bunn | Entries tagged with wales

Here's a postbox topper dragon with daffodils that I met today in Ystradgynlais.

It's been a busy couple of days: yesterday I went to art group, packed games to post, and went swimming at Freshwater East with the Bluetits (the thermometers swore the sea was at 10 degrees, and although the sun was shining, I am sure those thermometers were optimistic by at least 3 degrees: we were not blue, but we were certainly very pink when we got out)

Then today I got up early, baked some bread, took Theo to a scentwork class. He was pretty good at it though he was a bit surprised I wanted him to find such easy things over and over. Next time we get to hunt for smaller things, but he has homework: a pair of large plumbing pipes screwed to boards, that he must practice finding things in for his homework.

Then since the sun was shining I and Pp hared off in the car eastward, and drove some of the mountain roads, from Llangadog to Brynaman, to Ystradgynlais (a surprisingly busy and thriving little town: would lunch again) to Defynnog and back along narrow lanes across the mountains through Ystradfellte and home via Neath.

We drove over the Black Mountain, but it was more golden in the sun today.

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This year my Mum announced firmly that she would really prefer to spend Christmas at home with her cat Pudding and no other company, so after we had popped down to visit for a couple of days beforehand then came back to Wales. It was very nice and relaxing and the quick visit to Devon was handy for going to the Cheese Shop in Tavistock to buy Christmas Cheese.

We had a nice lunch at the Bearslake Inn before we went home. I think my mother enjoyed it:

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The dogs were quite insistent that they could not possibly go anywhere or do anything due to their extreme levels of Woe, but must remain on their princess-and-the-pea layers of comfy beds. They basically stayed in bed apart from brief pee breaks for an entire day yesterday, and most of today too. I was really quite worried about them yesterday, but not quite worried enough to call on the emergency vet on New Years Day and they are much brighter today. Theo has had a little outing to the beach, and Rosie managed to run up the stairs this afternoon.

So, since there were no walks needed yesterday, I planted some rose bushes that I have had heeled in waiting for me to get around to them, and mulched the roses I planted last year with well rotted manure. The new roses are GHISLAINE DE FÉLIGONDE musk roses. They grow to a theoretical height of 12 feet, so should help to clad the wire fences I erected in a great hurry when we moved here and I urgently needed dog containment solutions. In a perfect world I would replace them with 6 foot fences, but I'm not sure I can endure further infestations of builders at the moment. We had enough of them in 2022.

Today I went and did a new thing: I went swimming in the sea in the winter! I had been swimming with a local sea-swimming group a few times in the summer (I am not brave enough to swim in the sea alone) but November and December were terribly busy and I fell out of the habit. But today someone I met in the summer asked if I would like to go along, and I thought 'WHY NOT' so I did.

It was terribly cold - not too bad on the legs or body, but my hands took one look at the temperature and burst into frozen pain. I've now ordered a pair of neoprene gloves. They will be handy for kayaking, even if I don't make a regular thing of sea-swimming in the cold.

Got a not-Covid bug... somehow. It was still quite horrid and had me sitting here basically unable to do anything but dip in and out of consciousness for a couple days, and then wander around drooping.

Much better today though, and I managed to give the dogs a proper walk under clear blue skies. I had hoped we could get out with the kayaks over New Year, but that didn't happen, what with the weather and the cold and having to acquire a new car... which has now been achieved. It's a Skoda Octavia, and quite shockingly for me and my history of old bangers, it was only registered in 2015. It has achieved 108,000 miles since then, but still feels worlds away from the ancientry of the 2003 Volvo. I am still eyeing the many electronic devices with suspicion.

Anyway, before the lurgi struck, we did manage to take it over to Pendine Sands to look at the beach where they used to do the land-speed records long ago. The tide was in, so it was mostly under water, but we agreed it was a Very Long Beach.

Gah, I am sorry, DW does not want to put my images behind cuts any more :-/

Along a path that was steep, slippery and muddy, but made up for it with Views. I suspect the steep muddiness was the reason we met almost nobody up there, though the little shoppy / cafe bit by the car park was fairly busy.

Till we got to the point, and looked down to the beach at Morfa Bychan, and decided that climbing down and then back up was Too Far.

There are definitely things about living in Wales that remind me of the 1970's, and not only because I was a child in Wales in the 1970s.

In England, they are furiously organising walk-in booster vaccination clinics.

In Wales, we are told that we must wait to be called upon by the State, because heaven forbid that the Welsh should have to queue in the rain in a 'free-for-all'

It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that if there is a long rainy queue, people will see it and go home, returning at a time convenient to them.

Whereas, if there is an Official State Letter Giving One An Appointment, inevitably that appointment is going to be at a time and place that many people cannot make, because their lives are busy and complicated, and there is no provision for telling The Government when you simply cannot get away.

