And I’m working nights until Thursday morning this week
Serve me for having so much time off.
I’ve daydreamed the morning away. Thoughts and ideas interrupted by the thoughts and daydreams of others all hidden away on line. Sure I’ve walked the dogs and made the breakfast which is a much loved ritual of brewing coffee as long as it takes to poach eggs and make toast.
I have the toast dripped in tahini too.
It adds, special to a mundane meal.
Roger and his pubescent little bark, alerts me to passers by.
And I walk out “nonchalantly” , tea towel in hand prepared and quietly eager to say hello to someone I may know .
This morning is was designer North Faced Heulwen and Derek fresh from a London trip.
Then Eirlys with my dinner plate wrapped inside a bag. The chicken dinner was delivered on her, 50th wedding anniversary to be.
A fortuitous coincidence which was nice for both of us.
Roger showed off as we talked over the kitchen wall, and ran around the garden swinging a wet pair of underpants which had been left too hopefully on the garden chairs to dry
I stopped day dreaming and made a Thai green prawn curry with half fat coconut milk and syphoned the soup off for lunch, the curry I will eat at work
Nu texted me with a photo
Underneath simply read “table pour uno Juan Les Pins”
It was her way of encouraging my next trip, which was as sweet as it was subtle
Facebook has been sending me some memory photos one taken 2 years ago one taken 5. This is how I like to see myself . It was taken when I was trying to publicise the closing of the church. A posh anorak and a cap cover a multitude of sins .
I hate my photo being taken, but I do condone this one with my faraway look into middle distance
The next photo just makes me laugh. It was taken almost 5 years ago now when fellow villager Ann and I were doing the zipwire .it was taken on a hairaising journey up the side of the Bethesda slate quarry in what only can be described as an army truck straight out of Tenko.
It was terrifying , and more more scary than the zip wire itself.
I’m pottering today. I’ve sorted all of my paperwork yesterday and have piles of home paperwork, university stuff, work stuff and Community Association stuff.
I cooked a full roast chicken dinner yesterday and because I always make too much, I plated up a portion for Eirlys and took it round
She looks well but told me to slow down
I said I will and today I am
It’s Judgement at Nuremberg on dvd, a long video chat with Nigel and some homemade duck spring rolls by a lit fire as outside its gloomy and wet and a little chilly
No we are snippets of things to people some of the time.
I was Marilla Cuthbert to Dorothy’s Anne ( with an E) overnight when she endeavoured to slip under the duvet at the coolest part of the night ( Mathew would have given in) I as Marilla did not, but I did give her a tap on the head for trying.
I love the way television and cinema allows the audience to subtlety empathise with its characters.
In the remake of Anne Of Green Gables ,crabby Spinster Marilla has to face a garrulous and hysterical Anne who has just experienced her first period. After the expected conversation the camera silently observes Marilla’s hand centremitres away from Anne’s shoulders, hesitant before alighting .
I’m not a Harry Potter fan but this audience reaction to Dumbledore’s death ( Michael Gambon only passed away yesterday) in a special anniversary showing is quite beautiful to watch.
There will be a few wands lit up at his funeral no doubt.
I’ve also been watching the mini series Five Days At Memorial an account of how the staff of an isolated inner city hospital coped after hurricane Katrina made for an emotional and thoughtful watch.
I will leave you with another minute scene which takes the audience anywhere they want to
Film is so useful when we realise it’s power to unleash empathy
And without, empathy, true empathy
We have nothing
The other day I was talking to a neighbour over the garden wall and a small white feather landed between us, at my feet.
The chinks in the local pharmacy service have been evident, well they have to me over the past few weeks. My broad spectrum antibiotics have been out of stock prior to “ Rome” necessitating a search for appropriate pharmacies which may have it. Subsequently ( and there’s nothing like being in sync) my bladder is playing up as it has a want to do.
So much so I went to bed this afternoon with Dorothy, who lay against my back with her head on the pillow.
I got up at 16.46 and went to the pharmacy again. My drugs still hadn’t arrived .
I didn’t get irate at all. I just went very quiet, which threw the staff even more.
The pharmacist will deliver the drugs himself a bit later which was sweet of him and I did say it wasn’t his job to do that and that I was grateful but I was perfecting my grandmother’s thin lip approach at the time.
Her lips, when vexed could be reduced to absolutely nothing
Not even a line in folded cardboard.
I’ll make some frozen cranberry, ginger and yogurt shake later, though I suspect the sleep did me more good.
Last night on the way too The Crown I dropped my phone. It was found by one of the village schoolboys who recognised me from my ID card I keep with it, so he and his three sisters and his mum all tracked me down to the pub and presented me with it as I stood by the bar.
The kids were excited at the bearhunt so I gave them a 20£ reward to be shared out .it tickled me that the youngest, a girl of perhaps five , piped up very quickly That’s a fiver each !!!
At least they were honest.
The dogs have been smelling doggy, so we have all been in the shower with a bottle of baby shampoo
The pharmacist knocked just as we all got out so there was a flurry of barking and wet paws against the kitchen wall and me looking soaked in a t shirt and shorts
“Sorry we were all in the shower” I explained and he nodded slowly as if to say “ of course you have”
I dug out my new linen trousers and green shirt bought especially for Rome ( and never bloody worn) and had a shave and a good hair brush and met the twenty five or so members of the village TCA and volunteers at The Crown for a meal. The food was lovely and the company chatty, and as the gin and tonics were downed we thought of more outlandish ideas for the association to support in addition to the following hall based activities.
Between now and Christmas we have organised
A Casino night
A concert night by the Trelawnyd Male Voice Choir
An Apple Festival day
A Christmas Fayre
And It’s a Wonderful Life Christmas film night as well as the usual Saturday coffee mornings
Our Chairperson Bridget making her thank you speech
My suggestion of a ancient Welsh tomato festival where we villagers throw ripe tomatoes at each other in the street after copious amounts of Cymraeggin is drunk was met with mixed but chuckling results
I always found the slightly sanitised Russell Brand vaguely amusing. His overly pompous way of challenging pomposity tickled me in its irony and could see why the BBC Thought he was a little bit of a darling and a trendy challenge to they grey suits and grey hairs that fill the organisation .
But then we didn’t then see his stand up. A stand up that revealed his leopard spots, his crude way of viewing some women and his misogyny.
Glinting eyes and a persona reminiscent of a cartoon wolf he underlined in the most crudest of ways what he thought of rough oral sex, and he lost me in that second, as I suspect he did of many of his audience members.
He crossed the line and the level headed and fair BBC documentary Dispatches illustrated its point perfectly with that one vile clip that was shown.
Masks, we all wear.
They protect others from seeing the real us
They sanitize and provide a screen on which we project the more acceptable and socially polite self
But masks can slip
Sometimes they do just for a second
And when they do, I will always stick to my gut feeling , to that inner voice
