bunn | Entries tagged with pembrokeshire

It was Pp's birthday today, so since the forecast was clear and windless, we went out in the boat.

We had lunch in the shelter of Skokholm island, with puffins and guillemots whirring busily past us. There were no seals today, but there were bluebells and whatever that small white flower is that you can just see forming masses among the grass in the photo below.

Then, since the weather was good, we went on past the next island, Skomer, whose massive cliffs were surprisingly busy with visiting tourists, as well as seabirds. That meant we went into St Bride's Bay, the wide bay between Skomer island and the massive point of westward-thrusting rock that holds St Davids, the smallest city in Britain. The oil tankers often hang about in St Brides Bay, and there was one lurking there today, waiting for a space at the oil terminal, I assume.

However, the wind from the north was getting up, so we decided that was enough exploring for now, and headed back south through Jack Sound. Jack Sound has a bit of a reputation as a difficult passage, but the tide was flowing straight south, so we thought we'd risk it, and in the end it was a smoother route than the seas around Skomer had been.

Here's one of the tourist boats going out from St Martin's Haven to Skomer behind us, as we came out of Jack Sound and started heading home.

We've volunteered to support our friends the Celtic Longboat rowers again - last year we went to Saundersfoot with them. They have a team of nine, with four rowing and one coxing at any time, the rest of them ride in the RIB with us until it's time to swap over.

This year we have ambitions to go north, out to Grassholm, the island of the gannets, which depending on who you ask, is 6, 8, or 11 miles off the coast, and then across St Brides Bay to Solva. If it happens (and it will be very weather dependent!) it will be mid-August when we try it. At present, we are just doing a bit of training in the estuary, including swapping boats, towing the Celtic, and so on.

I'd always thought of this as a poetic phrase, but yesterday it happened to me! We were out in kayaks on the Pembroke River, a very calm sunny evening, the sky blue and the water full of reflections of the ploughed red hills, sun on the yellow gorse and white blackthorn-flowers. The sun was going down into the hills west of us, and directly opposite, a huge pale moon was rising. The reflections were unreal.

I did try to photograph it, but my phone camera is clearly not wired for poetry.

Theo and I went for a beach wander in the March sun. Waves crashing on the sand, and an almost empty shore.

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One of Theo's absurdly large ears is painful and a bit gunky again. I am tentatively putting this down to my having given him too many Asda Southern Fried Chicken Chunks as treats on his training course. Back to beef and insects only and ears wiped out daily with leucillin.

I feel like I've fallen enough behind posting that I'm just going to type random things that come to mind.

It poured with rain today, but I walked to Pembroke with Theo anyway, and went to a coffee shop.

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What else have I been doing? I've kayaked across the Cleddau river to swim on the other side a few times, though this summer is cooler and wetter than last, so there's been less kayaking in general.

I took Pp and Theo for a wander along Lindsway Bay to peer at the lighthouse we briefly considered buying when we were moving to Pembrokeshire, and concluded that as we had suspected, buying it would have been a terrible mistake. Another mistake was that days' assumption that the forecast cloud would keep Pp cool enough to go walking: it was waaaay too hot for him.

I went down to Devon to visit my mother at the end of July: I've not been able to go for a while because Rosie wasn't up to the journey and I was worried about leaving her.

It was a good visit, even though it rained a lot there too. We drove over to Widemouth Bay on the North coast and wandered around on a Cornish beach for a change, pottered around Tavistock, and I took Theo up for a walk on the moors. Baked a banana bread with bonus kiwi fruit in it.

I voted in the election, despite my polling card arriving about a week too late.

Oh, and we did take the Celtic Longboat rowers for a Long Row, though not for the planned Fishguard to Pwllheli row, since they weren't able to get a support yacht, which was required for that race. Instead they rowed from Gelliswick to Saundersfoot, which is still a respectable distance and further than we'd been before in the RIB.

It was a bit stressful in the harbour in Saundersfoot, which is a drying harbour with a lot of mud at low tide and not a lot of room to manoever a very long and fragile thing that is the Celtic Longboat. We got our propeller caught on a buoy rope. But it was fine, and probably a good experience of things going a bit wrong.

