Rock'n Roll

I woke just before 4 pm
I had slept through the bun fight which was the arrival of the sexy bearded dog walker
And the dogs were lying in unconscious heaps in the kitchen when I sleepily came downstairs
I hadn't managed a shop so cooked gnocchi for tea
And prepared it simply with garlic and lashings of parmesan

I ate my tea, Amelie style at the kitchen table and read the previous posts' suggestions on paint and textures and light
I watched the final half hour of Cocoon and drank my usual bucket of coffee
A bath, ironing of the uniform, feeding the dogs and I'm off too to work

Not exactly rock n roll

Decorating On A Budget

I had just opened the first of a loaned mountain of Homes & Gardens magazines when the phone went.
I'm now working night shifts instead of day shifts over the weekend
Bang went my afternoon of decorating research.

I need to redecorate the cottage.
Psychologically that needs to be done
But physically that really needs to be done

A log burner maybe romantic and inviting when lit
( when you get home after a long shift and you have to light a mucky stove, romantic is the last friggin word that comes to mind)
But soot and dust and occasional smells take their toll in a tiny cottage
And everything looks a bit grubby, even in candlelight.

At the moment the living room is a gentle sage green, a plain background to my remaining original art, grandfather clock and furniture .
The paintwork is an old fashioned ivory cream and the ceiling and beams are painted white in traditional Welsh style.
Every surface is now slightly sooty and smoke stained.
The carpet is old and needs replacing.
It will have to be content with a good deep clean.

The master bedroom needs a total overhaul
The wallpaper remains a thirteen year old Laura Ashley rose print

I'm open to ideas on colours schemes
Send me your ideas

gifts

One of my colleagues in work gave me a gift today
It was the above framed map of Trelawnyd  with the caption "I'm staying in the village"
A small kindness but a thoughtful one/

I didn't get back home until 20.45 pm
Winnie's jagged wound is improving but she is still walking in boxing gloves, which strangely seems not to be bothering her too much

There was a bowl of macaroni cheese left carefully wrapped inside my mail box
thanks neighbours!

The Gayest Film Of All Time

I've Just Sat Through 

Magnificent Obsession

I've never seen it before

"May I get excited Tomorrow?"

Your Advocate, your mentor

No matter just how old you are, we all need an advocate of our own
If you are lucky, those mentors will be your parents and in some fortunate cases a healthy parent in their eighties can still parent a son or daughter who are approaching their sixties.
My mother died not long after the millennium, my father back in the late 1980s, so since then and to be honest since I was a child, my mentor and advocate has always been my elder sister, Ann

No matter just how old you are, its nice to have a protector
I remember when I was in my thirties and I brought my husband to be home for the first time my sister was gracious and welcoming and warm and funny
It was at a family meal and as we got into the car to leave she followed us to the road to say goodbye.
There was lots of  cheek kissing and hugs at that farewell and just before we drove away my sister leaned through the passenger window at my husband to be and smiled sweetly
"Don't you ever mess him around" she warned not unkindly but the subtext was clear to all of us
"For if you do, You 'll have me to deal with!"

who is your advocate?

A Little Fat Horse

Well I think I have found a hidden talent

My sisters and I went to our first pottery class today and we started off with my request at potting my own little fat horse

So here is my very first little fat horse

not bad for a first attempt

Next week we are being taught how to throw and centre our clay on the potting wheel!

My sisters in full concentration mode

When I was busy potting , Winnie was opening up her wound with her strong back claws so I's missing choir in order to watch her after bandaging her back foot in a boxing glove

Tits Up

I never got to see Little Women at lunchtime
I found a rather nasty self scratched wound on Winnie's neck folds this morning which needed assessing so found myself sitting in the vet's waiting room instead of the warmth of the Prestatyn's Scala Cinema orange plush seats.
Winnie always makes a vet visit a bit of a joy even if she is not quite 100% when there.
She loves to sit by the door as we wait to be called, a position she likes as she is able to greet any dog or human as they wander in.
She reminds me of a rotund 1930s matron greeting her guests at a fashionable cocktail party.
The new Eastern European vet snorted when I all told her that I need not hold winnie's head for her to give the standard painkilling injections and antibiotics
and true to form Winnie started to blow kisses at the vet as the first injection plunged in
The wound looked nasty
and so did the 100£ bill
These dogs will be the death of me.

The weather is atrocious and with Storm Brendan in full flow I bought Winnie a Ginster's Pasty
then went on spec to the multiplex cinema in Llandudno.
There I saw the excellent and typically Guy Ritchie-esque The Gentlemen as Winnie slept after enjoying the aforementioned pasty and several handfuls of miniature cocktail sausages!

