Tired

I didn't realise just how tired I was tonight.
12 hour shifts , much of them with gloves and masks on can be tiring
Exhausting in fact, especially on a hot day.
I got off early tonight too , because I think I took all the new support workers under my wing and taught them how to take baseline observations.
I can teach quite well.
As Winnie started to kick a selection of her most hated scatter cushions around the living room ,in a fit of temper....instead of typing something interesting on Going Gently 
I fell asleep in my armchair
Still in my uncomfortable uniform .
I've not long woken up
With a dry mouth from snoring

I feel old today

Pride

Twice a day, when I'm on the way back and to from work, I see the beautifully stoic and grand Conwy Castle. Built in 1283 it has stood facing the sea, guarding the beautiful little town of Conwy from the might of the English.

Yesterday it was lit up in rainbow colours as a thank you to the key workers of our country and the single welsh word "Diolch" which means " Thank you" flashed across the estuary towards Llandudno where I work .

I was moved to tears, as I seem to have been done so many times this lockdown 

This week Auntie Glad was 101! 

So very frail and now living in a care home 16 miles away, Gladys celebrated her birthday with her carers separated from family and friends and the village Male voice choir who adopted her as their mascot many years ago now. 

Her daughter sent me this photo today to remind everyone that she was still with us and one look of that valiant, snowed haired old face took me flying back to the Flower Show Committee meetings held around her kitchen table , laden heavily with buttered scones and China cups with weak tea .

She would be so proud of her village if she knew just how well it's inhabitants had coped with this  lockdown . 

Today Hattie collected Mary from Trendy Carol's for her fix of doggie sweetness. and although the dog walker is back once during my 12 hour shift I still have to rely on Carol and her Hubby's good nature at taking the dogs in to her house for the afternoons for the girls to be looked after properly .

I could not have coped with things without them. 

Especially now as a single dad to three robust girls

Thank you guys so very much! 

I also have to thank the kind blog reader who sent me some homemade  uniform bags! 

I have used mine today and a dear colleague Quickly snapped up the other with a squeak of excitement .

Beautifully wrapped but without a name , 

I want to thank you personally for the kind gift ....so useful now that we have to keep our uniforms separate 

Affable despot Jason has bombarded the village social app site with funny , morale boosting videos and photos for weeks now. 

He is a one man sick humour feast! 

This is his latest Donald Trump advice photo to share 

And finally 

I have to thank all my blog readers who have bought my hospice's tee shirts ! 

We have done so well in selling them given the sudden lurve people have for our towns  goat population ! 

Apparantly.  Orders from abroad will be accepted 

Please google St Davids Hospice Llandudno for website 

https://stdavidshospice.org.uk/

Notting Hill

Before my I met my husband, I had a relationship with a man that ultimately and simply didn't work
It didn't work intermittently, so lasted in total for several years
Yesterday, I was reminded of the exact moment I knew that relationship was almost over for me
It was a moment that involved Julia Roberts.

My boyfriend, Philip, was a closeted gay man and when I first knew him had been so for many years.
I was a gauche and relatively inexperienced gay  who had just come out to his family and friends so we made for an extremely odd fit from the get go.
I had a big need for acceptance and heteronormality in our relationship
He wanted a romantic relationship but had two lives as well as two properties, one in the city and the other in the Lake District
He shared his left between Sheffield and countryside, and straight and gay lifestyles were interwoven between houses
It was a relationship doomed from the start.

But I was mostly desperately hopeful it would work.

I remember meeting him on one Friday afternoon to go to the cinema
I had wanted to see Notting Hill for a while and had  a weekend off
He finished work early so we could go and see it near MeadowHall a famous shopping centre and cinema complex
I was looking forward to a weekend together but before we even sat down in the cinema he informed me that he wanted to drive to his second home after the film for some " time out"

A love story was perhaps a wrong choice for a film that day.
But when I look back, it proved to be somewhat cathartic, for me , more than Philip
The film, as we all know,  is a light comedy in which Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts are sympathetically charming as gauche bookshop owner and needy Hollywoid star and the wonderfully
Schmaltzy ending had me weeping buckets even then,

Romantic films have a power all of their own, and this is especially true when the audience identifies with the story and invests in it , and by the last scene of the pregnant Anna Scott sharing a bench with her husband in a blissful study of coupledom, I was almost overwhelmed by the insatiable need to have my own  Notting Hill moment.

