The mysterious “P” in my last post commentated thus
“ Just wondering if any Trelawnyd online meetings can be as entertaining ala Handforth Parish Council and Jackie Weaver. John?”
Well P, first let me explain the above video for those not aware of it. This video is part of a local council meeting in the North of England where old beefs and fall outs between the counsellors came to a head when a local council official , the placid and wonderfully patient Jackie Weaver was sent in to trouble shoot the Egos.
In Wales, we in the villages of Gwaenysgor & Trelawnyd have an officially elected Community Council which are responsible for generally local and small scale affairs. I was part of this council a few years ago now, when the village was “ run” predominantly by a phalanx of middle aged, white heterosexual men.
My appointment was a small step towards diversity back then and today I am glad to say that there are several women and younger men on the committee, but back then there was only one delightful troublemaker amid the serious old school members.
The troublemaker was a character I used to blog about a lot in the early days of Going Gently , and that was the Red Faced Welsh Farmer.
The RFWF could be described thus
“ Think of the classic actor Robert Newton in full pirate voice aka Long John Silver but dressed in an ancient tweed hat, grubby tweed jacket and cardigan and driving an old red Land Rover, with the driver’s window forever open”
He looked and sounded every inch a farmer pretending to be a pirate.
Now the RFWF was famous for his temper and his no nonsense approach to everything village based. If he liked you , he would bend over backward to help you in anything you asked of him and after a shaky start ( we had a row over a large blue water butt of all things) he proved a godsend when I needed an expert hand constructing my pig pens and eventually taking them to be slaughtered.
But if he didn’t like you,( and he would be first to say that there were several on the then community council committee he hated) he was a right old bugger and at every meeting amid the boring crap of building requests and road sign issues, he would challenge the group decision making with points of order, mischievous shenanigans, secret taping of discussions and challenges to the ineffective clerk who, I am sure had to take a Valium before each meeting in order to cope.
It was great fun watching him take the floor. Throw out his conspiracy theories and shout and bellow over his deafness which made things even more complicated and much more entertaining.
I now realise that I adored the old pirate’s chutzpah and his devilment and his cunning and when he died, I wasn’t surprised that the huge marble church at Bodelwyddan was filled to standing room by hundreds of Welsh farmer types in their black funeral coats standing shoulder to shoulder.
This morning I thought it was time for a scotch egg.
Over the years I have worked very hard in designing a high flavour , lower calorie scotch egg the size of a large hand grenade.
I’m feeling rather altruistic today so I shall share my recipe.
Lean pork mince ( enough to cover four large organic eggs which have been boiled for four minutes)
A bulb of garlic roasted
Dry herbs
Paprika 2 tea spoons
2 eggs beaten
1 large packet of Panko* breadcrumbs
When the garlic cloves are still warm, squeeze out the insides which have the consistency of a paste and mix it with the pork mince, dry herbs, onion salt , pepper and paprika
Don’t add onions if tempted as they make the scotch egg wet and breaks the pork ring.
Shell the eggs and wrap each one in the mince. Be generous and make sure the scotch egg is large , the size slightly bigger than a tennis ball.
Roll the scotch egg in the egg then press handfuls of the panko breadcrumbs into the meat.
Repeat the process and place of greased oven tray.
Roast at 200 degrees , until the egg is golden and Crispy
Serve one egg per meal with an apple salad coleslaw or low fat creme fraîche as the pork is a little dry
Enjoy!
My four eggs will make four meals......
No real news today . I have my second covid vaccine appointment for next week.
Alfred Hitchcock lecture tonight on zoom
* Panko are made from a crustless white bread that is processed into flakes and then dried. ... These breadcrumbs have a dryer and flakier consistency than regular breadcrumbs, and as a result they absorb less oil. Panko produces lighter and crunchier tasting fried food
I adore that moment after work where the PPE comes off and you take the first proper breath out of 12 hours.
Tonight the night air was cool and moist and refreshing in the hospice car park
And in the spitting of raindrops I stood and said hello to a family group of mountain goats who had hunkered down for the evening on the grassy bank behind Bluebell
I heard the other nurses and support workers leave, but I wasn’t in a huge hurry to follow them.
So I chatted to the nearest goat who watched me carefully through bored eyes until I grew damp and properly refreshed and my mask almost turned into blue mush
I drove past my favourite cafe in Colwyn Bay early this morning on my way to work.
