The Magical World of Tylluan Penry

The past couple of days have been incredibly busy and I've been feeling under the weather. Not quite sure what the problem is, just feeling rotten. Anyway today I've been a bit better so have to plough on with the book (and do some cooking - Lentil Loaf plus a corned beef Hash and some home made bread on account of I found bread flour reduced to 20p per bag in the Co-op.) What an interesting life I lead - NOT!

I just wanted to explain why I've not been around so much and hopefully will catch up again in a day or so!

Hope you are all well out there in blogland!

Now here's a fascinating idea - an online site designed to allow you to write up your complaints about where you live...
You might like to check it out - there wasn't much around my area, but yours may well be different.

http://www.fixmystreet.com/

I'd be interested to know what you found for your area and whether you think it could be a good idea

Firstly apologies if I don't appear to have commented on your blogs lately - I'm plagued with a poor internet connection here, and sometimes spend ages just sending and re-sending comments when my connection breaks. I do try and visit everyone virtually every day, it's just that commenting can sometimes be very hit and miss.

Secondly, I came across an interesting article in today's online Daily Mail : headed 'Could there be proof to the theory that we're ALL psychic' you can find it at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=510762&in_page_id=1770

Basically the headline says it all, that there is a growing body of evidence (I hesitate to use the word 'proof' since that makes some people hit the ceiling) that about 85% of the population are, or could become psychic. Fascinating stuff.

But what makes it most interesting for me was the comment from Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, a sceptic.

To quote the article, he says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do."

*Here we pause a moment for Tylluan to stop gnashing what remain of her teeth. The standards of any other area of science? Just what does he mean? That he wants more proof because it's something he doesn't want to believe in?

"If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me. But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you'd probably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence."

And with people like him around, they're not going to exactly looking for it, either!

THe sun shone today and in spite of the cold I ventured out into the garden to snatch a few photos...

As you will see, I am rather fond of horseshoes. I collect them and then nail them up all over the place. Horseshoes are an ancient protective symbol, thought to resemble the crescent moon. Some of mine are quite ancient, others more recent. Here are three of my favourites:

This one is for Usky - a rather rusty horseshoe, quite large and half buried amongst the ivy.

This horseshoe is near the first and what I liked about it is the way the black paint looks almost iridescent. It's just black gloss paint, honest. But of course, it is in a magical garden!

I have several horseshoes like this one - they are absolutely huge, the largest I've ever seen - probably double the size of the other two....

I think it was Tennyson who coined the famous phrase: 'In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.'

Well, despite the cold (which made the garden birdwatch uncomfortable to say the least) there is plenty of evidence of spring on the way. Snowdrops, a few narcissi, crocuses (yes, maybe that should be croci but it sounds like an alligator with a marble caught in his throat).

I ordered seeds for the garden up on the terrace and they arrived yesterday along with some seed potatoes. I am quite excited about these. The plan is to grow herbs, Tomatoes, potatoes and broad beans this year. And maybe some carrots too.

All this is going to entail a lot of work. The potatoes are going into buckets to make it easier to harvest them (doesn't that word 'harvest' sound grand? Don't believe a word of it - most likely I'll get a few handful!) as are most of the tomatoes, although I have a cunning plan to place these all the way down the front path so they will be easy to pick. Nobody ever ventures past the front gate, so they should be pretty safe.

The worst problem I ever had with stolen vegetables was when I had an allotment. I can't say anybody was tempted to steal what I grew since most was eaten the moment it ripened (and sometimes before) but some people had real problems, especially if they were growing strawberries.

My great grandfather came up with a novel solution for this when he discovered boys were scrumping for apples down at the bottom of his garden. He covered them in manure

Now what I really want to know is - did anybody actually eat them after that?

Just to remind you all briefly that it is the RSPB's birdwatch day tomorrow. If you haven't come across this before, here is a good link http://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/

Mr Penry has been busy practising and when he came back indoors he was frozen to the marrow. He told me he needed a drop of whiskey to keep out the cold. Ah well, I can understand that. I once knew a man so cold he could hardly stand....

Today I went out and about exploring a bit. I took my trusty camera with me and this is what I came up with....

All these places are within about two and a half miles of where I live.

And meantime, just to show you something a little magical, below is a photo of the place where my granddaughter spend her honeymoon. I took the photo just as we were dropping them off there on the wedding day....

Pretty, isn't it?

I notice Sally has already posted on this so I'm going to add my voice too. This new way of putting private messages into the message box just isn't working for me. For those of us with slow connections, it makes more work, and everything takes so much longer. I feel a lot of people are going to miss out on posts (and messages) they wish they'd read, too.

