I Have Old Hands

My routine has gone all to pot.
With Chris still away and with a bad cough as well as no voice, I feel overtired this morning.
I don't know why. For I went to bed at 10 pm, and apart from three episodes of animal care ( 2 dog walks and Ukrainian Village sort out) I am still in bed now
It 11.50 am......
The dogs are all fine with me being a sloth, for they have been walked and now are back on the bed with me, but William did wake me at 9.10 am with a worried look on his face.m
He knew I was late sorting the field animals out.

I will get up again shortly and have a bath. I have eggs to sell and I promised to go to see Bob D who was due to be discharged from hospital. He has a bad chest from years of chicken keeping....

Not an inch of blue duvet to be seen

I am looking at my hands. To be precise I am looking at my left hand. I've been looking at it a great deal recently, for it has been sporting a delicate white gold wedding ring. I think most newly married people do this a lot.
My hands are looking older now.. I have the hands of a man in his fifties.
They are not the hands of an artist or a musician or a tradesman.
They are not manicured or even overly clean
They are not long and slender like the hands of an aristocrat
They are small and pudgy
Wrinkled, clumsy and slightly weather beaten.
Hands that are not worried if they get dirty

I have my grandmother's hands

Four Gifts

It's been three weeks since the wedding and I am delighted to say that we are still recieving belated gifts . 

 The first is a Miss Marple-esque  cake stand from Peter & Val who used to live in the village

The second was a beautifully framed photograph taken on Friday 6th 2015 ( the date of the wedding)
With the inscription " John and Chris' Wedding Day"
Now this arrived this afternoon and as it had no covering letter or card to let us know who had sent it, I cannot thank anyone for the lovely thought.

The third gift was from Albert.
The first dead rabbit of the season.
I was up late this morning as I was still feeling rather crook
So the corpse had been dragged around the house by the terriers with a huge amount of gay abandon

I found it's liver on the bathroom floor

And what suspiciously looked like a lung  on the living room carpet

And the fourth gift?
Two packets of throat losengers left on the garden wall by village elder Islwyn
Very kind!

Facinating Aida and The Walking Dead ep 15

This is what I am missing tonight!
Fascinating Aida have been going donkey's years and are a real scream
So the prospect of a nice meal out, posh hotel and a few belly laughs would have been lovely
especially as I am presently gargling with TCP and still have a voice that sounds like a cross between Ertha Kitt's rasp and Minnie Mouse' trill

Hey ho...
Oh and I forgot to review episode 15 of The Walking Dead, the episode which sets up the season finale which is due out here in the UK on Monday.

Episode 15 " Try" was an exploration into traumatic stress disorder and the adjustment of veterans of the apocalypse to a more normal life in the Alexandria Safe zone. In this way , there was an obvious reference to the stories of present day servicemen and women trying to make their way post deployment from the killing fields of Iraq.
Rick, Carol and Sasha all were shown to have varying degrees of the disorder, with Rick clearly losing track of objectivity and order and so it is interesting to see " team family" being somewhat fractured with Michonne, Glen , Maggie and even Daryl understanding that " democracy" and peace may be the way forward.......

Not so officer friendly

Of course, in this odd, savage world Rick will be proven right....especially given the fact that a new set of human " badasses" are massing just beyond the gates to the safe zone!
Ps....i did like the sub plot where the ice cold carol is being stalked by 10 year old sam .....children are just drawn to her...... Like a damaged Gladys Ailward

Puberty Comes Late

If you want a translation

Let me know

Operation Fanny Smell

In my fantasy life...the cottage always smells of camomile and lavender.
In reality, at this time of spring, the cottage, indeed the village, stinks of muck spreading.
The prevailing wind is invariably from the west, and the fields beyond Trelawnyd have been covered in a particularly rancid concoction of shite recently so this resulted in an overwhelming sense of "sewer" about the place
It reminds me of one of our made up Abba song verses we used to sing as kids

"There was something in the air last night,

It stank of shite,,,,,

Fernando"



