Lle Llywela

Hello, chaps, how are we all doing? This year is going great so far, isn't it – not. And we haven't even reached the Ides of March yet! Sheesh.

It's been a while since I updated, so I can't even remember what I've noted here and what I haven't. I don't even know where to begin!

( Very long update is behind the cut )

It’s been a while since I updated this journal – and it seems like all I ever blog about these days is family stuff, so I’ll just give a brief update on that and then move onto other subjects.

The main family news is that my Big Sis and her Hub brought their children home to live two weeks ago today, and they are now in the process of bonding as a family. It hasn’t been without its ups and downs, as you’d expect. The children have had disrupted little lives, Miss E in particular, so understanding that this is forever will take a lot of time and patience, while forming a true familial bond is something that can’t be rushed but rather will grow gradually over time. They’ve all had colds. Little G came out in spots and is now on antibiotic for a bacterial infection. Miss E is quite jealous of Sis’s time and attention and has started talking about past trauma beyond what was noted in her file – and has proved to be obsessively tidy in a way that is also indicative of past trauma. The smaller of the two dogs has become very protective and keeps stressing herself out trying to watch over both children at the same time, which is aggravating her epilepsy. But on the whole they are doing okay, still cocooned within the bonding bubble that is required of the first few weeks together as a family.

As for me, I think I’m only now beginning to fully understand just how stressed and depressed I’ve been all this year – well, for longer than that, really – with everything that’s been going on. I won’t go into any of the more personal ins and outs, but one effect of this is that I haven’t been able to do a lot of the things I usually do to relax, like write or attempt any other creative endeavour. No matter how much I want to work on a project, my brain just won’t do it – keeps shorting out from worrying about too many things, it’s a struggle to focus on anything, never mind attempt to be creative.

So I’m trying to be really gentle with myself and not place any demands on myself at all. I’m letting all my creative projects just sit and percolate – they’ll still be there waiting, when I feel better.

Instead, I’m doing a lot of comfort-TV-watching. If the brain doesn’t want to do anything, take it off the hook for a while! Gentleman Jack and Good Omens have been two new shows that I really enjoyed this year, although I have mostly retreated into the comfort of re-watches.

But I think I must be beginning to feel at least a little bit better, because I’m getting quite excited about the new Star Trek: Picard show, which is due to air for international viewers on 24 January on Amazon Prime – and it feels like an age since I felt this sort of enthusiasm for anything, so this has come as quite a relief.

I wasn’t expecting it – I certainly didn’t feel like this when Discovery came out. I didn’t even attempt to watch that until two seasons had already aired, although I’ve seen it now and enjoyed it, for the most part, while agreeing with those critics who’ve suggested that making it a prequel didn’t do it any favours. Picard, though – TNG was the Star Trek of my youth. I grew up watching it. As a teen, I collected tie-in novels with my pocket money (still have one or two favourites I couldn’t quite bear to part with when I got rid of the rest to free up shelf space). I followed TNG, DS9 and Voyager from start to finish, when they were on TV, although I never took to Enterprise.

I hadn’t given the franchise much thought for years, though, once it went off the air. Doctor Who was my thing – I started collecting DVDs of the Classic series almost as soon as they started to be released, back when it was the only Doctor Who that existed, no ‘classic’ about it, because the reboot hadn’t happened yet. With Star Trek, I was content to let it be a thing I’d enjoyed at the time but then moved on from when it was over. I looked at the DVDs from time to time over the years but didn’t want them quite enough to justify the investment. I caught random episodes now and then in re-runs on cable, but that was it.

Then I treated myself to a Netflix subscription last Christmas as a pick-me-up. And Netflix has all seasons of Star Trek ever – including Discovery, which was when I finally got around to watching that. After a while, I started dipping in and out of both TNG and Voyager to refresh my memory of those – and I picked those two as the least serialised, so that it wouldn’t matter if I was only watching the odd episode now and then, and it wouldn’t matter how long it took to get through all the seasons or even if I never made it very far at all, there was no pressure, it was just for fun. Comfort viewing of the kind I’ve been craving all year, safe and cosy and nostalgic.

But then this new Picard series started to be talked about, and casting details started to come out, and snippets of information about characters and plot. And I got interested, and then more interested, and started to wonder if it would be possible to get through all seven seasons of TNG before it airs, rather than going into it relying on 20-30-year-old memories – and actually found that target motivating rather than intimidating, which I am taking as a good sign.

