket to ." Go to the loo" 
I don't know about you, but I do so hate public toilets, and so, if at all possible I will always seek out the disabled loo in which I can have a sneaky number two in total privacy.
I know I shouldn't  but there you have it.
I'm a bad person.
Anyhow you will be glad to know that I got my comeuppance yesterday, as after a somewhat large " movement"  the door handle rattled loudly and I heard a woman's voice trill "There's someone in here Brenda"
I got up, flushed the loo and washed my hands, and as I glanced around , I noticed with horror as the toilet bowl filled with water and almost overflowed onto the floor.
The previous " user" had effectively blocked the U bend with what looked like a mixture of things both human and paper in nature.
In panic I tried to unblock the " bung" with the loo brush but that just made matters worse, then came the knock on the door
" Excuse me , but will you be much longer ?" The woman's voice came again and very very reluctantly I opened the door.
Two women , both pushing those triangular walkers on wheels were waiting outside
" The loo is blocked" I told her, my face burning red " I will go and report it, don't go in it''s not very nice" and I marched off , ostensibly in search of a supervisor.
The first woman pushed her trolley past me , and as I darted for the exit all I heard was a rather shocked
" Oh no......Brenda !!!!!"

The shame of it all.........

Helen Hayes: The Life Saver

The Prof came home late last night. He stayed long enough to raise a Roger Moore eyebrow at the state of the cottage, had a few hours sleep and caught the early train this morning. He won't be back until Saturday evening.
I am alone again with a bomb site.
At seven this morning Winnie knocked one of her claws out jumping from the bed. The blood trail added to the general " flavour" of the place....i.e. It resembles a particularly violent murder scene.
Hey ho
And in the middle of it all I have a funeral to attend at midday!
Thank goodness for all of yesterday's jokes.....and thank goodness for Helen Hayes

No..I'm not talking about the cute stowaway old lady who didn't really deserve a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Airport, I am talking to blog follower Helen Hayes ( sp) who took the time, effort, expense and kindness of spirit to send me a gift.
And what a gift it is.......take a look.

Even two of the workmen came over to praise the work when I opened the box, and Welsh plumbers are the most fickle in the entire world!
It was exceedingly kind of you Helen , to have done this for me and I am so grateful and overwhelmed at such a gift.
It arrived, just at the right time, when my reserves and morale are just a tad low....
Thank you so very much.....

Bumming Chips

The lounge....the kitchen doesn't look much better! 

 The workmen have given themselves until late evening tomorrow to install our new heating system, which seems a huge job to me. Having three workmen in the cottage has been a trial today, so at the height of the bedlam Winnie and I took ourselves to the pub.
There was no one there for the first couple of hours , so we had a pub lunch, several pints of Diet Coke and the landlady all to ourselves.

Watching the diners

Later in the afternoon , two Lancashire couples came in for a meal and Winnie managed to wander over to their table to say hello.
By the time I had got up from my sofa by the fire, she had managed to beg two chips and what suspiciously looked like a croquet potato out of them.

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?