General Chat

I think it is one of the older shopping centres now but it is a good one. A large M&S, John Lewis, BHS and a lot of the smaller shops.

It's been there a good few years now Ann hasn't it.I think I went there once with my sister to IK**.Yep Maureen a bit too far for you lol.
Cribbs Causeway would have been great for me back in 1981/3 when I lived in Nailsea.But of course it didn't exist then :-S :-S

I like to hang on to my decorations untill the last day then take them down and have a good clean.

Been helping someone with their tree today.

Evening All,

Sorry to hear about Henny Penny Mel. So sad for you but she had a really good home with you and a happy life and is now buried in her favourite sunny spot which is lovely.

Poor Fitz must be fed up with the septic tank Jane, but Mandy's OH's suggestion sounds good and worth him looking into (not literally!) Does the nearby farm have problems too? I hope he has plenty of pennies for spending at your house. :-D At least there were plenty of hands to do the dishes with 19 people, but I would be a nervous wreck trying to feed that many. You are a very good neighbour to him, but I am sure he would do anything to help you too.

Maureen, are you carrying a tissue too! My red nose feels like a leather one now it is so rough, but the cough seems to be getting better at last so I went to Hinckley today to look at a few shops with OH . It was cold but nice to be in the fresh air for a while and not many people about either. OH got himself a big new notebook for his clerking notes, thermal t shirts for under his shirt at football, thermal socks and a new pair of slippers and bought me a top and some bead wire snippers that were only £1!!

Are you still sniffing Pat? I must get whirring too with the washing etc. Yes I did write a big post about the pony and photo, but went to edit it and pressed delete instead! I'll see if I can do another.

I think this must be the worst Xmas and New Year I have had for not being well........feel like I missed most of it!! I think our boxes of stuff will be going back in the loft in easy stages, I'll need oxygen by the time we've lugged the tree up there!!

It is me in the picture aged 18 on a freezing, breezy day in February. I’m not smiling because I am hurrying home and a young man I hadn’t seen before had just pulled his car up ahead of me on the country road and jumped out with a camera! He asked my address and said he would bring me a copy of the pic when he had developed it, which he did a few days later. I was by the front gate at the time. He then started to suggest he would really like to take more pictures of me at his studio. I politely declined his offer as a few alarm bells had started to ring by then and I was a very cautious 18 year old!!

I bought the pony when I was on a week’s pony trekking holiday in Wales, having just sold a smaller pony I’d bought as a foal at age 16. I didn’t earn much, mum took half my pay for board and dad charged me for a gallon of petrol each week as I drove his small van into and from the city each day to his workshop. His view was that I was getting free transport so he charged me for it even though he needed to get the van there anyway and couldn’t drive it as well as his car!! I didn’t have much money left so the only way I could afford a pony was to buy a foal, break it to riding and then sell it at a profit to afford to buy one big enough for me.

The owner had bought the handsome pony (golden colour in summer) a couple of months before for his wife to ride, but the pony had bolted twice, once with her and once with someone else and she wouldn’t get on it’s back again. The only person who was riding him was a huge 6 foot plus lad who was far too big for him but who was very strong. He brought him out on one of our rides and he seemed quite a handful, but not nasty or kicking or anything. The owner made me try the pony out in a small paddock and he was keen but lovely to ride, so I then went home to ask if dad would do the fetching of the pony as my birthday present. We borrowed a trailer and brought him home. What would he be like on busier roads.......would he bolt with me?
To be contd.

Looking forward to the next installment Ann!
I want to try and get that pic bigger but don't know how :-S
I'm off to bed now ,so will see y'all in the morning.
Night Night x

Looking forward to the next part Ann, but we're so tired so we off to bed ,we were late to bed last night it was gone one o'clock which is late for us .

Night Night xx

Hi.

Can you see me hanging on to the side of the wall while my legs are flying out behind me??? It is soo windy here that the rain is blowing along the ground in clouds. It has been lashing the bedroom window all night and I dare not let the chickens out as they will be blown away. There are two bluetits on the bird feeders that are feeding on the leeward side and they are ringing wet. I don't think they know how top get off!! Oops the wind just blew one away into the box hedge.........We have a red river of mud flowing out the back where oh made that ditch for the water to run away a little while ago. One out the front too running down the road and past the bungalow. It is bypassin g the drain outside the kitchen window as it can't take amymore water and is going past the bantam houses.

Think perhaps oh should have made an ark and not a new bird table and boxes then we could all ride this storm in comfort.

