April 1st

Not an April fool...I won first prize for my daffodils in the Rhydlewis Gardening Club Spring Show!

Sort of.

Okay, I’ll ’fess up. I won first prize in the category photograph of daffodils.

But, honestly, I could not have been more proud. 

The real winners were Janette, who lives ‘at the top’ of Rhylewis and Barbara, who lives in Brynhoffnant, which is on the way to the pretty fishing village of Llangrannog. Dilys, who teaches at the local school, won ‘best exhibit’ for her gorgeous daffs. 

The table in the village hall looked a picture of spring with its exhibits, and everyone - Jim and I including - put a lot of effort into choosing and arranging their entries. I was most struck by the camellias, these seem to do really well around here, both in pots and in gardens. So now I’m on the look-out for a cheapie cutting, as well-established camellias are almost £15 at the market.

For a while, in the garden, it has seemed like we were hard landscapers, rather than gardeners, and at least the Spring Show pulled our focus away from finishing the garage driveway, cementing the new greenhouse base into position and removing and moving turves from new veg beds to areas that needed a bit of grassy help. We wanted the garden to look at least a bit ‘up to it’ when Norma came, but it was the colour that caught her eye; the polys outside the front door, the anemones on the little bank beside the path and the daff that form a half-moon shape around the new lawn and the tulips on the front wall. 

We’ve been hoping Norma would pay us a visit; she was our next-door-neighbour for almost 30 years. She chose a wonderful week; the weather has been hot - record breaking  - and even West Wales. We were able to get out and about. I took Norma to the  National Woollen Mill, the museum of the history of wool in Wales. I hadn’t been myself, despite the fact that it is barely twenty minutes south of us. We had a good time, watching a traditional weaver use his loom, and looking round all the machinery that must have been noisy nightmare for the Victorian workers. We had an even better time in the woollen mill’s shop! Norma kindly bought me a Welsh wool rug which we use every evening on our knees when the temperature drops, and she bought Jim a pair of real Welsh Wool socks. 

The following day we took Norma to Brynhoffnant. The tide was in a perfect place to walk on both beaches and then have a G&T outside The Ship. We also dragged her off to see dishy Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman in Black; which the local book club is reading at the moment. I haven’t yet made a meeting of this book club, but I’ve got to know Vicky, who runs it, very well in the process of not going to meetings! Having read Woman in Black on my Kindle (cheap and quick to obtain) I have to say that the scriptwriters for the film did a very good job off strengthening the rather weak plot, adding interest to the rather weak characters, finding a much more satisfying ending and adding far more moments of real terror. When these shocks came at you in the cinema, the entire row of seats bounced as everyone gasped.

Mwldan, the arts centre in Cardigan, shows all the blockbuster movies; it also has live events, everything from travelling ballet to folk groups. We went to see Lennie Henry ‘live from the National Theatre’ in Comedy of Errors, recently. This does feel a little odd; watching live actors on a screen, but it did work of me, I soon forgot I wasn’t actually sitting in the auditorium. Our next plan is to try to do some of the opera they screen ‘live from the Met’ in New York. 

Meanwhile, back on the ground, its time to get the spuds in!