Running around (Elvis) Preseli

My favourite running route is a 6.3 mile loop up towards the Preselis. This is about two thirds of the way looking towards a really pretty farm on the slopes of Foel Cwmcerwyn. It is very bleak up here in the winter and sometimes we can't see it for days. I turn right at the junction, it's a clockwise route.


An ancient road marker. One day I'll stop long enough to read it. Recently someone put a sheep's skull on top of this. It looked appropriate, but it's gone now.

Looking back the way I have just run. Sometimes, even here, the roads are straight. To the right of this picture in the distance (and the lower, rockier hill in the middle of the picture below) is Carn Meini, the only site in which the Preseli bluestone is found. How did they get the stones from there to Stonehenge? Who knows! And why is this road so straight? I'm about to run around two 90 degree bends, but other than that the road is pretty straight again. Who knows why!

Finally for Snailbeachsheperdess from Helium.com:

"In Wales, Pembrokeshire, there is a Neolithic burial chamber which bears the name of St Elvis Cromlech', also in this area is St Elvis Farm and the Preseli Hills. This is considered by most people to be an eerie co-incidence but there are some people who theorise that this, along with Elvis' mother having a Welsh name, Gladys, proves Elvis Presley was of Welsh ancestry. "

I knew I should have called myself Elvis Preseli!

November sky

It was a nice, crisp dry day here today,

rounding off with this lovely sunset.

Four legged friends

So, exactly where am I? What is this place? Who lives here?

Ooooh look! I can see three new friends!

Look at me! I'm GORGEOUS!

Do you wanna be in my gang? Bullseye (grey, foreground); Pippin (aka The Boss, behind Bullseye); Maisie (visiting Exmoor) and Isty (dark bay, extravagant tail) start to get to know each other.


Itsy examines potential riders from head to toe. Hannah (blonde, aged six) and Rosie (brunette, aged four).

How lucky are we? We have been fortunate in being chosen as a new home for Itsy, a devastatingly pretty cob mare. She's 13.1hh and is the perfect addition to our little pony herd. She was owned by fellow blogger Bovey Belle who has written a little about Itsy on her lovely blog Codlins and Cream.

Itsy arrived on Friday and is settling in well. The other ponies were, understandably, astounded to find a new pony in their midst, but there was no animosity and I'm sure they'll be firm friends in a day or two. Itsy has a posh snuggly rug to keep her warm and dry, which caused some consternation among Pippin, Bullseye and Maisie when we put it on last night, but I think today they are all a bit envious of her extra layer.

Itsy is magnificently well-behaved, easy to box and catch (Pippin and Bullseye take note!) and is quite, quite gorgeous. At the moment she's a bit like a glamorous film star amongst a herd of hicks from the sticks. I think Pippin, Bullseye and Maisie will have to raise their game a little!

Nick, chicks and rally madness

It dawned on me yesterday that, although my blog is called 'Life in the Preseli Hills', I have written about everywhere but the Preseli Hills recently.

But the hills are still here and I suppose I avoid writing about life in them because, at times, it seems so mundane. Anyway this weekend there have a been a few happenings of interest, not least the subjects of the above picture.

They are (to me) Nick and his chicks or (to Hannah and Rosie) Troy, Gabriella and Sharpay. They were on Freecycle and we had an empty chicken pen, so ours they have become. We collected them from a farm in St Nicholas on Saturday afternoon and this morning were rewarded with our first cockadoodledoos.

You see, we had a theory about a 'free to a good home' cockerel. We bet that he would have the loudest voice in the world and that we would be startled out of our beds at the crack of doom by his blood curdling yell. Luckily, this is not the case. He's a sweetie. He thinks he's a big bad cockerel boy, cookadoodlin' like a good 'un. In fact he's more of a toot tooter. Perhaps his voice will break and then he'll have the last laugh.

Other excitement was when our little lane became the stage of a car rally. This lane is my school run and is chock-a-block with steep twisty hairpin bends and 90 degree corners. You can see why the rally boys wanted to whizz along it at 3 am. Yes, it was a night stage. I woke up in the early hours of Sunday dreaming of motorbikes, but I could still hear them. The rally cars! I shook Brian who said " off" and "duck" or something, so I pulled on a woolly pully or three and headed out into the sparkling night.

