Thought For The Day and The Blue Caftan

I’m in the Storyhouse library/ cafe with my paper bucket of coffee. I’m completing my final entries for my college workbook and journal. In an hour and a half I will go and watch a movie here before heading home. The movie is Moroccan and is titled The Blue Caftan .

I will review it later

I have just written 1000 words or so on the art of Demonstrating acceptance

The following video says it way better than I could ever do

His dry honesty is incredibly moving

 

The Blue Caftan is a gem of a film.

It’s a precise, gently unfolding drama set in the claustrophobic back streets of a Moroccan town where tailor Halim ( Salah Bakri) and his wife Mina ( Lubna Azabel ) forge a difficult existence producing beautifully crafted items of women’s clothing mainly for weddings . The couple are devoted and loving but exist with the unspoken truth that Halim is gay and occasionally visits a local hamman to meet his sexual needs. 

When a young apprentice Yosef. (Ayouboui Massi)  joins the shop, Mina’s unspoken fears are unearthed as she realises her husbands attraction to the younger man.

All this is done at such a gentle pace in just three claustrophobic and dimly lit places, the couple’s flat, shop and the hamman and as deftly as Halim’s beautiful sewing the threads of the three characters come together as Mina’s health fails her and she comes to face her own mortality and the potentially happy future her husband may have with Yousef

In one slow and beautiful scene the dying Mina apologies to Yousef for being so hard on him and with a few gentle glances she effectively weaves the young man into the couple’s life with an acceptance and love which is heartbreaking to watch .

The Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani has crafted a nuanced, brave and important film in The Blue Caftan.

A film bursting with hope and love and the goodness of people.

Beautiful 

Hungover and Hangover gone

 Ooooooh, I’ve got a bit of a sore head this morning

A case of too many peroni beers last night.

I felt rough as a bears arse.

Ruth and I took the dogs for a long walk and stopped at Y Shed for a restorative coffee and bacon baguette

Then it was back to the hall to clean up which didn’t take long as 8 volunteers turned up to help.

I’m drinking Diet Coke and am having a mooch on the couch covered in dogs

I’m too old for hangovers.

As it happened I took myself off to bed at midday. 

I got up at 5.45 pm with Dorothy gently occluding my airway with her chin ( she does this most mornings when she wants her first pee of the day) 

I drank a litre of Diet Coke and ate three bananas and now feel human 

   

Albert has not been around  and has been under the spare bed all day 😒

I only know that because Roger has been standing guard over him

Eurovision

I’m Fairly indifferent to the music 

But with my old friend Ruth in tow, we manned the door and counted in seventy odd souls from Trelawnyd to enjoy the night. 

I faded around eleven after night shift, but left enough dancing away

It was lovely to have the 2 village Ukrainian Families cater for us all with real Ukrainian finger food 

They were our special guests 

My star of Eurovision ? Amazing Hannah Waddingham

Ruth and Mary who has just been diagnosed as deaf 

Stars

In the mid 1980s I went to see Les Miserables on my own in London.

I was twenty three or so

A very gauche and young twenty three.

I saw the production with the original cast.  Colm Wilkinson, Patti LuPone, Michael Ball, Frances Ruffelle but non affected me more than the chocolate voiced Roger Allam as the policeman Javert.

His performance and voice was captivating.

In a couple of weeks time I’m taking Janet to see the Les Mis revival at the Sondheim. 

It’s for our birthday

We’ve hopefully squeezed it in between rail strikes and fuck me I managed to get us two rooms at the lovely Mimi Hotel in Soho. 

I had cocktails there with Nu a while ago

A Stuart Clarke is apparently playing Javert at the moment

He looks about 12

Vigils

 

I’ve seen hundreds of vigils in my time

Perhaps even a thousand .

One sticks in my mind more than any other and it was in Sheffield in the 1990s 

It was with a young man in his twenties. 

A slight, Bonny lad with pink cheeks and brown hair. 