Please put things back the way they were, BCUK - it worked so much better. I'm not against change, but changes should always be an improvement, and this really is a retrograde step.

I have been trying all day to get online to blog but my internet connection has had other ideas. However, I have found my annual quote - regular readers will recall that instead of a New Year's Resolution I have instead a quotation that I hope will help me through the coming year.

This is the first time I've had a quote in Welsh (which according to Mr Penry is the language of heaven ) although I've had quotes in Latin before now. Anyway, here it is, the quote to keep me pondering over the coming twelve months :

Myfi fel yr wyf - Myself as I am

I reckon it was the influence of the full moon that helped me find it.

'They' say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.... or that procrastination is the thief of time.... well for me today I started out with the best of intentions i.e. to clean the bathroom etc., and ended up in a bit of a muddle with mountains of washing, mucky towels from the dogs and the smell of bleach in my nostrils.

Was it worth it?
No.
Did anyone notice I'd done some cleaning?
Don't be silly.

Right. Sod it. Back to my book..........

It’s not just that I’m a crabby old bat – I really do believe the world has gone mad. For example, take these three seemingly unrelated articles that caught my eye today on the Times UK news website.

Firstly that the MOD have managed to lose a laptop containing the personal data of 600,000 people, including serving personnel and thousands of people who have shown an interest in a military career. Now we’ve known about identity theft for years, and the ‘War or Terror’ has been the government’s excuse for all manner of infringments of our personal and civil liberties… so when is somebody going to heed the lesson that if you must have people’s personal data you owe it to them to at least look after it?

The second piece was about how Claire Verity, a so-called Nanny who appeared on some TV programme advising parents to leave their children scream all day and night had ‘fabricated her qualifications.’ Clearly although the rest of us have to give all sorts of personal data the moment we want to move from Job A to Job B, the people who demand such data seem incapable of checking it. Perhaps it’s all be lost on a laptop somewhere.

Thirdly, a judge has ordered an inquiry into how an asylum-seeker got a full-time job with an asylum and immigration tribunal service. That’s a nice own goal. Apparently routine checks (which presumably meant just looking at the application and saying ‘Yes, that’s an application’ failed to detect that his documents were fraudulent. The Tribunals Service has promised that checks have since been updated.

So what is really going on here? Sounds to me like the powers that be are telling us : We must have all your information and if you don’t provide it we shall not consider you for a job. If you DO provide it, however, we shall:
(a) ignore it
(b) fail to check it without first taking the paper bag off our heads
(c) lose it
(d) sell it to the highest bidder.

Take your pick, it could be any one of them.

Looking back to my childhood, all the pointers were there at an early age. The stroppiness, the anti social behaviour (hiding in the hydrangeas with a bucket of water and a bicycle pump and spraying it over passers by); carving pictures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table on the headboard of my bed; sending my uncle a ticking clock and pretending it had just arrived in the post; painting the dog's colour with phospherous paint (not sure of its exact name but it glowed in the dark) so people thought they were seeing things when my Dad took it for a walk at night....

I could go on and on... but you don't deserve that.

My question is - do you think we really change much as we get older? Or are we really still children just beneath the skin?

Apologies for this late, brief post. Have worked for several hours on the book but have been feeling pretty dire today. Hopefully shall be back feeling more myself tomorrow....

It's always been my ambition to grow old disgracefully. There are so many things I've never done and one of these is hotwiring the car. Can it be so difficult, I wondered? After all, it's played a vital part in many a movie.

So after dropping off my granddaughter to work this morning, I stopped off in Somerfield's near-empty car park (it was pretty early) and rummaged around in the vicinity of the steering column.

All I found was a sweet wrapper. (one of mine, probably). The scene where the hero reaches in and yanks out a handful of brightly coloured wires didn't happen for me.

But at least I gave it a try. Now I have to think of something else...

Well, my last post was great fun! It's amazing the things I've found when I've been researching for this book...

But all that writing about peas did put me in mind of a merry little tale years ago. When I was a child, an elderly neighbour of ours was forever taking Kidney and Liver Pills, using a brand that was well known for turning your urine a bright shade of green. (Pea green, get it? ) Anyway, she had her grandson staying with her one day when I went around there with my mother and aunt, and he was a bit of a handful, she said she'd had to keep telling him off and threatening him with the bogey man and heaven knows who else.

