Just back from a lovely meal with family
I’m tired, it was a hard shift last night
Watched this ……
This is so hard to sing. The kids make it look so simple
Joyous
The Wedding Suit
In October my nephew Jon and his girlfriend Holly get married.
It’s the first family wedding since my own back in 2015.
Jon is my brother’s son.
(For those that don’t know, my brother Andrew died of motor neurone disease almost ten years ago now)
The wedding will be a relaxed affair in a country hotel over the border and so, I think my family is going to book a large shared suite at the hotel in order to stay over.
It will be nice to have a few drinks.
I do love a nice wedding.
The only knotty thing about the wedding is that I will need a suit.
I am sure, non of you will be surprised to hear that I don’t own one.
I did have a tuxedo however, a matching one I wore at my wedding. But since I have lost over two stone ( and counting) it no longer fits! I dug it and my dress shirt out last week and took it to one of the hospice charity shops for recycling.
The man behind the counter was broad, like me..and he immediately took a personal interest in the tux when I handed it in with the caviat that it had only been worn one by one not-so-careful owner.
“ I think it’s my size” he preened and asked hopefully “Have you got the tie to go with it too?.”
I told him I had not, for I had kept the woollen maroon tie and had placed it in my almost empty tie drawer ( alongside my black funeral tie)
…It is the only thing I have kept from my wedding day….….I’m still not quite sure just why I have kept hold of it.
And so I am still left with the suit dilemma. Should I buy one for the wedding or just get a jacket and trousers ? I’m not sure of what is appropriate.
A bit lost I reviewed my options and have texted Chic Eleanor for advice
She’s left me with a reassuring and simple note of
“ Leave Things to me”
The wedding isn’t until October so I will wait to nearer the wedding day to pic my duds as I hope to lose at least another stone plus before the nuptials.
I don’t want to be the fat bastard in the wedding photos
Mule Train
Bob Blackman was a phenomenon, albeit a minor one on the club circuit in 1970s Northern Britain.
I first saw him in a working man’s Club in Rotherham around 1981, a place that had a stripper on in the men’s bar at tea time at the same time families were enjoying dinner in the main lounge.
I remember crying with laughter at his antics with the tray.
As I recall I got very drunk on Barley Wine
I’m Still on nights, and strangely Bob was a product of some nostalgic chatter in the wee small hours of last night.
My first sojourn to my beloved South Yorkshire
I got up at midday when Dorothy started to perform CPR following a tickling bladder and donning shorts and my new I love Scotch Eggs T shirt, we all went out for a walk which was nice because everyone seemed to be out and about and I could tick the box with some human contact.
Trendy Carol ( nice bomber jacket, designer jeans, chic sandals ) stopped. She’s pulled her left arm at work and has to wear a sling. She said that she is coming to the church meeting on the 2nd as did Pippa from the rectory then Mrs Trellis and Mr Poznań who was pottering in his front garden.
I came home and ate some chicken and salad before going on line for a bit in order to purchase a subscription to Disney +
The Walking Dead returns on Monday and can only be viewed on Disney which sounds a bit odd given it’s an ultra violent zombie show
I also managed to get cheap tickets to the Liverpool Philharmonic and their performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique which is a Sunday afternoon concert….
The Liverpool Philharmonic has a sexy new conductor Domingo Hindoyan
What fun
The walking Dead returns next Monday for its final season
Piss Boring Post then Hiraeth
I’m back on night shift again, which is ok given the miserable weather, grey skies and chill in the air.
I lit the fire last night, and the Dogs and Albert crowded around it as if they had never experienced a fire before.
I’m going back to bed in a bit. There’s no one to see, and little to do on days before night shifts.
The postman has just knocked on the window with a package for me.
I bought a jar from a private buyer on eBay the other day. 4£ for the jar 3 £ for the postage.
It’s my spectacle jar .
I’m a bugger for losing specs. That is the reason I never buy any expensive ones as invariably within a few days they be lost for eternity.
I buy a selection of nice no prescription reading glasses on line every few months or so, but even then I’m always scrabbling around the cottage looking for a pair when I’ve lost the ones that are generally perched high on my forehead.
Now I have a spec jar, compete in cheerful yellow, which comfortably holds 6 pairs standing up
Life in the fast lane
Ok there IS always something interesting to blog about.