The stars were out, it was crisp and clear. It was completely bonkers. Lots of little cars with their drivers and torch clutching co-pilots zooming past the end of our drive. Overhead I saw two shooting stars. It was magical and bizarrely funny.

This morning on the school run I saw the scars of the rally; rubber everywhere, skid marks and dinks in the hedge banks and, in one particularly bendy bit, the perfect impression of the front of a rally car in the bank. I can just see it now: "Left bend, right bend another left, I said LEFT!"

"BANG!"

Other bits of Preseli life include a new pony, more of which in future blogs, I'm taking part in NaNoWriMo again, we've nearly finished the kitchen, and the washing machine has been fixed and is now 'boring' rather than 'shock and awe'. Right now, the kids are back at school after half term and I'm off for a three and a half mile run in the sunshine.

Help!

My toaster, like all toasters, is a fickle beast, and like all toasters, has Various Settings. One is for Pale and Uninteresting, another is for Perfect!, the third is for Charred, and the fourth for Smoke and Flames.

It seems others appliances within this household have taken note of the toaster's antics.

Last week, for example, the water pump which turns our bore hole water from meager trickle to mighty, er, trickle, changed its normal habit of being Irritatingly Noisy to one of Slightly Explosive.

Meanwhile the bathroom extractor fan, usually Irritatingly Whiny, became Oddly Quiet.

Today the washing machine, an elderly beast of at least a decade, discovered a setting for Shock and Awe.

Finally, Granny in the Annexe, discovered a new setting on her computer screen: Elegant, But Alarming, Plume of Smoke.

What's next? Who knows! My money's on the fridge freezer, normally Chilled or Ice Cool, discovering Alarmingly Warm or Flood.

Help.

Do you remember...?

Do you remember chalk hearts melting on a playground wall?

Do you remember dawn escapes from moon washed college halls?

Do you remember the cherry blossom in the market square?

Do you remember I thought it was confetti in our hair?

Kayleigh by Marillion (Misplaced Childhood, 1985)

I don't normally quote lyrics; I find them a little too much like poetry which can be - like the bible or Shakespeare - a little like someone scraping their nails down a blackboard. But these lyrics (and their accompanying tune) have been floating around in my head today.

Because today found me in Aberystwyth meeting new friends and having a terrific day all round. For me Aber is mired in nostalgia. I spent three years there as a student from 1987 to 1990 (BSc Agricultural Economics) and it hit me today, 20 years later, just how happy I was there.

It's odd to go back there now. I kept expecting one of my bunch of friends to pop up. Outisde the bank, for example, which was then Midland and is now HSBC, or on the sea front.

I found it extraordinarily poignant standing at the north end of the sea front opposite where the Sea View hotel used to stand - I say used to because it burned down a few years ago. There was a big Great Dane dog there and it was where we'd go for last orders. I remember a mad evening there with Sue and Ant and a hippopotamus puppet while Sam Brown sang "Stop" in the background. And someone lived there who I was particularly fond of for a while.

It was odd, too, walking past the sea front halls - Carpenter, Ceredigion, Plynlimon - looking up at the rooms where Fran, Sue, Tracy and Sarah lived and to see that the former Padarn Hall on the corner of Great Darkgate Street where Neill lived is now home to Corals the bookies.

Rummers Wine Bar is still there, tucked into its cosy nook by the bridge over the river. I wonder if it still serves foaming jugs of Stella to thirsty students. It had the best bar staff in Aber too, I've only seen better in kilts in Scotland.

Odd to walk past front doors that used to mean home and whose keys used to rattle in my pocket; the house at the bottom of Constitution Hill where I lived for a term in my third year and Frondeg in Portland Street where I lived for two years.