Comic-Con panels and trailers back in the summer and again this week have provided more snippets of information about what to expect, including returning cast members from TNG (and Voyager) and first sight of the new crew, who are very much not TNG 2.0 – this is, it is clear, going to be a very different kind of show, with very notable undertones of Firefly, ragtag team of misfits on a totally unauthorised mission, which has got my interest well and truly piqued. And with all that, my TNG re-watch kind of stepped up still another gear almost without my noticing, while Voyager pretty much fell by the wayside – even though a character from Voyager is going to be in the new show, with important backstory that would probably be useful to bone up on. Only so many spare hours in a week, after all.

I’m halfway through season four now, so I might make it! Seasons one and two were a bit of a slog, but seasons three and four are excellent, I'd forgotten how much! And I'm having lots of fannish thoughts, and following all new information that becomes available, trying to piece together as much as I can from what has been released, and it really does feel like forever since I felt this enthused and interested in anything new, so I'm really hoping this is the start of being able to pull out of the doldrums at last. I've found in the past that when I can't be creative, writing analytically about something that interests me is a good way of keeping the brain ticking over in the meantime, but haven't even managed that this year - so beginning to at least think analytically, piecing together available information for a new show to try to figure out what to expect from it, that's got to be a good start, no? And maybe, in time, the rest will come...

In which I am not actually going to discuss the state of the nation, because that would be depressing beyond words and might lead to me spitting nails at the world in general, so perhaps this post would be better titled 'the state of my life in 2018', but that doesn't sound as good.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I made a resolve to be better at blogging here but have so far failed miserably, so as the end of the year is fast approaching I thought I'd try to put together a round-up of my year, for my own sake as much as anything else. I haven't talked about a lot of this stuff online as it was happening, but I think I need to get it out and recorded coherently, for my own reference. Feel free to read or ignore as the mood strikes you

( This is likely to get long, so I'll put it behind a cut! )

So that's been my year. A lot of stress and worry, and a spot of gardening.

So yesterday I went out after work to have a bite to eat before finally making it to the cinema to watch the new Star Wars film, Rogue One - which, ( spoiler alert ). So I didn't get home until almost 10pm, whereupon I was perturbed by a hissing sound coming from the cupboard under the stairs.

One of the water pipes had sprung a leak. In the cupboard. Which is a big cupboard, in which I store everything that needs to be stored out of sight. All of which is now soaked.

But I have a landlord, and the landlord has a maintenance guy and a plumber on retainer. So I contact the plumber. He informs me that he's off work sick and I need to contact the maintenance guy. I contact the maintenance guy. He's not answering. I leave a message. I go to bed. Except that my bedroom is right by the cupboard, so all I can hear is the hisssssssss of leaking water, so I can't sleep. So I take my pillow and quilt through to the lounge and sleep on the sofa instead.

Morning comes. Maintenance guy finally makes contact and promises to come look at the leak asap. I have to go to work, because there's an event on today that I organised and I have to be there for it, so I go to work and I go to the event. The food is great. Maintenance guy gets in touch to say he's fixed the leak.

But now. Now, I'm going to have to go home and face the dreaded mopping up, figure out what can be salvaged and what'll have to be chucked. My box of Christmas decorations is soaked! I just put them away! My fan heater, my little fibre optic Christmas tree, the strimmer - so much electrical stuff, now wet. Bah humbug.

Happy new year, eh.

Is it mean-spirited to spend Halloween hiding in the back room with all the lights switched off? I just really kind of resent the commercial hijacking of an ancient pagan tradition - and I especially resent that it's become an excuse for all the neighbourhood kids to learn extortion. So I'm hiding.

I haven't updated in a while, since free time is becoming a rare commodity. I have found time to check out the new Doctor Who spin-off, though - Class is currently airing on Saturdays on BBC3. I think I'm well and truly past the target demographic, but I'm enjoying it anyway, it's been promising so far. I've always enjoyed Katherine Kelly's work and I'm loving her as Miss Quill, and I like the other characters too (although the show does fall into the eternal telly trope of hiring 20-somethings to play teenagers). Plus, it's the first high school show I've ever seen that actually reflects the kind of ethnic demographic that was my personal high school experience, so there's that (in my A'level history class there were eight students, of which two were white, the rest from a variety of backgrounds - none of us noticed until the teacher pointed it out, because we didn't think of each other that way). And, you know, it's the Whoniverse. I'm liking it more than I liked the last few seasons of the main show!