The Fields West



Add to this mix, the delights of last night's home made curry, three terriers in dire need of a bath and Winifred's not-so-fragrant fanny and you have the recipe for a home that Oscar the grouch would be proud of.
Usually, on a bright day like today the answer to cottage smells would be open the windows to the spring breeze but all that will do today is to bring the muck spreading inside, so with a mop and bucket, a bath full of foam, enough cleaning stuff to re open Woolworths and a big soapy fanny cloth at the ready....I am to reclaim the cottage back into a fragrant land of the living

The stinky fanny culprit

First things first, I scrubbed Winnie's fanny until it gleamed then dipped each of the terriers in turn into the bath before facing off the soft furnishings. I've even squirted some of my expensive clinque  "Happy" on the bed linen!

perhaps the best thing to do today is to just to smear vicks underneath our noses

Even in the Great Welsh Countryside there is no fresh air







It's All A Load Of Old Cock

Tonight I helped out with the training of volunteers who have to deal with

sex and abusive call on the phone.

The experiential learning is always a little difficult as there is a lot of role play 

which features swearing and sexual phrases

At the end of a particularly sensitive session

the leader turned to me and whispered

It's all a bit ironic given the big cock on your chest!

Sunflower

I couldn't quite believe that I was working last night!
Doesn't the nhs managers of zintensive Care know that monday nights are The Walking Dead nights?
Obviously not!
There was a nice lot of nurses on yesterday's shift and even though it's been a couple of weeks since the wedding.. A group of them bought me some brand new wellington boots!, a set of smart gardening gloves a huge, four foot sunflower scarecrow and a massive chocolate cake.
It was a lovely gesture
It was an incredibly busy shift and the chocolate cake was left uneaten until one of the junior doctors who hadn't stopped for hours took a massive bite out of it.
I'm off to bed now.....the Walking Dead will have to wait.
I'm so tired ..my eyeballs hurt

Old Ladies At The Window

We bought the cottage back in 2005.
There was a great deal to do, to make it look like a period property as the previous owners had put in laminate floors and had pulled out the living room caninets, fire surround and bannisters, so we lived in another cottage in Meliden until the work could be finished.
Almost daily,I would come up to Trelawnyd to paint and to supervise our joiner, who was notoriously slow ( but good) at his work and I remember one afternoon as I was painting our bedroom ceiling, hearing a noise by the front door.
I walked half way down the stairs  and looked over the banister and saw two old ladies peeping through the living room window.
I didn't disturb them but watched with interest as they pointed at various points of interest around the room and I only darted down the stairs and out through the back door when they ambled off back towards the village.
By the garden wall , I introduced myself, and there was much nodding smiling and slightly embarrassed Welsh hellos. The ladies, I was told, were lifelong friends Gwyneth Jones and Olwena Hughes and that in around 1930 Olwena had been taught the piano in our cottage front room!
I found out much later that the village gossips had been working overtime and that everyone knew tgat a doctor and a nurse ( both men!) were moving into the cottage. I was also told  that locals like Mrs Jones and Olwena had often popped down to see what we had done with the place.
Over the years, like most of the Grey hairs from the village, Gwyneth and Olwena became a regular backdrop to our lives here. On our very first open day they very slowly led the small line of villagers who walked down the lane to support the event. A scene that had me misty eyed, in it's pure cinematic impact.
Their arrival reenforced our acceptance into the community.
A few years ago Mrs Jones sadly died of a stroke and Olwena's health deteriorated to such an extent that she gave up her bungalow on Bron Haul to live in a nursing home towards the coast. It was here that she in turn died only a week or so ago.
Today is her funeral and I shall be going to pay my respects . I've cleaned the church in readiness and brought in some miniature daffodils to cheer the place up a bit , flowers which I suddenly realised had to be removed to the vestry as there is a " no flowers" rule in Church before Easter
I'll leave you with this small video of the pair of old friends, which I took several years ago now.
I had been asked by a blog follower to post a video with a couple of villagers talking welsh on it, so who better than Olwena and Mrs Jones.
I asked them to chat about a belly dancer , that had been asked to perform at the Friendship group meeting the previous Thursday but the pair  decided to chat about something much more interesting ( the story of how another local man had experienced a bad fall at home)
It's a very Welsh thing talking about a misfortune