Then suddenly the little lad emerged from the garden, having clearly made a visit down to the Ty Bach (outside loo). There was this wonderful triumphant expression on his face as he finally found himself in a position to exact his revenge.
'Ahah.... I've got you now, Granny,' he bawled, 'I'm going to tell everyone you pees green!!!!;'

Ahhhh....... happy days

During the course of researching this latest book I have come across some pretty odd things. Oddest of all recently was the old practice of throwing peas at the wall in order to discover when you were likely to get married.

Now I, and others of a certain age may well remember counting out prune stones (Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief) and throwing apple peel over the left shoulder (it was supposed to fall in the shape of an initial). I can even remember looking for nine peas in a pea pod, because they were supposed to be extremely lucky.

I was pretty gobsmacked however when my research revealed that some people used to throw a handful of cooked peas at the wall, in the belief that if the peas stuck, it meant you would get married in the coming year.

Ah well, takes all sorts, I suppose.....

I woke up today full of the joys of life, full of good intentions, even though I wondered how it was I'd actually managed to sleep later than normal. And then I opened the curtains. The room didn't get any brighter, I just rearranged the gloom a bit.

It's going on 4pm now - I've needed lights on in order to read, and I feel like a mole. In desperation I even cleaned some lightshades just in case a thick film of grease and dust was making things seem really dark. It made not a jot of difference.

And it's making me (and the dogs) really sleepy....

Oh, for some sunshine! Oh for some light!

A large new Asda's store has opened in a nearby town. Before it did, the nearest branch was about 18 miles away. The new store has just about emptied the local supermarkets of SOmerfield, Co-op, ALdi and Lidl, and closed down a very good and obliging local greengrocer, garden and pet store.

Today I made my third trip to Asda's since it opened and guess what? I still haven't managed to get in the store. The car park (no buses go near the place, and if they did I couldn't manage to carry the shopping on one)is so badly designed with narrow 'roads' between the rows of cars, ambiguous areas where double parking appears to be positively encouraged, and extremely narrow parking spaces. In order to have enough room for my passengers to alight, I simply cannot open my door.

All this on a Friday afternoon - hardly the rush hour!

I think three tries is quite enough (the old saying goes 'Three tries for a Welshman.') Asda's appears to be modelled on the Gates of Hades, and unless or until it actually manages to develop a decent car park (Asda's at Aberdare is well laid out by comparison) I shall stay away.

So that's Tesco's out and now Asda's.... not many left to go, really!

They say that schooldays are the happiest days of our lives (Ahem.) But are they? And did our teachers really understand us at all?

Have a look at this link and see what you think....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=507221&in_page_id=1770

Personally I suspect there was an awful lot of spite in some of those school reports.

It always surprises me to go into someone's house and discover there is no dining table, or one the size of a postage stamp. When I was growing up the table was a central feature (not the TV!) and everything in the house revolved around it.

My mother-in-law had a saying to the effect that provided your fireplace and your table were clear and clean, the rest of the day would take care of itself.

We have a fairly large table by modern standards, 5 feet long, and a little chewed around the corners (thank you, Ben). I have mended it with wood filler, but it still looks a little odd, particularly after the time Mr Penry nearly burned a hole in the middle when his home made wooden candlestick caught fire....

The table will easily seat 8 and is still the centre of my home. Plans were made there, shopping lists drawn up, the children did their homework there, we watch DVD's when we're sitting at the table, and of course, we sit down to eat together.

I don't know about you, but I love having meals altogether. Even if people arrive at different times (and breakfast here is a good example of this) then we are all coming to the same place, and there's a sense of continuity that I find really important.

I have only one rule at my table - no arguments. I will not allow anger and food to be mixed (it causes indigestion, for a start!) We can discuss, consider, talk politics, religion, tell jokes, but anything heavier than that has to wait until the food is cleared away.

I still haven't found my motto yet - it can take time. But meanwhile the Penry household has visitors - my newly married granddaughter and spouse. This means cooking for six on a daily basis which is rather fun, quite like old times. Also the New Husband is a spectacular cook, and last night dished up a Chick Pea Curry, some heavenly rice, and a cucumber and tomato Raita. All from scratch ingredients, and most of it done in a pressure cooker. It was absolutely wonderful. So for the duration of their stay, Tuesday nights I am going to hand over the kitchen to him!

I am still working on my book - it's taking shape, but because it's intended as a reference work it seems to be a very slow job. However, I stick at it every day, and it seems to be coming along.

My hip niggles a bit now and then (it woke me up in the night) but it seems to be much better than it was. The clouds have lifted a bit today and the sky is that wonderful glowing shade of pearl that makes me want to get out into the garden and er - wade through the mud....