We'd completely forgotten that Mondays come after Sundays, which was important, because the Castlemartin Firing range is closed on Sundays, but not on Mondays, and we had to come home in the RIB on Monday. So we ended up going a couple miles out to sea to avoid it, which was the furthest we've been out to sea. We probably need a better radio with more range to do that again.

I've been enjoying swimming with the Bluetits this summer. I am cautious about sea swimming, but the Bluetits are active enough that there's always someone that wants to swim when I do, and usually someone who has already got a convenient time planned.

So far I've mostly swum at Freshwater East, once or twice at Angle: both of them conventionally pretty sandy beaches, and at Hazelbeach, which is a shingle beach inside the Cleddau estuary. A bit weedy, but you can go straight into the water and out without getting sand all over you.

Of the swims I've done so far, the most memorable was definitely the swim at Lydstep - a month ago now, but I wanted to make a post about it and have only just got round to it. The hillsides were full of tufts of pink thrift as we made our way down the winding path and steps to a steep cleft in the rocks.
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Current Mood: cheerful

1. Developed an excellent technique for getting medication into Theo's giant floppy ears. For some reason, it's fine if I put the medicine on my finger and then my finger into his ears. Ears are now sorted.

I attended the Patients Participation Group at my local NHS practice a couple of months ago. The idea of these is to get a patients-eye perspective on the practice, and also provide an avenue for the practice to communicate with the patients while they aren't actively being ill.

This practice, it is fair to say, has a dire reputation. Just the mention of it gets people tutting gloomily. 

Being short of doctors, it resorted to the system of requiring people who wish for an appointment with a GP to phone at 8am each day. resulting in a mad frenzy that maxes out the phone system.  By 8:20, all the appointments for the day have gone.   There's no way to book ahead, and no other way to contact a doctor or to make a non-urgent appointment. 

It doesn't matter how many complicated ways you find to slice the cake, if the main problem is that there is nothing like enough cake.  The doctor present feels that paid-for GP's appointments lie ahead and are only a matter of time.  

Though, I am not sure if that will actually help much in this case, since the major problem here seems to be less lack of money than remoteness, and reluctance of medical staff with many jobs to choose from, to isolate themselves in obscure Western lands, and particularly, to go to work for practices with appalling reputations.   This is also a very white area, and the doctor who spoke to us was fairly up-front about racism being an issue for many potential recruits, which is a particularly awful thing to hear. 

The social media complaints have become something of a self-fulfilling  prophesy: the more people complain in public, the more potential recruits are deterred from choosing to work there. 

There's also the problem that unlike England, NHS Wales has not invested in electronic prescription system, and therefore, all doctors are stuck on a treadmill of endless manual prescription signing.  I must say that one surprised me, and I darkly suspect that the thorny problem of providing everything in English and Welsh is an issue there. Which I support, but possibly not to the point where people are actually dying as a result. 

Anyway. There was a Senedd member present who had come out from Cardiff for the meeting, so I'm hoping he's going to raise that with whoever it is can actually change things. 

I am not sure that there's much I can do as an untrained volunteer to contribute to anything, but armed with this info, I have managed to help calm a major Angry On FAceboOK incident, which I think is the kind of help they wanted from the group. 

Things are better here than at a neighbouring practice, where the last doctor retired a few months back and now the practice is probably going to close. I'm not sure what happens then. I really hope it doesn't involve all the patients being allocated to the practices around. 

The good news is that they have actually managed to recruit one extra doctor, who will have started work by now.  They've also given their receptionists more training, which I guess allows them to shuffle the deckchairs on the Titanic faster and with more assurance. 

The time has come for photos of dogs! Today we went to Stackpole woods and practiced Theo Standing On Things. I was so pleased with him Standing on these wooden mushrooms that I photographed him twice.

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Storm Arwen was pretty wild here, particularly since builders are hard at work in the garage making more Shop storage, and have busily removed all defences between us and the ocean winds, replacing them with a temporary and not very wind-proof door.  But they are motoring on with enormous speed, so with luck this will not be the case for too long. 

