Danielle's Performance - Over The Rainbow - Episode 13 - BBC One

Reality shows are now leaving me just a little cold.....but I must say having caught this girl's performance tonight.....I think that sometimes these awfully contrived programmes can throw up a real "star"......Danielle is quite a find in Over the Rainbow!!!

She could be Dorothy!

What a difference a day makes

blanche and the allotment

Della and Pirrie to the rescue

Thank goodness for Della.
She stopped by today to let me know that she had seen a fox, as bold as brass walking down the fields near her farm , pen-y-cefn-isa, and although I know that foxes are always around, her warning put me on top alert so to speak.
Tonight, just before the light turned into dusk I made a point of leaving the warmth of the wood stove to go and watch the hens form themselves into small groups outside their respective hen houses (the turkeys and ducks had already been put away into their own houses)

Before I got to the field, I could hear the smallest of my bantam cockerels, Pirrie(above), angrily chattering away from his vantage point on the top of the ark roof. In immediate response the roosters Jesus and old Stanley started to run up the field and the three guinea fowl started to scream from the Churchyard wall. I caught sight of Hughie, Alf and Ivy and all three of them were craning their necks in the direction of the riding school in anger and panic.

I followed their gaze, and there standing 50 yards away with his face poking through a gap in the fence was a large fox.
Despite my advancing years and wellies, I galloped forward shrieking like a girl, and the fox turned and trotted off ( not galloped but trotted! how bloody rude was that?)

I stayed out until every hen was locked up and the guinea fowl were safely up in their Churchyard tree!!
Thanks again Della
x

Lets have a group hug

With the major Government ministers chosen, perhaps there is a place for some optimism at last.......? I do hope so.....
I think people want to see their politicians act like the adults that they are.....no one has to be best friends at work, but we would all like to think of ourselves as professionals when we have to work alongside someone we dont actually like or agree with....
Perhaps the conservatives and the lib dems will now leave the toys in the cot where they belong and start working together.......
who knows?
sigh

No News

Chris returned from Newcastle at lunchtime and I dragged him up the Gop with the dogs in an effort to relax him. The weather seems to be turning for the better and the general talk around the village is of the push now to get the delicate vegetables into the warming soil to make the most of the growing season.
The gorse on the Gop is bright and vibrant, and the view across the vale now lush and green. Spring might have started properly!

When we got back, Chris went to bed for a sleep and I finished planting out the second vegetable plot. Broad beans, Chinese cabbage and beetroot have gone in, so that leaves one large and final plot ( around thirty feet by fifteen) to finish off. This final plot will be planted out with sweetcorn and pumpkin (Apparently it is an American way of utilizing space:- the pumpkin snakes in and out of the sweetcorn mulching the ground in hotter weather)- is that right American blog readers???

I am working tomorrow night, which is nice as it leaves me free to enjoy the weekend with Chris.....I think we will be going to see Robin Hood (Mr Crowe at his gruff best!!!)

Next time...it's a comedy

I don't think that the cinematography in a film has ever made me feel sick before. Today was a first.

In the Italian saga I am Love. the steadicam roars around the vast millionaire mansion villa of the Recchi family in a nausea inducing homage to the museum scene in Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill....so much so in fact that I literally had the urge to vomit, which I am sure is not quite the effect that director Luca Guadagnino was looking for.

Having said this, Guadagnino has crafted a stylish, almost Hitchcockian family saga which centres around a doomed love affair of the rather controlled matriarch, Russian ex pat Emma, (Tilda Swinton)....the camera swoons around her sketchily drawn family like a swallow around a field, and I found the cinematic themes of passion and food (the scene where Swinton eats a prawn has to be seen to be believed!) interesting but all rather cold and with characters devoid of any warmth.

I gave it 7/10

Our second film of the day, as it turned out, was not a bag-of-laughs either!

The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin Cabeza) is an odd unsettling little film about denial, guilt and I suspect concussion!

In it , a wealthy middle aged dentist Veronica (Maria Onetto) runs "something" over on an Argentinian back dirt road. In the accident she strikes her head on the windscreen, and enters a slightly opaque, ever-so-quiet-senseless world where nothing may be what it seems.

Veronica may or may not have killed a child (a ghostly handprint on her car's window is left chillingly just in view) but any concrete clue of what indeed did happen is quietly camoflagued by subtle confusion which mirrors that hard smile paranoia exhibited by those with a head injury.

It is not an easy film to sit through and for me it is far too long, but it is a film that provokes thought and discussion........Having said that, I don't think it is the masterpiece that some in the artistic press would have us believe....it is just not that clever

7/10

Hazel and I felt a little wrung out after our movie double bill....... we agreed next time we would see something a little more uplifting next time......two challenging, slightly depressing movies in one day is a little too much!!!

Guilty pleasures

The chicks in the shed are going stir crazy. They are five weeks old this week, so will be coming off the heat early next week......note the third from the right...the araucana tuft is just showing

I am catching up with Hazel today. Chris has been working in London then Newcastle, so won't be home until tomorrow night, so today will be movie day!
Hazel suggested that we go and see the Tilda Swinton Italian saga I am love at the Scala, then changed her mind when she realised that the much lauded Argentinian movie The Headless Woman was playing at Theatre Clwyd.......(below pic)
so we are being reckless crazy bitches and ARE GOING TO SEE BOTH!!.