It was still dark
For weeks it has looked somewhat dilapidated and empty with whitewashed windows and an unkept sign proclaiming a simple “ Shut”
This morning the mismatched chairs and wooden tables were back in their untidy islands and the counter top swept clean in readiness for the stacks of coffee cups and plates stood neatly behind.
I’ve just spent nearly a hundred pounds at the supermarket.
How did that effin’ happen?
I’ve also had an argument with a couple of entitled mothers who let their respective children invade Dorothy’s body space
I’ve had several such altercations in my time.
I cannot abide parents who think it’s perfectly ok for their little darlings to approach a dog they don’t know without permission .
I missed coffee with Chic Eleanor which pissed me off
Dorothy also happily shredded two extra large kitchen rolls in the back of Bluebell during the ten minutes it took me to collect some meds at the vets.
I had to pull what looked like a ton of white papier-mâché from her mouth and throat in the vets car park with the help of a man with a poorly and very shy dachshund which caused a minor drama in itself
Three bits of excitement for the day.....
I bought a cheerful fruit bowl, an indoor primula and flowers... from Sainsbury’s ....it’s yellow interior pleased me.
This afternoon , I made sweet pepper soup, and talked and swapped moans with Nu as she walked around some westLondon parks ......
This open letter was posted on the village Facebook page today .
A sign of the times and a kindness from a nice villager.
And something I need to share today.
Most of my colleagues at work now have their second covid jab appointment and I’m proud that my little country is leading the entire world with the percentage of population vaccinated
One by one my loved ones are getting the jab and are moving one step closer to safety .
I hope to hear about my appointment in the next day or so.
I’ve just come home and although shattered I’ve lit the fire and refused to eat crap for supper.
Work has been hard but I’ve laughed regularly all day.....
Laughter is common in a hospice .
The girls were curled up on trendy Carol’s trendy conservatory sofa when I collected them and they were so happy to see me
It’s after nine and I’m catching up with the latest Line of duty download, with a chicken salad made by the chef at work.
I will leave you with this my most favourite of line of duty put downs
When I was 18, I embarked on a very short and exceedingly unsuccessful career as a bank clerk.
Banks in 1980 were still staffed by dozens of clerks, all beavering away behind counters and in machine rooms and in the hierarchy, so evident in those old beige offices, I was the lowest of the low .
Now one of my daily jobs was to fold individual statements and seal them into envelopes before franking and posting . Now Certain statements of the most special customers had to be pulled out separately and their envelopes had to be hand typed by the junior clerk and the one I always remember was Sir Basil Rathbone *
Now Sir Rathbone had no less than twelve letters after his name and every month I somehow managed to get one of those letters wrong. The B in OBE would be in lowercase, or the K and B in KBE would be reversed: I’d forget a comma between award letters and one time I actually had the audacity to forget a full stop.
I was forever being dragged to Mr William’s, the deputy manager’s booth, stationed behind and above the counter clerks to be bollocked for getting the envelope wrong and after a year I grew to hate Sir Basil and his difficult twelve letters, even though I was the one that had done the wrong thing and he was “petty enough” to shout down the phone to complain .
I eventually started my nurse training a short while later but on my very last day, I spied Sir Basil’s statement waiting patiently for it’s typed envelope and couldn’t resist completing it myself.
Before franking and posting the letter, I read out the top line of the addressed envelope to myself
It read
Sir Basil Rathbone SOD, BUM, ARSE, HOLE, TIT
POSTSCRIPT: a few years ago I remembered Sir Basil and looked him up online
His obituary was written in 2015 when he was in his nineties and chronicled a war hero of some renown and note a fact that made me feel almost guilty for the typed letter.
“ All you people who wake up in the morning and write about "we this" and "we that", spare a thought for those who it is "I this" and "I that" when they wake up and for the rest of the day“
I heard and understood her loneliness so well this morning. The loneliness of lockdown and the loneliness of living on your own is sometimes a difficult one to deal with and although I think I can speak for Rachel too when I say we are not banging on about all things singleton it’s nice to acknowledge that life is sometimes just a bit tougher when it’s only you at home when the doors are shut and the curtains are drawn.