Hugh Grant his best performance to date

 

I wont go into any of the plot of the movie as it is simply just too complicated to make a stab at, suffice to say it has Mathew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam , Michelle Dockery and Colin Farrell all playing London based gangsters who are involved around the battle for topdog status in the production and supply of high grade marijuana

Who would have imagined that Lady Mary was such a good shot

In typical Ritchie style the film is very darkly funny with the whole cast looking like they had the time of their lives during its production, and uniformly they give some very impressive performances indeed, performances that are just overshadowed in a scene stealing turn by Hugh Grant who turns up as a sleazy gay, camp Michael Caine sounding private eye
I loved watching him in this movie, which is a true compliment as I don't rate him much as an actor.
I bet he wins a BAFTA for best supporting actor!

I'm home now and have just dressed Winnie's wound carefully as she sat on the kitchen table happily munching a slice of pizza
I love that old dog
She has more Chutzpah than Miriam Margolyes

Two Days Off

Nurses are notorious for not recharging their batteries.

I am presently trying to bring in a slightly more structured way of debriefing and discussing situations that challenge them in clinical every day work

It's bread and butter within Samaritain work

But still not quite normal practice in nursing.

Younger nurses still, I think, work hard and play hard. 

Lots of late nights, alcohol and buckets of fun

It has always been so

Today I find it's getting the most out of days off.

And days off mean , wherever possible two days off together!

This week I have three days off together.

Yesterday was a bust after night shifts. It was a day of scrubbing the kitchen floor free of bulldog separation urine, dog walks, shopping and cottage cleaning

The next couple of days are earmarked for some downtime

Today it's Little Women, A lunch date, dog walks and a hospital visit

Tomorrow it's Pottery Class, choir and badminton with Gorgeous Dave

Many of us are not very good at giving ourselves permission to relax.

We use words as should and Need too many times 

The next couple of days, all I am allowing myself to say 

" I'd like to..."

Matt Alber

The penis post was a cheap shot
I admit it.
Penises will always grab the attention, and I was tired
Anyway posts can get forgiven for they are seldom long to read
Videos posts are lazy posts too
but this one is at least pretty to look at.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o8uocNOr7aY

Penis

The other day I caught two middle aged ladies photographing a particularly fine palm tree outside work.
Were they Horticulturalists ?
Naturalists perhaps ?
Nope
They were photographing a new limb, growing  in the shape of an erect man's penis

Seaside smutty humour is not dead

Lovely Lisa Tarbuck

Thank fuck for lisa Tarbuck
The BBC radio 2 presenter
Had me laughing out loud tonight
As I was battling the weather to get to work
She was chatting about the Alexa wifi accessory and in a fit of the giggles
Yelled out onto the airways
"ALEXA!!!!!!! RING THE POLICE!!!!!"

Supermarket Tea

I'm feeling a bit of a sad sack today

I'm on nights and I'm sat in supermarket cafe having my tea before I drive down the coast to work

There are four people in the cafe and they all look as sad i do

Night duty can leave the days expanse of time in between shifts like dead time

It's like experiencing that awful Sunday night before school feeling three days in a row.

What you really want is to get up in the dark with a bath already run for you and with tea on the table. 

Your uniform is pressed ready and your supper is boxed ready to microwave at midnight...(a time nurses get peckish after their very first sit down of the night)

When you leave the house a kiss sends you on your way

My uniform IS ironed ( and hidden under a jacket - to protect it from stray gravy) and my coffee was self service. 

I doubt the check out woman will give me a kiss goodbye

I'm glad she won't, she reeks of fags.

I look at the clock, I've got 25 minutes to finish my coffee and to buy dog food and some treats for my colleagues 

It was a challenging shift last night

And I     suspect tonight's will be the same.

Hey ho xx

A Winter Funeral

It was blustery throughout Gwyneth's funeral.
So much so that at one point in the service, several of the congregation lifted their heads to listen to the wind as it whistled menacingly around the Church roof.
There is something more emotional about a funeral in winter I always think.
Every colour is muted like the dull green/browns of the graveyard foliage .
The grey of the skies echoing the mood of the moment.

Village Elder Islwyn and Trendy Carol ( lovely handbag btw) were stoic and movingly brave and it was good to hear that their work and friendships were celebrated so publicly by the vicar before the burial in the Churchard where the valiant semicircle of family and villagers braved the icy wind as it raced like a train over the valley floor from the West

The Day I Killed Bogbrush

A patient asked me to tell her a story today.
She needed diverting and I had just a few minutes to spare
I didn't quite know just what to talk about until I spied an nylon exfoliating face scrub sticking out of her bathroom bag sitting on her locker.
When I saw the white Pom Pom I remembered Bog Brush 

Now Bog Brush was a nasty little cunt
A silkie cockerel no more than nine inches high, he was the epitome of little man syndrome 
Full of bluster, anger and sexual tension bordering on the psychotic , Bog Brush spent his days either pecking at any passing female hen within range or shagging any passing female hen within range.
When he had a spare moment , free of the motivation of depositing sperm , he would spend it attacking anything that he saw as a threat.
The dogs, the pigs, even the hysterical Indian runner ducks would be targeted by the little white crested cockerel, who without fear and with much howling would hurl himself claws first at any poor unfortunate within reach.

