Dinnerladies 1999
A Coconut Smelling Bulldog
My bladder is playing up today. It does this from time to time and as it was with Paul Edgecombe from The Green Mile I’ve been plagued by cramps and pain that arrives and leaves like lightening .
I’m not moving too far from home today.
I’ve completed the jobs I mentioned yesterday including a somewhat colourful wrestling match with Dorothy in the shower.
She now smells of coconut.
My final job was to measure and mark my front gate.
Village Leader Ian, who has lived down the lane for years admitted that he has been bugged by my gate for most of that time.
It used to be the gate to my pig pen and before that was a gate to one of the 1920’s Council houses in Erw Wen and it’s never properly fitted my narrow path and it’s bother Ian’s neat mind so much he’s offered to have his own blacksmith to reduce its size.
How kind is that?
Albert has walked down the stairs like an old man and yowled loudly for something to eat.
Garlic
Does anyone else feel as though they are on catch up all of the time?
At times I can be almost overwhelmed by the size my to do list
And my life is nothing special
Today I’ve taken the dogs out for a long walk, picked wild garlic flowers which resemble little fireworks of white and ordered logs and shopped.
I’ve also called around to Meirion Jones’ neat little bungalow to sweet talk him into being our flower Judge this year. He has the best garden in the village.
The flower show returns to Trelawnyd on August 5 th
So back to today
It’s just past 10 am and I have a workbook for university to finish and share with my tutor on line. That has to be completed this afternoon.
I have certificates to sort for the Hall window sponsorship, they need printing out, hand finishing and posting
There are Carpets to clean after Albert’s nocturnal bladder emptying
Dorothy to shower ( gawd don’t ask why all I will say that it rhymes with Manny) and it’s bugging me that my new outside solar lights haven’t had their little paper lanterns slipped over their cages.
The floor needs mopping, the chimney sweep needs re booking and I need to sort my repeat prescription for antibiotics out with the pharmacy.
Oh and I got to sort out more vendors and posters for the vintage table stop sale a week on Saturday .
My to do list is written and I think I need another bucket of coffee
Thought For The Day and The Blue Caftan
I’m in the Storyhouse library/ cafe with my paper bucket of coffee. I’m completing my final entries for my college workbook and journal. In an hour and a half I will go and watch a movie here before heading home. The movie is Moroccan and is titled The Blue Caftan .
I will review it later
I have just written 1000 words or so on the art of Demonstrating acceptance
The following video says it way better than I could ever do
His dry honesty is incredibly moving
The Blue Caftan is a gem of a film.
It’s a precise, gently unfolding drama set in the claustrophobic back streets of a Moroccan town where tailor Halim ( Salah Bakri) and his wife Mina ( Lubna Azabel ) forge a difficult existence producing beautifully crafted items of women’s clothing mainly for weddings . The couple are devoted and loving but exist with the unspoken truth that Halim is gay and occasionally visits a local hamman to meet his sexual needs.
When a young apprentice Yosef. (Ayouboui Massi) joins the shop, Mina’s unspoken fears are unearthed as she realises her husbands attraction to the younger man.
All this is done at such a gentle pace in just three claustrophobic and dimly lit places, the couple’s flat, shop and the hamman and as deftly as Halim’s beautiful sewing the threads of the three characters come together as Mina’s health fails her and she comes to face her own mortality and the potentially happy future her husband may have with Yousef
In one slow and beautiful scene the dying Mina apologies to Yousef for being so hard on him and with a few gentle glances she effectively weaves the young man into the couple’s life with an acceptance and love which is heartbreaking to watch .
The Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani has crafted a nuanced, brave and important film in The Blue Caftan.
A film bursting with hope and love and the goodness of people.
Beautiful
Hungover and Hangover gone
Ooooooh, I’ve got a bit of a sore head this morning
A case of too many peroni beers last night.
I felt rough as a bears arse.
Ruth and I took the dogs for a long walk and stopped at Y Shed for a restorative coffee and bacon baguette
Then it was back to the hall to clean up which didn’t take long as 8 volunteers turned up to help.
I’m drinking Diet Coke and am having a mooch on the couch covered in dogs
I’m too old for hangovers.
As it happened I took myself off to bed at midday.
I got up at 5.45 pm with Dorothy gently occluding my airway with her chin ( she does this most mornings when she wants her first pee of the day)
I drank a litre of Diet Coke and ate three bananas and now feel human
Albert has not been around and has been under the spare bed all day 😒
I only know that because Roger has been standing guard over him
Eurovision
I’m Fairly indifferent to the music
But with my old friend Ruth in tow, we manned the door and counted in seventy odd souls from Trelawnyd to enjoy the night.
I faded around eleven after night shift, but left enough dancing away
It was lovely to have the 2 village Ukrainian Families cater for us all with real Ukrainian finger food
They were our special guests
My star of Eurovision ? Amazing Hannah Waddingham
Ruth and Mary who has just been diagnosed as deaf
Stars
In the mid 1980s I went to see Les Miserables on my own in London.
I was twenty three or so
A very gauche and young twenty three.
I saw the production with the original cast. Colm Wilkinson, Patti LuPone, Michael Ball, Frances Ruffelle but non affected me more than the chocolate voiced Roger Allam as the policeman Javert.
His performance and voice was captivating.
In a couple of weeks time I’m taking Janet to see the Les Mis revival at the Sondheim.
It’s for our birthday
We’ve hopefully squeezed it in between rail strikes and fuck me I managed to get us two rooms at the lovely Mimi Hotel in Soho.
I had cocktails there with Nu a while ago
A Stuart Clarke is apparently playing Javert at the moment
He looks about 12
Vigils
I’ve seen hundreds of vigils in my time
Perhaps even a thousand .
One sticks in my mind more than any other and it was in Sheffield in the 1990s
It was with a young man in his twenties.
A slight, Bonny lad with pink cheeks and brown hair.
He was unconscious and sadly brain dead and he had a mother and many brothers who were sitting with him in shifts.
I was working nights and it was very dark and very cold as Sheffield winters often are,
And he was in a dark side room with his mother who was sat in a chair and a younger brother who was asleep on a mattress on the floor.
Now, because the mother hadn’t slept, one of the sons had fashioned a paper shade cover over each lens of her spare glasses, so by slipping them on she could effectively shut out the light of my inquiring pen torch when I came to assess her son in the middle of the night.
What we hadn’t factored in however was the youngest son’s sense of humour ,as unbeknownst to all, he had drawn two massive staring eyes on the paper with a felt pen. So when I shone my pen torch over at the woman in the chair, two massive bloodshot eyes were staring out at me in the dark!!!
My scream and subsequent swearing woke mother and son, and most of the ward up
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