Last night my friend Ruth popped around for a night in. We have been in each other’s bubbles since the start of lockdown and so it was her turn to organise dinner. I was online completing my Hitchcock - The spy films lecture when she turned up laden down with food , and so, for a change she pottered around the kitchen preparing a delicious salad to have with Waitrose pizzas, wine and garlic bread as I worked away online.
Seeing someone else in the cottage, albeit in the background of my zoom box made me feel part of something a little bigger from what I have.......and to eat in companionable silence with someone after conversations of interest and light was a treat much more savoured that it ever used to be , because of its rarity .
We watched a film together and someone else but me cried “ oh no” when Dora left Josuè at the end I walked the dogs, whilst Ruth had a cigarette in the garden and this morning I made coffee and breakfast and loved the fact that two plates were on the table rather than just one.
I’m not banging on, I’m not saying poor me..I’m really not ...and nor is Rachel , or Libby, or Sue in Suffolk or Weaver or any of us singletons at home on this cold Friday in February ..but today I understood Rachel so well when she said what she did without self pity but with a certain sadness,
“spare a thought for those that have to say I rather than we”
Brazilian Dora is a retired teacher who writes letters for the illiterate at the central Station in Rio
By chance she meets up with a young orphan Josué and the meeting allows her to find some redemption from a life of cynicism as she finds herself responsible for his future happiness
Me and Ruth watched it last night and cried buckets at it
It’s message about redemption and reinvention is universal and recently so pertinent
I’m doing something I have not done since I was a teenager
Something indulgent, something certainly selfish, something just a bit wicked.
As a grown man it has taken me 38 years to revisit it again
It’s a lockdown phenomenon
It’s naughty
And as one antipodean artist used to say
Can you tell what it is yet?
I’m talking about the lie in.
Well if I was being totally honest it is a return to bed after a brief early morning dog walk
But you will understand the gist.
My lie-ins are somewhat loud affairs
They are filled with bulldog snores and the unexpected purring from a cat well know for his silence.
Occasionally Mary from the window seat will raise a sleepy eye to a passing dog walker and will let out a muffled Woof ! which will in turn illicit a brief hiatus in the purring and the snoring but it is not long before airways are compromised and feline confidence returns and the background noises of the cottage return to normal .
It’s a soup day, butter bean and chicken with paprika .
After three consecutive twelve hour shifts, I had a lie in with a book this morning, then walked the dogs, shopped and photographed the churchyard snowdrops before the cold ushered me back to the cottage in order to light the fire.
I managed to leave out the fucking in “you have to be FUCKING kidding”
But it really DID deserve to be inserted there as I stood for a mini second with urine in my face, urine seeping under my mask into my mouth and eyes and all across my head.
The patient and the nurse-who had forgotten that she had left the urine standing inside a covered bedpan looked at me open mouthed
I lost my usual bouncy sense of humour and bolted to the sluice where I ripped off my sodden mask and washed my face and hair
Urine in open eyes and mouth is the equivalent to a needle stick injury and has to be taken seriously
After a shower, a failed blood taking effort by the hospice doctor, a long talk to occupational health and cup of hot tea, my sense of humour slowly started to reappear.....just !
Once I nursed a psychiatric patient who would intermittently delve down his pants , grab a large and rather wet turd and fling it at the nearest nurse.
The staff would get used to the melodramatic warning cries of “incoming !!” as turd left hand and a blob of brown hurtled through the air of the ward like a smelly hand grenade .
* photo of Dorothy tonight , sleeping in front of Trendy Carol’s log burner
My husband left back in the summer of 2018....three years this summer and I’ve been thinking for a good while now that I was still a bit stuck with the anger of how he left rather than the why he left.
I’ve already written about my recent approach to his mother where hurts were put to bed so it only seemed Common sense that he and I finally had a dialogue of sorts sans blame and anger.
The impetus for me to initiate the contact came from a recent video call I set up with a dear friend who has a cancer. He had lost considerable weight since our last meeting and I blurted out the fact as soon as I saw him......like a broken hearted loon . Our conversation ,as conversations always do with friends that are deeply loved, then descended into gossip and chat and laughter but the call left me with the aching reminder of the fragility of the every day and underlined the pointless nature of prolonged anger and hurt when a relationship goes south.
The dialogue I had today with my ex husband The “ Prof” wasn’t prolonged, but it was to the point. It was honest and most importantly .....and by celebrating the good times ......it was mutually kind.