Therefore just as with the vaccination program earlier this year, there will be oodles of missed appointments, particularly since I am pretty sure that once again there will be no simple way to reschedule. (I tried to call the contact number on my Official Letter, on my way for my Official Government Appointment, after getting stuck in traffic, and found myself in an infinite on-hold-loop. Fortunately it was fine, I was only a few minutes late in the end, and a lot of other people had not turned up or were also late, so it wasn't at all busy.)

No doubt there will also once again be a bunch of people who hear on the grapevine that you can just turn up because so many appointments are being missed and the guys doing the vaxing are understandably keen to get doses into arms. Those people will have a 'free for all' after all, while everyone else waits for their turn which will be all the later because the system has no flex for anyone's job, childcare, etc.

I don't know how people who are travelling for work or have no fixed address for The Letter to go to cope.

Sigh. First world problems, kind of.

I went down to the beach here a couple of days ago, and wandered along the beach and up onto the coast path with the hounds. These are just some photos I took along the way. We explored a headland, and got as far as the gate marked Lundy View, from which you could indeed see across the wide arm of the Bristol Channel to the little island of Lundy off the North Devon coast. Then Rosie decided that was far enough, so we turned around and went home, but it was very lovely, so here are some photos. It was so good, I came back the next day, without the dogs, but with my kayak.

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And on the return...

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The other day I saw a meme of the Millennials, saying that, as a people, they feared DIY because they were the ones who had survived their parents and grandparents terrifying DIY efforts.

At the time I dismissed this as over-caution, but the discovery last night of the DIY fitted pump under the bath here that would not turn off, leading to alarming smoke, and could not be got at, except by moving far too many large reluctant flat-headed screws and wooden slats, and the further discovery that it was plugged into a three-pin electrical socket located directly under the bath has made me think again.

Maybe these millennials have a point after all.

Still, we got all the screws out, unplugged the pump and the smoke went away after a while! Not entirely sure I want to take another bath directly over an electrical supply though.

I keep vaguely thinking 'I should do a post about that' and not doing it. So to get back in the swing I shall just do a bulleted list of Things in no order.

Today we went to Lawrenny Quay, which is a lovely place some distance up the Cleddau river, looking out onto the resoundingly named Black Mixen Pool. There's a nice cafe, but rather a lot of signs of all kinds — some of them helpful signs about crab sandwiches and toilets, but also so very many 'don't do this!' signs. We watched a man very determinedly attempting to make a verge flatter using a road roller. It was a fair battle, but I think the verge won.

Wally the Tenby Walrus has reportedly taken off to Cornwall, and was seen some distance off Padstow. I imagine the Tenby tourist industry is weeping, but at least the pubs are open again so they can weep into their beer.

In a desperate attempt to stifle some of the rather ugly concrete driveway here, I have covered it with a sedum carpet, the kind they sell for green roofs. So far this seems to be working pretty well.

This garden, or 'concrete and tarmac pad' as you might call it, is very much the opposite of my Cornwall garden. It has practically no soil, is very sunny and extremely windy!

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We went for a short drive today to Tenby, and we SAW A WALRUS.
A WALRUS.
Just chilling on the lifeboat ramp as if he was waiting for fish & chips to be delivered. Thought to be the first walrus recorded in the county ever.
And it was just there. Chilling. Between the two busiest beaches in a tourist town.

This one: https://www.westerntelegraph.co.uk/news/19177858.lovely-pictures-pembrokeshires-wandering-walrus/

My photo was considerably less inspiring since, to my annoyance, I had not brought a proper camera, only my phone. But he was definitely a walrus. This is the main lifeboat slipway in Tenby, which was full of people wandering in the sun on the beaches and eating icecreams. (It was our first day out of lockdown in Wales, so time for socially distanced days out by the sea.)

He was just napping, and occasionally turning over and going back to sleep.

I am astonished. And eternally thankful to a random bloke called Jim who stopped next to us on his way back from seeing the walrus to say to us 'have you seen the walrus?' and give us directions.

England has just been awarded another 4 weeks of lockdown from 5th November, sigh. This is not going to make selling this house any easier. The last people who were supposed to view it got a Covid alert from their daughter's school en route, and had to go home to isolate. They said they intended to come back next week once they had finished isolating, but I don't suppose they will now.

We are still planning to move, rash though that may seem. Wales is out of lockdown on the 9th, so whether we can leave Cornwall and go to Wales at that point... well, we'll see. Cornwall (which we are leaving) and Pembrokeshire (where we are going) both have really low infection rates, so the likelihood of carrying or picking up infection is pretty slim. That said, I am not sure that I am likely to be able to drive from A to B without a loo break somewhere. Perhaps its time to invest in a thermos and some kind of Portable Device.