At one point they were playing Eye of the Tiger  and SINGING ALONG.  Given how fast they are going, the possibility that there was some sort of Montage going on down there seems good. 
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I love these two tugs. They look tiny here but when we've kayaked past them they somehow transform from bathtub toys to Monstrous Vehicles of Industry.

I took a photo of them from the north side of the river when the wind lulled and I took the hounds out for a walk .

The coast path goes all along the northern side of the estuary, past the oil refinery, where we found a rather terrifying wire tunnel over a lot of pipes.

A LOT of pipes. Going down to the place where the tankers dock (with the aid of the surprisingly large tugs).

I'm really enjoying living here, and so is Theo! This is the little beach just around the corner from our house. Most of the time it's a shingle beach, but when the sun and tide come together at the right moment it's glorious.

For balance, here's some grafitti I found under the Cleddau bridge up at the eastern end of the town. Eve the grafitti has a pretty good view, tbh, as long as you look in the right direction.

Rosie seems to quite like the beach too, though she does sometimes find it a bit chilly.

So the dogs would be nice and tired for Firework Night, I took them to Freshwater West beach today. The tide was down, so there was a LOT of beach.

Which dog cannot be trusted off the lead on the beach even though she is 13?

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I did not see the seal that swam past the house the other day because Theo had managed to find a place where he could scramble over the wall AGAIN. I have bought yet more wire fencing but have not yet had a chance to erect it. It's been a busy week what with one thing and another.

But I did see the egrets which came for a while on a recent high tide. Such elegant birds.

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The builders who were supposed to be arriving next week have cried off due to Covid-related supply problems. However, the Bathroom Guy is supposedly now over his bout of Covid and subsequent isolation, and in theory should be here next week. I am not holding my breath. Long ago in the optimistic Spring, we thought that the bathroom would be done and dusted by the time D&D rolled around at the end of Oct, but I now doubt the work will even be started. We have hired a little shower-bathroom thing that sits outside, which, the gods of the pandemic allowing, will arrive on Friday, because even if other roleplayers are happy to share one shower and two loos for a week, I have decided I am now old enough and grumpy enough to cry: NO! to that. Annoyingly, you can hire a shower that goes inside the house just in a room (if you have space), but not a toilet. Temporary toilets have to be Outdoors for Reasons of Hygiene. Which is ridiculous really because in the not-bathroom there is a currently ex-toilet (the Once and Future Toilet, one might say, since it will be one again) that is insulated from the mains sewer by the inadequate means of a plastic bag thrust roughly into its gaping maw, which I am pretty sure is also Forbidden but we have lived with that since May and nobody has died yet.

On a tangent, to my enormous if somewhat self-consciously ridiculous pride, I have made a construction of old floorboards and erected upon it a sink, in the room where the boiler lives. I plumbed in the cold water and the waste connection, but am currently stumped by the problem of how to turn off the hot water for long enough to plumb the hot tap in. I was hoping that Bathroom Guy would know how to do this, since presumably he will have to do it to plumb in the Bathroom Things. We shall see.

I looked through my The Plague tag and thought I would add these photos to my personal record. We go here most days with stuff being sent from Shop on the Borderlands. I miss the friendly Gunnislake post-office with Jack the dog and windows that let in the day-light, though we're starting to know the staff here a little, and it is undeniably convenient that they are open such long hours. Even if the postoffice bit is closed, we can still drop off parcels. It's a bit of a pity that it's not dog friendly, or else I could walk here with the dogs and the parcels. At least, I could on light-parcel days and those are not very common now. Anyway.

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It's a hot one. I went swimming today from the little beach by the house for the first time. I had previously been deterred by ... I don't know. Potential swans (they can break your arm, you know). Green weed. Winkles. Fish. Etc. But today it was too hot to worry about any of that. I plunged in. It was great.

I wore the wetsuit shorts I bought for kayaking. They are a tiny bit too loose for ideal swimming shorts, but then I wasn't swimming very enthusiastically so it didn't matter that I had to haul them up occasionally.

Here is the sunset yesterday. Looks almost tropical. Most unlike Wales.

This morning, Pp noticed somethings swimming up the estuary, mostly under the water but occasionally just surfacing visibly. I think they may have been harbour porpoises. Sadly I wasn't able to get a good enough photo of them to confirm.