As a postscript I’ll post this illustration , which was sent to me by friend and blogger Mike
So many rural houses have no numbers in Wales so often have to have a name to differentiate them from each other.
My cottage and Mandy & sailor John’s cottage next door used to be collectively called dan y Fynwent which means under the graveyard . Then they were known as Llan Cottages ( Llan is one of several words in Welsh for Church) Now my cottage is known as Bwthyn y Llan which is Welsh for Church Cottage
Hiraeth, has other meanings in Welsh , as well as nostalgia, it can simply mean homesickness and yearning but I think I prefer the above definition
There is a magic quality about it .
Pond Bun Fight
I was a little disappointed by the pond meeting.
It was wasn’t quite what I was expecting.
Let me explain…
The village pond used to be a bit of tipping ground and thirty years ago or so the Community Council suggested a renovation .
They did a cracking job, utilising local farmers to bash the pond into shape. They planted trees around the new pond and eventually a lovely oak fence and gate surrounded the area.
It must have looked wonderful
However over the years, the oak fencing provided an effective barrier to locals to use and visit the pond and eventually it has more or silted up and has been totally overgrown .
In my sixteen years here, I have never seen it visited .
Now members of the new Community Association have taken an interest in rebooting the pond as a conservation project, and so a proposed plan was drawn up, the AONB dept consulted and a grant obtained to support the project.
Yesterday was planned as a relaxed meeting with interested members of the village, members of the community council and Association , a AONB *ranger and a council expert in amphibian and pond wildlife present.
The ranger and expert provided positive support and information for the pond project but I found some of the comments from others, rather negative, slightly confrontational and a little unhelpful .
A lot of people had a lot of advice to give, barriers were thrown up before basic information was shared about the project and complaints voiced thirty years ago about basic seating areas were unhelpfully resurrected.
I made sure that I voiced some positive comments about how good the project seemed.
I caught the eye of the ranger, who had obviously seen village meetings like this before,
“Too many chiefs “ he whispered “ Things will be fine when work starts”
I liked his attitude and I like the proposed plan which is a detailed conservation project which can be utilised by the school as well as the community in general.
Things are different than they were thirty years ago.
Although there is a place for bish bash bosh, where the local farmer would sort everything out informally with brute strength, chutzpah and his trusty JCB there is much to be said for getting the experts involved and doing things systematically.
I wanted to scream out “ Let’s be positive
Hey ho
I photographed the pond site today in the rain.
and thought how lovely it would be for it to be functioning again , with crested newts swimming in reed beds and with locals sat in the shade of the cherry tree watching dragonflies dart in and out of the dappled pond light.
Hey, but I’m a romantic
* area of outstanding Natural Beauty
————————————————————————————————————————
No gravy stains on it yet !
Why I left Psychiatric Nursing
In his morning blog, Cro talked about the state of psychiatric care in the country, discussing its efficacy especially when dealing with the sad case of the recent Devon Shootings.
I trained as a psychiatric nurse back in 1983, just as the big asylum system was closing and the relatively new community nursing system was being set up and greatly expanded.
The nurses, especially on the acute admission wards, were becoming much more psychologically focused in their care and training, like most branches of care, nursing was becoming more academic, research based and professionalised.
It was an exciting time to be a nurse, in many ways but after just three years training and three years staffing on an acute admissions ward I left to become a general nurse. I was burnt out, jaded, and a little cynical.
I was also just twenty seven years old
Very few of our patients were the Conrad Jarrett type. (Conrad was the lead character in the book Ordinary People , the character played by Timothy Hutton in the film version, who was wracked with guilt and depression after his brother’s death) Conrad was cured by the intervention of a kindly old Psychologist after his discharge from psychiatric hospital.
Our patients where the acutely ill psychotic and depressed. Patients that were admitted time and time again when meds were not taken, home stressors remained unchanged and when life too a turn for the worse.
The community teams supported many so very well, but magical cures were few and far between.
Such is the nature of the beast which is mental illness. Running alongside those patients which enter the psychiatric system are millions that are just , well, psychologically damaged. We all…all of us fit into this category in one way or another.
Most of us, through luck, self awareness, experience and with support, manage our demons and our weaknesses ourselves, but many others just get by. They often exist within a life of varying sadness and emotional pain.
