How are you all doing? There are signs of spring all over. I have snowdrops out in my front garden and daffodils out down the path. There are also daffodils out in the containers by the front door…daffodils in time for St David’s Day, the 1st of March.

I don’t know if you know the traditions of St David’s Day? St David is the patron saint of Wales and was a monk who was alive in the 6th Century. He established many monasteries throughout Wales and Northern France. He was considered to have performed many miracles and so was made a saint in 1120AD.

Most of the children in Wales will be wearing Welsh national costume, like in the picture. Many of the adults wear Welsh dragon on their clothes or Welsh rugby tops, or sometimes a daffodil pinned to their top because daffodils are the emblem of Wales. A lot of people eat traditional Cawl for their dinner, with Welsh cakes or bara brith, which means speckled bread because of the raisins in it, for pudding.

Cawl is a soup made with either lamb or beef, stock and vegetables, but most importantly with leeks, which are another emblem of Wales. They were the original emblem of St David, who ate as close to an Ital diet as a Welsh monk could (vegetables, herbs, homemade bread, with water to drink) and so a leek as his emblem seems understandable to me.

In the Battle of Crecy in 1346, the Welsh soldiers were commanded to wear leeks on their helmets in battle against the Saxons so they could be identified, probably by their smell just as much as being able to see it because warm, uncooked leeks do smell horrible!

I had exciting news this week. My middle daughter passed her driving test! She was so nervous and completely sure she was going to fail. She didn’t, and the driving examiner even said she was an excellent driver. She came back home and we had a celebration, a takeaway and some sparkling wine. Then we went into full search mode and went looking for a car for her. She wants to be able to get to a job and also do some work experience relating to her course, so she wanted to get a car quickly. She has an idea of the sort of thing she wants, now we just need to find it.

My son is coming to the end of lambing. He thinks there are only a few weeks left but that next week is going to be very full-on because the next lot of sheep are going to be brought into the barn. During the storms recently, quite a few trees came down so he and his friends have been cutting them up for firewood to sell. There are a few oak and sycamore trees that came down, but also there are quite a few ash trees affected by a disease that affects ash trees so he has been felling those too.

He leaves to go up to the farm for lambing at about 6.30am and gets home at about midday. Then he spends the afternoon felling trees, sorting the firewood, delivering hay or haylage to other farms or fixing his tractor (again! It’s old and always needs fixing). Then he has to be back at the farm for 4pm and he is there til 7 or 8pm, depending on how much needs doing. He’s only doing one day a week at the dairy farm at the moment because he has been given the rest of the time off to help out with the lambing but he has done about 4 weeks in a row without a day off! At the moment he gets into the house in the evening, eats his food quickly and then goes straight to bed he’s so tired.

Anya, who I told you about last week, has had an exciting week. No, she didn’t pass her driving test…she’s been learning a new skill. She’s been snoofing! Anya is a hunting dog (she hasn’t ever hunted much more than a warm bed and a stupid squirrel) but what she has got is a nose with a turbo drive…she’s really good at smelling. Not the ‘making stinky smells’ sort of smelling, although a good run in a field that a fox has wandered through means that she often manages the ‘stinky smells’ and needs a good scrub with tomato ketchup…the only thing that reliably gets the smell of fox poo out! No, this ‘smelling’ is the tracking sort of smelling, the finding sort of smelling which it seems she is really good at. We have found that doing man-trailing (the posh words for go-snoofing, which is what we call it) seems to calm her inner-kangaroo and tame the not-so-inner velociraptor. My husband and she go off with lots of boxes of cat food, sardines, cut-up sausages and all sorts of other stinky stuff to a field with a few other dogs so they can train for trailing. I think if she gets good at it my husband would like to do lowland rescue….he says he wants to do nothing that could see him and Anya having to leap out of a helicopter or scramble up rock faces, but across fields and moorlands he feels that he’s up to (he doesn’t have an inner kangaroo sort of attitude to life). She comes back from her classes very tired but incredibly pleased with herself. She looks very smug about life and is sure she has been the bestest girl ever.

You have been introduced to Dilys before…she’s the sausage dog that Clyde, the cane corso, is afraid of. My mum and dad have her litter sister, Maisie. You would never believe that they were litter sisters. They are wire haired crossed with smooth haired dachshunds. Maisie looks all wire-haired and has the wire haired character. She is a real clown but very well behaved. Dilys looks completely like a smooth haired dachshund and is as stubborn as smooth haired dachshunds always are. She probably knows her name but she won’t often admit to it.

Every so often, when my parents come over to see me, either Maisie will decide that she is coming for a holiday to me or, more often, Dilys decides she is going on a holiday to Maisie’s house. Some days there will be no change of house, neither of them have any requests. My parents have been over to my house most days this week and neither of the dogs have had any requests. Today they came over and Dilys decided she needed a holiday from us all. She stands like a tripod on three legs and does her ‘bossy bark’, the one where we know she is telling us how something is going to be. Then she runs to the back door and barks again. And back…and on and on til we can’t ignore her. So we packed Dilys’s food, her collar and lead and she’s gone off on her holidays until she decides to come back. It’s usually only a couple of days but I do miss her whilst she isn’t home. She is the smallest of our dogs but definitely the bossiest.

The photo here is one my Dad took whilst he was doing some work in his garden. It takes a lot longer when moving paving slabs up to the top of the garden, which is on quite a slope, if you have to make room for two bossy dogs in your wheelbarrow!

Blessings,

Elizabeth