llywela | TV, holidays and gardening (Reply)

Hey, so it's been a while since I used this blog - just listen to those crickets chirping!

I've more or less decided that when my current LJ sub runs out later in the summer, I will cancel it instead of renewing and might even delete the whole journal at that point – or at the very least make it private for a time, before actually committing to pulling the plug. I'll keep the Dreamwidth journal going, for the archive and occasional new post, but with LJ being the way it is these days, it feels like time to let go. Which will mean also losing my photo archive, which is the real shame (DW doesn't offer that pic-hosting facility, so all the images on DW will become defunct once they are deleted from LJ), but such is life. It is time to move on.

For now, though, since I still have the account for a little longer, I decided to break my silence and actually say something! Maybe one or two people might even see it…

First things first: a TV rec. Currently airing on BBC Wales and available on iPlayer is a show called Hidden, which previously aired on S4C under the name Craith. Craith/Hidden comes from the same stable as the acclaimed Y Gwyll/Hinterland and Un Bore Mercher/Keeping Faith, a joint project between S4C and the BBC, filmed in both Welsh and English for different audiences, and this one I think is my favourite yet. If anyone out there liked Broadchurch, you will also like Hidden – but it won't win the publicity Broadchurch had, because it is tucked away on a regional channel, and whereas Keeping Faith has just won itself a nationwide BBC1 airing for later in the summer, thanks largely to Eve Myles (it is, in fairness, my favourite role of hers that I've seen), Hidden doesn't have any well-known names to draw in the viewers.

It is excellent, though – a crime drama with a twist, and the twist is that we the audience know from the start whodunit, as the show follows the story of both the investigating officers (Sian Reese-Williams is excellent as world-weary DI Cadi John) and the creepy, pathetic, dangerous, yet in some ways almost childlike Dylan Harris and his twisted little family in the woods (Rhodri Meilir is the standout of the show, for me). Plus two more seemingly unrelated sub-plots, which take a few episodes to begin to merge with the main storyline – this isn't the story of a police investigation, this is a very human story about people. Investigator, villain, victim: everyone has a story, and those stories don't begin in the moment of crisis.

So the central mystery of the show isn't whodunit, but rather what exactly happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? And, crucially, can the next one be saved? Watching Dylan's story progress alongside that of the police investigation, waiting for his path to cross with those of the potential new victims…it really ramps up the tension, because we know what the police don't, we get to see Dylan spiralling, are allowed insight into his home life and mind-set to see the pressures he is under, we know that this is a race against time before more people get hurt – but will the police be able to put the pieces together in time?

I'm four episodes in and absolutely loving it – I'd previously recorded Craith but never quite got round to watching it, but now I'm so gripped by Hidden and its slowly converging sub-plots that I might have to just binge the last four episodes in Welsh rather than wait for them to air on BBC Wales, I'm so anxious to know what happens next!

Also, I've seen a lot of Welsh dramas set in the south and west, but Craith/Hidden is set and filmed up north, around Snowdonia, so the Welsh is a different dialect and accent than I'm used to, which I'm really enjoying, plus the scenery and cinematography is beautiful. So go forth, UK people, and check it out!

The other new show I've really enjoyed recently was Bulletproof on Sky One, created by and starring Noel Clarke and Ashley Walters – in general style and tone it felt like nothing so much as a modern version of The Professionals, and was loads of fun to watch, a proper buddy-cop drama in the finest tradition. I'm a little annoyed that a prominent female character got fridged in the final episode, purely so that one of the male leads could be sad about it for five minutes, but that's really my only complaint, other than its being a little rough around the edges in places (and it is hardly alone in that). I found the series as a whole really entertaining, full of both humour and drama, and it is clear that a lot of thought and care went into making it as diverse as possible in multiple ways. It has humour and it has heart, so again, if you get the chance to check it out, folks, please do!

In other news, my Big Sis has recently invested in a holiday lodge at Manorbier (near Tenby) in Pembrokeshire so earlier this month the whole family descended on the place for our annual holiday get-together. It is a beautiful place, rural enough to be really peaceful yet also close to enough leisure and sightseeing attractions to keep holiday-makers busy for weeks, never mind just a few days! Beaches, castles, gardens, theme parks – Pembrokeshire has them all!

This is the site where the lodge is situated:

What's not to love about views like that?

