Making A Scene

I know most of us don't embark on what can be helpfully described as " Making A Scene " on a regular basis but, I am sure, we have all had our moments when the wind was in the right direction and nerves may have been pushed way past " twanging point" so to speak!
Flare ups, especially if they occur in a rather nice restaurant, can be satisfyingly entertaining, especially if you are the observer and not the participant !

Last night, The Prof and I enjoyed a very nice meal in a rather expensive eating house. It was as trendy as it was slick and as a particularly well dressed woman sashayed past our table, the whole place reminded me of a rather nice restaurant in Amsterdam where I was dreadfully humiliated by a previous boyfriend. Now this was many, many moons ago now, but I do remember that the restaurant suddenly went very quiet after my dinner companion hissed a rather aggressive rebuke at me over the perfect table settings and I sat there with my head bowed, red faced and seemingly helpless.

But I wasn't helpless. For slowly I put my napkin down and very deliberately stood up and walked out of the restaurant. I was so slow that the maitre d' had just enough time to pick my coat up and pass it to me as I passed ( a classy moment which made up for my blushes)
It wasn't the end of that relationship, but it was one of just the few reasons it did end!
Thank God!

Have you ever had a scene in a restaurant ?
I'd be interested to know.

Opera Grill

We went out for a posh supper in Chester tonight

Wales needs to catch up me thinks

Banana profiteroles and cameral sauce ! 

Who needs scotch eggs x

A Parenting Moment- Without A Child

Quintin with the nameless architect 

Friday night tv watching is enhanced by a regular " buddy" documentary where the actress Caroline Quentin and some faceless architect visit some amazing houses across the globe.
I love this programme.
I love voyeuristically exploring other peoples' spaces ( ohhh errr)- for sure but I also adore Quentin  who just bursts with mischievous good humour and warmth!
It's a great watch.
We had just been introduced to a subterranean dwelling in rural New Zealand when William, who had been soundly asleep in the armchair next to me started to gag and thrash in his sleep.
He does this sometimes, it's something to do with a narrowing of his airways, and there is nothing to be done except making sure he's placed in a position where breathing is made easier.
It's a bit like positioning an epileptic during a fit.
Winnie, from her bed next to the fire, got up and with the worried face, only a bulldog could pull,  hurried over to sniff William carefully as I rubbed his back and he fell back to sleep like a puppy in his mother's care.
Winnie then took a long look at William , then turned to me carefully, watching my reaction with all of the seriousness of a toddler.
" It's all fine" I told her and I kissed her forehead gently saying
" Go back to sleep!" 
She sniffed loudly, processing the information I gave her and then heaved herself back to her previous position next to the fire where she lay down watching William anxiously
She only closed her eyes again when I nodded that things were then ok

A little family moment for sure........and not a child in sight...

Classic

I adore this clip.
For those that don't know it's from the early days of a British Soap opera called Coronation Street  which was ( and is)  set in the industrial North of the country.
The writing is superb, but it's the delivery by the  Violet Carson that impresses the most....
This is where the roots of my own humour hail from
The working class matriarchs of the North West

Have You Ever.......

........bought something shit?

I have.......went to Lidl and bought a miniature ironing board for £4.50

That was on Monday

The Prof is still laughing about it!

What shit thing have you bought recently? 

A Thought At A Traffic Light

This morning I had to attend several study sessions on Intermediate Life Support .
The Prof had several bigwig meeting booked too.
We were booked  into adjacent buildings.
I dropped him off, completed my study, shot back home to sort the animals out, then returned to pick him up and drop him at another meeting in another town.
It all felt terribly urban

He then had multifaceted strategies to sort out.
I went to jet wash the car!
We do inhabit very different workds during the day!

I had pulled up at a traffic light in the centre of a large nearby village when I spied the couple in the window seat of a cafe.
I know her fairly well even though she is an odious, bitter little woman with a nasty edge.
He, I quite like, for he is quiet and polite to the point of almost invisibility.
They were tucking into a lunch which looked as comforting as it was substantial.

I watched them for a moment before the traffic started to move on.
Both were tucking into their food with clear enjoyment. The wife nodding to her husband that
" ...it was very nice indeed! " and I suddenly felt just a tad guilty for disliking the woman who had irritated me for so long.
She had done nothing more than pucker up over a plate of burger and chips.
But for that tiny moment I recognised her humanity and felt the briefest twang of shame for my dislike of her

Power Walks

In a desperate effort to reduce my rapidly growing waist, I have been power walking up and around the Village, Gop Hill and the road looping around to the collection of houses called The Marian.
In the daytime Mary is my guide and companion and on the evening walk Affable Despot Jason does the honours.
Now the despot is blessed with a natural wit and an over abundance of Northern " Chutzpah" so the evening walk feels so much shorter when he takes the lead in the walk and the conversation.
Having said this
On our ascent of Gop hill, I was gasping so hard, I couldn't have joined in with the chatter even if I had of wanted to! 

