Happy birthday Tia...

Tia was our first cat, a lilac Burmese. She was very special. She would have been twenty today but she died two years ago of old age - she simply wore out. We were there with her at the end, at the vets. It was sad - very, very sad and it took a while to move on. We still miss her.

Anyway, today is her birthday.

We were in Criccieth this morning and we parked up by the castle on the hill. It was a bit blustery but the sun was shining, so I got out of the car and went to look at the 'funny house thing' that I'd been noticing each time I drove past it.

The 'funny house thing' sits in the centre of an old rowing boat that is planted up each year with bedding by the Britain in Bloom people. The Britain in Bloom people made the 'funny house thing' after the Tsunami in 2004 in remembrance of all the people who lost their lives. It's an oriental spirit house - a place where you can leave a memento or a message to a lost loved one. Lots of people had left messages written on pebbles picked up off the beach - messages to mums, dads, children, husbands, wives - little rememberings of who they were, what they meant.

It made be uncomfortable at first, standing there looking at another persons private memory. And then it didn't as I realised that in reading the messages I was thinking about the person it was written for - picturing, wondering.

I don't know why, but I went down to the beach, picked up a pebble and wrote this message to Tia. I'd like to think that someone will read the message and think and wonder about her.

I wonder if they'll wonder if she was a cat?

Happy birthday Tia, wherever you are.

Whirling Dervish Girl Thing…

Where - oh - where did we go wrong?

Was it the little pink rabbit baby grow with white fluffy tail, or the five piece (top, skirt, hat, socks, shoes) matching sun outfit in lime green and cerise, or maybe it was the rainbow knee socks.... look at her, thank God it’s for charity, sponsored walk, race for life, all sponsorship gratefully accepted in the comments box below.

She couldn’t go out on the street like that could she..?

‘Now THAT is what I call a cool outfit. So much better than the bright stuff she usually wears. I really can’t bear her bright orange school uniform – yellow jumper, yellow skirt – and that awful cerise shirt – what is the headmistress thinking of AND as for those purple shoes and the turquoise tights.. Well, I ask you - it’s like Paul Klee on acid. This is so much more sedate, cultured even… perhaps this whirling Dervish girl thing isn’t so bad after all… IF only she would stand still for a second or two.

Of course I’m a fine one to talk what with my purple fur, fluorescent green whiskers, and banana yellow chest and feet… far too bright if you ask me. A sophisticated cat like me should be black or grey - a nice dark grey, yes, that would suit me. But here I am all… colourful. If only I could look as sober as the WDGT does at the moment I’d be as happy as the man who got the cream.

Why on fish-fins did Mu-Mu make us so bright? Mouserkins down the road is vermillion, Patchy Poo is fuchsia, Old Whistles is aqua (except at his temples where he’s a nice shade of lavender) and young Tommy Tittletat is at least twenty different shades of green. How sickening!

Oh well… it isn’t about our colour, it’s about what we are like inside... but I really like that black skirt thing she’s wearing, perhaps I could get one on meow-bay… now where did Hisfault put his laptop and his credit card? Ah, here they are... www.google.cat.uk... Search… P-U-S-S-Y T-U-T-U. Now, I REALLY like that, such an elegant shade of dark navy…’

… Thank God cats see colour differently to us, different spectrum, something to do with the shape of the iris. I’m sure all of those migraine causing colours would be too much for poor Misty to bear.... They are for me. I’m going to lie down for a bit, my head is pounding… You don’t know how lucky you are Misty... you don’t know how lucky you are…

Rubber Duck Spot...

Rubber Ducks, who can resist them?

Along with my ragged Elephant on wheels my Rubber Duck, bobbing in my bathwater, is one of my earliest memories.

So I've decided to have a regular Monday rubber duck spot on the blog. Here's one that I picked up from the Apex Hotel in Edinburgh.

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Hope that you enjoy the Rubber Duck spot. Let me know.

It's all done with mirrors - and magnets...

Anyone remember the Magic Robot Quiz game?

