Category Archives: Humour

British history, Humour, Local History, Travel

Discovering Shrewsbury…

Although I’ve lived within 50 miles of this, the county town of Shropshire, for 20 years, I’ve never really had the time to look at it properly — always rushing for a hospital appointment, changing trains or dashing back for some imperative.

Last week we took my friend, Anne, to catch a train to Yorkshire — she had a tortuous journey ahead so, despite the traffic (we do not expect it in Wales), we opted to drop her at the historic railway station (above) where we ejected her unceremoniously and to much furious and unsympathetic honking. “No cars!” said the entrance to the carpark, “Bicycles only!” Nobody actually mowed us down as I hauled her luggage from the boot and we found the platform up 28 steps (lift out of order) taken at a trot with her heavy bags — fortunately the train was 3 minutes late and we had 15 seconds to spare.

Having found somewhere to leave the car legally, Bill had to buy a ticket which fortuitously brought him to the booking office where, having waved off my friend, I was wondering what to do next and where he might be — it seems for once the stars were aligning for a good day out!

Shrewsbury Prison is a smouldering presence above the carpark, built in 1793 by Telford, designed by local architect John Hiram Haycock and William Blackburn, advised by John Howard the famous prison reformer who looks down from his plinth above the gate. You can book a tour and even stay the night in a cell, “That’s an idea!” says I with my Granny hat on.

Here’s another famous citizen, Clive of India, getting more infamous by the day as we look at empire from a different angle now — still he hasn’t been toppled from his plinth yet.

The town is full of tantalising mediaeval alleyways– note how the common gutter has been replaced by festive commercial waste bins — I miss the piglets, dogs and red kites scavenging on the waste!

The marvellous market has moved indoors but still bristles with prime produce. As we amble around town the clouds are gathering and the tempting aromas start to emanate from the various eateries. Our noses led us to La Mer Rouge for delicious tapas and to watch the torrential rain in comfort. Behind the old market hall is the town museum and art gallery, irresistible!

Mermaids and dolphins vase, made by Walter Crane Maw and co, Broseley (Shropshire) c1889.

Also the findings from Wroxeter, the 4th largest city in Roman Britain (Vironium) just beyond the modern bypass — both to be explored in Granny hat.

Shrewsbury has been an important place ever since, at the gateway to Wales, a strategic and wool trading centre. Fortunes were made.

In Stuart times one of these rich wool traders, Thomas Jones, pictured below in 1615, married Sarah Ballard, the educated daughter of the Mayor of Chester. Thomas rose in the local hierarchy as an alderman, then Bailiff and finally Mayor in 1638.

At the beginning of the Civil War (1642-1651), one man, Francis Ottley, seen below with his family in 1636, was appointed Governor of Shrewsbury by Charles I, who called on him to form a regiment of foot. These were divisive times with mixed loyalties. He carried the town along the Royalist path. Francis was appointed Sheriff of Shropshire in 1644 and, as the tide turned, was involved in negotiating the surrender to the Parliamentarians in 1646 after which his estates were sequestrated. He paid a price for his loyalty to the Crown spending the rest of his life fighting to retrieve his estates at Pitchford. However, It seems he negotiated these treacherous times, relatively successfully as his family remained prominent after the war and for centuries thereafter.

It may be significant that Sir Francis Ottley had been criticised by Prince Rupert, when in power, for being too lenient with Parliamentarians — Perhaps that was his salvation… One never knows when the boot will be on the other foot! (personal note)

For all the above, the highlight of our visit was the discovery of the Castle Museum and the history of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, a magnificently curated museum deserving another visit and a blog of it’s own.

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Humour, Wales, Writing

Brace Yourselves!

My new book is now in the publisher’s catalogue with a release date in December 2024!

My dog can’t read, but if I sent him a postcard, he’d sniff it and know I was fine and thinking of him. If I needed to tell him more, I suppose I’d send him one of my socks. 