They don’t receive the benign insights from a kindly psychologist.
They don’t get the chance to have psychotherapy, or have a stretched community psychiatric nurse visit them once a month…
They are the people that live next door, the people you work with. The people you date.
I’ve meandered off a little here….and have not answered my own question.
I left psychiatric nursing because it overwhelmed me.
Plain and simple.
I left because I wasn’t fully cooked myself to cope with it
and I left because it saddened me.
“ No One Ever Called Me Darling”
That gown !
I’ve never reviewed Now Voyager.
Having said that, I’ve never seen it on the big screen as it was meant to be seen.
And so nearly 80 years since it was made, I thought it time for my Going Gently review.
Now Voyager is a melodrama to cap all melodramas.
It is pure nectar to a middle aged gay man’s sensibilities for everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown into the mix .
In two hours we are witness to the transformation of Bette Davis’ neurotic, monobrowed spinster into an assertive , shoulder padded, coiffured woman about town through some unseen but obviously highly effective psychotherapy .
What a bitch Gladys Cooper
Throw into the mix a harridan mother ( A gloriously hateful Gladys Cooper), a handsome married Austrian (Paul Henreid), a voyage to South America, a benign psychiatrist ( Claude Rains) a wise cracking nurse (Mary Wilks), oodles of pop psychology, a dozen gowns to die for and more cigarettes than one set of lungs can cope with.
I loved almost every minute of it.
On the big screen, Henreid is quite beautiful
Ok I could have lived without the snivelling Tina and the “ hilarious “ comic aside in the mountains of Rio but the rest, with the eye rolling Davis in full gallop, was a camp lesson in emotional romping.
Having said this, Bette Davis is still incredibly moving as Charlotte Vale, and I found myself tearing up at the quiet, understated moment Henreid’s character shows his affection and thanks to her, the first time anyone had done so in her life. Her expression when she received his gift of perfume , literally breaks your heart.
In 80 years, the movie has lost none of its power
Bedevilled with Meetings
….so said the wonderful Moria Rose from Schitts Creek.
I’m happy to steal her lines any day even if they were uttered with no self awareness whatsoever.
Sunday today and after a short sleep I intend to meet up with my friend Colin for Lunch and Bette Davis
It’s going to be overcast and gloomy, ideal weather for Now Voyager me thinks.
I managed to sort out a preliminary meeting of “ The Friends of St Michael’s” for the 2nd of September inside the Church itself, where we hope to organise an action group into some sort of coherent force so that the Church can eventually become a Pilgrim Church and tomorrow I’ve been asked by the community association to go to a site meeting at the village pond between the Community Association who are planning to rejuvenate the green space and the Clwydian ANOB ( Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty) I think I’ve been invited to represent an “ ordinary villager”
Which is nice.
It’s nice to be useful
Gut Feelings
A photo of the Louisa Street Bombing
Rachel’s post about gut feelings held a certain resonance with me today.
I wouldn’t be here today, if my Grandmother had not listened to her gut feeling during an air raid over Liverpool in 1940, Nor would another 20 or so members of my family.
One gut feeling meant that two dozen others plus would exist.
She used to tell a good tale of it.
So did my mother who was a girl of fifteen at the time,
But there they were in 1940 running through the Liverpool streets during an air raid. My grandmother, my mother and my uncle Jim who was around ten years old at the time
My family had three choices.
They could either go to the public shelter which was furthest away or run to the family shelter in Louisa Street Everton where my grandmother’s in laws had congregated, their last choose was to make for the nearby school.
The school was slightly further, but my grandmother had been promised a single “ reinforced” room just for her own use in it, so she was torn between the choices.
My mother remembered than the bombers were already turning at St George’s Church, the highest point of that part of the city when my grandmother stopped in the road unsure of which shelter to make for.
She prayed and her gut feeling made her turn for the school.
The bombs were falling when they flung themselves onto the school floor, and nearby explosions brought in windows and doors as the Louisa Street Shelter suffered a direct hit which brought the roof in onto my paternal family fatally injuring my great grandfather and killing seven others.
Just tonight I found my great grandfather’s name James Samual Fry in the official Liverpool and Merseyside Bombings Blogsites on line
My grandmother followed her gut feeling that night and soon after, with family dead and no home to go back to , she followed that little voice in her head and took her family to wales where she settled in the back of a small shop, in the village of Gwaenysgor, just a mile or so from Trelawnyd.
