Bringing The Outside In.

Yesterday's blistering blue skies have turned a cold grey and Wales has returned to it's native drabness.
The Prof has numerous deadlines to reach by Monday , so apart from a brief tussle with his twenty year old personal trainer this morning and a meal out with me this evening ( I'm taking him to a popular Italian place in Conwy), he will be hidden away in his office.
Like most academics his office is a functional place in which to work, and before he went out this morning he asked me if there was anything I could do to cheer the place up a bit before he started his writing.
Thinking of those lovely photos of yesterday, and after a surreptitious flit round with a duster, I decided to bring a bit of the field onto his desk to lift the gloom of the day.

When I was collecting the flowers I noticed that the baby rabbits , in their enclave, are all now showing signs of disease

A Photo blog

Sometimes I write too much. This afternoon I have been strimming the field. The dogs and Albert accompanied me. A lovely, lovely afternoon..here are the photos

The cottage with the Gop in the background covered in flowering gorse

Winnie spied Monika and her baby in the churchyard and went off to investigate

( they had sandwiches)

The Church

Albert

,

George and Winnie 

A rare shot of everyone together 

Irene and Sylvia standoff the dogs 

william chasing the batchelors 

Polish monika's little girl with Winnie And Wiliam 

The montanta growing over the gate 

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

" That's Winnie, she's a rescue bulldog!" 
So proclaimed a small boy dressed who was dressed in a blue pullover after he had crossed the road outside the school.
The boy and his younger brother stopped briefly to rub Winnie's nippleline  before being whisked away by a busy mom. The mother said something to him and I heard him say " He told us a story in school"
I remember giving him and others an outline of Winnie's history after being surrounded by kids when picking up the despot's girls one afternoon. They were fascinated and somewhat horrified by the fact she was not allowed to suckle her own puppies, their imaginations sparked by what seemed such a cruel and odd act.
Children love a good story..
Much of Going Gently is storytelling I am aware of that. I have inherited the habit of sharing stories from my mother and Grandmother who were naturally dramatic raconteurs of a good tale. Give them an audience, and off they could go, recounting oral histories of wartime dramas and near miss encounters with the luftwaffa better than anything Ian McKellen could do ever do on stage.
Family Oral histories are handed down through generations, that is until they are petered away by processes of dilution.
We have no children of our own to impart these tales to and the children of my siblings are now removed from the family memories somewhat which are themselves dulling with time.
Sadly so many of our oral histories will go the way of the wind.

If you could choose just one story-one to share and one to keep forever- which one story would you pick?

Myxomatosis

Myxomatosis has hit the village rabbits with a vengeance .
It's a terrible terrible disease.
The affected rabbits suffer rapid weight loss, lesions and tumours over their faces and genitals and die a painful death after respiratory complications set in only fourteen days after being infected by host fleas. Only perhaps 35% of the population will survive.
Albert usually drags in baby rabbits during the spring months and even he has stopped feeding on the field. It's as though he knows the animals are tainted and like the sad zombies on The Walking Dead the dying crouch feebily on the sides of the lane and road waiting to die.
At the bottom of my field, isolated by thick brambles, a small enclave of young rabbits remain seemingly healthy and playful.
I watched them this morning, playing together in the dawn sun.
I hope they survive this outbreak, but things do look rather bleak

Thinking

I facetimed my husband just before he went to bed in his London hotel room this evening
He 's had a crap birthday.
He asked me if all the dogs were on the bed and I said "of course not!"
Of course they were!
Hey ho
Before I went to bed Winnie sat in the arm chair next to me and carefully watched me for over an hour as I watched tv
I have no idea why, but she did it..... There must have been a reason....she looked so serious!
Bulldogs think..I know they do........but of what? .......I have no idea

Wiff?

Can anyone recognise these flowers?
I've filled the cottage with them today.
Delicate spiky petals in a starburst shape.
Wild garlic, grown on the borders of the field.
I adore the smell of garlic, I can't get enough of it......the cottage now smells like an Italian restaurant and I couldn't be happier.
You can't smell dog!

When I wear aftershave, I wear Clinique HAPPY 
I like the smell of fairy soap and find that carbolic smell of old hospitals strangely nostalgic.
And I love the aroma of pea and ham soup when it is simmering.

Roast chicken, fried onions and newly laid tarmac are favourites too as are honeysuckle and jasmine and I must not forget to add butterscotch angel delight, fresh coriander and nappy cream to the list.
But tonight, I'm happy with garlic

What's on your list?

Happy Birthday Prof!

Today is the Prof's birthday.
He's working away in London overnight.
I got up at 5.30 , made  him tea and presented him with his cards in bed before I was even awake.
He seemed to like my gift of tickets to Swan Lake at The Royal Opera House .
I dropped him off at the train station before 7 am and packed him off with a small bag of goodies from Marks. 
I went to Marks and Spencers yesterday and conscripted the jaunty Angela into my quest to set up the Prof with some birthday goodies. Initially I only asked the saleswoman if she had any miniature cakes ( the Prof like me is healthy eating) but after learning I was collecting a birthday goodie bag she warmed to our quest and helped me dig out a few choice bits and bobs which included miniature chocolate bars, little bottle of wine, a bag of nuts(!) birthday candles and the like. For a minute she disappeared excitedly into the card section and returned with a small multicoloured mass of birthday streamers and a classy party bag to complete the ensemble and then ooohhed enthusiastically when I showed her some posh moisturiser I had bought to beef up the gift! 
Middle aged ladies do love a gay shopping drama!

A Spoonfull Of Sugar

Saving Mr Banks was on tv last night and it proved to be an unexpected gem of a movie thanks primarily to the standard of the acting. Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as P.L Travers ( the writer of the Mary Poppins books) were absolutely top notch and at the top of their game!
The film was ostensibly the story of how Disney courted the prickly Travers in order to get her to sign over the film rights of her beloved heroine but it had much more to say about how the ghosts of the past visit the lives of the living, and not always in a positive , healthy way.
I blubbed through the final third of it like a good un.

We all live with our own ghosts from the past. Bereavement, childhood disappointments, parent divorce, sadness, illness and abuse of all kinds , being a child is often fraught with damaging moments that disappear under the banality of life only to resurface at inopportune moments of adulthood.

I once washed a patient's hair when they were on skull traction. It was a tricky proceedure as the patient, a man in his fifties , had broken and dislocated his neck only a week or so before, but as his hair was matted with blood after the callipers had been literally screwed into his skull, the job needed to be done.
Slowly I rinsed the man's scalp with warm soapy water, making sure that spinal alignment was maintained, and as the bloody water flowed away into the bucket on the floor I saw he was  crying away large silent tears and those tears just didn't stop.

This emotional  'reaction' to paralysis and trauma was a common event in spinal injuries , especially when a nurse performed intimate cares with patient behind the safety of closed curtains, but my assumption in this case was oh so wrong as I found out after I had wiped away the tears the patient was in no position to wipe away himself.

" My Mother died when I was ten years old " The patient eventually told me in way of an apology " You washing my hair suddenly reminded me of her " .
He cried for an age afterwards, the grief about his disability  finally being unleashed by a dreadfully painful and precious childhood memory of a mother lost.