Britain's Best

Kirsty Young is my first girl crush in an age! 

No one does radio like BBC Radio 4
Yesterday I listened to the latest Desert Island Disc programme, which is now in it's 75 th year!
The velvet voiced Kirsty Young was interviewing the International Welsh rugby referee Nigel Owens.
It was a rollercoaster ride of an interview.
With quiet diligence Young gave Owens space to talk, and boy did he talk!

With incredible candour and emotion, he described the difficulties of accepting his alternative sexuality within a tight knit rural Welsh community and without pulling a punch, shared a somewhat harrowing suicide attempt with a shotgun and a packet of pills on the mountain over looking the family farm.

Owens came out gay to his family and the rugby world soon after and it is a testament to both that he was embraced and supported in his new life.
Rugby men and their supporters seem more accepting than most sports people I think!

It was an inspirational and at times tearful interview.
I wept, standing at the kitchen sink listening to it all.

This track was one of Owen's chosen discs, it's a version of The Sound Of Silence which I have never heard before .
It's wonderfully dramatic even though the lead singer scares the begeebers out of me!
Enjoy!

I Have Never

I 've never cried at a funeral! 

This revelation came to me this morning after I recalled reading that Hitler loved watching Snow White and the seven Dwarfs
Both facts to me are mildly surprising, especially as I always thought that Hitler was more of a Gone With The Wind kind of guy!
Anyhow, as usual I digress

Yes, I have never cried at a funeral.
I have never found myself naked in pubic either, which, when you think of it , is more or less the same thing!
I also have have been called to Jury service, which is a real pisser! I have always thought I would rather suit than linen jacket Henry Fonda kept taking on and off in Twelve Angry Men.

I have never eaten Haggis or oysters !
Or ever had  fight in the street.
and I have never once been on a protest march and waved a suitably ribald placard at the authorities!

I have never slept in a tent or had a shit in the woods
And I have not seen a hedgehog close up since I was 13!

I have never read Dickens, Proust or Chekhov

I have never been to Madame Tussauds, The Tower Of London or The Royal Albert Hall.
And  have never waltzed with gay abandon on the sprung floor of the Blackpool dance ballroom!

I never said " I love you" to my parents. And I never heard them utter the phrase back  to me

And I have never cried at a funeral!

Paysanne

The Prof and I found a rather delightful restaurant this evening.
The food was unfussy and very tasty and the front-of-house host interestingly quirky with his somewhat unusual tableside delivery. He reminded me of a cross between a posh Russell Brand, John Cleese and Terry Thomas 
When asked why the restaurant had an obituary of the hell-raiser Oliver Reed on the toilet wall, he replied with a wave of his hand and a breezy " It makes for an interesting read!" and when The Prof asked if he could add the tip on the card machine our host apologised describing the rules for not doing so as " positively Orwellian!" 
What fun!

I've nothing much to say today! 

The Ghosts Of Boyfriends Past!

The room felt oppressive .
The walls were painted badly in the primary colours of the Brazil flag. Garish Yellow, Green and  Navy blue. With strange " tropical " symbols clumsily hand painted over the yellow borders around the tall old fashioned victorian windows.
Curtains with cheap gold tassles were hung around those windows and an immersion tank hidden next to the fireplace and in each dark corner, at ceiling height, a fat gold painted cherub looked down on the flimsy ikea bed set against one wall.

I hated that room.

I hated it with a vengeance .
I hated it as it was the Prof's bedroom when I met him.
I hated it as it was decorated by his previous, much younger partner.
A partner who obviously had no taste whatsoever, but whose ghost lived on in every badly painted piece of woodwork and smudged gold effect stencil!
My first morning there, after we woke up, I started as I meant to go on!
As the Prof prepared coffee and french pastries in the kitchen
I found one of my shoes under a pile of clothes on the floor,
And knocked every soddin cherub off the wall before he came back to bed with a tray!

Watching

I think blogland is suffering from a Febuary bout of writer's Block. 
I blame the short dark days of winter coupled with small doses of apathy and a post adrenalin drop following surges experienced with the crowning of Trump!
Perhaps we are all feeling rather jaded with all of this demonstrating
Or is it more likely that fuck all is happening in our lives ?

On this morning's power walk Mary and I sat on the broken stone wall overlooking  Basil's sheep fields and the valley East of the village and looked out at the view. Welsh terriers love to sit and watch, so we sat and watched for an absolute age.
I day dreamed about having a new kitchen. Mary sat with her own deep doggy thoughts.
She was so preoccupied thay she didn't notice Mrs Trellis and Blue walking up the hill behind us. Mrs Trellis' bobble hat was sticking straight up as usual! She looks like Noddy!

Thank You

......thank you Eirlys
The gift of a dozen of your free range eggs ( all be them from a huge barn) was a lovely gesture today.
I gave you a hug which threw you slightly!
But it made my day
I miss my hens

All That We Share

I was surfing youtube as I was soaking George's klingons off under the kitchen sink's mixer tap this morning. 

I can't remember if I used the sponge pan scourer or not! 

But I digress! 

This video from Denmark Tv came up on my you may like this  section . I stopped short with the nail sissors to watch it.

It's rather beautiful

I sent it to Donald Trump 

I do hope he watched it

Guilt

We have had emotions today....have we not?
Grief ( post 1)
Horror ( post 2)
And now post 3 = guilt

The Prof is at some posh meal in London
And on the way home after Sams this evening
I bought and devoured a scotch egg almost without chewing!

Be still my fucking beating heart!!!!!!

Butter

My first post of the day has depressed me

So I will leave you with this surprised shot of

just why does our butter have a strange mottled effect on its surface

Hey ho

Grief Has A Face

I bumped into a colleague yesterday. I saw her while she was out shopping.
She looked as she felt.
Grief stricken.
The word sadness cannot suitably explain someone experiencing grief. I think there is a hollowness about the emotion that shows on the face, an empty faraway look who some can describe  as being haunted or empty. Whatever it is, I saw it on my friend's face yesterday and was moved terribly by it.
She cried as soon as I looked at her .
A sympathetic look is sometimes the worst thing you can offer up when someone is hanging on to their emotions with their fingernails but you have to offer it, ignoring  the " elephant in the room" is worse.

Bad Behaviour!

William nipped the postman today as he put his fingers through the letterbox.
I only knew this as I heard his swearing as he marched back to his van.
He's usually so much more deft in his movements about the dogs
I shouted a robust " SORRY! " from out of the bedroom window where I had been shaking the cat hairs from off the duvet.
He half waved his thanks.
When I got downstairs William was doing an excited lap of honour around the living room!
Bating the postman is the nearest thing the old boy has to a devious side.

We all need to act in a naughty manner sometimes don't you think?
Unleashing the devil inside, underlines that rules can be broken, and that ( literally in William's case) that there is life in the old dog yet! 

William, victorious with the taste of the postman in his mouth

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