In an insecure world, be cheered by the landscape and friendliness of this quiet, green valley, with its unexploded bombs, stampeding cattle and life-or-death decisions. Diana’s off-beat take on life, honed by her years as a family doctor, is one of the things that made her first book, Iolo’s Revenge: Sheep farming by Happy Accident in Mid Wales, so popular. People who read it ask what has happened since?

Quite a lot actually …

Pre-order at https://logastonpress.co.uk/product/my-dog-cant-read-more-tales-from-an-accidental-farmer/

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Ecology, Humour

Doricum hoax uncovered!

Still getting serious responses to this post published 9 years ago — time to clear the air!

DoricumWhen faced with plants he did not know my father would confidently pronounce them  Doricums.  ‘Shouldn’t it be Dorica?’ we would ask.

‘No, Doricums.  The word is derived from the Greek, or possible the Zoroastrian,’ he would concede.  Doricums grew everywhere in Hertfordshire — my dad was not much of a gardener.

Last spring we dug some gravel from the stream bed to create a pool to encourage fish, we left the gravel in a heap at the waters edge.  Normally a fox would have placed a walnut whip on its summit — they do this to announce their ownership of all heaps — sand, salt for the roads, compost, even large mole hills — but this mound of gravel has become subject to another interloper — the dastardly Doricum!

Have you seen this plant before?

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We have scanned the internet and looked at all our books but to no avail — although it does look vaguely familiar — we guess that it is feral or seriously out of context.

Do you have information about its true identity?

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It has been nibbled but not by sheep, this gives it a spiky appearance — we’ve looked up squirrelwort and rabbit-bit in the index of popular names — its not even under badger-nip.

Is this a new species — D. notlikelae?

Addendum: 30.11.2023 St Andrew’s day and Winston Churchill’s birthday.  On reflection this may have been a rather tatty example of Redleg (P. persicaria L.) a member of the dock family.  There is more of it about now and it looks more typical — sorry Dad!

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Humour

The Life Recycled!

You know that family dynamics have reached a transitional point when your entire stock of chocolate biscuits appear in the re-cycling bin. They do this spontaneously — apparently of their own volition. You call your daughter who is staying for the week-end to witness the mystery. You both stare into the gaping mouth of the green food-recycling bin where pale, slightly crackly milk chocolate digestives peep out from beneath cauliflower leaves and carrot peelings. “Perhaps it’s for the best, Mum? They don’t look very fresh!”

“I just fancied something sweet,” chips in son-in-law from somewhere in the background. The plot is edging towards a painful denouement. “But I couldn’t find anything that had expired later than 2018.”

“But, but…” I suddenly sound defensive, “We’ve only just dealt with the spaghetti mountain.”

“Not quite” interjects Judas Iscariot who is helping set the table, ” we’re up to 2016.”

“Well that’s no age at all for dried spaghetti” I snap, I’m starting to sound petulant. “Anyway, I’m on a war footing.”

So I have reached some sort of milestone. It only seems yesterday that I was furious with my own mother when I caught her rummaging through my kitchen waste to rescue things that she felt needed to be recycled — this was early in her eco-warrior phase. She had done this by emptying the entire contents of my kitchen bin onto newspaper on my kitchen floor.

I seem to have come all the way around some sort of cycle — I think I’ll go and hide my dirty underwear, like great-granny did, in back copies of the Daily Telegraph and start spitting my pills behind the toilet cistern.

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Humour, Medical

NHS’s famously flexible workforce

When I was a houseman my legs were blebbed and bubbled by the bites of the fleas from the feral cats that lived within the hospital grounds — but things have moved on.

Hospital cats are now more professional — they have come in from the cold, are properly trained and equipped, have regular health checks and probably mandatory immunisations (long before the other staff!)

The thing about cats is that you cannot exclude them if they don’t want to be excluded and some cats just have a vocation! So the NHS works with them, not against them.

Somewhere in Britain, probably everywhere in Britain, Buster here (or a cat like him) guards the confidential waste in the office of the emergency department. He keeps his wits about him as he dissipates the stress of staff, his mouth shut, the perfect confidential mentor and counsellor but as a member of the occupational health psychiatric team, as you can see, he does have his own panic button.