Morning All
Wow what weather!.Panels from the greenhouse have blown out again :-S.I've been awake on and off since 3 listening to the rain and wind .I know we have a slipped roof tile as well.I haven't seen the forecast so don't know if we have all got this.It's soooooo dark.
I need to go to the Post Office but think I might just hang on a while and see if this rain eases off.I just managed to get out for a quick walk with Chester.It last for 10 minutes lol
I hope everyone is battened down safely.

Hope is well with you and yours Kim!

Morning Mel and Jane and others.

Very windy and wet here as well..I need to go down the road to the bank and post office to. Had tax letter this morning..Got a rebate from them for the year 2007/8...Didnt think I earned enough to pay tax lol...Connected to my pension as well..Better spend it before they ask for it back...

Leigh my eldest son called in for a cup of tea this morning,,he is heading back to paris this afternoon.Brought his 2 eldest children back yesterday afternoon ready for school.

Pat ,I hope he is going back via the tunnel and not flying!!!.
Mel ,have you got your flippers???Poor little bluetit being blown into the hedge.
They have been hanging on for dear life on our peanut holder.Plus the Squirrel hanging upside down from the branch .He was braving it :-S
Right I am going to grit my teeth and go now :-D :-D

Afternoon everyone,

What a day !! we started off dry and managed to get the outside christmas lights down ,then down came the rain !! we had just got our coats on to go to sons and Tesc*'s, i said to hubby i'am not going out in that ,and it was a good job we didn't the wind blew and then the rain got harder and harder ,it was so bad it was like a fog !!!
I didn't hear much wind in the night ,it just seems to have got bad here the last few hours .

We stopped in and took all the decorations down ,looks so bare now .

Poor little bluetits,they were lucky to have got onto the feeder in this wind , hope you don't have any damage Mel ,sounds really bad your way .

Jane...Leigh has gone back to Paris by the train

Well I got soaked this morning was in the post office when it came down even worse stayed there a few mins then made a dash to Bank...

Charity shop near bank so = dropped some things and books in there,Came home with a cushion lol.. Then called in my freinds who broke her ankle she has ablood clot now and had to have her bloods tested again..Still cant get it right.Back to injections again.
Stopped raining now and the sun peeped though vanished again...
At least you managed to get your lights down mel..

Ann ..I thought I was going mad..I was beginning to imaging I saw a long post... Look foward to reading more too.

Hi folks, how's 2012 suiting you all? Apart from us almost getting blown into 2013 that is! Anyway, one or two of you asked for another of my childhood stories, so here is another one for you to read - and hopefully enjoy.

THE SNOWBALL

This tale will take you back to about 1945, when I was a mere boy of ten years of age. Where we lived in Chadwell Heath, all the streets formed either squares or rectangles, so it was always said that you were ‘going round the block’. Coming up to Christmas that year, we had a huge fall of snow, an absolute delight to young boys starved of toys due the war, not so easy to keep amused. I guess I’ve always done things on impulse and this was certainly one of them.

For no particular reason other than I couldn’t find my mates to play with (probably had more sense and were all indoors around an open fire), I rolled myself a solitary snowball. So what, I hear you say, but that was only the start of what happened from there on in. I got it in my head to put said snowball down and roll it along in the virgin snow. I’d better explain to those who can’t imagine such a utopian scene, back in 1945 there was no such thing as parked cars, traffic on back streets was at a bare minimum. Maybe a milkman’s electric delivery truck, or a bakers hand pulled cart did the rounds once a day, but not much else.

Anyway, back to my snowball; there must be some spooky scientific theory that rolling a snowball will increase its diameter – and I’ll tell you, it’s correct! So the snowball started to increase its size as I pushed it away from our front gate towards the corner of our block. It was off the pavement area and into the road and would have been approximately 2 feet from the kerb. I turned the corner with this growing orb of snow and proceeded pushing down the next stretch in the direction of the next corner, totally absorbed in what I was doing, not feeling the cold at all.

By the time I got to the next corner, the snowball was about two foot in diameter and this increase had me fascinated. It must have had the equivalent attention power of a modern Game Boy, or such, because by the time I reached the next corner I was committed to see how far I could push it and how big it would get. On the next stretch, one or two passers by made remarks to me probably thinking I’d escaped from Borstal!

Corner three reached successfully, one more to go before I reached the home run back to our gate. A ‘pit stop’ for a bit of hand clapping and foot stomping to keep the frostbite at bay then I was off once more. The snowball was still growing and getting heavier to push by now. If this sounds a bit like Gerard Hoffnung’s ‘Barrel of Bricks’, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Never say die, I was turning the last corner, level with Mr Lutkin’s off licence – if I’d had any sense, I’d have popped in and asked Mr Lutkin for a giant arrowroot biscuit on tick!