WELL. It has been a rather frantic few weeks. The Shop on the Borderlands has been growing like a particularly enthusiastic weed, and, already pushed for space, we decided that we were really going to have to look at Doing Something. We now have stock in all the bedrooms, tucked under beds and packed onto shelves, and getting stuff up and down the stairs was starting to be a major chore.

We'd started to look vaguely at other houses, and then it occurred to me that I knew a few people who had moved to South Wales recently, so we started to look via the internet at that area too, particularly Pembrokeshire, which is rather like Cornwall in many ways, and before long we had a shortlist, and were starting to work on decluttering and painting the house to make it saleable...

Anyway, we'd got to that point when lockdown restrictions were eased, and since Pp was off to Bristol to pick up some more second hand games, we thought, why not pop over and take a look at a few areas, and actually, why not take a look at a house while he's there....

And then of course, I had to go and have a look too...

And now we have had an offer accepted on this house and suddenly everything is moving very very fast! The photography really doesn't do that house justice. In fact, this was a bit of a theme of many places we looked at, the photography was often AWFUL and left a lot of questions open, which is just what you don't want in the land of Covid19. I'm thinking I probably would like to do the photography myself rather than rely on an estate agent to do it, since frankly most of them seem to be less good with a camera than I am.

We've had assorted shysters and pessimists of the Estate Agent variety to look at our Cornwall house, and we've been working flat out on rendering it relatively clean and neat inside and out. Am kicking myself for not having it painted back in June, when the painter I got to quote had lots of availability: I booked him for August, and now he's saying he can't do it till the second week in Sept, and since the outside of the house has big black seams where we had the render fixed, all the estate agents agree that painting the place is absolutely essential, sigh. And I *really* don't want to DIY that.

On the plus side, apparently people are fleeing the cities in the time of plague in the traditional manner, so our hopes are high that someone will want to flee to the Tamar Valley, where they can work from home.

What else has happened? Oh yes, further to my hip problems, I decided to do a course of https://www.secondnature.io/ which is a sort of diet-and-lifestyle-change program, to try to relieve the weight on the hips. One of the key things is cutting right back on sugar and eating only smaller amounts of whole-grain carbohydrates and a lot more veg. I must say, I am somewhat amazed by how much of a change this has made to my energy levels, and my hips also have improved vastly. I've lost about 6 pounds in six weeks, which is not exactly a mountain of blubber, but it feels like a lot more. I no longer feel like I need to nap every afternoon, my hips are much happier, and I can both walk and garden energetically without feeling too zonked by it! So yes. Sugar. Delightful but better eaten rarely. Which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but still.

Not a photo from 2018, because although the spring was warm up to this week and there were lots of daffs in bloom, the ICY BLAST has come and they are all lying around the place now limp and floppety and unhappy. We have no snow, though the ground is hard as iron and if we do get any precipitation, it will certainly settle.

I have just updated a website with an announcement saying 'we are all working from home because of the snow in Devon'. Devon and Cornwall are reallly not set up for snow.

A Bloody Field By Shrewsbury - Edith Pargeter : a deeply unfair and biased review by bunn.
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Our Game - John le Carré
This is another of le Carré's books about belief, which I think in the end is what his Smiley books were about too...( Read more... )

Wine of Angels - Phil Rickman
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The Lost Prince - Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Currently reading: Fire & Sword by Louise Turner, aka

endlessrarities :-)

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I have to admit, that is not the meaning of 'pistyllio' that I learned as a kid growing up in Swansea. :-D Also I'm fairly sure that when you include things like 'spitting' 'mizzle' and 'downpour' the English must have pretty much the same number of words for rain as the Welsh. I suppose we need them...

Current Mood: Happy St David's Day

[Poll #1809802]

Current Mood: damp

Not sure how I feel about our ludicrous one-sided extradition treaty with the USA now being a pop culture reference. Mind you if it is all down to aliens, that would at least be some sort of explanation for the damn thing.

On the other hand : Yay! Rhossili beach! I was going to post a photo of the hounds running there, but philmophlegm beat me to it with a photo with Gwen and Rhys's house in the background.

This means that philmophlegm, despite his air of elaborate scorn for all things canine - has posted, unprompted, a photo of a doggy. Bwahahahahahaha!

... and another thing, the Kindle version of A Dance with Dragons is 20p more expensive than the print copy. Surely paper is more expensive than bandwidth? Or is it purely lack of competition?

Current Mood: thoughtful

Off to the South Wales valleys again for a long weekend. November may seem an odd time to go to Wales, but we were quite lucky with the weather and the place we were staying is pleasingly sheltered, at the bottom of a deep valley by a small river. ( Read more... )