I remember walking out of the movie with our hands touching.
We were quiet and emotional and filled with the romance of the moment
" I feel as though I shouldn't go back to the Lake District !" Philip said quietly as we approached  his car
" Well don't ...stay here!" I remember saying , trying very hard to play down that moment so close I was to tears.
He dove back to the Lake District moments later
And I stood at a tram stop for home
And I knew then that the relationship would never work,
and at a moment in the near future ,would be over

Whitty, Christine and Bryn , Morning cockerels and the Church bell

I like The chief medical advisor Chris Whitty 
He is quiet, to the point and clear in his advice and his ideas
He has credibility and gives bad news without apology .
He's done well

What day is it today? I wasn't sure at first
Mind you one of the  cockerels had perched himself inside the open bathroom window at 5.02 am this morning and filling his lungs cock a fucking doodle doo-ed at full blast .
I thought I had just been electrocuted
Lucky for the little bastard , he managed to dodge several thrown bottles of bath gel and shampoo before he escaped into next door's garden but I did manage to give him a sharp smack on the arse with an almost empty bottle of listerine mouth wash

I never got back to sleep.
So I've been watching my phone from under my duvet
The Trelawnyd Street Warden's Social app has been rather frenetic today after Tim ( "Tim, Tim smart and not dim") , found out that our Church Bell mechanism has frozen and there has been much talk about how to get it freed up so that the bell could be rung at the  8 pm Thursday thank you to front line workers.
Even former Church Warden Christine Davis rang me up with some ideas to help which was kind.
Christine and hubby Bryn have just moved out of the village and will I am sure be missed by many of the villagers as both have been pivotal to village life and its activities for many years.
At the moment the group is trying to source a cherry picker!
How exciting

I'm back to work tomorrow and have booked the dog walker for the girls
after very early walks this morning we all went back to bed and watched the first episode of The Great British Sewing Bee recorded from last night.
It's what we all need at the moment
Nice people, doing nice things , with nice fabric
Nice........

Mark , one of the contestants !!! Cute as his buttons 

Zoom

Thank goodness for Zoom
The app is doing mighty fine in this time of isolation
Even in this tiny part of Wales
Tonight my family got together for a simple quiz
Nothing showy
Nothing flash
A child reading the questions out
A funny wisecracking nephew
A surprise of a decorated toilet roll as first prize!!
It was lovely
I love my family

 

Yesterday the Choir met and sang a much loved African song about a hypochondriac !
We clapped and sang and as always it was a bunfight of noise and chatter and giggles about silly things, brief personal news and of course of   Lindi's Charlie
( Charlie is in fact a dog!) 
I love my choir 

Speaking of dogs Hattie called around for some more  "Mary Time" today
I feel this could be the start of a new business venture

A Dog For All Seasons

I got up in a right grump this morning
I had florid dreams about a whole new cast of The Walking Dead and how they were fighting in a brave new world.
Covid related no doubt.
Last night I wasted too many hours of TikTok videos .
It's a new phenomenom to me.
Entertaining but vapid
I feel somewhat unsatisfied today

And so I've kept busy. The little yellow chair in my little yellow living room was marked and needed a shampoo. I had covered it but Mary's in season spotting had found its target and it was bloodstained
In a divorce you don't get maintainance for the pets!
And any spare money has had to be put towards solicitors' fees rather than spent on a bitch's hysterectomy which is something not covered by insurances, so it has taken me months to put aside a few hundred pounds towards the operation costs, an operation booked for the beginning of this month.

After washing the upholstery I spent a satisfying hour cutting Mary's hair on the garden wall.
Great lumps of Black and Tan fur wafted up the lane like miniature tumbleweeds only to be snapped up by the wood pidgeons and hedge sparrows who are busy nesting in the Churchyard .


Dogs hate having their hair cut.

I always think that they look guilty or shamed

Apparantly the Church bell's mechanism is stuck fast , so there will be no ringing of it tomorrow evening unless it can be freed up. A couple of the villagers are looking into the borrowing of a long ladder.

I've cleaned the car, made bread and after my sister dropped off some sweat pea seedlings, and bedding plants did some gardening with the cottage windows wide open in order to hear the dulcet tones of Paul Schofield in A Man For All Seasons running on Sony classics

Flowers in the kitchen window 

And facing the sun I. The living room 

Family Quiz on Zoom tonight

Lazy Arsed Video

I've been asked to show just how I get to talk to so many passing characters in Trelawnyn, so here is a lazy arsed video showing anyone interested just " where stuff is!!!" 

I only know it's Tuesday today because Hattie reminded me it was choir meeting at 6.30pm Tonight.

Questions in a postcard ...

A dog heals a tired soul

I had fallen asleep in the armchair of my yellow living room when a call came over the kitchen wall
It was well past 6 pm in the afternoon!!, I had been asleep hours
I answered it wearing just one croc and with dribble down my t shirt.
Luckily Hattie is made of Sterner  stuff than most .
She wanted  and more importantly needed Mary's company
The little terrier the ideal panacea to awful corona ward shifts at the hospital.

We we chatted I told her of the village street Warden app obsession with the Elon Musk's satellite watch from last night that had wardens around the village ( and indeed the night staff from my hospice) all watching the skies to see the 44 strong satellite train scooting across the Welsh sky at 10pm last night
She said she would have a look at the skies again tonight

But all she really wanted was a friendly supportive chat and a daft dog to spoil and to cuddle and to walk quietly with
And Mary is the ideal foil for stress.
It was lovely to see them both walking down the lane together