Jennieworld Today

I did the race! And as you can see, fate was smiling on me, as the rain stayed away and I didn’t get wet or muddy! Happy days! I know I’m overloading on exclamation marks, but I’m so relieved to have done it and not got soaked on the way. And as well, I managed to raise in excess of £150 this year, which I’m very proud to have done, and grateful to my sponsors for their generosity. Roll on next year!

Race for Life starts in a little under three hours, and I’m really not looking forward to it. The sky is grey and heavy with rain, the ground is saturated and one step from becoming a mud bath. I am in a quandary. This is my dilemma; do I get to the front, run like hell (despite being almost completely unfit) and half kill myself trying to stay towards the front and therefore in front of the developing mudbath, or do I accept that this is very unlikely to actually happen, and go prepared in wellies to walk five kilometres through mud? At the moment I’m leaning towards the half killing myself option, if only because I can then come home faster and get the chocolate out!

Hi guys, I’ve sent out my begging e-mail for sponsorship for my 5k run, and the fundraising website is ready to go! The URL is www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/mjpowell. Any pennies you have to spare would be most welcome!  

It’s that time of year again, and I’ve now signed up (rather late in the day) to take part in the Cancer Research UK Race for Life on 27th June. Usually I sign up as soon as possible in February, but for some reason I just didn’t get round to it this year. I’m sorting out my fundraising page at the moment, and will post more details of that once it all comes together.

I wasn’t going to take part this year as I felt a bit bad asking for money from people for doing a mere 5k when my brother in law is going to all of the effort of cycling from London to Paris to raise money to fund research into pancreatic cancer (click here for a link to his fundraising page if you have a pound or two to spare for this really worthwhile cause). However, in the end I felt too guilty and thought that even if I only raise £100 it’s £100 which they wouldn’t have had otherwise, and so I should go for it. Plus, by leaving the registration this late, it’s a fairly safe bet that I’m not taking the place of some dedicated fundraiser who would have raised thousands, as they’d all have booked their places months ago.

I really really hope that the weather will be better on the 27th June than it is today though, as the rain has been absolutely torrential in phases.

Check back in a couple of days for details of my fundraising website where you can sponsor me online if you feel so inclined!

A few weeks ago I joined the Facebook website, interested to see what it was all about. I’m very surprised a few weeks on then to find myself back in touch with a dozen or more schoolfriends as well as people going back even further who I really thought I’d never have the opportunity to contact again! And to think that I nearly dismissed it as something only used by schoolkids and people just out of school. One problem that I have with it though is that there is no facility to enter your maiden name so that you could be searched for under either your pre- or post-married name. For example, almost everyone who I was in school with wouldn’t have the first idea what my married surname is, and so if they were looking for me wouldn’t stand a chance of finding me. I just hope that I haven’t changed too much from schooldays so that if they see my profile picture they’d recognise me from that.

I’m trying to brush up my German ready for a short holiday I will be taking later in the year, and it has brought back many memories of my school language lessons. In retrospect, languages were my best subjects, and I really should have carried on with them to A-level. I enjoyed learning French, and I had a fantastic teacher, Madame Davies (born French but married a Welshman) who has since sadly passed away. We didn’t think she was that wonderful at first, mind you, as she bullied us into using French constantly when we were in her classroom to the exclusion of all other languages! Whatever we wanted to say, we had to tell her and she would translate it to French for us to copy. I don’t know why, but the sentence “Je voudrais un cahier neuf, s’il vous plait” (I need a new exercise book please) is the one I remember her teaching us the most! She must have had to tell us that sentence most lessons for the first couple of years! However, her methods worked, and I got my A* at GCSE. To this day I think that if I was dropped in the middle of the ‘Frenchest’ part of France I’d still be able to make myself understood.

German lessons were very different. The teacher was much more laid back, and we all loved him for it. He went through phases of making us speak German all the time, but I don’t remember him ever being so strict as our French teacher. I know I was never so confident with my German as I was with my French. However, I got my A at GCSE, and left it behind. And now, I’m surprised at how little I remember. Before I picked up my refresher course I think I could just about remember enough to tell you that my name is Jennie and I live in Wales! I’m hoping that it will come flooding back to me as I progress through the course.

I’m also thinking about taking some sort of evening class in a language next academic year. But which one do I choose? French would probably be the easiest, as I have the firmest foundation in that, and yet given the choice I’m much more likely to go to Italy or Spain for holidays so maybe they’d be a better idea? Or maybe I should take German and try to bring it up to the same level as my French was? Well, I have three months to decide if I’ll take any courses at all.

Ten years ago I voted in favour of having an elected assembly for Wales, thinking that this would improve the representation of this small Principality in Britain as a whole. I thought that it would highlight issues in a way that a dozen MPs in a large British Parliament would find it hard to do. And I think that it hasn’t done badly with it’s limited powers during its first eight years. However, now it seems like it’s turning into some sort of national parish council; something which will only be mocked by the rest of the UK and create an impression of people from Wales that we are poor losers and throw the toys out of the pram as soon as something happens that we don’t like. I refer of course to this so-called “rainbow alliance” nonsense which the petulant AMs from the Plaid, Lib Dem and Tory parties are trying to set up to dismiss Labour from its place in the administration. I voted Liberal Democrat in this last election, but I’m regretting it bitterly now and am quite sure that they’ll not receive another vote from me unless they can get their act together and behave like an independent party rather than petty power-grabbers willing to ally themselves with parties whose views are poles away from their own. How much does this alliance think that it will achieve? Surely the Tories will agree with Plaid about very little? I wouldn’t have thought that they’d achieve much in tandem with the Lib Dems either, except for that party’s apparent willingness to prostitute itself and its values for a seat in power. Basically, it has been so long since any of these parties had any influence in the larger political sphere that they are willing to try anything to claw back power. I really feel that the parties of the “Alliance” need to be very careful, as surely a lot of wavering voters, and voters who strongly dislike their tactics (like myself) will now be very tempted to give their votes to the Labour party. After all, they only need to gain five seats to have a full majority. Perhaps we should have another election next month. Get rid of these petulant little parties for a full term and get things done in this country without their whining voices giving people indigestion.

I love going home. Home in this context is always the part of the world in which I grew up around Aberaeron in Mid-Wales. The moment that I drive over the mountain near home and catch my first sight of the sea in Cardigan Bay is one which never fails to bring me a deep sense of contentment. Of course, I have to treasure all of these moments now, as it won’t be long before my parents move house and I can’t go back so often. I have been back for a visit this week just gone, and took the pictures in this entry. The one above is of the breakwater outside Aberaeron Harbour. It gives the misleading impression that we have a sandy beach. Unfortunately this is the only patch of sand in sight amongst the pebbles, although there are gorgeous beaches a couple of miles down the coast at New Quay.

This picture shows the outer harbour, and I took it more for the interesting sky than the actual harbour, which I prefer when it’s at high tide with all the boats bobbing away!

And finally I zoomed in a bit for this one, so that you could see three places which are important to me. Firstly, my school, which is the range of buildings on the hill overlooking the town. Imagine the potential in the views for disrupting my concentration (which happened often!). Secondly, the cream coloured house which is at the far end of the terrace on the left of the picture houses Evans and Davies Solicitors, which is where I got my ambition to go to Cardiff Law School and study for my degree in Law. Finally, and some may say most importantly, the single storey building next to the office I used to work in is home to honey ice cream, which, once you have tried it, puts Mr Whippy ice cream in the shade forever. There’s really no going back!! A trip home just isn’t complete unless we’ve had a quick drive down the road to have a honey ice cream by the quayside!