It was a stressful weekend because the Shop was down and the support guys were frankly not in any way supportive so I spent ages fiddling around with it myself. But I decided not to get stressed about it and after a horrible horrible headache on Sat, managed to not fret and tried a few things, and now it's fine. Hurray.

I'm enjoying having a new area to explore with the hounds. Rosie found a little house among the foliage

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I forgot to take photos of two of the Garden Features : the anchors. These were discovered on the estuary floor by the previous owner of the house, who was a diving instructor. I've taken those rather ugly plastic pots away and filled them with pelargoniums now.

the smaller anchor

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This is what we started with on the lower side of the house. It's rough concrete, a bit cracked, and with no fence or gate onto the lane on the right-hand side.

I strung some wire across the driveway so I could at least let the hounds out without them running for the hills, and put down a roll of sheeps-wool garden felt — I was intending to put some compost under it and plant things into it, but the winds here are fierce, and even when wet, the garden felt won't stay put! I still intend to use it, but will need to put some rocks on it to keep it still. The wind also knocked the wire fencing over a lot.

view from above. Those bird feeders attract a lot of birds, including a woodpecker!

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Yes, in the middle of a pandemic, we moved to a place that we had each visited for a few hours on one occasion. At the moment, the only people with their normal furniture are the dogs. We brought the garden chairs on the grounds that being aluminium and plastic, they are very light so were easy to get in and out of the van Pp hired. Here he is still sporting his lockdown beard. He's gone back to Cornwall now, to prepare for the Moving of the Shop.
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WELL. It has been a rather frantic few weeks. The Shop on the Borderlands has been growing like a particularly enthusiastic weed, and, already pushed for space, we decided that we were really going to have to look at Doing Something. We now have stock in all the bedrooms, tucked under beds and packed onto shelves, and getting stuff up and down the stairs was starting to be a major chore.

We'd started to look vaguely at other houses, and then it occurred to me that I knew a few people who had moved to South Wales recently, so we started to look via the internet at that area too, particularly Pembrokeshire, which is rather like Cornwall in many ways, and before long we had a shortlist, and were starting to work on decluttering and painting the house to make it saleable...

Anyway, we'd got to that point when lockdown restrictions were eased, and since Pp was off to Bristol to pick up some more second hand games, we thought, why not pop over and take a look at a few areas, and actually, why not take a look at a house while he's there....

And then of course, I had to go and have a look too...

And now we have had an offer accepted on this house and suddenly everything is moving very very fast! The photography really doesn't do that house justice. In fact, this was a bit of a theme of many places we looked at, the photography was often AWFUL and left a lot of questions open, which is just what you don't want in the land of Covid19. I'm thinking I probably would like to do the photography myself rather than rely on an estate agent to do it, since frankly most of them seem to be less good with a camera than I am.

We've had assorted shysters and pessimists of the Estate Agent variety to look at our Cornwall house, and we've been working flat out on rendering it relatively clean and neat inside and out. Am kicking myself for not having it painted back in June, when the painter I got to quote had lots of availability: I booked him for August, and now he's saying he can't do it till the second week in Sept, and since the outside of the house has big black seams where we had the render fixed, all the estate agents agree that painting the place is absolutely essential, sigh. And I *really* don't want to DIY that.

On the plus side, apparently people are fleeing the cities in the time of plague in the traditional manner, so our hopes are high that someone will want to flee to the Tamar Valley, where they can work from home.

What else has happened? Oh yes, further to my hip problems, I decided to do a course of https://www.secondnature.io/ which is a sort of diet-and-lifestyle-change program, to try to relieve the weight on the hips. One of the key things is cutting right back on sugar and eating only smaller amounts of whole-grain carbohydrates and a lot more veg. I must say, I am somewhat amazed by how much of a change this has made to my energy levels, and my hips also have improved vastly. I've lost about 6 pounds in six weeks, which is not exactly a mountain of blubber, but it feels like a lot more. I no longer feel like I need to nap every afternoon, my hips are much happier, and I can both walk and garden energetically without feeling too zonked by it! So yes. Sugar. Delightful but better eaten rarely. Which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but still.