Autumn

Autumn is here.

There is a definite chill in the air.

I’ve been washing the spare bedroom bedding this morning and have hung it on the field gate to dry.

Leaves are whipping down the lane as if in a grey river and have started to heap in the gateways and livery  stable fields and the ponies have started to wear their winter coats.

Roger has been galloping around the front garden, excited by the wind. 

He remains a joy

A regular little gentleman.

Who has only just started to learn to cock his leg up against the shrubs and flowers like an adult.

Chic Eleanor has just messaged. We are meeting in the pub at 5.30 

“ how naughty !” She texted

Nigel Returns

 

Nige’s last visit

Nigel “ I ‘ll be arriving on Friday afternoon , can you pick me up from Chester? “ 

Me “ Of Course , just let me know when…I’m looking forward to you coming it’s been over six years since your last visit !”

Nigel “ I know “

Me “ I’ll make sure everything is clean and tidy for your Visit”

Nigel ( scoffs)  “Have you got a dozen cleaning ladies coming in ? “ 

He knows me so well

My friend Nige is coming to stay on Friday and I’m so glad I have a new kitchen and bathroom

He likes to be in control and has, to be fair, suffered  a few horror visits in the long lost past when my cottage was more “ rustic” for his aseptic needs so to speak 

“ I promise you can make dinner “ I told him last night on the phone 

It sounds silly but I so want to impress him on his return 

The Chicken Field

 I found the painting behind the shelving until in my bedroom. 

It was covered in dust, and had slipped down out of sight over a year ago now

It’s a painting of fifteen multicoloured chickens 

I painted it 17 months ago now at the height of lockdown.

I think it’s important to remember the isolation of lockdown and not to forget it 

My lifelong friend Nia in New South Wales messaged me with the suggestion we cooked together on zoom on day. 

It was silly and frivolous and fun and sweet, and the conversation flowed easily in between the cracking of eggs and the mixing of sauces . Conversations you would have if you didn’t live alone 

Conversations you could still participate in lockdown .

From cooking we evolved to painting 

And the chicken field was born at the same time Nia swirled around blue abstract shapes on her canvass ten thousand six hundred miles away

This simple activity kept my head about water  during lockdown , it really did 

And yesterday I wrapped the duck painting in brown paper in preparation of sending it to Nia for Christmas.

She was there for me that day, with a smile and an inconsequential chatter and gossip about  ordinary things and I will always be grateful to her for that.

Lovely Linda and The Meaty Farts

 

I’m not banging on about being busy

But I’m busy.

I’m on a two day training course and it’s college night tomorrow 

I’ve just finished nights as well,

And they were busy too.

I got home all in a rush, and after dog walking, cat feeding and the like took a few minutes respite and let Dorothy give my feet a jolly good licking

It was Delightful! 

Now when she’s on a good one, Dorothy can slobber over my bunions for a good half hour, during which she has a particularly odious habit of farting rather heavily. 

I think it’s a kind of gastrocolic reflex, like a baby sucking a bottle will wind

And It’s only a small price to pay, to be sure

But today I wasn’t banking on the velvet voiced Linda knocking on the door wanting to organise a community council meeting just as Dorothy was in mid lickn’fart

I let Linda in before I realised that not only my feet were covered in slobber, but that the cottage smelled of the meatiest of farts….and boy are we talking meaty.!

I was mortified .

Blaming Dorothy seemed like the most obvious of ruses 

So I said nothing and hoped she wouldn’t notice

Linda was as gracious and as smiley as always, she’s rather like Chic Eleanor in this respect 

But I did notice that she didn’t stay very long at all

A Bee Vase

 My nephew Pete has just gotten divorced. 

He’s cheerful yet conflicted as many divorcees are but at fifty is moving into his own house, the first he can call just his own. 

I took him round a card and a house warming gift and he laughed when he opened it today

It was a flower vase with bees on it. 

I know it was a stereotype, but I bought him a gift I know many straight single men would never ever buy themselves and I think he was touched by it as he hugged me in the street as we said goodbye.

Memories

 December 29th 2005 was a Thursday . 

A suicide bomber killed himself, two Palestinian civilians and an Israeli soldier on the West Bank 

Tony Blair was Prime Minister and Mariah Carey was doing well with “ Don’t forget about us” 

There was little else of note to report that day, however it was the day I started to write Going Gently.

My first post was perfunctory 

disaster thoughts

well my first blog........sounds rather like something Kenneth Williams would say.
I will be brief, and "set the scene" as it were.

I am 43, a nurse professionally, newly moved into the Welsh country side from Sheffield. I Am probably going through a mid life crisis.

Ideal for a place like this......................look forward to talk soon.

