This week I have had an all British make-over. Despite usually only admitting to Welshness, a couple of things per year bring out the whole British-obsession in me….the right weather to cut the hay (I know some of you from the group have been around for my hay-anxieties) and snow! I am completely obsessed with the weather at the moment, have subscribed to websites who produce all the detailed weather charts for different countries, the ones where METEO (who do the forecasts for the BBC) and the Met Office get their information from….completely obsessive! I’m not even supposed to like the snow.

Snow is an absolute nightmare when you live on the side of a steep hill, with no decent main roads and have farm animals…no shopping, no outside water for the animals, no driving down the roads unless its in the tractor, often no electricity because the weight of the snow has brought the power cables down. But I love it! I love wandering about in the unmarked snow and watching the birds, the foxes, the badgers all out going about their lives. I love the strange quiet of the land when no vehicles are moving, nothing is moving, so there is just you and nature. I must admit as well, I can pass a good bit of time just playing ‘dragon breath’ and seeing how deep the drifts are in the field. I love watching all the dogs race round, jumping and snapping at the snowflakes as they fall, chasing each other and barking with excitement. I do agree however that 5 wet, snowy dogs all drying off in our kitchen requires quite a lot of air freshener and towels!

Last year Mali became a snowy natty spaniel, she had snow dreds and we had to melt her in warm water in the sink.

So is it? Isn’t it?…going to snow? I know its going to be cold, its now down to where the low pressure gets dragged to as to whether we get a lot of snow or not and also whether you see me or not next week, because if it snows much at all there is not much chance of me getting to Berwyn. If I can’t get there, I will write you a letter like I did for Christmas and ask the Chaplaincy to see if they can get it to you.

There is something that is not going anywhere this week, or from now on. The sardine can (aka my son’s car) has died in nasty ways. We went off for our Monday excursion to get red diesel, plenty of cans just in case we do have snow, and the brakes started to stick. Some handy WD40 didn’t do the job so my son ended up driving along pulling up the brake pedal with his foot…not good. It seems it’s probably the brake cylinder gone and it doesn’t look like its worth putting a new one in. The state that the sardine can is in now, putting an air freshener into the car would double the car’s value, especially as the little problem it had with the ‘limp-home-mode’ coming on is now almost an every mile sort of problem. I think he and Mali are going back to travelling by tractor.

In the service sheet this week we looked at Psalm 103 and I promised you a story about verse 5 of that psalm “so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s”. The start of this story is a long way from the understanding of why that verse is relevant to my week, so hang on in there!

This week we went to pick up my husband’s Christmas present to me.

When I was young, I used to go for holidays with my parents up to my Grandparents’ house. We lived in a very tiny house at the time so I thought my Nanna’s house was amazing. It was a typical 1930’s house with stained glass parts to the window and it had a dining room as well as a living room and space for proper beds instead of bunk beds, so I thought it was really posh. We had a tiny kitchen, a very small living room and my Dad and Grandad had built a porch onto the back of the house that we squeezed a table into, as well as our coats, shoes and wellie boots.

My Nanna had 3 old clocks in the house, 2 wall clocks in long cases and a grandfather clock in the hall. The grandfather clock had a beautiful painted face and struck the hour. The other two clocks chimed on the hour, quarter past, half past and quarter to the hour. Sunday was clock-winding day and we used to watch my Nanna wind the clocks in the morning after our first cup of tea.

I’ve always been bad at getting to sleep and I was particularly bad at my Nanna’s house. She made the beds up with a sheet, two itchy Welsh wool blankets and a bedcover and the knack was to lie perfectly still so the slightly too small sheets didn’t move and let the itchy blankets get to you. I used to get into a tangle of concentrating so hard not to move that I couldn’t sleep, not being able to sleep meant that I would wriggle, wriggling meant that the itchy blankets got me, then I would have to get out of bed to try to put it all back together again, putting it back together again was a formula only grown-ups knew how to do and it was always cold at my Nanna’s house. My sister had a bed in the same room and after a bit of chatting and silliness she would fall fast asleep and stay sound asleep until morning. I would end up lying coldly, under the itchy blankets, listening to the clocks strike and chime the night away. I ought to have hated the clocks but I was still always mesmerised by them.

Fast forward to this Christmas and grandfather clocks have lost most of their value. No-one wants them. No-one has room for them, there are very few people who know how to repair them, they don’t match with modern furniture and so the value has come down massively on them…but I’ve still always wanted one. My husband said he would buy me a grandfather clock for my Christmas present.

It’s very difficult now to get a whole, original clock. They were made so long ago that bits of it get damaged or broken and then that piece of the clock gets put with a different case, the ceiling is too low so the legs get cut off etc etc. But I wanted an original clock, in its original case and I wanted it to be one of the older clocks too. I had looked for quite a while and I found one I really wanted, it was all original and we could afford it for my present.

We went off to Liverpool to look at it this weekend and if we liked it, to buy it and bring it home. The man who was selling it had inherited two of them from his aunt who had just died. She died at 102 years old, the clocks had been in her family all her life and had been inherited into her family from older family before that. The man who had inherited them now lived in a one bedroom flat in Liverpool and two grandfather clocks were a lot more than the flat could hold. He also wanted to sell the clocks to be able to pay back the loan he had taken out to pay for his aunt’s funeral. He was sad to see them go, but he really couldn’t keep them. By the time I got there one was already sold but it was the one that was left that I was interested in.

We started off by making small talk. The man looked like he had lived life quite hard, he had no hair at all, stretcher earrings in and not a single tooth left in his head. He seemed like a really nice man and I was trying to think of something we had in common to make conversation. He had lots of ska and original punk album covers on the wall…ha! Got it!…I’ll talk about music…I can talk music to anyone, I love most genres of music and I do like punk and ska. ‘Oooo! I like your taste in music’ I say. He says ‘yes, you must be the same age as me’. I’m stood a bit stuck, thinking that I still have most of my teeth and most of my hair and I really didn’t think I looked as old as that. ‘So how old are you?’ my husband asked him. “65”, he says……65!!!!!! He thinks I look 65!!!!!!! That’s almost two decades older than me!!!

I still bought the clock off him.

I went home and nursed my hurt feelings. My children and husband haven’t stopped teasing me. We went on a night out to Liverpool again that weekend with a friend…guess what the first thing my husband told my friend was?…yes, you guessed right! We went to a cocktail bar where one of the cocktails was made with ovaltine…they suggested that I drank that then went home to sleep. Drawing pensions was maybe mentioned. Not good.

I have fended off all sorts of jokes about my age this week so when the psalm I was reading promised ‘youth renewed like the eagle’s’ I couldn’t help but laugh about it. It was either laugh…or cry!

I’m sat here writing this in front of the fire with a mug of fennel tea, listening to the owls calling each other. It is -4*C outside and I can hear tawny owls and barn owls hunting in the field behind our house. I have Gwen for company, she’s leaning against my knee keeping me warm…she’s like a big ginger blanket. Dilys, the sausage dog, has deserted me. She has made herself a lovely nest in her new Christmas blanket right in front of the fire. And I’m off to check the most recent forecasts, hoping for a ton of snow!

Blessings,

Elizabeth