2022 DONE.
This year my Mum announced firmly that she would really prefer to spend Christmas at home with her cat Pudding and no other company, so after we had popped down to visit for a couple of days beforehand then came back to Wales. It was very nice and relaxing and the quick visit to Devon was handy for going to the Cheese Shop in Tavistock to buy Christmas Cheese.
We had a nice lunch at the Bearslake Inn before we went home. I think my mother enjoyed it:
So, it was just me & Pp and the cats and hounds here:
We had a nice Zoom chat with Mum and my sister and her partner on Christmas day evening, which was fun.
Fankil the Grey Cat made it his quest to remove every remaining ornament from the tree and stash them all safely under the sofa. Theo initially disapproved of this anarchic behaviour, but he seems to have got used to it now.
We went down to Sandy Haven beach on Christmas morning, and it was wonderful.
It was a busy time in the Shop on the Borderlands. Just after Christmas we got a huge order for a Very Large Dragon from Fishguard, so we went up there on Boxing Day and did a walk with the hounds after delivering it. This is the view across Lower Fishguard harbour, which is unexpectedly beautiful (the larger harbour where the big cruise liners and ferries dock is behind me, on the other side of the point. I think this must have been the original fishing harbour). I want to come back here and walk more of it!
Fishguard is very proud of being the place where the last ever invasion of mainland Britain (where people actually landed) was defeated, partly by a contingent of Welsh ladies wearing tall hats. The legend goes that the French troops saw the Welsh ladies approaching and thought they were military reinforcements due to their impressively military hats (tall hats being a Thing of the time). Anyway, apparently this pub is where the peace was signed.
I began the new year with the discovery that both my dogs were broken. New Years Eve, they were fine. 2023? Theo has a front-leg limp, and Rosie had back legs doing their own thing entirely without her control. I'm not sure if they overdid it when we went walking on NYE or what.
The dogs were quite insistent that they could not possibly go anywhere or do anything due to their extreme levels of Woe, but must remain on their princess-and-the-pea layers of comfy beds. They basically stayed in bed apart from brief pee breaks for an entire day yesterday, and most of today too. I was really quite worried about them yesterday, but not quite worried enough to call on the emergency vet on New Years Day and they are much brighter today. Theo has had a little outing to the beach, and Rosie managed to run up the stairs this afternoon.
So, since there were no walks needed yesterday, I planted some rose bushes that I have had heeled in waiting for me to get around to them, and mulched the roses I planted last year with well rotted manure. The new roses are GHISLAINE DE FÉLIGONDE musk roses. They grow to a theoretical height of 12 feet, so should help to clad the wire fences I erected in a great hurry when we moved here and I urgently needed dog containment solutions. In a perfect world I would replace them with 6 foot fences, but I'm not sure I can endure further infestations of builders at the moment. We had enough of them in 2022.
Today I went and did a new thing: I went swimming in the sea in the winter! I had been swimming with a local sea-swimming group a few times in the summer (I am not brave enough to swim in the sea alone) but November and December were terribly busy and I fell out of the habit. But today someone I met in the summer asked if I would like to go along, and I thought 'WHY NOT' so I did.
It was terribly cold - not too bad on the legs or body, but my hands took one look at the temperature and burst into frozen pain. I've now ordered a pair of neoprene gloves. They will be handy for kayaking, even if I don't make a regular thing of sea-swimming in the cold.