Visiting humans would also be subject to sneak attacks and could be often seen limping away from the field with bloody calves and ripped tights.

The population of the field was effectively under seige until the day that Bog Brush picked on a baby bantam cockerel called Gayboy 
Gayboy, was a sweetie. He was tiny runt of a bantam who had a bad leg after it was trampled by his socially inept mother. The injury left him slow and when he walked he flounced somewhat like a more camp version of john Inman's Mr Humphreys 
Gayboy was bully fodder for the likes of BogBrush and that day it was fortunate that I was passing with a tin feeding bowl in my hand for Bogbrush had almost killed the little guy ( as he skipped by presumably whistling show tunes to himself ). I yelled " You little cunt" at the top of my voice  and swung my bowl like a good un
The tin bowl had clacked Bogbrush , just a glancing blow
I only intended to scare the bastard
But the cockerel stopped short, gave me a brief but vicious look , then dropped stone dead to the floor.
" You killed Bogbrush" my patient stated
" I did " I told her "I am ashamed to admit it!" 
" but Gayboy survived!???!!!"
" he did indeed !!" I told her......
Thus Ending the story

40 Thousand Pairs of Eyes

 In Tate Britain I shared with Sitges John my most profound experience with modern art.  The moment came quite by accident as in the 1990s I took myself off to an Antony Gormely exhibition in Sheffield's Weston Park
The exhibition was his award winning terracotta figures 
40 thousand Faces looking forward at you.
The piece had a strength and an emotion which has never been beaten and I remember standing for hour and hour just feeling the power of those tiny faces

 With global warming, the fires in Australia, the uncertain nature of our so very fragile modern world , Gormley's piece has taken on a new significance with me
The figures do plead " what are we doing?" 
" what shall we do?"

There is a simple honesty in those blank little faces .
Power that, I remember kept me standing and watching for a couple of hours on a blustery Yorkshire afternoon

Facebook thoughtfully sent me this final photo this morning. It was taken years ago when I was cloudwatching on the top of Gop Hill. The Scottish terrier isn't George , it was Maddie . 

Maddie was a delightfully opinionated lady who mistrusted and disliked most of the living world around her. She was grumpy and stoic and in her own way quite magnificent and this selfi showed a rare burst of affection from a lady who preferred her own company.

Like the Gormley figures, Maddie was nothing but honest

I miss her straightforwardness

Thank you John and Nigel for yesterday x

Judy

My sister Janet, Judy and Trendy Carol manning my tea tent on one of my open days

My last surviving Aunt on my father's side of the family is poorly.
Her name is Judy
She suffered a severe stroke just before Christmas and is slowly recovering.
We, the extended family have just had the ok to visit her.
And today amid the overwhelming cacophony of a general ward, I did just that.

I arrived just as my cousin and his wife did.
We've known each other since we were children and we've never seen our aunt so quiet, so still and so far away vulnerable.
We looked at each other carefully as she only half acknowledged us
My aunt was sleepy. A side effect of stroke
The physiotherapist  helpers were waiting to wake her enough to transfer her into a chair.
The noise of the ward was deafening and a knew any meaningful dialogue was impossible.

I told her I would return tomorrow and I will do just that
And I then  did , what I've never done to her ever before.
As she closed her eyes to sleep
I leant down and kissed her very tenderly on the forehead

The Bitch Chair

Animals teach you how important touch is

When they want body contact, no matter what reason they have for seeking it , they simply find it. Unlike food and water,  contact is shared and is often a mutual thing.

Humans mix touch with all too many social taboos. I thought this the other day when a man I know from the village congratulated me on finally getting the cottage changed into my name. 

As he wished me well, I sensed that he suddenly didn't quite know what to do with his hands and so I reached out and half held half shook his right hand as we laughed.

His mind wanted that contact but his head couldn't allow the physicality of the gesture to happen and as that physical warmth occurred something needy and kind and human flowed between us 

Like I said, animals can teach us many simple things

The Horse

Yesterday
Lunch in trendy Shorditch, drinks in Lewisham, Tate Britain by the Thames and homemade soup and Bread in Catford! 
The William Blake exhibition reinforced to me that he was a troubled man and I was thrilled to find my favourite painting of his , the tiny ( literally) paint on copper...The Horse.

I had a lovely time.

Tate Britain