I do, from my nines or tens, perhaps a little earlier. I think I first played it at my Auntie Kate’s with my girl cousins Lindsey, Judy, Alison and Sue. It was made by Merit games and it fascinated me - it must have for me to have happily played with all those girls. I don’t remember exactly when I got my own Magic Robot but it has to have been some time in the sixties, so mine was a very early version. It probably had questions about the Empire, steam locomotion, and ‘old money’ – ‘What percentage of the globe is coloured pink?’ – ‘Which is the faster train: The Flying Scotsman or The Mallard?’ – ‘How many shillings are there in a guinea?’…

It was all so different back then as you can see - just take a look at those children on the lid of the box.

Which ‘Aliens have taken over the planet in the bodies of small humans’ sci-fi, ‘B’, movie did they come out of – ‘Children of the superbly coiffured hair’? Nice teeth though and plenty of them – particularly the older boy - bet he needed a brace in his teens. I also bet that the girl did ballet… ‘Crippled in a terrible pony trekking accident, would poor Mary Fontaine (‘Fonty’, as she was known at the orphanage where she’d been placed by her wicked stepfather) ever dance again?’ Of course she would - and overcome her disability to become Prima ballerina at Covent Garden – and discover that her mother wasn’t dead at all, but merely a little forgetful where crippled daughters were concerned… And why is the other boy, the small one whose mother probably tells his games teacher that he has ‘a weak chest and a tendency towards migraines’, giving the Magic Robot THE finger? Come to that, what is the goofy boy doing with his hands – ‘Here’s a church, here’s a steeple, open the doors, and here’s the people’? I hope so - I don’t like the overexcited look on his face, nor the over-familiar way that the girl is touching his shoulder.

Were we really like that? I don’t remember wearing school uniform ALL of the time. I bet the older boy grew up to be a second hand car dealer, the girl married an ex-RAF pilot who bought a country pub - then proceeded to drink all of the profits, and the younger lad - the cheeky one with the dubious hand signals - became Julian Clarey.

I remember placing the silvery grey plastic Magic Robot in the tray in the centre of the 'Questions' section – then turning the Magic Robot by his head until his pointer was pointing at the question I wanted answered. It was a sort of an early trivial pursuit for kids with eight sets of fourteen questions. I must have learnt all the answers within a week or so – can’t really remember what they were now though.

Now, here is the magic bit… when you lifted the robot from the question area and placed in the centre of the answers area he rotated himself until he pointed at the correct answer! There was a 'mirror' in the 'answers' section (both questions and answers were in two circles each with half of the board), you stood the robot on the mirror and waited for him to point at the right answer. I used to think the mirror was the secret - that it was full of some powerful force energy that moved the robot to point – as it said on the box, the robot ‘ALWAYS gives the RIGHT answer’.

Wow! How Magical is that? It was incredibly magical to me at the time and I spent hours trying to get the robot to answer a question incorrectly – he never did of course, he was 100% right all of the time. But, even though I found this slightly annoying, I must say that never at any time was I tempted to give the Magic Robot the finger, make odd gestures with my hands whilst thrusting out my front teeth, or put on a blonde wig and dress in a gym slip – well maybe this last one just a little.

Merit also released a "World of Sport" version in the seventies - I think that had an Olympic torchbearer to point to the right answers instead of a robot.
Sport? An Olympic torchbearer?

How… dull.

Of course the mystery has been destroyed by the internet… it tells me that it was all done by magnets. The Magic robot wasn’t magic at all - just a single magnet in the plastic robot and two magnets in the cardboard board. The question area simply set the correct offset on the robot's magnet, and then the robot was allowed to freely rotate in the answer area until the magnets aligned - thus giving the right answer.

How… un-magical. How… scientific. How… very mechanical.

Oh well, what else do you expect from a robot – even a magic one?

By the way, I’m bidding for one on e-bay… can’t quite work out why though.

Big fish eat small fish...

I saw them in the sky the other evening - Breugel's fish. I’d stopped for a loo break on the M6 at the Keele services, only thirty minutes or so from home but I couldn’t wait. Besides, it was a good sky, plenty of cumulus… and there they were, almost too perfect, so perfect I had to look twice.