He was unconscious and sadly brain dead and he had a mother and many brothers who were sitting with him in shifts.

I was working nights and it was very dark and very cold  as Sheffield winters often are,

And he was in a dark side room with his mother who was sat in a chair and a younger brother who was asleep on a mattress on the floor. 

Now, because the mother hadn’t slept, one of the sons had fashioned a paper shade cover over each lens of her spare glasses, so by slipping them on she could effectively shut out the light of my inquiring pen torch when I came to assess her son in the middle of the night.

What we hadn’t factored in however was the youngest son’s sense of humour ,as unbeknownst to all, he had drawn two massive staring eyes on the paper with a felt pen. So when I shone my pen torch over at the woman in the chair, two massive bloodshot eyes were staring out at me in the dark!!!

My scream and subsequent swearing woke mother and son, and most of the ward up 

Thursday Morning

 

Night shifts have come around awfully quickly this week. 

Back tonight.

I finish Saturday morning which will mean I can watch Eurovision in the Hall Saturday night.

Bluebell needs more work this morning, but that’s the only big job of the day to sort.

I’ve already given the dogs their big walk and mown the lawn. 

My sister is due to do the garden but is snowed under by bookings

The garden will be transformed in a week or so when the alliums bloom. At the moment the aquilegia and forget me nots are. Filling the borders with their gentle colour

And the cheerful Welsh poppies are poking their yellow heads in the few gaps left

Sushi

 I am consistently amazed that such in innocuous blog such as Going Gently can rile some readers into such apoplexy and anger. 

It baffles me, as does a comment from last night which admitted that my blog is bad for a certain reader’s mental health. 

Gawd help us, if that’s the case, I hope that reader contacts MIND immediately before never reading Going Gently again.

There’s a lot to be said for self help.

Anyhow I went shopping today.

I’m not a big shopper, but I heard that a new sushi bar had opened up in the town of Mold which is located around 17 miles east of Trelawnyd, so I thought I’d treat myself.

Mold’s Welsh name is Yr Wyddgrug ( Mound in English) and it is a pretty market town overlooked by Theatre Clwyd which situated a mile or so out of town.

I was impressed with the bespoke shops as well as the sushi and as well as buying myself some Japanese tea, I bought some French bacon twists from a bone fide French baker, some books at in independent bookshop and some bespoke birthday cards from an art shop

Looking At Yourself

 

It’s not a pretty sight. 

I’m writing my last assignment for Uni and I am in the process of analysing my own counselling skills on film. 

I’m finding it all rather harrowing .

Seeing yourself on the screen , warts and all isn’t nice.

No wonder I’m single.

I look a mess

So I have been trying to concentrate more on my non verbals, my ability to paraphrase, recap and challenge. My use of Egan’s three stage model, my use of  advanced empathy, my voice,  my phrasing and my abilities to make the interaction flow. 

Now that feels a bit better. 

I see past looking at a fat old man and now , at least,  I see a friendly fat old man

With crinkling eyes and a gentle voice

Hey ho

Mary

B

She rolled in the body of a dead badger on our last walk of the day 

After nights I am in despair 

It’s ok I have gin in 

 

Tea and Cake

I was in bed for most of the day yesterday. We’d had an incredibly hard and busy shift Saturday night and so I slept heavily and long, despite being woken by the dogs baying at someone at the door in the afternoon. My visitor was Nick from the TCA who dropped off some of the Coronation cake made by bouncy Bridget . I missed his knock but soon spied a parcel of cake wrapped in silver paper plonked on top of my wall basket.

It was bloody lovely too with a hot cup of tea.

But I was soon snoring away the rest of the afternoon so missed any post-mortem from the Coronation afternoon tea which looked impressive on line and which probably  tasted even better in the flesh

The Eurovision night next Saturday will be a much bawdier affair me thinks.

Me hopes so.