That left almost the whole street before I reached our front gate at number six, circuit complete! By now I was shoving this white monster with my shoulder but my goal was in sight, what did it matter, it was about four foot high now and growing. The bigger it got, the more snow it picked up. A lady neighbour came out to chat, maybe she thought I’d lost my marbles (mental ones that is) but the cold soon sent her scuttling back in again.

The weight of it made it harder to get rolling again and I only needed another twelve foot to reach my target. Just then, some law of physics cracked in (I never was any good at that!) and the whole giant snowball cracked in half – one half fell south, the other half fell north – and I fell to pieces, almost stumbling in the snow. There I was crestfallen (I love a bit of drama), project abandoned, so near yet so far. I just had to leave it where it collapsed and moped back into home, head down, hands deep in pockets. The next day a thaw set in and within two days all the snow was gone. That is, except for two great lumps that lay halfway down our street, they took another week to melt away. Happy days, or a sad day, make up your own minds.

Pat you can soon get soaked through with weather like this ,although its now nice and sunny here and there was a lovely rainbow when we came home from sons a little while ago .

Poor Toby he hates the wind, he shot out for a wee and came racing back in with his tail between his legs :-S

Well according to the news it was a womans body found at Sandringham and she was murdered :-S :-S

I think tea today will be that blessed cold meat again :-S i'll be glad when its all gone now getting a bit sick of wondering what to have with it ,might do chips tonight .

Hope everyone's staying safe with these winds ,wonder how Fiona is ?

Oh William another lovely story , i can remember pushing snowballs about round the garden like that to make a snow man , and once you get to a certain size they are hard to push , i thought you were going to say that you got to a hill and it rolled away :-D

Afternoon All,

We seemed to have escaped the worst winds, just our bin and no-one else's blew over. Quite rainy but dry now. Sounds as if you have had it bad Mel with water flowing like that in the ditches. Poor little birds hanging onto the feeder.

Mandy I thought that murder must be not too far from you. There seem to have been more family murders over this Christmas period than usual.

We have been out this morning and spent a gift voucher pressie on a new bird feeder, one like Maureen's I think with the gauze feeder tray and drinking saucer. Also a new feeder for it as some of our old ones weren't so easy to fill as this one. We also took back some picture mounts that were the wrong size and OH bought yet another diary!! He already has a filof*x and a small diary!! I asked him why he needed another and his reply was 'it is only a pound'!!!! I don't get his logic sometimes!!! lol

Another lovely story William. One thing I used to hate when you rolled a ball of snow to make it bigger was when it would pick up the dirty bits under the snow. But I loved the crunchy sound it made as you rolled it. a sound you either love or hate.

Afternoon All,

You have been busy chatting away.

We got home about 12.30 pm The weather up in Rutland was terrible, At one time you couldn't see the fence for the dense rain, with wind gusts must have been 50 mph. They wouldn't let us leave till it quitened down. The drive home was good, sunshine and cloud, the reflection of the sun on the wet roads, were dangerous, you could hardly see the cars in front.

Ros's trip to Cribb's was a dissaster. Jo. Jans daughter who was driving up from Torquay got stuck in traffic and didn't move for over an hour. Ros and Jan sat in John Lewi#s coffee shop waiting, so didn't get to go shopping. Saved me a fortune.!!!!

Weekend was very quite, We danced round the table at midnight, but that was it.

Haven't sleept well up there, The mattress is far to hard for me, and the Duvet to heavy. Kept thowing it off, then getting cold and pulling it back on, I was awake before dawn every morning and layed till a respectable time to get up.

We have over eaten like all of you, and have bought back the beef from yesterday, That is dinner tonight in onion gravy with potatoes around the meat. Still got loads of veg to use and have put a Rice pudding in the bottom of the oven.

William, I remember well that Winter. but the 48 winter was the one to beat all You didn't live that far from me. Woodford Bridge. Close by was a very steep hill, where we would toboggan down on sheets from the ANDERSON shelters. At the bottom of the hill was an Orchard, with a barbed around wire fence. It didn't stand up to eighnt kids on anderson curved sheets. Good job the apple trees stopped us. I enjoyed the snowball story.

Poor old Fitz, Those tanks are a pest. We had one at Gayton, put in by the previous owners without any help, to save money. Two brick pits joind together with a pipe then went underground to the field behind for the soakaway. Forever playing up, so paid out to have it sorted.

