Hi,

I hope you are all managing to avoid the horrible illnesses that are going round…there are some really nasty bugs. If you haven’t managed to avoid them, I hope you are recovering. I hope you are all keeping warm as well…I’m sat here with Dilys cuddled up with me so there’s not much chance of me feeling cold.

Poor Mali is sat shivering in front of the fire, looking bedraggled. She has had…I bet you guessed it…a bath. She went for a walk earlier and was the very stinkiest spaniel ever. I dread to think what she had been doing but it smelled like forty different kinds of grimness had attacked her from behind, held on tightly to her whilst they rolled her in evil! She was eye-wateringly bad. Now she’s a clean spaniel, she has to sit and dry off in front of the fire instead of running round the house like a muppet.

Did any of you manage to see the meteor shower the other night? I didn’t manage to see it that night, it was too cloudy, but on Saturday night it was really windy but there were clear skies and a managed to see a couple of meteors. They weren’t very impressive ones, were very small and their colours couldn’t be seen but I saw some which was enough to make me happy.

The next meteor shower after that is the Ursids meteor shower, which has already started and carries on until the 24th December. These peak on 21st-22nd of December and, for those of you who have a pad on the ground floor, some of these can be seen during the day (hopefully, if you are outside during that time) so you might manage to see them. For those of you that didn’t see any, I borrowed an image of the meteor shower this time, taken from a landmark that I think is near Berwyn…

I think its such a beautiful picture.

This week is not so much about the dramas with the animals,

more about the dramas with the humans.

A few years ago, when my son was just starting doing summer jobs in farming, he went to help a local farmer with bringing the hay in. He was part of an ever-changing group of teenagers who go to the different farms and make up the cheap labour of hay time. It’s a sort of farm boy rite of passage, where you get to learn from the older farmers in return for £20 for the day, a fish and chip dinner and their body weight in cans of monster and packs of haribo. The day usually starts at 6am and can continue until the early hours of the morning if there’s rain heading over. It’s fun, frantic, driving ancient tractors and barely-running quads, sometimes a bit of bad temper that blows over fast…time is too precious in the race to get the hay in, weather-watching, bale-throwing, something always goes wrong type of weeks. This particular year it was towards the end of the dry patch of weather, with rain heading towards them when the bale slide blocked. My son decided in the adrenaline of the moment to unblock the bale slide with his foot….bad idea!

I think he realised straight away that this was a problem, but of course getting the hay in comes first, so he kept on going. When he finally got home after a long day he was the same colour as the new growth grass…bright green and feeling very sick. The following day was another long day, but this time sitting in the accident department of the local hospital….he had managed a total of 8 breaks in his foot. He had a plaster cast on, crutches and found baling hay much slower for the rest of the season. I threatened, being a kind and sympathetic mum, that I was going to make him write (in his own blood) “I will not be the sort of wally that unblocks farm machinery with body parts”.

So…fast forward a couple of years until this week. I think I have told you that my son does lots of different work for different people, and one of those is someone who sorts and sells firewood. He also has sheep, so sometimes (like today) they are working with the sheep…today they have been dipping the sheep to get rid of any ticks or other parasites on them. Earlier this week he was helping his boss process firewood. They were in a rush to get the logs processed before it went dark and the weather got too bad. The wood processor blocked. Guess who’s son was the wally that unblocked it, whilst it was still running, with his hand? Yes, that would be my son.

He still has his hand…which is lucky. He still has all his fingers…which is more than he deserves (said his kind and sympathetic mum). He has quite a lot of skin missing and 2 fingers that look either broken or dislocated. Has he gone to the hospital?…he went to the little local hospital to have them checked, who said he needed to get them sorted at the main hospital, so he came home. He has carried on working and, as every kind and sympathetic mum should do, I’ve promised him arthritis and generally creaky fingers for his old age. How do I know this?…because I was just as bad when I was his age. 😊

Now the only thing left to answer is, will he be the wally in future who unblocks farm machinery with body parts?…what do you think?!!!

It’s been a really busy week, with all the prep for Christmas. Shopping, wrapping gifts, collecting my middle daughter from university with all her washing…and flu, so she is currently on lockdown in her bedroom with strict instructions not to breathe in public or anywhere near her sister. My eldest daughter has had her operation this week. It went well but it always leaves her painful for quite a while, so she’s watching films with Carrie, her assistance dog. I think they are working their way through all the Marvel films…Carrie loves watching films and quite often makes little barks and squeaks as she watches. She has lots of opinions.

Original readers of the Blitherings might remember that it is not one of my best skills to do paperwork. What I am really good at is finding a way of avoiding paperwork…hiding it, ignoring it, persuading Pete to do the paperwork for me. Writing Christmas cards, in my head, is way too much like paperwork…so I have developed a paperwork avoidance technique which, bonus, I also enjoy doing. For the last 10 years instead of writing cards I make Christmas decorations. I then hang them on a lit Christmas tree and when people come to my house they get to choose their own Christmas ‘card’, one of the decorations on the tree. That way people who have been in our lives for a decade have a decent collection of decorations and no cards are written or get thrown in the rubbish afterwards…that’s my excuse, cards are bad for the environment….see, I get to pretend that it is because I’m eco-conscious and get to not have to do paperwork!

Each year I buy a couple of extra beads and I always choose a few new charms to put on the end, usually to represent people or the year that has just gone. So last year we got Mali as a puppy, so I bought little spaniel charms. There are retriever charms to represent Gwen and Carrie. There are sausage dogs to represent Dilys and I still have Staffordshire bull terrier charms to represent the bestest Lenny. There are zebra charms to represent Gwen’s boyfriend…I will tell you about him one of the letters in the future, hedgehogs to represent my middle daughter. There are snowflakes, bells, Christmas charms, all different colours and different beads, so people very rarely just take one, they always tell me that they can’t choose between this one and that one and take both.

I always bring them into Berwyn for the Chaplaincy staff to chose one each instead of Christmas cards and this year one of the new charms is a lion…can you guess what that represents? It represents our new start! It represents, for me, coming back to Berwyn to this job, the learning I’m trying to do to make our group the best I can and the faith I have in our group for us to all gain overstanding and knowledge, as H.I.M. Halie Selassie I instructed us to.

So for the Berwyn staff I made the decorations in black, gold, red and green with a lion charm at the bottom. I really wish I taken photos of them before I distributed them, so I could show you all. I took these photos just now so you could get the idea of them but the tree looks a bit rubbish there because the lights don’t show up. I will see if any are still in the staff room to show you when I get in there, but I think they all went home. Somewhere, on Christmas trees all around our area, there are little lion decorations…a representation of our new start! I like that thought! 😊

Blessings,

Elizabeth