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.