Hope you have all survived the bad weather. The wind is still blowing, but with a lovely sunset. I think it will be cold tonight.

Just going to put the oven on. See yoyu later "HOLBY " is on at 8.00.pm

Cont'd.

Well he came out of the trailer fine after the long journey home and started tucking into the back lawn straightaway so it hadn’t stressed him at all. Being an unknown quantity I decided to lead rather than ride him the half mile to his field. He had old cuts on his face so I wondered if he’d been hit. (not by the chap I bought him from....he loved his horses).

I soon discovered he hated, not just dad, but ALL men and his head would go up and he would pull back even if they tried to lead him.....was worse and would play up if they got on his back. He was fine with traffic, apart from jumping a foot off the ground if a motorbike roared by.....a bit unerving the first time! He didn’t like those red flickering lamps they used to hang on roadworks years ago and would snort and stare at them while stretching himself as far away as he could as he hurried by.

As soon as you got on his back, his neck would arch and he would want to be off in his favourite, high stepping prancing trot. I also soon discovered when I tried to hold him back that he would rear halfway up.........very dangerous if it got any higher, so I concentrated on stopping that first!!! It seemed the energy had to go somewhere and instead of rearing he would stay low but jump up and down on the spot from front to back feet as if about to charge only he didn’t ever do that.

He soon got used to me calling in home when I rode past our house and there were right shennanigans the first time I tried to get him to go straight by. Hopping up and down, running backwards, sideways, spinning to try to get across to the other side of the road. I managed to get him in the long grass on the verge thinking it would slow him down. A man on a bike stopped and shouted ‘get off, get off’ to me, but I knew if he won this battle it might be impossible next time. We ended up at the bottom of the steep sided ditch, covered in scratches from brambles, but we did carry on by!! When I came to a T junction in the road, he wouldn’t always wait, but would barge forward into the traffic if he could, spinning his back end round.....also dangerous! Sometimes I could spin him right round in a circle to try and settle him, but it was as if because he knew where we were going he wanted to get cracking!! I did eventually find a way to deal with this because whenever I was getting off him, he would stand rock still and soon he would do this as soon as I took my feet out of the stirrups whether or not I actually got off. Then, to my surprise and relief, I found I could stop whatever shennanigans he was doing by slipping my feet out of the stirrups. It was like flicking a light switch! I would wait like this a few moments then put my feet back in and he would carry on like a little lamb, waiting or walking..... all the fuss he had made forgotten.

The other thing about him was that you never needed to push him along. You set him at a pace and he would keep to it up and down hill without slowing and would carry on till his heart and lungs gave out if you let him, bless him!! He never did bolt with me, probably because I would turn him sharp if he started to pull so he had to slow down and I only let him gallop uphill!! One of my friends turned him so sharp she fell off!!

Although he was odd, I got used to him and how to deal with him and loved him. I suspect he got those cuts from a man trying to ‘knock sense into him’. He never bit or kicked or tried to buck me off . He was a dream to catch and the blacksmith loved him. He wore his shoes down perfectly, not scuffing the toes or anything. He was the strangest but loveliest pony I have ever known. He would stand and doze for ages, tied to the front gate, my 4 year old brother could lead him and would ‘hug’ his legs.

From the start, when he ran sideways facing forward and crossing his feet I wondered if he’d been taught dressage and found he would do it beautifully on the diagonal too and do the little skip thing to change legs and go the other way, so I was pretty sure he had......also the spinning around his front legs.

Later, I wondered if he had been used in a circus in his past as he was a colour they like. It would explain the neat moves, the rearing thing and his preferred pace of a prancing trot. Maybe he found doing ‘routines’ so ingrained it made it difficult for him to be any other way. Maybe that is where he got his cuts on his head. A lot of maybes......if only he could have told me!!

I would say it was a happy day William, lovely story, I could just picture the little boy pushing an enormous snowball.

I knew it would be hard today but I've had 14 blacksacks/baskets of ironing, managed 12, the other two will have to wait until tomorrow, which will be a lighter day anyway.

Yes, I've had the gusty wind and torrential downpours too, though not as bad I think as some of you.

Enjoyed your pony story Ann, did you actually give the young man your address, I probably would have done had he been good looking ;-)

I have tissues scattered all around the house, cold seems a bit better today and touch wood, haven't had the cough.

I thought 1947 was the worse winter ever Frank, can't say I remember it as I would have been a few weeks old but my mum always said it was freezing and people were actually skating on ponds.

I'm off now to get my dinner ready for when I get back, then load up the car and get rid of all the ironing, think I need a lorry it's going to be a tight squeeze in my little Nissan.