I didn’t give much away did I? but the “ Midlife crisis “ quote was a bit of giveaway. 

For I felt a bit…..aimless. 

Lizzy asked about my move from Sheffield to a tiny village the size of Hillsborough Park and I’m trying to recall the lead up to it. 

My husband certainly had itchy feet and had wanted to move to the country for  a long time and we had been together five years in a city that had served us both very well. He was looking for promotion , 

I was looking to nest.

If children were on the cards then, I would have been an ideal time to adopt,

But we left my large three bedroom terrace on the steep Wynyard Road in Hillsborough with two old cats, Welsh terrier Finlay and grumpy Scottie Maddie and moved to Trelawnyd which was a village three miles ( and thirty  years )different from my childhood home of Prestatyn.

The first year in the cottage seems a blur now. 

There was a lot for me to organise as the inside had been reduced to a bland, 1980s shell by the previous owner and so I contracted a big shy bear of a carpenter to design a new staircase and handrail, Victorian looking glass fronted cabinets for either side of the inglenook fireplace and a bookcase and wardrobe for the bedroom. 

New windows were replaced in the back of the cottage and a new garden dug from beneath the tarmac car park , an  eyesore which was bordered with a new but traditional welsh limestone wall complete with an iron wrought gate made by my brother in law.

I oversaw everything and made a home. 

And never had much to do with the “ locals” until one moment when I was painting the living room ceiling one day I caught two old ladies peeping through the living room windows. 

Both had matching cardigans on. 

It was my first meeting with lifelong friends Gwyneth Jones and Olwena Hughes. Gwyneth had a penchant for tweed skirts and lived in the farm down the lane.

Olwena had no ankles and lived in one of the pensioner bungalows on Bron Haul.

Both ladies made a run for it when I saw me waving at them with my paint brush.

I caught them in the lane by the kitchen wall and invited them in for tea.

They admitted they wanted to see what we had “ done to the place” 

I recorded this video of the two matrons a few years later. I wanted to record some spoken welsh 

The conversation is about a fellow villager who had hurt his face in a fall.

Both have long since passed away

Funny what you remember

Roger’s Stairs

 

After many weeks of trepidation and angst, Roger has now mastered the cottage staircase.

True he runs at it with all legs flaying,

Almost as if he was a over wound clockwork toy injected with Adrenalin 

And true he is still very much so an uncoordinated mass of red and tan curls, typical of a puppy half his age.

But hundreds of times a day, he can be found somewhere on or around the staircase,

Bouncing up it

And Falling and bouncing back down it.

A gleefully happy smile upon his daft face.

The Valeta and Other Stories

 

In yesterday’s comments Lizzy asked how such a quiet, clearly gauche young Welshman like me became a psychiatric nurse at the tender age of twenty.

The answer, is probably more complicated than I realised at the time, they always are, but the overwhelming reason was that I was looking for a career was that I hated my life as grade 2 bank clerk in the National Westminster Bank in Rhyl.

I wanted a job with kudos

Something I could be proud of 

Something my family would be proud of.

And my decision to be a nurse was thanks primarily to a woman by the name of Nerys Griffith 

Now Nerys was a student nurse at Wrexham Maelor hospital .She was and is,very Welsh, was a seriously committed General nurse and briefly was my second or third girlfriend ( I know it was a phase) I was also quite in awe of her general nurse tales of blood guts and gore so thought that I could be a nurse of sorts and psychiatric nursing seemed a logical move even though I knew absolutely nothing of what it would entail. 

Up to then my sole experience of mental illness was that I watched the film Ordinary People with Timothy Hutton in 1981

I hadn’t got a Scooby Doo!

And so I applied to three school’s of nursing .

The local psychiatric hospital in rural Denbigh.

The school of nursing based at the West Cheshire Hospital in Chester

And a dreadfully scary gothic looking hospital in Chesterfield of all places in Derbyshire 

I was accepted for both the English schools

Now my spoken welsh wasn’t good enough for the local hospital .

And so I chose Chester , a city I revisit weekly even now.

My nurse training was dominated by a camp,multifaceted Quaker tutor by the name of Leslie Brint. He opened my gauche, small town mind not only to mental illness and it’s treatments , but to different lifestyles, cultures, sexualities as well as to aspects of social injustice, pacifism and culture and literature

He was my Jean Brodie. 

A man of great charm

Safari suit jackets 

And a lover of the Valeta 

 

So , apart from the Valeta what did I learn from my three years at the West Cheshire hospital? 

I learned that fragments of human beings that were ravaged by mental illness were still people that required respect and care.

I learned to give physical contact to people before I even leaned to receive it for myself and

I realised that an unhappy childhood was a common experience of so many.