Mule Train

Bob Blackman was a phenomenon, albeit a minor one on the club circuit in 1970s Northern Britain. 

I first saw him in a working man’s Club in Rotherham around 1981, a place that had a stripper on in the men’s bar at tea time at the same time families were enjoying dinner in the main lounge. 

I remember crying with laughter at his antics with the tray.

As I recall I got very drunk on Barley Wine 

I’m Still on nights, and strangely Bob was a product of some nostalgic chatter in the wee small hours of last night.

My first sojourn to my beloved South Yorkshire  

I got up at midday when Dorothy started to perform CPR following a tickling bladder and donning shorts and my new I love Scotch Eggs T shirt, we all went out for a walk which was nice because everyone seemed to be out and about and I could tick the box with some human contact.

Trendy Carol ( nice bomber jacket, designer jeans, chic sandals  ) stopped. She’s pulled her left arm at work and has to wear a sling. She said that she is coming to the church meeting on the 2nd as did Pippa from the rectory then Mrs Trellis and Mr Poznań who was pottering in his front garden.

I came home and ate some chicken and salad before going on line for a bit in order to purchase a subscription to Disney + 

The Walking Dead returns on Monday and can only be viewed on Disney which sounds a bit odd given it’s an ultra violent zombie show

I also managed to get cheap tickets to the Liverpool Philharmonic and their performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique which is a Sunday afternoon concert….

The Liverpool Philharmonic has a sexy new conductor Domingo Hindoyan

What fun

The walking Dead returns next Monday for its final season

"I Wanna Dance With Somebody"

Piss Boring Post then Hiraeth

 I’m back on night shift again, which is ok given the miserable weather, grey skies and chill in the air.

I lit the fire last night, and the Dogs and Albert crowded around it as if they had never experienced a fire before.

I’m going back to bed in a bit. There’s no one to see, and little to do on days before night shifts.

The postman has just knocked on the window with a package for me.

I bought a jar from a private buyer on eBay the other day. 4£ for the jar 3 £ for the postage.

It’s my spectacle jar .

I’m a bugger for losing specs. That is the reason I never buy any expensive ones as invariably within a few days they be lost for eternity.

I buy a selection of nice no prescription reading glasses on line every few months or so, but even then I’m always scrabbling around the cottage looking for a pair when I’ve lost the ones that are generally perched high on my forehead.

Now I have a spec jar, compete in cheerful yellow, which comfortably holds 6 pairs standing up

Life in the fast lane

Ok there IS always something interesting to blog about.

As a postscript I’ll post this illustration , which was sent to me by friend and blogger Mike 

In wales Hiraeth is often a popular name for a house . 

So many rural houses have no numbers in Wales so often have to have a name to differentiate them from each other.

My cottage and Mandy & sailor John’s cottage next door used to be collectively called dan  y Fynwent which means under the graveyard . Then they were known as Llan Cottages ( Llan is one of several words in Welsh for Church) Now my cottage is known as Bwthyn y Llan which is Welsh for Church Cottage

Hiraeth, has other meanings in Welsh , as well as nostalgia, it can simply mean homesickness and yearning but I think I prefer the above definition

There is a magic quality about it .

Pond Bun Fight

 

I was a little disappointed by the pond meeting.

It was wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

Let me explain…

The village pond used to be a bit of tipping ground and thirty years ago or so the Community Council suggested a renovation .

They did a cracking job, utilising local farmers to bash the pond into shape. They planted trees around the new pond and eventually a lovely oak fence and gate surrounded the area. 

It must have looked wonderful 

However over the years,  the oak fencing provided an effective barrier to locals to use and visit the pond and eventually it has more or silted up and has been totally overgrown . 

In my sixteen years here, I have never seen it visited .

Now members of the new Community Association  have taken an interest in rebooting the pond as a conservation project, and so a proposed plan was drawn up, the AONB dept consulted and a grant obtained to support the project.

Yesterday was planned as a relaxed meeting with interested members of the village, members of the community council and Association  , a  AONB *ranger and a council expert in amphibian and pond wildlife present.

The ranger and expert provided positive support and information for the pond project but I found some of the comments from others, rather negative, slightly confrontational  and a little unhelpful . 

A lot of people had a lot of advice to give, barriers were thrown up before basic information was shared about the project and complaints voiced thirty years ago about basic seating areas were unhelpfully resurrected. 

I made sure that I voiced some positive comments about how good the project seemed.

I caught the eye of the ranger, who had obviously seen village meetings like this before, 

“Too many chiefs “ he whispered “ Things will be fine when work starts” 

I liked his attitude and I like the proposed plan which is a detailed conservation project which can be utilised by the school as well as the community in general. 

Things are different than they were thirty years ago. 

Although there is a place for bish bash bosh, where the local farmer would sort everything out  informally with brute strength, chutzpah and his trusty JCB there is much to be said for getting the experts involved and doing things systematically.

I wanted to scream out “ Let’s be positive 

Hey ho

I photographed the pond site today in the rain. 

and thought how lovely it would be for it to be functioning again , with crested newts swimming in reed beds and with locals sat in the shade of the cherry tree watching dragonflies dart in and out of the dappled pond light.

Hey, but I’m a romantic 

* area of outstanding Natural Beauty 

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Big thank you to Joyce for my new t shirt

No gravy stains on it yet ! 

Why I left Psychiatric Nursing

 In his morning blog, Cro talked about the state of psychiatric care in the country, discussing its efficacy especially when dealing with the sad case of the recent Devon Shootings.

I trained as a psychiatric nurse back in 1983, just as the big asylum system was closing and the relatively new community nursing system was being set up and greatly expanded.

