Heavy rain lashing at the window all night. Woke up a couple of times and lay there listening. Then up at six thirty as is usually the case when it’s my turn to make the tea. However today I was dressed and at it by six forty five and out of the house five minutes later taking our Tom to the stayshun. He came up with Joe and Lucy in their car yesterday but had commitments in London today.
Relentless rain yesterday an all. Spend the whole day at the farm shifting stuff which is why the London crowd were up. We’ve been storing miscellaneous bits from the Beyond The Woods festival. Old sofas, signs, lots of stuff from around the festival site. We stopped putting the event on years ago, a combination of cancellation due to a storm that blew through resulting in the cancellation of most outdoor events that weekend including Boardmasters and then two years on the trot due to covid. After that the team had moved on and had busy jobs with no time to spare to run a festival. Takes many person months to get up and running and we had a core team of maybe fifteen or more volunteers with many more during the festival itself. The heavy rain is set to continue this morning so we will have to see how we get on. We have a load of crappy wood to burn.
On Thursday I discovered the resting place of my 2g grandparents Ben and Mary Davies: Amor Baptist Chapel, Llanfynydd. I’m in correspondence with a distant cousin I’ve not yet met but who I came across on Ancestry and he mentioned the place and that he was planning to visit. I am going with him in May. Then when going through some old bits of research I found a note re the chapel I’d scribbled when I was doing this stuff almost twenty years ago. Totes forgot about it. Next I found the will of his father, Ben Davies that I had also forgotten about. It’s quite nice finding these things as they have the handwriting of your relatives although on occasion this is an X, her mark. I have examples where I’m pretty sure both parents could read and write but their daughter couldn’t. Marriage registers usually. In one case Margaret Evans nee Davies was the daughter of a Baptist minister so not surprising that she could write. She married a farmer and had nine children and again not, perhaps, a surprise that her daughter Mary couldn’t.
The other interesting observation is that in the official documents they were Benjamin Davies but their signatures said Ben Davies. Natural really but nice to feel that touch of “reality” if that is the right word. Humanity perhaps?
One nice thing about working in the rain yesterday was that I stayed perfectly dry. It might not have been particularly nice working in the rain but having the right gear makes a huge difference. My boots had trodden through a lot of mud and water but kept it all out. Ditto my old Lonap raincoat. The Tilley hat keeps the rain off yer specs. It’s the one I wore on the coast to coast walk where the first two days were driving rain.
So Tom is now on his way back to London and I’m sat in the snug. Didn’t seem much point in going back to bed when I could be catching up on my diary. Had no time yesterday and was somewhat fatigued when we got home. Not used to all this physical work. In fact I wouldn’t have been able to do it during the last three years or so. The new hips are pretty miraculous. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to walk pain free and not I notice it all the time. The contrast. Wow.