Lion

It's always nice to see a Brit nominated for an academy award but I must admit I was fairly surprised to see the floppy haired Dev Patel up for the best supporting actor gong , especially as he dominated the second half of the movie Lion as former Indian street child Saroo, a boy seperated from his Indian family by a quirk of fate who was brought up by an adoptive Australian family thousands of miles from his rural dirt poor native village.

I was reminded of the movie as I watched the dogs and Albert lying in their untidy heaps on the bed this morning for in one sad pivotal scene a handful of Calcutta Street Children are seen huddling together for warmth and comfort on cardboard beds by the side of the road.

The sobering truth is that these Street Children are not just  figments of a Hollywood screen writer's mind. They are real sad little scraps who don't know the comforts that a handful of terriers and a wide eyed black cat enjoy in a small Welsh village.

The astonishing Sunny Pawar

Lion is an interesting, uneven movie. The first half is literally stunning. It is a total assault on the senses as we follow the ever chirpy five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) and his ever loving mother ( Pryanka Bose) and hero worshiped older brother Guddu ( Abishek Bharate) in their dirt poor rural existence in central India.
Saroo is seperated from his family, and by an odd quirk of fate transported over a thousand miles to Calcutta where he survives on the dangerous streets for months until adopted by an Australian couple from Tasmania.
This chapter of Saroo's life is true heart in the mouth stuff thanks primarily to the child actor Pawar who literally breaks your heart with his solemn face  and doleful eyes.
Unfortunately the whole pace of the film grinds to a halt soon after, as we then follow the continuing story of Saroo, a man living a fairly loving and comfortable life with his Australian parents  (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) Saroo ( Dev Patel) is conflicted by submerged memories of his former life and after a long period of reflection and research ( with too many scenes of the angst Patel staring off into the middle distance) the adult Saroo is finally reunited with his mother in a tearful sob fest finale.

Now Patel is undoubtedly moving in his role as the adult Saroo and I sincerely hope that he nabs the Oscar for his performance, but for me the real dramatic punch of Lion is the honest, naturalistic turn by the baby faced Sunny Pawar that really lingers long in the mind
8/10

No McDonalds!

Alice's comments in yesterday's post tickled me.

She thought that when I referred to buying  a sneaky egg mcmuffin, we actually had a McDonalds in the village! 

Today, I've been playing with my ipad doodle! 

It gives you all a bit of a flavour of where things are in Trelawnyd 

The positions of everything shown on the map are very general!

1  Our Cottage
2  The Ukrainian Village
3  Trendy Carol
4  The Church
5  Animal helper Pat
6  Village Helper Islwyn
7   The School
8   Gay Gordon/Big Mary
9   Mrs Frazer
10 Mrs Trellis
11 Gop Hill
12 Village Centre, Auntie Glads, Harmonika,High Street
13  Memorial Hall
14  Chapel
15  Affable Despots
16  Old Post Office
17  The Crown Pub
18  Village Green, Cameron the boffin

" It looks mighty fine" 

The Pussy march impressed me. 

Garfield Had It Right

I was going to blog about those chance conversations you have in the street, when you live in an odd little place like Trelawnyd, but a set of strange morning circumstances have taken over somewhat and these have overshadowed a somewhat surreal conversation I had with Mrs Frazer outside the pensioner bungalows yesterday which culminated with her pulling down her blouse in order if I could confirm her GP's preliminary diagnosis of shingles!

Now, the sun is shining, and all is well with the world.
Earlier, this was not quite the case.
I was out last night until 1.30 am and crawled into bed around a quarter to two.
The Prof's alarm went off just after 5 am I was due to drive him to the station at 6 am in order to catch the Edinburgh train!
You with me?
Anyhow things were ok until I dropped him at the station where he realised that he had forgotten to locate the whereabouts of an important document.
No problem.......could I find it and email him the fact!
He caught the train
I drove home and ripped the cottage to pieces to locate the document
No luck.
The prof got off his train somewhere in England, and promptly caught another returning to the station where I picked him up. Again, I, drove him home where he located the aforemntioned document within 30 seconds of walking through the door!!!!
I could have ripped his smug expression right off his face!
Then for the third frigging time I drove him back to the staition so that he could recommence his journey.
By this time I was late taking William to the vets for his appointment so he and I shot up to the surgery via Mc Donald's drive through where I ordered an egg McMuffin and large coffee for me and hash brown for him!
Even a stressed middle aged homosexual and a half blind Welsh terrier needs breakfast!
Anyway
I stopped at the  busy T junction at St Asaph where I took a massively comforting bite of muffin and a huge swig of coffee and in front of several school children standing for their school bus  promptly sneezed my whole mouth's contents onto the steering wheel and windscreen.....