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Health and safety, Humour, lifestyle

One of those days!

Putting on my glasses while leaving the bedroom I noticed a spec on the lens, thus distracted, I walked into the low beam which floored me, moaning and clutching my forehead.

I struggled downstairs clutching my re-booted head which remembered that I had not checked the freezer since I had switched it on several days ago in such bright sunshine that I could not see the little indicator lights. Never mind, I had thought, loading it with frozen fish, scallops, squid and prawns — I’ll check it when it gets dark! It has been dark on and off several times since but today it is bright again so, ever adaptable, I open the door to feel how cold it is. I am knocked back a second time this morning , this time by the disgusting smell of corruption — of rotting flesh — wasted seafood — green slime drips out onto the floor. I pause and experience a wave of sympathy for the poor fishermen whose produce rotted in Calais because of the wrong paperwork, then start lobbing out my lovely fish as Bill retires gagging.

Back to basics, I pull out the freezer and trace the wire to a plug that I had forgotten in a cupboard I don’t use and switch it on — all the little lights sparkle into life — well at least the freezer works but there is another whiff. In that cupboard with the disused wedding presents from the one before last there are signs of mice — that distinctive musty smell (Mus musculus) and tell-tail chocolate sprinkles — really disappointing, as I had thought we were rid of them.

So I set to — washing out the freezer, the cupboard and the floor — I set the mouse traps by the likely looking hole, a job I hate, then I rise with a sense of completion and crack my head on the overhanging work-surface, sending me reeling a second time and wondering what new horrors will be jarred to the forefront of my mind.

Just another day at the end of the rainbow!

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Humour, Medical, Thoughtful

Padded knickers extending lifespan!

I read somewhere that time accelerates as you age. This is my impression and may be because as you get older you do fewer new, memorable things. Memorable things that you do for the first time populate the time-scape and as you look back, if there aren’t many it seems as if the time has flown by. I don’t suppose it matters much as it’s all just a trick of the memory but it’s good to have things to look back on and one of the reasons I blog.

There was a time I did something new almost every day but that’s not so easy now with all the restrictions. Last week I bought Saville oranges for the first time and yesterday I made marmalade for the first time and got my first sugar burn!

When we are next in Peterborough I am going to have a go on my daughter’s new adult scooter (she uses it to get to work at the hospital avoiding parking and public transport) — it’s manual like the ones we had as kids but bigger — I used to love my scooter! This will require the manufacture of padded knickers — the only proved way to avoid fractured femurs (I should have had them years ago) and I will certainly need them in Kettering when I try the new grown-up motorized scooters that whizz up and down the Headlands with some of the youngest 17 year olds (with driver’s licenses) that I’ve ever seen. Before I can do that I’ll have to get my first i-phone (that’s how you mobilize the scooter) and waylay a school-boy to help me (I’ve done that before).

A friend of mine (I won’t identify him any more specifically — you’ll see why) likes to go to work each day using a different mode of transport, it was easy to begin with, especially as they live on a waterway (that narrows identification down a bit). Car, bicycle, skate board, paddle board, kayak, walking, running along the beach… As time goes on finding new ways gets harder — swimming, sailing… Running over the dunes? (But that’s really just running). Running over the dunes naked! He could do them all again naked even if it does mean going early when it is quiet. So if you knew who it was and where to go you could see him at 5:30 am riding a child’s peddle-cycle, stark naked, along the sea-wall.

Electric Scooters for Rent by Wuestenigel (CC BY 2.0) Object of my desire!

When you see me streaking down the Headlands in nothing but my padded knickers you will know that I too am running out of new things to do.

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animal psychology, Humour

The Septic Geranium and Trans Lamb

A cade lamb, orphaned at birth and bought up by a silly woman and a clever dog will not be like other sheep. Aby has had her portrait painted, has been photographed for magazines (not Hello! but she was the centerfold for Border Life). Basically she is a celebrity — the ovine equivalent (in my mind anyway) of Joan Collins and also looking very good for her age.