I will leave you with this lovely song
A Little Bit Of Magic
I haven’t got much to say today.
The meeting with village leaders Ian and Helen was productive and we now have a plan regarding getting an action group ready to support the Church , but generally yesterday was pretty quiet and today, I will be working then sleeping in that order.
No real magic today,
We all need little moments of magic in our lives…..just occasionally
Things to offset the humdrum and the ordinary .
Things that we will always remember.
A sunset, a view, a glance, an uncontrolled giggle….a moment …..we all have our little fragments of magic
I remember a few years ago now going to The New York Met for the first time.
It was to see The Magic Flute
It wasn’t the Opera the took my breath away, even though it was big and brash and extraordinary beautiful but it was the unexpected drama of the Met’s famous Lobmeyr Crystal Chandeliers as they were raised and lowered before the performance.
It was a wonderful piece of choreographed magic.
Understated but showy all at the same time.
And something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up
What is your magic moment?
The one that first enters your mind
Black Widows, Church Meetings and bad Humour
My meal on Tuesday bloody lovely
My next day off is Sunday, I’m back on nights Thursday, Fri and Saturday nights
Sunday afternoon my friend Colin and I are doing a gay afternoon
Lunch out and the Bette Davis movie Now Voyager at the Storyhouse….
I’ve told him we are drinking vodka martinis
I got myself all a bit fed up yesterday .
The good humour, meal out and theatre of Tuesday boosted me so much that I came down with a rather large bump yesterday
The day was boring and gray and wet
I mooched most of yesterday then met luckily Gorgeous Dave for a trip to the cinema
We had arranged to see a well reviewed art house horror movie Boys From County Hell at llandudno cineworld but they’re cancelled the showing due to “ lack of interest” ( obviously there is now a policy of cancelling poorly subscribed movies so that popular shite can be rescheduled instead ) so we went to see the awful Black Widow which is a dreadfully loud superhero thing. I knew it was a bad move because even my nephew Leo texted me that it was rubbish and he adores anything Marvel
Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow
Gorgeous Dave as Gorgeous Dave
It was nice to catch up with Dave though, who has agreed to accompany me to see Nigella Lawson later in the year
He giggled in the cinema when I said I would only go with a straight friend to see her in her one woman show…….she Is definitely one of his cougar crushes…every straight man I know fancies Nigella
Today I’m meeting with village leader Ian regarding a plan of action regarding the Church
Like I told u I’m back on nights tonight
Hey ho
Udder Cream
A local read all about Dorothy’s bite the other day and popped around with some magic cream which she said would help the wound enormously .
The cream, she said, was used by farmers to treat sore udders in cattle so I thought nothing ventured nothing gained and took a large spoonful of the ointment
Within a couple of days the would improved much more than I expected and now, a week after the attack her wounds have healed and the skin is pink and clean and painless.
Lol for the past four days I’ve rubbed a little udder cream on the tiny spots of psoriasis on my knees
And voila! I now have knees of a 40 year old!
Pride And Prejudice
What a delightful evening
A Thai meal followed by a camp production of Pride And Prejudice in the Grosvenor Park open air theatre
Where everything felt right including a bearded rotund Howard Chadwick gliding on stage as Lady Catherine De Bourge.
The romantic and lovely drama was turned into a gentle comedy of manners and relationships and it was lovely to laugh and be moved by the words of Austen even when they were played sweetly and with humour
A Tree Called Nigel
One of the smaller goals in my days is to be able to name all of the trees I see.
Apart from some of the old favourites, I am woefully bad at recognising species, and so every morning when we are out for our “ big” walk when I see a tree I don’t recognise I will grab a leaf from it and take it home to pour over google or as a last resort use the free Woodlands Trust Name a Tree App in order to name that tree.
This morning as I was snapping a few leaves from a tree just off the path, I caught the eye of a passing dog Walker and felt the need to explain what I was doing.
“ I’m trying to name all the trees down the walkway” I told him
And the man nodded and smiled politely and walked on.