Big fish eat small fish - Breugel would have loved it. That's his drawing at the bottom of the post - see the fish in the sky? I love Breugel, always have. Weird drawing isn't it?

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the sky since doing my ‘Dali sky’ post thing, and I mean a lot of time. I can hardly take my eyes off the clouds - I’ve even found myself glancing at them when I’m driving which is not good and something I must stop, but it is so hypnotic… watching the clouds as they move and change.

Did you know that the sky is full of dragons? There are dragons everywhere, you can hardly move in the sky for dragons. Take a look. I bet within a few minutes you see a dragon or two popping their horny heads out of the clouds.

I tried it myself just then and got an elephant's head. Look... an elephant! Amazing.

I’ve taken to carrying a camera around so as not to miss anything... is this the start of an obsession? It’s startling what you see. I saw a dog yesterday but the clouds were moving so fast that by the time I’d waited for a plane to move and got the camera ready the atmospheric currents had begun to morph the dog into a splodge. Can you still see it? I think I can just make it out. Is that a dragon above it… or another elephant’s head? I’m not sure, are you?

Doggone!

Dragons and dolphins… go on take a look. I bet you see a dolphin straight away, maybe even a school, slicing their way through a sea of cloud on their way to becoming cloud again.

And fish.

The sky is so full of fish, big fish, small fish, single fish, shoals of fish. They chase and merge with each other, the big fish eating the small fish, sometimes becoming a bigger fish, a dragon, a dolphin, a dog… gone… back to simple water vapour hanging in the air.

Take some time to look. There could be anything up there.

Big fish eat small fish in the sky…Yes, Breugel would have loved it.

My Fisherman friend...

It can’t be that hard. Can it? Fishing?

I’ve never really got to grips with fishing. I never fished when I was a boy and it wasn’t until we came to Wales that I even thought about it - but with so much sea around… well, it seemed like such a waste. After all, isn’t the sea meant to be FULL of fish?

My dad gave me an old beach casting rod which I took to the beach and snapped within minutes – problems with the bail-arm. Well, how was I to know that you were meant to release it when you cast? I’m sure it didn’t say that in the book.

I’m a tryer though, so straight into town to buy another rod… and a new reel, and some line, and weights, and floats, and funny metal things that looked like fish, and some tinfoil hooky things on some line, and a box, and a hat, and a net… I bought just about everything that they had to sell. Surely I could be a fisherman now? After all, I had the gear.

After losing about twenty quids worth of tackle in an hour I was getting pretty fed up. So, perhaps I should have tied the weights on better… and how was I to know that the sea was full of rocks and weed that had been put there simply to grab my tackle so that I had to cut my line and send yet another fiver’s worth of lead and steel down deep to Davy Jones’s locker.

I kept on trying though. How hard could fishing be?

One evening we took our rods to Pwllheli harbour. It was the end of a lovely sunny day and I was definitely going to catch a fish this time. Holly had brought her little rod along with her and was playing at casting into the water a few feet from shore. How sweet. I on the other hand was casting way into the deep water of the harbour channel. I was bound to catch a fish this time, no doubt, definitely, absolutely a fish, and a big one.

“Dad, dad, I think I’ve caught a fish.” Holly screamed excitedly.
“Don’t be silly, you can’t have. It’s probably just some weed.” I replied in my best ‘I know best’ fisherman voice.

It wasn’t weed though. It was a fish - a little Dab. Still at least it proved that there were fish in the water. It would be my turn next and I was going to catch a whopper, maybe a Sea Bass or at least a Huss (whatever that is).

Two hours later I packed away my fishing gear, put it in the car, and later (after we’d arrived home) I stowed it away in the shed.

And there it has remained to this day, gathering cobwebs in the dark whilst I continue with my fishless existence.

Until…

This weekend I met a chap who has offered to teach me to fish (well actually it is his son who has been tasked with teaching me). We popped around on ‘kayak’ business (no, not now – I’ll tell you later – I’m talking fishing here) and I got talking about how I’d love to catch a fish and how I never had - and of course Gaynor filled in all the hilarious details of my disastrous fishing attempts (thanks Gaynor), and the long and short of it (the outcome) was an offer to teach me to fish.