Yesterday I found what I thought was a calf halter in the shed and I used it to tie a great sheath of brushwood to the wheelbarrow so that I could overload it like a Greek donkey and wobble to our “30 meter heavy duty compost heap” — our special habitat in the woodland. This is a safe haven for dozing hedgehogs, nesting wrens and the innumerable wood moulds and fungi that live in our little piece of temperate rain forest. Aby came with me for the walk.

On they way back I wondered if Aby was too old to be halter trained — she does after all identify as a cross between a dog and a human (a category that EIDCymru refuse to recognize on their annual sheep and goat inventory). As usual she was walking to heel. We stopped and I picked up the halter from the barrow and threaded it into a noose configuration — simple. Aby looked interested — lifting her head up to look at the circle of rope that I held in front of her. Without thinking I just slipped it over her head! She was pleased with this new award and set off to show it to Tex, her new companion with me still attached to the other end. As she ploughed on through the mud I was left behind — I tugged on the rope to demonstrate the principle of the process. The noose (for that is what it was — not a halter) tightened, she pulled harder. Not wanting to hang her, I let go! She headed up the hill. Her deadly pendant dragging in the mud and looking for something to grab hold of so that it could strangle poor Aby.

I gave chase — I grabbed — I missed — I grabbed again (this is fun) — I caught it as it circled her neck — she accelerated and swerved — I lost my footing and described a wide arc landing on my back in the mud (I thought “fractured femur — hospital — covid” but I didn’t let go) I was not in pain. Aby was no longer pulling. She was lying on her back with her feet in the air. What a piece of luck — she was caste — immobilized by that primitive quirk of sheep neurology whereby the do not work when they are upside down. I had time to pull myself together and remove her rope noose.

Our relationship may take longer to sort out — she stomped off feeling humiliated and totally let down and has been firing withering looks at me ever since. Like the car that rolls and has a dent on every panel, I was wet and mudded on every surface.

Thinks: must get a proper halter!

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Birds, Humour

The Curious Incident of the Bird in the Night-time

1 am awoken from deep sleep by Magpie calling from very nearby.

“That’s odd!”

Stupor ensues.

“Owls!” I hear from the edge of perception.

Then there is a clomping down the stair, crash, expletive, flash of light and the sound of a something heavy being moved.

Then I hear it: “Qweeik! Qweeik!” Very loud and very near. There is a chorus of twit-toowooing from all around the rim of the bowl of hills in which we are presently contained. Every urgent, insistent queeik answered by a reassuring, low pitched owly sound from a different direction and each queeik parried by the rattling panic of a magpie.

Now my eyes are open and there is wild illumination from outside the house. Trees flash on and off like Christmas lights; I wonder about hallucinations in confinement — hypnogogic perhaps. Better go with the flow — I rise and grab a dressing gown, descend the stairs in darkness (mustn’t alert whatever it is — that’s odd someones moved the toolbox — I’ve got good night vision). The front door is wide open — I follow the flashes.

The qweeiking and corvid football rattling are unabated and can now be localized to the tall leylandii on the bank just above the house below which a man in a dressing gown and carpet slippers is scanning the tops of the aforementioned trees with the beam of a powerful flashlight.

The sky is clear, crossed by a shooting star. The moon is bright but still quite new so the stars are not so dulled by the moonlight. “Watch out!” calls the man who is hearteningly familiar, “Watch where you step!”

Looking down, there is a middle sized black and white bird sitting at my feet, looking up at me but not moving.

“He’s petrified!”

Now there is a moral dilemma. Farmers hate magpies, I’m not keen on them — they raid nests, eat loads of fledglings, do unspeakable things to defenseless, sick and trapped creatures and desecrate the bodies of the dead (true, they don’t drive to County Durham).

In the interest of balance — magpie pauses after grooming sheep.