Also on my tellybox currently is the second season of Poldark, which is still very beautiful and all the actors are very lovely, and the show is doing a better job of balancing and interweaving sub-plots than it did in season one, although it continues to deviate from the source material in sometimes inexplicable and damaging ways - I really wish Debbie Horsfield had more faith in Graham's novels as written. I also wish she'd read the entire series before attempting to adapt it! She has admitted she only read each book as she adapted it, and it shows - she's had to backpeddle more than once as a result of this approach. But so far she's doing a lovely job with Dwight and Caroline, and since I'm all about Dwight and Caroline when I read the books, that's what I care about most!

But Poldark is no longer on my live viewing schedule, because Y Gwyll began its third season last night on S4C, delegating Poldark to catch-up viewing. It's the first time I've managed to catch Y Gwyll for the Welsh language version on S4C - two seasons in a row I've managed to completely miss it thanks to not realising it was on, and had to catch the bilingual Welsh-English version Hinterland on the BBC a few months later. So the next few Sundays are going to be all about Y Gwyll, which remains as atmospheric and as plot dense as ever.

In other news, family stuff remains difficult - my little sister is not coping with motherhood, the combination of autism and post-natal depression sending her into something of a spiral, leaving her intensely vulnerable and easy prey for negative influences, to which she is sadly susceptible. One so-called friend in particular is taking advantage in a big way, and nothing anyone says or does seems to pull her out of the spiral. So the burden of childcare falls to my parents, who are applying for a child arrangement order to safeguard the baby's future. Layla-May, however, remains oblivious to all of this - she is the happiest little soul in the world (except when you turn a camera in her direction, whereupon she becomes very solemn). At 13 months she is very tall and very active - she's not just walking confidently, she spends all day running, non-stop! One day she might even have hair...


But my Mum and Dad are in their late 60s, and it's a big burden for them to take on, so I am stepping up as the support system and am currently spending a lot of time being Aunty 'Ro-Ro'.

1. Something was filmed on my street yesterday afternoon, but alas I will likely never know what it is*, because I was at work and not at home watching.

*Unless, of course, I happen to recognise my street while watching something over the next few months!

2. My colleague finally gave birth to her baby on Tuesday! I say finally, he's actually two weeks early still, but his birth has supposedly been imminent for weeks now - she was taken into hospital at 28 weeks because they thought she was about to go (her last baby was born at 31 weeks), but evidently the bed rest did the trick as she made it to 38 weeks before popping! Baby is 8lb5 so a real bruiser compared to the last one, who was only 3lb11 - also, another very fast delivery. Active labour was just 15 minutes this time, compared to 20 minutes with her last baby! So, congratulations to Sarah, Dylan and Holly on the safe arrival of little Alex.

3. Layla-May cut her first tooth this week, hallelujah - she's been teething for about five months without anything ever actually coming through, so it was about time, really. Look at this tall, happy little sunflower!

1. Well, the new semester has just barely begun and already Freshers Flu is rife all through the department. Atchoo!

2. This is how my city has chosen to mark the Rugby World Cup:

It just appeared one morning. Hilarious!

3. It's been one of those weeks. I went back to work on Monday after a week off to find that one of my colleagues had died while I was on leave! Not a direct colleague within my department, but the maintenance manager from Estates. Bless him, Ron is the only person in the entire university who has their name highlighted in my telephone directory, I rang him that often, because he was the person I liaised with every time about redecoration projects and repair work and all the rest of it. I knew he was unwell, and had guessed from small clues that it was cancer, but he didn't like to talk about it - always brushed it off and maintained his image as the chirpy little sparrow. I spoke to him just a week before he died, he was still in work, although probably shouldn't have been. Turns out, it wasn't the cancer that killed him, though. He took his own life. That's what's so awful about it. He had cancer of the oesophagus and was due to have surgery just a couple of days after he died, but he'd already had three rounds of surgery and it kept coming back...it seems he just couldn't take any more. He took an overdose. It's really horrible to think of him being so scared and unhappy and not feeling able to talk to anyone about it. :( Rest in peace, Ronnie.

4. On a more pragmatic note, I have all kinds of outstanding jobs with Ron that will probably never now be completed!

5. Also this week, we've had a two-day bus strike, which coincided with train problems and Rugby World Cup road closures, so that thanks to a combination of all these factors I ended up walking to and from work for two days straight, a journey of over an hour each way. Which...I actually quite like the walk, because most of it is through parkland and along the river, and will picspam on that subject another day, but still! Good thing the weather's been so lovely this week, crisp and clear. I'd have had a harder time of it if it had rained!