The town is chock full of the ghosts of Christmas past. Memories of running down the sea front in a ball gown and stilettos; the daily slog up Penglais hill to the campus; walking down to town from the students union at night on the white line in the middle of the road to avoid the rapists in the bushes; sitting in my room in Portland Street in the summer with my legs hanging out of the window as I bashed out another essay; the telephone box at the bottom of Constitution Hill where students would queue to phone home and beg for money.

The sea is a big memory too: Crashing onto the pebbly beach, spray clearing the sea front buildings and coming into our kitchen window two streets in; the night we had a really high tide and the sea came in through the front door; the snorkeler who scared me across the road once (I thought he was a dead body, floating in the sea); walking Richie home to Alex Hall after watching a horror film at the cinema (Alex Hall was a bit too Gothic in the dark, even for a big rugby player!)

I remember the days we couldn't walk on the sea front because the weather was too windy or the sea was too rough; and the storm in October 1987 when I ran home to Frondeg through the streets as slates rained down on the road from the roofs high above me.

Gosh, so many memories. Listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon at night in a car parked on the sea front with someone whose name escapes me now; buying bars of Galaxy and bottles of Coke from Arkwright's after a night in the pub; walking up Constitution Hill on Sunday with a hangover; fending off insults as I walked through the fair in my army kit on TA night; dancing with (another) Richie at the football club on a Saturday night; making popcorn in Frondeg's kitchen in a frying pan without a lid (we'd had wine).

Those three years passed in a blink of an eye. I remember Andy saying one night, probably in Rummers, before we graduated, that we would never have it all again; that we would go our separate ways and lose touch with each other, that life would move on and grown-up things like careers and mortgages, families and children, would take over.

He was right, of course, but I think, at the time, we probably just said: "Nah!" and ordered another jug of Stella.

Spooky

I had one of those evenings last night, you know one of those evenings where everything is full of sinister danger. Outside was a howling torment of wind and rain, inside was all a rattle and a tattle of doors and window frames. It was a bit like being at sea in a big, dark creaking galleon.

So I decided to watch Spooks series one on DVD. Now I'm not the bravest of watchers, it has to be said. I'm okay with things like the Tellytubbies and In the Night Garden, but real proper horror, such as Eastenders and Casualty, scares me witless.

Odd, then, that I should have developed a passion for Spooks. Odder still that I should choose to watch Series One completely on my own while Brian suffered a late shift at work.

So, there I was, crouching terrified on the sofa, half hidden behind a cushion as hero Spook Tom and his attractive blond colleague had their husband and wife cover blown and were in mortal peril. To non-Spooks watchers, said pretty blond then comes to a sticky end courtesy of a deep fat fryer (face first) and a hand gun (which, after the frying incident, was probably the kindest thing to do).

All pretty shocking really, at least for the easily shocked such as myself.

So, I was already in a pretty sensitive state when suddenly my peripheral vision caught sight of Something Nasty walking along my leg in a very furtive and particularly creepy fashion. In a nano-second a blood curdling scream had issued forth while I swatted the beast off.

Once I had restarted my heart and ceased the screaming business, I thought it sensible a) to check exactly what the foul beast had been; and b) to establish whether it was alive or dead.

So I followed its elegant trajectory and found: a shrimp.

What?

Yes, a real, live shrimp, or, to be exact, one of the algae eating shrimps from the fish tank.

"You bastard!" I yelled unkindly at the tiny crustacean.

"Boing," it did back.

Now we paused for a moment of the heebie jeebies, probably on both parts, before I pulled myself together, fetched the goldfish landing net from the cupboard and recaptured the beast. It took three goes, the shrimp being of a bouncy persuasion, but I finally had it in custody and returned it to its tank in the dining room.

In the dining room?

Oh yes. Said shrimpy was a whole room away from home, the wrong side of a closed door.

How?

Now that's a very good question indeed. To get from the tank in the dining room to my lap in the living room is the shrimp equivalent of walking from here in the Preselis to the tip of Everest in Nepal.

So he/she is back in the tank again after his/her adventure. I had a good look to make sure that his/her wife/husband/life partner was also still in the tank too. He/she/it was. After all, one shrimpy shock during an evening of Spooks is enough for anyone.