Mr Penry had a copy of the World at War DVD for Christmas and is completely glued to it. We don't watch TV, hardly at all, but a good documentary or film on DVD is always a pleasure!

Well, back to the book, catch up with you later!

Today is the day we get our rubbish collected every week. After the wedding, Christmas and the New Year we had a bit of a clear out, prior to my big spring clean in a week or so.

Looking at the number of bin bags we put out, I'd say we just sacked Carthage.....

I may not have written much online today, but my hip is improving and I am much more mobile. This of course means I get to go out and do all the things I haven't been doing when I felt so creaky!

The writing continues, too slowly for my liking, but I'm getting there, and this one is going to be a much longer book than the others...

Hope you are all keeping well in Blogland - catch up with you tomorrow I hope!

Brightest blessings
Tylluan

I wasn't around yesterday and am only posting briefly this evening - this hip thing has slowed me down more than I would care to admit. Old age comes at a bad time, as they say....

Anyway, I am also working on my book, which is coming on quite nicely, but always takes longer than I would wish. And there was sunshine today which lifted my spirits no end! I began thinking of all the things I'm going to do when the weather gets warmer and the days lengthen.

I'm trying to catch up with all your blogs tonight, but may not be able to comment on all of them since the internet connection is very slow here at the moment.

Hope you have all had a great weekend and best wishes for the week ahead!

Brightest blessings
Tylluan

Yesterday started off just like any other until the post arrived. In it was a letter telling me that a book I had been after for quite some time had eventually turned up at a Bookshop in Hay on Wye. For those of you who haven’t been there, Hay is well worth a visit. Apart from being a beautiful place, it is full of second hand bookshops, the sort of places where I can browse for hours. So Mr Penry gallantly suggested we should travel up and get said book yesterday ‘in case it snows on the weekend.’ Ah, bless him.

It was an amazing day – all told I managed to get THREE books I had been after, so there was clearly some strong magic at work, methinks. We even sampled the toffee cheesecake in the Blue Boar while sitting in front of a roaring fire. Magical.

But you know, most magical of all was that it was a day out for just the two of us. Rolling away the years, I felt about twenty five again. It was lovely. I don’t think love ever lets you grow old….

One of the things about modern life that really annoys me is the way the powers that be constantly carp on about how 'we' are not doing our bit for the environment, planet, world, global warming whatever.

The other day in the paper I read about how 'we' waste one out of every 3 (some sources said 4) bags of shopping. Well not here in the Penry household we don't. I am naturally thrifty and enjoy the challenge of making things go the extra mile.

But what can you do when 'they' are clearly not doing their bit? Today the recycling lorry turned up and crushed all the bags together, just like the ordinary bin lorry does. On the lorry's side there was a cheerful message to remind us all to do our bit and recycle - which seemed a tad hypocritical considering that I had gone to the trouble of recycling only to see it all carted off presumably for landfill.

The washing machine is a case in point. I was all for getting it repaired, but no, it turned out that doing this is only a little cheaper than replacing it altogether. And bearing in mind that I'd had it for some time, there was always the possibility that something else would pack in next month. So there was virtually no incentive for me to get it repaired.

Ho hum. The washing is mounting up. I have put this off for long enough. I'm off to shoot the old machine....

Years ago there was a popular superstition that you shouldn't wash on New Year's Day 'or you wash your family/friends away.' Hmm. I can't say I ever remember my family taking much notice of it, but I did not some people who took it very seriously indeed.

However in the Penry household there is fat chance of washing on New Year's Day - or indeed any other day in the foreseeable future, since the washing machine has gone insane.

Now normally a washing machine just malfunctions, doesn't it? It won't switch on, or it won't spin, or maybe spills water all over the floor. But mine has gone one better. It has totally flipped it's lid.

So it switches itself on an off when it feels like it - on two memorable occasions doing so when the power was disconnected which was downright creepy. I seriously thought about calling Mulder and Scully, I can tell you.

I don't know what's causing the problem, but I do know it isn't unique. Sometimes electrical appliances do seem to function independent of electricity. Yes, I know it's impossible - but I also know what I saw. I have now unplugged said machine permanently and moved the plug far from the socket (well, you never know, maybe it's learned to plug itself back in.)

I hope you are all having a great New Year's Day. I know I am, although I have spent most of it in the kitchen, cooking up a feast : pheasant with mushrooms and bacon, together with Duck in an orange sauce plus a veggie option.

I am now full of food (and wine!

Duw, it's great!