6. When I moved into this flat two years ago and began to turn the wasteland out back into an actual garden, I made a point of planting a lot of bee and butterfly friendly flowers, to encourage insects. I wasn't, however, expecting to end up with a whole colony of these guys!

This, apparently, is a speckled bush cricket, although it looks more green than speckled to me. I've got loads of them, they've been living mainly in my mint and salvia all summer, but the one I photographed was chilling on a rose leaf, enjoying a spot of late afternoon sun. This is the rose:

Pretty, yes? It's called Harry Wheatcroft and was the very first plant to be planted in my garden.

7. During my week off work the week before last, I didn't really do much beyond hang out at my mum's house helping out with the new baby, because Chelsea was really unwell after her traumatic birth, but I did take a day to go for a walk along the promenade and cliff path in Penarth, which is always lovely. Look at this view across to Flatholm and Steepholm and the north coast of Somerset:

Timing is everything - while admiring the view, a gorgeous square-rigged tall ship came sailing along from the west, past the islands...

And around toward Cardiff Bay:

All she needed was Captain Jack Sparrow!

8. My Uncle Colin is in hospital having a coronary bypass today - and while his wife is in New Zealand visiting their daughter and grandchildren, as well! Get well soon, Uncle Col!

9. Layla-May is three weeks old today and gorgeous:

Went to see the Lion King stage show at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay last night - absolutely beautiful! The costumes are amazing.

Although I'm not sure Mufasa was supposed to stumble up Pride Rock in the opening number, I'm almost certain he's meant to be more majestic than that, and I was slightly distracted when a light in the bank just to the right of the stage blew out in the final set piece...but overall it was absolutely gorgeous - 10/10 recommend seeing it, if you get the chance!

And then today we had out little little Christmas carol concert in work, which was lovely. We do it every year, on the last Thursday before Christmas: everyone crowds into the Reception area, a few staff members bring in musical instruments and we all sing our hearts out, all traditional Christmas carols - even the senior managers and directors come out of their Very Important executive board meeting to join the festivities - and there’s a collection for a nominated charity (this year cancer research, in memory of our friend and colleague John who died earlier this year), one of the engineers does a funny Christmas reading, and then afterward there’s mince pies provided by the Director.

Perfect.

If I could just shake this stupid cold, I'd declare myself ready for Christmas!

Okay, so one of the things I did recently was spend a day out in Cowbridge with my mother. Cowbridge is a pretty little market town a few miles west of Cardiff. It has quirky little shops to wander around, and it also has a medieval Physic Garden, which was restored about 10 years ago and is now freely open to the public.

In the Physic Garden, I found this:


To Laudanum
"Thou faithful friend in all my grief
In thy soft arms I find relief
In thee forget my woes
Unfeeling waste my wintry day
And pass with thee the night away
Reclin'd in soft repose"

Yep,you read it right, that's an ode to laudanum, written by the bard Iolo Morgannwg in 1794. Because why wouldn't an 18th century poet write an ode to the virtues of opium!

1. Father Mine seems to be recovering nicely after his knee replacement - almost two weeks on and he is well enough to be bored, hobbling around the house getting under my mother's feet and sneaking out when she isn't looking to take the dog for a short walk!

2. The day before Dad had his surgery, his cousin Alma also went under the knife - in her case it was the third surgery since Christmas, which is not to be sniffed at for someone who is 80 now. She's had melanoma - it started on her leg and was removed some years ago, then they found it in her nose a few months back, hence the multiple surgeries, which thank goodness have seen every last scrap of the cancer removed. Unfortunately they also saw every last scrap of cartilage removed, so she's basically had to have her entire nose rebuilt, but she's very philosophical about that. "I've always wanted a smaller, cuter nose," she told the surgeon. "And I've had to wait till I'm 80, so please make it cute!" Bless her she's out and about already and in great spirits. I'm very fond of Alma, so hopefully she has many more years in her yet!

3. I took the plunge and invested in a new computer at the weekend, taking with me not one but two technical advisers to help choose which one. I ended up with a laptop - at the upper end of my price limit but much higher spec than I expected to be able to afford thanks to being substantially reduced as last-in-store, and so far so good. I'm delighted with the speed and functionality now that I've got it set up the way I want it, and although I haven't reinstalled all my old programmes yet, I haven't come across any that won't work on Windows 8 yet, so fingers crossed that continues!

4. Also at the weekend, I held a working bee to dig a couple of borders around my scrubby little lawn out back and got a few plants into the ground. There's still a lot of work to do, but by summer I might even have a nice garden to enjoy.