Our first day out was spent at Freshwater East beach on a baking hot Sunday – and just look how lovely and quiet the beach was:

Freshwater East is a five minute drive from the lodge – the equally quiet, unspoiled beach at Manorbier is a three minute drive in the other direction, plus has a castle sitting right above the beach, which, you know, is always big draw for me:

Manorbier Castle, btw, is the birthplace of Gerald of Wales, him what first mentioned King Arthur in his largely fictional 'historical' writings and thus spawned the mythology that came later.

Inside the castle, we met this little guy – I've never had a house martin sit still long enough for me to photograph before:

And I was entranced to see that they've turned their castle ruins into a beautiful garden (plus a holiday cottage, FYI):

I wonder what Gerald would think of it? Not a bad view from the castle walls, either:

The other castle we visited during the week was Picton, near Haverfordwest:

It's an unusual design for a Welsh castle, primarily because where most Welsh castles were built either by native princes as defensive forts or Norman lords as a stamp of conquest, this one was first built by a Flemish baron and then comprehensively re-constructed by an Anglo-Irish judge in the 14th century, so a lot of Irish influence went into its design.

The castle has really beautiful gardens:

And derelict outhouses turned into pretty little grottoes:

Plus a 'secret owlery' (also featuring non-owl guests):

Wildlife was also the theme of a blisteringly hot day at Folly Farm:

So hot, even the camel just kind of collapsed! But this meercat had the right idea:

In the barn, our 'Little May' (as the niece has taken to calling herself; we don't know why, but it's really cute!), learned how to milk a fake cow – just look at that concentration:

In the nearby village of Lamphey, we found the cutest little plant shop you will ever see – racks of plants for sale in the front yard of this cottage, with a note asking customers to just post payment through the letter box!

And in the churchyard next door, I was really struck by this one particular grave marker:

"In loving memory of our unknown shipmate from the U.S.S. coast guard cutter Tampa, torpedoed in the Bristol Channel September 1918"

So, a war memorial, but what really struck me was that this century-old war memorial erected to an American sailor lost at sea had fresh flowers on it – placed to mark the centenary, perhaps? I thought it was really touching that someone had made the effort to do this.

We also visited the Dinosaur Park at Tenby, which is all Layla-May has talked about ever since – she tells anyone who will listen that she saw dinosaurs and they were really big and really scary, with sharp, sharp claws and terrible teeth in their terrible jaws (at which point, she tends to segue into a recital of The Gruffalo…)

This little guy, though, I think has been mislabelled – I mean, they call him a dinosaur, but come on: it is very clearly a baby dragon that hasn't grown its wings yet!

Also not a dinosaur:

And finally, I would like to note for the record that the boating lake at Oakwood Theme Park is really pretty - especially if you happen to visit on a day when you have a knee injury (I damaged my medial collateral ligament about three weeks before we went) and are therefore completely unable to contribute to the peddling of the peddle boat and have no choice but to sit back and relax while others do all the hard work

In other, other news this is what my garden looked like at the beginning of March, when the Beast from the East hit:

Pretty impressive overnight snowfall for this temperate coastal climate! The university where I work actually closed due to the snow, first time in its history (and my first ever snow day).

And this is my garden in April, looking a lot greener, first signs of spring, but still pretty ratty - a mild winter followed by late snowfall was not kind to a lot of my plants.

So I decided that the time was right to begin to set in motion a plan I'd been cooking up all winter, to extend the herbaceous border and thus shrink the lawn. This turned out to be a rather more difficult undertaking than I originally expected, because once I started digging, I found – well, this:

So now at last I understand why my lawn is always so rubbish! Because it is growing out of about half an inch of topsoil thinly laid over a great heap of rubble! Seriously, this is how much rubble I dug out of just one little strip up the side of the lawn:

Half bricks, broken paving slabs, shards of glass – you name it, I found it, less than an inch below the surface. Worth all the hard digging in the end, though – this is the first strip, freshly dug and ready for planting, back in April:

Planting and seeding commenced:

And the digging continued!

New plants and seeds went in – I am extremely grateful to the Pound Shop in town for so regularly stocking a really lovely range of plants, which I've found to be both beautiful and healthy if you manage to pick them up on the day they hit the shelf (by far the cheapest option for planting a new bed).

So that was May. Fast forward a few weeks to the beginning of July...and the garden is now a sea of flowers, bees and butterflies! Ignore the lawn, the lawn is horrible, thanks to the heatwave and the fact that it is growing out of only about an inch of soil over a layer of rubble, but the flower beds are just bursting with life – I'm really pleased with how it is coming along!