Deep joy! What a nice man, what a very nice man.

So imagine my disillusionment when, last evening, I received this picture on my phone from said ‘very nice man’ showing me what his son (his fourteen year old son) had caught that afternoon… two, lovely, fresh, juicy, trout.

What is he trying to tell me do you think? Perhaps he’s simply showing me what my future in fishing terms has to hold… but look at his face… is he gloating? Is he shaking those two fish at me? Goading me? Is he saying - ‘Look at these lovely fish and you’ve never caught so much as a minnow – LOSER’?

No, he can’t be. Fishermen aren’t like that are they? They aren’t competitive, or close, or singularly vindictive. They are all very nice men. I’ve seen ‘Extreme Fishing’, Robson Green seems very nice. Yes, that must be it, I’ve taken the picture the wrong way – not goading… encouraging, that’s all. It isn’t a sneer. It’s an open honest smile. It isn’t a taunt. It’s a gesture of welcome to the fraternity of fishermen.

After all, aren’t all fishermen friends? I’m sure that’s what it says on the packet.

Walking on the Moon...

We took a stroll on the beach at Gimlet Rock yesterday.

The rain stopped just long enough for us to take a quick look around Pwllheli’s new Sunday market (only two weeks old, it’ll be interesting to see if it takes off) where I bought a milk-blue Opaline dousing crystal. Why? Well, so that you can read about the adventures of the amazing crystal douser in the future of course! And afterwards we drove up to Gimlet Rock to see what we could see.

Gimlet Rock (Carreg yr Imbill) was once a very large plateau of granite that dominated the coastline just off Pwllheli town. It was extensively quarried for stone paving by the Liverpool and Pwllheli Granite Company in the nineteenth century and today most of Gimlet Rock is in Liverpool and Manchester being walked upon by Liverpudlians and Mancunians respectively. Precious little of it remains at Gimlet Rock which, as the name suggests, is little more than a large rock now.

You reach Gimlet Rock by driving through a council estate, past the harbour, and then through a holiday park crammed with overpriced holiday chalets. Once there though you could be forgiven for thinking that you’d landed on the moon - if it wasn’t for the sound of the waves. It’s a little desolate. The beach and surrounding shoreline are strewn with chunks of granite (big, small, and huge) left over from the mining days. There’s even a large metal thing that looks a bit like a crashed rocket. We come here sometimes in the winter, park up and watch the waves, crabbing boats, beach-casters, and (if we are lucky) the occasional seal.

Today though, we are here for a stroll. So we scramble down the steep, rocky, shore and onto the steep, rocky beach. Sometimes the beach is littered with huge pink clam shells, washed up by the sea, but not today – today there is just rock. Pity really, I was looking forward to collecting some shells and taking them back. We have lots in our garden, at the front, in the gravel – maybe next time we’ll be luckier. We walk along the beach towards the remains of the old wooden jetty. It thrusts out of the gravel like the weathered ribcage of some long dead, abandoned, sea creature.

The ships that used to collect the huge blocks of granite from the jetty are just memories now, tens of decades gone - Manchester and Liverpool are concrete (not granite) built these days – but the jetty is still here. I’ve read that a quarryman’s life was a hard one, accidents frequent, men giving up their lives for the stone – onshore and at sea.

Watch out! Mind that you don’t trip over that big rock. It’s half hidden by the sand.

Look, what’s that? Are those seagulls sitting on the jetty posts? They don’t look like seagulls. What are they? They seem to be looking out to sea – watching for something, waiting for something maybe? They look like people (creatures) waiting expectantly for someone (something) to return… Are they figures? What are they doing here? Do you thi… Ouch! What was that? Something flashed past me. Did you feel it? It almost hit me. It felt sad. Like an old memory, not my memory though – someone else’s memory… someone else’s sad memory, here on the moon with my new dowser’s crystal hot in my pocket and guaranteed to find all things lost - maybe I should take it out and just... WAIT… Did one of them just move?

Come on, let’s leave. The winds getting up. I’m cold. I don’t think we’re wanted here today. We’ll come back another time. Perhaps next time we’ll find some scallop shells.