Now the tables are turned: Magpie has met its match. Its nest is under attack by Tawny Owl — female tawny owl egged on (sorry) by male members of her family from a distance (typical) and we feel a wave of sympathy for the magpie mum whose only just fledged baby has parachuted onto the patio and into our protection.

First thing next morning there are no feathers on the ground and later an adult magpie is seen feeding a fledgling in the big pine tree at the other end of the house near to where the baby bird had landed the night before while the other parent feeds its sibling in the leylandii.

Tawny Owl (Strix aluco) by Martin Mecnarowski (CC BY_SA 3.0)

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Humour, Thoughtful

First Ten Ages of Woman

from the Library of Congress photographed by Stuart Rankin(CC BY-NC 2.0) Flickr

Life has chapters but someone else is turning the pages — here’s a brief index!

1 – the bit you can’t remember but you’ve seen it in photographs.

2 – Idyllic childhood gradually eroded by the realization that all is not 100% even in your Garden of Eden. Adults not always all they are cracked up to be! Actually — the sooner you learn this the better.

3 – Teens — driven by so many peculiar drives and preoccupations: BOYS/ girls/ secretions and changes/ dandruff/ dancing/ BOYS/ men/ exams/ driving lessons/ BOYS/ getting drunk/ stoned(not me!)/ paranoid/ poetical/ no money/ weight gain/ weight loss. Generally not very mindful of the bigger picture but navigating that choppy sea with friends in the same boat.

Teenagers by Kamyar Adl (CC BY 2.0) Flickr

4 – (Optional) Suddenly serious about relationships, politics and career (not necessarily in that order). Get qualified/ get married/ read the papers/ vote etc.

5 – Motherhood and child rearing (Optional) — struggling to keep head above water, multitasking, juggling multiple balls in the air (marriage/ finances/ clean socks/ hair cuts/ children/ job/ MOT/ tax returns/ cleaning out the rabbit/ walking the dog/ visiting Granny) feeling guilty about whichever one is about to drop. “Mummy, the cat’s had kittens and they are in my bed! Why’s my bed wet?”

6 — Dropping a ball (inevitable) — Divorce/ Burn out/ Son sets fire to the house/ teenage daughter pregnant (not ours)/ serious illness in the family/ menopause (that was quite a relief actually). Pretty well anything that can go wrong will go wrong and not just for bad people!

7 – Decline — coasting towards retirement with 2nd husband (if you are lucky) — is the work more demanding or are you just getting older? Science, technology and systems generally are starting to evolve more quickly than you seem to adapt. Spend a lot of time shouting at computers, often scratch the car and find it’s always later than you think!

An angry woman: 16th C. misericord, the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame (Collégiale Notre-Dame), Le Puy-Notre-Dame, Anjou, France

8 — Retirement — Yippee! However did you find time to go to work. Do new things and find you are not as stupid as you thought.

9 — Grandparent and Health Service User — endless peer group discussions about eyesight/ teeth/ bowel screening/ breast screening (Ouch!)/ stents/ knee replacements/ erectile dysfunction/ prostate surgery and how you can’t do anything with your hair since your last chemo! All this is rather unwelcome but is punctuated by delightful visits from little kids that remind you of yourself (and sometimes of your X-husband) and of what a wonderful life it really is.

10 — Widowhood — sudden, though always half-expected because no-one can expect to be happy forever and you did know he was ill although he pretended not to be. Now your children (who are suddenly definitely grown-up) worry (and probably moan) about you at least as much as you do about them. You keep wondering why people are being so nice to you, then you remember. Suddenly you can do whatever you want although you don’t really want but you do it anyway — yesterday I climbed a mountain with a group to look at historical sites, one of those Welsh mountains that are really a huge hill. I was interested in the archeology, the others seemed to be serious, serial walkers — there was talk of Kilimanjaro! It was very cold and steep and I got extremely short of breath (probably not the altitude) and hobbled a good deal on the way down but I walked 8 miles and didn’t die. I’ll tell you about it another day.

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