What did Garfield always say at the beginning of the week?

" Ok Monday........hit me! "

La La Land

I was in two minds about seeing LaLa Land.
On the one hand come the multiple plaudits from the critics
On the other.......anecdotal so so reviews from ordinary cinema goers.
So I went with an open mind.

As it turned out, La La Land is a sweet movie; a modern day musical which starts as it means to go on with commuters stuck in sunbright LA traffic singing and dancing around their cars in a multicoloured explosion of bon vivre! 
The story is suitably cheesy.
Aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) meets up with Jazz bore Sebastian ( Ryan Gosling) a pianist down on his luck.
Over a year we witness their courtship in Los Angeles, the " city of dreams" as both try their best to attain their dreams in Hollywood and it's a courtship punctuated with a whole plethora of musical set pieces with the leads singing and dancing on the Hollywoods Hills, on the Warner Brothers' back set and and in one magical sequence weightless inside the city's planetarium!
Gosling is delightful as the puppy eyed Sebastian, playing the piano as easily as he sings and dances.
Stone is impressive too and almost steals the film with a plucky charm and warmth. They are incredibly sweet in their many scenes together.
La La Land doesn't quite reinvent the Hollywood musical, but it does kick start the genre somewhat.
Having said this I could done without the Jazz ( I am not a lover of it) and some of the final quarter of the movie sags just a tiny bit, but I dare you to watch the powerhouse sequence of Mia's final audition    
( sung by Stone as the camera revolves around her) without crying...it's a lovely bit of cinema.
8/10

Gravitas

A rough looking type and his missus parked their car behind the cottage in order to check over the plot of land which is up for sale just up the lane
He half blocked old Trevor's driveway and returning home Trevor beeped his horn for the bloke to move.
" You can get a fucking bus through there!" the man snapped angrily and taking an instant dislike to him I stopped the dogs as I passed
" He's an old man and he needs you to move your car!" I said carefully giving the man a very direct look and irritably he did as he was instructed, scowling at me as he did so
Only when I returned home did I realise what I was wearing

My " plucked chicken" hat does not quite give me the gravitas I thought I possessed!

I'm sick of all of this bad news.....

....hate....all of the bad feeling..........

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm had the right idea

Let's be optimistic 

U-S-A

The Prof and I have just been watching the inauguration on tv

Baby Boomers

I found myself explaining the phenomenon of " The Baby Boomer" to a 25 year old colleague the other day...they had not heard the phrase before, and why would they? What do they know of those " oldies" that were born between 1948 and 1964.
I was born in 1962, so just came in under the wire as did one other nurse on duty, and the younger staff seemed genuinely  surprised as we brainstormed baby boomer norms! Norms that would make modern parents run screaming to child protective services!


As children my sister and I would sit in a living room as my parents would chain smoke cigarettes until the walls ran brown with nicotine.

My father would drive us all home after babysitting my sister's kids on a Saturday night much the worse for drink!

No one ever Ever wore seat belts!

We used to walk 2 miles to and from school alone and in the dark with shorts on!

If you ever was allowed to use the home phone you had to sit in a cold hallway to do so ( and were timed! )

One playtime venue was the local rat infested public tip!

The coal fire heated a small square of the living room nothing else

We ate left overs on Monday and were often served things like mince, liver and onions and offal

Had a bath only on Sunday nights!

We coped with three tv channels and no daytime tv on weekdays ( unless you watched school programmes!)

Relatives and perfect strangers could reprimand you and be supported in the fact by your mother and father

Every winter there was snow

Being Heard

I once nursed a woman who had been seriously ill for several months.
For much of that time she was unconscious, floating between life and death and that strange half world in between,  where the body is propped up with drugs, and machines and that tenuous strength a body shows when the chips are down. Later during her admission, her sedation was finally turned off and her tracheostomy uncuffed in an attempt to get her body to function on it's own.
In the middle of the night as I was administering medication through her nasogastric tube, her eyes opened, they were watery red and tired .
I asked her if she was in pain and she shook her head .I asked her if she knew where she was and she mouthed the word " hospital" and as I pottered around doing nursey things she reached out a weak arm and touched my face with her hand.
Moments later she cried out with an unearthly wail.
This was followed by another and another... each one louder than the last and there was something almost animalistic in the way it sounded.
I hurried to the bedside.
No she was not in physical pain, that was the first question I asked again, but again and again she cried out like a baby does when it is distressed in the night .
I tried to placate her. I massaged her hands with cream in an effort to sooth her and I tried to engage her in a way of diverting her distress but finally, as she half spoke half whispered the words " I want to " I realised that finding her voice was a final statement of " I'm here and I feel so bad" 
Her cries validated her.