Much later as we ambled back to Bluebell, limp leaves in hand we passed the man again,
He pointed to a large Beech tree in the corner of a nearby field “ Do you know this one’s name? “
I was about to show off with the answer , albeit with the humility of “ I think” preceding it when he beat me to the punch
“ He’s called Nigel” the man said with a chuckle
Mike Kilner
I caught the up with my friend Jane for a silly video meet tonight. After that I met up with sheffield Mike on what’s app
It was his birthday today
Here is Mike well out of his sheffield comfort zone
He came to visit me here in wales and this is him with Boris my pet turkey
I miss him
We hope to go away for a few days together very soon
Happy Birthday pal xx
Thistle down
The wind is just strong enough to keep the butterflies off the buddleia and the thistle down from my field is blowing from west to east in bursts like snow.
The breeze is whisking away the construction noise from behind the cottage and all I can hear is the wind in the Elms and the faint contented sound of dog chewing.
Borborygmi
Borborygmi is one of my favourite words
It’s a medical term for the gurgling noise bowels make when they are working normally.
It made a wonderful round in tv’s Call My Bluff when the effete Arthur Marshall and Frank Muir battled it’s true meaning out, but I learned it back in 1983 in my first year of nursing school.
It’s one of those words like follow you , just underneath the surface of memory
Like mendacity, autonomic dysreflexia, and El- ahrairah ( who was a rabbit God in Watership Down)
I informed my colleague that a patient of ours had no borborygmi
She wasn’t impressed …
I need some company with whom I can talk shite with. It’s a product of being on four nights shifts in a row and needing some frivolity.
I search messenger for signs of friends on line , but it’s 2 am and all is quiet as it is here. Everyone is safely asleep except me.
One of my patients reminds me of DaVinci ‘s Ginevra De Benci
No wonder she looked pissed off.
Tomorrow nights it’s Film Noir again. After that I’ve arranged a what’s app video meet with a friend
With the strict instructions we talk shite over a large gin
Tea
It’s my last night shift tonight until next Thursday
I’ve technically run out of food except a few tomatoes and apples
I woke at three thirty and couldn’t be arsed going to the shops
So I dig out a small cake out of the freezer ( one that the velvet voiced Linda dropped off) and microwaved it until it was steaming
I ate it with leftovers of ice cream
And watched Antique Roadtrip in my boxers
Madge and Bisket
My great niece Evie using the video technology
It was my brother in law’s birthday yesterday
He is 73.
He and my sister organised a family meal in a rustic garden 1940’s tent strung with fairy lights and even though it was raining heavily a good time was had by all.
All my immediate family was there my sisters and their husbands, my sister in law, my two nephews, niece in law and great niece.
Being on night shift I turned up , briefly at 6pm and I was slightly jealous as since 4 pm a bit of wine had been quaffed and everyone was good natured and relaxed despite the weather.
The talk see sawed on to old memories and my nephews joked that when they were little , it was normal for them, as small kids, to be sat in the car at some pub car park with a bottle of coke and a bag of crisps while mum and dad were “ socialising “ inside.
Of course their memories were exaggerated for comic effect and the conversations grew wilder with everyone outdoing each other with tales of “when I was a child!”
My totally sober memory out trumped the others when I remember that my sister Janet and I being “babysat” by a family friend Uncle Cliff, a man who had marked learning and physical difficulties after he was kicked on the head by a mule in Egypt when he was four!
What were my parents thinking, even in those more relaxed days of 1970s parenting ?
Gawd knows.
My sister Janet then reminded everyone that in the 1980s the same group, that was sat under the canvas yesterday used to meet up for boozy Sunday afternoon meets where, towards Christmas we would make home made videos with a huge, shoulder carried vhs video recorder, loaned from my father’s electrical shop.
The videos would be silly affairs.
My nephew dressed as superman hanging off the back of the sofa with various family members holding pot plants running behind giving the impression he was flying.
The family dressed up in dresses and tinsel miming to ABBA’s Supertrouper
Silliness and nostalgic memories warmed by time.
I couldn’t stay long. so I left my brother in law’s gift under the table as the cake was being cut and managed to get to work seconds before I was due to start shift.
I was glad I had picked the gift that I did, one that was sparked by those silly videos of Christmases past without really knowing what the conversation would lead to
I had bought my brother in law a kit for making his own on line tiktok video!
Happy days
I shall leave you with these two maniacs
My fav tiktok video players
Madge and Bisket
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