Acts of Beauty

Goodbye Barbie, goodbye mountains, goodbye cottage, goodbye slate, goodbye river, goodbye lovely friends,

see you next time.

As we left the cottage this morning I noticed that our furry friend had left us a gift on out doorstep.  How kind.

But I was actually pleased because I thought it looked nice.  As we were walking on the hills two days ago, past all the piles of sheep pooh, I thought how great it would be to make pictures out of them, but I didn’t at the time.  I got as far as asking Rob how he would feel about holding my hand after I did that.  He said he didn’t mind, it was just cellulose.  But the walking took over.  So, here was my chance.  After our outing, I set to work.

I felt like it left an appropriate message to our cottage:

An hour later Barbie herself turned up for her photocall:

It’s a little blurry due to the vanishing light, but Barbie, your star is rising.

She wanted to be an artist aswell as a model, so she made her own contribution:

Ah, the transience of all things.

Rob and I are sleeping on the floor of the living room, which is two feet away from the front door and window.  On the first night we were woken at about 5am by a whole host of strange noises.

Tonight when it happened again, I decided to get up and find out what all the noise was about.

I discovered this:

Yes that’s right, your eyes do not deceive you, that is a sheep, or rather, Barbie the sheep, at our door.  She was bleating over and over again, and appears to be pressed up against the door, trying to get in.  Barbie is next door’s pet lamb, born in April, an orphan.  She is so tame she is more like a dog than a lamb, is not afraid of cars, people or, in fact, dogs.  When they try to re-instate her into the flock they will have an interesting time herding her.  Anyway she is not so tame as to be able to resist the temptation to run into the living room, jump onto the sofa and pee all over it, or so we had been warned, so I didn’t open the door to shoo her away.  Half an hour later (with more maa-ing), a small boy came out from next door, and it became clear that the sheep had unhooked the gate when it came up the path, so was trapped.  Tonight I will be tying the gate shut.

We finally arrived last night at our cottage near Machynlleth, to a very warm welcome and a gorgeous fish pie.  The next day, we went walking up a hill to discover the bearded lake (Llyn Barfog).  I found this hump, which to me looked like an ant’s nest, but Rob assured me it was a rock covered in grass.  Whichever, it was a very friendly hump that invited me to attach my assorted sheep’s wool to it. Further along the hilltop I balanced this: After our hill walking we tripped off down to the sea (in the car), and it was lovely: the chips in the cone just right, windyness – to – looseness-of-new-straw-hat ratio perfect, and the strings of seaweed lying around, endlessly inspiring.  I made lots of videos of myself playing with one seaweed strand, so edited version to come.

Finally I made this sand mandala:

using the seaweed as a spiral,

This is clearly not your average castle, this one has stones in the moat:

Hooray for today!