Defensive Positions

At 8am I was on the phone with my father-in- law. He was wishing me a very happy birthday, which confused me slightly as my birthday is not until tomorrow .
Anyhow I had just put down the receiver when an unholy noise coming from the Ukrainian village , made me bolt through the front door and across the lane. Shrieking hens and honking geese mean just one thing.......a fox.
The fox was huge, the biggest one I have ever seen close up, and he whirled around in a flash of red as the field animals took up joint defensive positions up towards the safety of the field gate. In front of him stood the Ewes, with their heads held up defiantly, both were stamping their feet angrily on the ground. The geese were positioned behind them, honking in unison as the much smaller and vulnerable hens  flapped their way to safety ontop of the Church wall and hen house roofs.  
It was teamwork at its very best.
The fox turned as I arrived and was gone in a second.
It's been years since the last daytime attack.
Winnie and George are now watching over the field animals and all now is quiet.

Bank Holiday in Trelawnyd

It's sunny and hot  on this spring Bank Holiday

Still life

Auntie Gladys asleep in the sun

Code Brown

In nursing there are jargon words and phrases for most things.
Most, people know ....NBM is, of course, nil by mouth. EUA is Examination under Anaesthetic and so on. The list is endless.
Apparently " Code Black" means a casualty department which is dangerously overloaded with patients ( or so American drama writers would tell us) but in this country, in clinical practice there is also the much repeated but rather less sexy " code Brown"
Code Brown literally means exactly what you think it does.
It's a whispered rally call for help when your bedfast patient " has been"  and it's a labour intensive and sometimes tiring job on intensive care, especially as sometimes it takes a whole team of nurses to do the deed. A deed that has to be carried out prudently and with dignity in mind.
A lot of code brown's on a shift cut into the 1001 other vital jobs on icu....and today I did feel somewhat jaded after just three hours sleep in bed.
The Prof and I went to Porth Eirias in Colwyn Bay and sat on the beach with a picnic
This Is how I ended up,
Portrait of a beached and very tired hippo baby!

Slowly Going Insane

Usually I work just one night a week, therefore I don't have the problem of sleeping during the day.
Tonight I am working two nights to help with short staffing,
So today, I really need to sleep.
The problem is that it's warm.
And south facing 18th century cottages heat up dreadfully when there's a bit of sun.
So windows have to be left open, and the nice weather brings out the noise....
It's 13.22 pm and I am wide awake. trendy Carol's terriers have been a bit yappy for the past hour, a group of Magpies have been ambushing something in the graceyard and on the domestic front, saturday is the binmen day, someone phoned us earlier on and the Prof flushed the toilet just as I was dreaming that I was letting the George Clooney vet get his hands on my best Indian runner .
NHS please note
I'm doing you a big favour
.

Yesterday's News

• Two new faces in the village today. One a dutch (?)  woman who has moved with partner and baby into one of the little cottages below Auntie Gladys. And the other a friendly middle aged woman with a pug, who is camping out with her in laws who have just moved here. Both were after eggs. I gave both a flower show schedule and welcomed both to the village. Apparently the Pug is called Eric and has dog  autism  whatever that is. 
• Ann, the smiley member of our  Flower Show Committee has been unwell as of late. I took her round a card and plant. She is the sweetest of characters
• The " black bin linered Windows" characters have fallen out with another neighbour....I can say no more on the matter
• Trendy Carol is sporting a very nice, expensive looking new jacket! 
• Three houses have been sold to new out of village  owners in Trelawnyd. 
• Village character and farmer Med is still in hospital after a nasty bout of cellulitis, he is keeping locals updated on his condition via facebook
• Rosemary and hubby " Bernard the German" called round with several pots of chutney and jams for me to try and a rather scrummy slice of bread and butter pudding wrapped in silver foil. They spoil me.

Th view from the Ukrainian village up the lane this morning

Look very closely and you can see Albert standing guard at the cottage driveway

'Bathers at Asnières'

When I am in London, I often meet with Nu at the cafe in the National Portrait Gallery. It's big sister The National Gallery, is only around the corner, but as it faces Trafalgar Square this free public space is far too crowded with tourists, to be used as a meeting point.
I have always wanted to walk alone around The National Gallery; the crowds spoil it for me, as it literally does my head in when the zombified masses amble past and in front of grand master after grand master without really looking at them.
Under a week ago, I bit the bullet and visited the gallery again and found myself  standing in front of George Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres only a few minutes after entering.
The painting is dominated by a slightly hunched, morose looking young man resting his arms in his lap. He is gazing out at the water lost in thought and I recognised him the moment I saw him.
For it was the spit of The Prof as a very young man.

No matter how successful the Prof becomes in his busy academic world. No matter how much international research he develops, or how much he shapes his own University when he eventually becomes Dean.
It is nice to think that in one world famous painting, he will always remain strangely immortal 

Bitch Fight

Don't you just love it when your child acts in an exemplary fashion when the rest of the class are all done for shoplifting?
It kind of reflects on you as a parent don't you think? ......., so you can sit in the Teacher's open day with a self congratulatory smug bastard smile on your face ?.
I had such a smile on my face today.
It was vet's time again, and this time Mary was the patient with two rather inflamed and painful ears! We got to the vets early in the hope of a quick " in & out" consultation but when I got there ( in the futile hope that the George Clooney vet or even the  Russell Crowe junior vet were on duty) I was disappointed to see that the large waiting room was half full.
Everyone had a dog, and as we waited for the new Spanish señorita vet to become free, more and more dogs and their owners arrived.
You could feel the tension in the air!
Everything went tits up when a bad tempered black lab bitch and her two jack russell friends lost it when a bearded collie walked a little too close for comfort. Within seconds the four had turned barking and snarling at each other like a bunch of  Barnsley butch lesbians at the Cossak pub in Sheffield . A farm collie and a border terrier with a cast on it's leg leapt into the fray and within seconds there were elderly owners being dragged  across the floor and chairs being knocked over.
The noise was deafening.
One lady owner ( who had one jack russell by the scruff of the  neck ) kept shouting to her husband " Geoffrey  GEOFFREY ! GEOFFREY!!!!!" For some obscure reason, so much so that the rosy faced Irish vet ran around the front to order that some of the instigators be taken outside.
Only Mary and a near catatonic teacup  Chihuahua called Twinkle ( who was wearing a pink tartan three quarter length coat ) remained silent.
(I was later told than Twinkle had a long standing anxiety problem)

Mary enjoyed the mayhem and did what all Welsh terriers always do when faced with the absurd or the new, she sat and watched the proceedings without moving a muscle.

When , eventually the labrador had been removed and the other dogs had all but settled down, the Spanish vet called Out " MARY GRAY " in a rather attractive lisping way, and Mary and I both got up primly and with some dignity and showed the room just how a well bred young lady should act in public .

It's all in the breeding I thought!

Still Chasing

I've been gardening today, all day
The yellow Welsh poppies are in flower so the bees have returned to the garden, and William is back in his element chasing them.
There is something incredibly moving about an old dog quietly enjoying himself and at dusk I watched him, bobbing in and out the flowers with a silly look on his face.
Every year, I mention it, and am moved by him and this year, almost to the day, the tradition continues even though his left eye is now a milky white and his bounce is not so pronounced as it once was.
My old sweet boy.....
My old  sweet boy