The nurses, especially on the acute admission wards, were becoming much more psychologically focused in their care and training, like most  branches of care, nursing was becoming more academic, research based and professionalised. 

It was an exciting time to be a nurse, in many ways but after just three years training and three years staffing on an acute admissions ward I left to become a general nurse. I was burnt out, jaded, and a little cynical.

I was also just twenty seven years old

Very few of our patients were the Conrad Jarrett type. (Conrad was the lead character in the book Ordinary People , the character played by Timothy Hutton in the film version,  who was wracked with guilt and depression after his brother’s death) Conrad was cured by the intervention of a kindly old Psychologist after his discharge from psychiatric hospital. 

Our patients where the acutely ill psychotic and depressed. Patients that were admitted time and time again when meds were not taken, home stressors remained unchanged and when life too a turn for the worse. 

The community teams supported many so very well, but magical cures were few and far between.

Such is the nature of the beast which is mental illness. Running alongside those patients which enter the psychiatric system are millions that are just , well, psychologically damaged. We all…all of us fit into this category in one way or another. 

Most of us, through luck, self awareness, experience and with support, manage our demons and our weaknesses ourselves, but many others just get by. They often exist within a life of varying sadness and emotional pain. 

They don’t receive the benign insights from a kindly psychologist.

They don’t get the chance to have psychotherapy, or have a stretched community psychiatric nurse visit them once a month…

They are the people that live next door, the people you work with. The people you date.

I’ve meandered off a little here….and have not answered my own question. 

I left psychiatric  nursing because it overwhelmed me.

Plain and simple.

I left because I wasn’t fully cooked myself to cope with it

and I left because it saddened me. 

“ No One Ever Called Me Darling”

 

That gown ! 

I’ve never reviewed Now Voyager.

Having said that, I’ve never seen it on the big screen as it was meant to be seen.

And so nearly 80 years since it was made, I thought it time for my Going Gently review.

Now Voyager is a melodrama to cap all melodramas. 

It is pure nectar to a middle aged gay man’s sensibilities for everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown into the mix .

In two hours we are witness to the transformation of Bette Davis’ neurotic, monobrowed spinster into an assertive , shoulder padded, coiffured  woman about town through some unseen but obviously highly effective psychotherapy .

What a bitch Gladys  Cooper

Throw into the mix a harridan mother ( A gloriously hateful Gladys Cooper), a handsome married Austrian (Paul Henreid), a voyage to South America, a benign psychiatrist ( Claude Rains) a wise cracking nurse (Mary Wilks),  oodles of pop psychology, a dozen gowns to die for and more cigarettes than one set of lungs can cope with.

I loved almost every minute of it.

On the big screen, Henreid is quite beautiful

Ok I could have lived without the snivelling Tina and the “ hilarious “ comic aside in the mountains of Rio  but the rest, with the eye rolling Davis in full gallop, was a camp lesson in emotional romping.

Having said this, Bette Davis is still incredibly moving as Charlotte Vale, and I found myself tearing up at the quiet, understated moment Henreid’s character shows his affection and thanks to her,  the first time anyone had done so in her life. Her expression when she received his gift of perfume , literally  breaks your heart.

In 80 years, the movie has lost none of its power

Bedevilled with Meetings

….so said the wonderful Moria Rose from Schitts Creek. 

I’m happy to steal her lines any day even if they were uttered with no self awareness whatsoever.

Sunday today and after a short sleep I intend to meet up with my friend Colin for Lunch and Bette Davis

It’s going to be overcast and gloomy, ideal weather for Now Voyager me thinks.

I managed to sort out a preliminary meeting of “ The Friends of St Michael’s” for the 2nd of September inside the Church itself, where we hope to organise an action group into some sort of coherent force so that the Church can eventually become a Pilgrim Church and tomorrow I’ve been asked by the community association to go to  a site meeting at the village pond between the Community Association who are planning to rejuvenate the green space and the Clwydian ANOB ( Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty) I think I’ve been invited to represent an “ ordinary villager” 

Which is nice.

It’s nice to be useful

 

Gut Feelings

A photo of the Louisa Street Bombing

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/familys-blitz-memories-shared-and-displayed

 Rachel’s post about gut feelings held a certain resonance with me today.

I wouldn’t be here today, if my Grandmother had not listened to her gut feeling during an air raid over Liverpool in 1940, Nor would another 20 or so members of my family.

One gut feeling meant that two dozen others plus would exist.

She used to tell a good tale of it. 

So did my mother who was a girl of fifteen at the time,

But there they were in 1940 running through the Liverpool streets during an air raid. My grandmother, my mother and my uncle Jim who was around ten years old at the time

My family had three choices. 

They could either go to the public shelter which was furthest away or run to the family shelter in Louisa Street Everton where my grandmother’s in laws had congregated, their last choose was to make  for the nearby school.

The school was slightly further, but my grandmother had been promised a single “ reinforced” room just for her own use in it, so she was torn between the choices.

My mother remembered than the bombers were already turning at St George’s Church, the highest point of that part of the city when my grandmother stopped in the road unsure of which shelter to make for.

She prayed and her gut feeling made her turn for the school.

The bombs were falling when they flung themselves onto the school floor, and nearby explosions brought in windows and doors as the Louisa Street Shelter suffered a direct hit which brought the roof in onto my paternal family fatally injuring  my great grandfather  and killing seven others. 

Just tonight I found my great grandfather’s name James Samual Fry in the official Liverpool and Merseyside Bombings Blogsites on line

My grandmother followed her gut feeling that night and soon after, with family dead and no home to go back to , she followed that little voice in her head and took her family to wales where she settled in the back of a small shop, in the village of Gwaenysgor, just a mile or so from Trelawnyd.

I will leave you with this lovely song