So, Trelawnyd life plods along at its own pace. King Charles has his crown and I suspect he shouts and  laughs with Camilla loudly and long.

Eurovision is the next altar to pray at. Then it’s summer 

 

Goats At Work

These two were sat by our back door when I got to work yesterday evening. 

It’s strange to think that a small seaside town in Wales has a thriving and popular population of Kashmir Goats but here they still are, the descendants  of a few individuals who were a coronation gift from the Shah of Persia to the young Queen Victoria in 1837

During lockdown they received much worldwide publicity after running amok around town like hoards of StTrinian schoolgirls  and here on West Shore at the base of The Great Orme , they often visit the hospice daily with their benign faces and exotic hornes….

 

The C Word

 

I won’t bang on about it

I’m not a huge fan of Charles

But I was rather moved by his expression when he walked into the Abby

Finally centre stage 

A hint of a smile on his face.

Bryn Terfels Kyrie Eleison sung in Welsh was incredibly beautiful 

Loved this bit too, see Kate beaming at them at the end 

The king sighed with a smile as his army, navy and airforce personnel cheered him from the gardens of Buckingham palace.

I’ve been incredibly moved by today’s coverage.

Seeing the king kneeling in the Abby in just a simple shirt reenforced his sense of duty, and the professionalism of the armed forces pitched things just right

Well done

Well done

Worth

 Tonight Gorgeous Dave and I went to see the darkly comic play Worth at the Storyhouse in Chester .

It turned out to be a rather brutal and harsh essay on a Uk/ Chinese family dynamic at a matriarch’s funeral and although not faultless it sparked a robust conversation about grief and families  on our way home 

Neighbours

I have a set of neighbours who are not particularly neighbourly

They are noisy and in my mind inconsiderate of others , so we don’t speak anymore….well ever since I complained to them by note that their five dogs had yapped continuously for a couple of hours in the garden one afternoon without supervision or let up

Today is blissful. 

There is no noise from next door. No constant sawing of wood. No barking. No yelling at the darling CHARLIE!!!  for barking so much. 

It’s silent and my back door is open wide , sucking in the peace and quiet into the cottage.

And it’s bliss

Am I turning into one of those strange neighbours that yell at people in the street? 

You know the ones you used to poke fun of when you were a kid. 

The old fart who lives alone and who spoils your fun on sunny afternoons when kicking a ball in the street feels like the ideal pastime?

Perhaps I am.I know my aforementioned neighbours think I’m unreasonable but I have been a neighbour to many over the years and even if I do say so myself , I’ve been a good one. 

Ok I once frightened my old lady neighbour half to death in Walkley Sheffield after I caught a black cat in my kitchen and threw it into her pond after it had terrorised my two kittens for weeks.

It wasn’t the fact that I three the cat into her pond that was the problem I think, it was more that I was just wearing a pair a rather shabby boxer shorts at the time that upset her.

I made it up to her years later when I found her in the garden unconscious after a fall and I went to hospital with her in the ambulance.

I sold that tiny terraced house to a very small postman person who wasn’t a patch on me….I was told after he had moved in.

My neighbour John in Hillsborough Sheffield, is still one of my best friends now and I still miss sitting in my neat tidy garden sharing a bottle of wine with him on a summers’ evening. 

Funny that the builder who has just bought that house for his son, has recently left me a comment on Going Gently .saying it is now in safe hands. 

Funny how small the world feels sometimes.

Back to today, it’s the blackbird calls that fill the air as they challenge each other over a mate. Then it’s the sound of rain on leaves, the faraway roar of a plane heading for Liverpool airport and the sound of Dorothy snoring 

And Im happy at that

Bluebells & John Kahu

 

It’s a Bluebell day today.This morning I took the famous Vauxhall in for her tyre changes and waited for her to be ready in the fabulous Jacob’s Ladder cafe in St Asaph where I had a bacon sandwich and too much lovely coffee.