It was hard but I gathered my nursing notes in order to write a report of the night and closed the side room door to the main ward. With them on my knee I quietly sat next to her and started to write my notes as she shrieked and wailed like an banshee.
Twenty minutes later she had cried herself to sleep..

*****************************************************************

Postscript to this week's dog attack.

Arrrhhh the power of the blog......this afternoon the owner of the husky called around to the cottage to discuss the dogfight on Tuesday evening.
She had read the blog and wanted to put things straight which was very big of her and we had a frank and open discussion about the incident.
The husky, as I thought,  is a somewhat damaged animal. She is clearly cared for by a devoted owner who understands dog psychology but the bitch indeed sounds a bit of a nightmare to care for due to previous abuse and trauma and by the sounds of things the owner has done everything in her power to rectify her problems.
I finally suggested a dog trainer I have heard of who specializes in aggressive large dogs and we parted on good terms.
I wish her and her dog well.

Frantic Fanny Friction

I'm glad I'm working tonight.
I'm somewhat jaded with ideas that backfire, and need a night of peace with bleeping ventilators and screaming monitors.
Talking to like minded friends and colleagues would be good too!

Mary and Winnie ( like women do I am reliably informed) have synchronized their seasons and as the elderly eunuchs William and George sleep their relaxed old dog sleep, the girls have embarked on an extended, strenuous and rather unsavoury bout of simulated sex play.
When we first bought Mary we played around with the plan that one litter of puppies would be a grand idea but with all of this puffing and panting and rubbing of toilet parts upon toilet parts

I think I have changed my mind.

Dog Attack

There must be perhaps fifty dogs in the village.
All sizes and all temprements.
Just three are overly agressive. A fat black labrador from the other side of Trelawnyd, Dr Barnsley's mongrel Meg ( who for some unknown reason hates the terriers) and a white husky type dog from Erw Wen.
The last two are big dogs and it troubles me somewhat that their owners have real trouble controlling them in the street.
Uncontrollable dogs are dangerous dogs plain and simple.
Last night when I took William and Mary out for their last walk we ran into the white husky.
He was on one side of the main road and we were  perhaps sixty feet away on the other. It was very dark so old William with his cataracts was unaware of his presence . Mary however saw him and stopped dead in her tracks.
The husky's owner stiffened and started to wrap it's lead around his hand but the husky on seeing the Welsh terriers lurched forward barking furiously.
I don't know if the lead snapped or it's collar slipped but suddenly the dog burst free and attacked.
In the couple of seconds it took to dart across the road ( stopping the traffic)  I managed to position myself between it and the terriers behind me and as it lunged towards them I kicked it  hard in the head.
The husky hesitated so I bellowed at it to keep away and stamped at it again and moments later  frightened by me, the stopped car's headlights and it's panicked owner  the husky galloped off in the direction of home.

We were lucky last night for William and Mary are no match for such an aggressive dog.
Winnie, with her bulk, and intelligence could fend off such an assault but a blind elderly terrier such as William and a delicate juvenile like Mary could well have been seriously injured or even killed.
Large aggressive  breeds are often kept as status symbols with little thought given to their potential

I know that this husky has not been socialised with other dogs. It is only walked in the " safety " of deserted night streets by an owner who has not been trained to deal with it.
I aim to tell the owner this when I see him.
I didn't have the chance last night
Hopefully it will be at a time when emotions run just a little calmer.

" How's William?" And Cramming My Fat Arse into Budgie Smugglers!

Today's blog will be much of a missmash.

Most of the day I've been catching up with jobs .
The Prof now has a functioning curtain pole in his office and curtains that close!
And Winnie almost whipped herself into hysterics as a water main in the village burst, flooding our lane with water and over half a dozen workmen in overalls turned up to repair the damage!
I mooched around trying to find fucking curtain hooks for an age too, but I won't tell you about that saga, it's just too exciting a read.
At B&Q a woman I didn't know stopped me at the power tool aisle and asked how William was.
Apparently she reads Going Gently regularly ! I love all this minor celebrity shit so went all magnanimous in the meeting and promised to take off my " no anonymous commentating"  sanction so she can leave me a comment.
" let's hope Petra doesn't reappear" she said
People have long memories I thought.
I didn't falter in Sainsbury's so not a scotch Egg was bought, but I did but 40 mini cocktail sausages ass a treat for the dogs ( Winnie can get at least ten into her mouth at once!) I'm back weightwatching as we have two trips abroad to look forward to this year and I need to squeeze my fat arse into my best tropical pants!

( we have booked to meet family at my sister's birthday holiday in Sitges. Spain and I shall be carrying the Prof's paperwork on his trip to Melbourne later in the year) how exciting!

Where are you going on holiday this year? I'd be interested to know!

Sitges is very gay friendly! 

We don't go on the gay beaches though

We can't find budgie smugglers to fit

Hey ho!