There is something therapeutic when you have to wait for something like a car service, just to be forced to wait allows your mind to wander and to think properly and without other activity or interruption. 

This afternoon I went to Bodnant to see the great swathes of real bluebells and it was lovely to revisit them even though the gardens always remind me of being married as it was a regular haunt of ours.

I wish I had taken one or all of the dogs with me as you never feel alone with a dog beside you. 

I won’t make that mistake again.

For the first time in a long while,  I felt quite  lonely today.

It’s that time of year I guess

I bought sushi for tea and treated myself to new chopsticks from the kitchen shop in Llandudno and when I got finally got home there were some on line flowers waiting for me in the letter box

They were sent from a blog follower Jon D who referred to himself as a “proud Hawaiian” 

He referred to me as John Kahu 

Apparently  Kahu is Hawaiian for an animal guardian or nurse

Timely flowers Jon

Thank you

Tonight’s old film on show

Union Flag

 

It wasn’t as busy at work as expected so I came home early and went to the TCA Hall meeting instead.

nice to see Bunty joining on the committee, she will be an asset.

Came home and put my coronation decorations up

I’m one big fat Royalist Bitch

Moving Forward

I watched bees entering and leaving an old badger sett this morning down Gypsy Lane

They looked like miniature spaceships visiting their mothership.

I sat for an age watching them until Dorothy started her I’m bored antics forcing us to move on.

She cannot abide standing still

It’s a lovely day today and a reflective one again….

Dorothy has the right idea…..it’s always good to move on.

I listened to Devipravaha again as I straightened the cottage

And opened up the windows to spring

A few more jobs after my bucket of coffee then I will drop the dogs off at Trendy Carol’s before going to work on overtime. The money from my extra shifts will be banked in my savings account in order to pay my college fees.

It feels nice that out of our group the three of us more mature students that have gravitated together are the three that are moving on for further training. 

We even get a cap and gown when we finish Donna whispered as we left our classroom

And that does mean a great deal when I think of it

The vets

 The vet detected a slight heart murmur in Roger but told me not to be concerned with it

I’m not….

He was also so captivated with him, he brought two of the vet nurses into the consultation room to meet him 

“ This is a delightful dog “ the vet said lifting Roger’s chin with a finger and Roger wagged his tail and stood on hind legs to sniff faces and lick noses.

“ He’s a superb  boy you should show him “ he added 

The nurses crowded round cooing and I beamed like a proud dad at the nativity play as they tickled and hugged him. 

Roger lapped it up and trotted on tip toe 

Tonight, at college  I’ve passed my main final practical assessment in my counselling course alongside my three besties…the feedback from my tutor was lovely and very gratefully received 

Even at 61, I still need positive feedback 

The Drop That Contained The Sea

Special little moments just happen.

They often catch you unawares.

That sneak under your radar, 

When you are least expecting them.

And they can brighten you heart, when you so need it.

This morning had such a moment.

The sun shining, Roger acting as co pilot his nose in the wind, we drove the seventeen miles up to the vets for his pre op assessment along wide country roads of bright spring green. 

I had bought the CD of Christopher Tin’s piece The Drop That Contained The Sea which is a collection of commissioned works for chorus and orchestra centred about water in all of its forms.

I have enjoyed one of its pieces Waloyo Yamoni before, but have never listened to the entire piece before.

Each of the ten pieces is sung in a different language, and they explore different vocal traditions so diverse it’s breathtaking. African languages Xhosa and Lango are featured alongside Bulgarian, old Norse, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Mongolian and Portuguese.

And this morning we listened to it for the first time

Beautiful .

It’s good to be alive today.

May

 

The seasons seem to be hurrying along this year after a bloody awful winter. 

It’s May already and the start of the month means that my Montana Clematis is in flower again.

It covers the garden gate arch with pretty pink flowers and suddenly the back garden is transported back in to a secret garden again. Private and enclosed as it was always designed to be.

We’ve had too many bank holidays , I’m sick of them