Giant July - a review of the month

Everyone, meet Darwin. He's a giant tortoise.

I met Darwin on one of my best work days ever, filming behind the scenes at Cotswold Wildlife Park. 

In the same week I visited Warrington to help support team members doing some filming there. The office is very near the Warrington Wolves rugby league stadium. (I took a pic but it's mainly of the car park so I'll spare you.)

Warrington wasn't my only northerly trip this month. Cathy and I went to see comedian Taylor Tomlinson in Manchester. We also had a look round the National Football Museum and met up with Connor. 

No photos allowed during the show

Another "giant" step, at least it feels like it for me, was joining a political party for the first time. I've blogged about becoming a member of Plaid Cymru and am enjoying getting stuck in. I also attended a Yes Cymru protest at the Senedd that was asking for the Crown Estate land in Wales to be devolved to the Welsh Government, to match the situation in Scotland where the Scottish Government has responsibility for it.

In between protests and political canvassing, I also got out on the Keep Grangetown Tidy litter pick (where a couple of lost footballs made it into my latest post about Lost Footballs) and went to the Penarth Model Railway show.

Speaking of footballs... I enjoyed watching the Women's Euros and England's gutsy underdog win. The new football season is starting up and I went to four games, including two trips across the border to see Barry play friendlies in England, Penybont's UEFA Conference League qualifier against Kauno Zalgiris, and Cardiff Draconians' first game in the Cymru South (the Welsh second tier).

Futbology badge!

The Dracs have had to make some improvements to their ground and now have a new "supporter's entrance".

I've also invested in a Dracs season ticket, so you can expect to hear them mentioned quite a few times as the season goes on.

Anglesey butterflies (and other beasties)

One of our days out on our North Wales Holiday was to Pilipalas Nature World on Anglesey. The centrepiece for the attraction is a butterfly house (pilipala means butterfly in Cymraeg) and it was probably the best tropical house we've experienced. Butterflies everywhere! 

The butterflies fly straight at you when you come in, and are very comfortable sitting on your shoulder to take a rest.

It's not just pilipalas at Pilipalas Nature World, though. There are small mammals, birds, reptiles, bugs and some fun farmyard animals in a small petting zoo - including a very needy goat called Dahlia who did not like me showing attention to any of the other animals when I could be stroking her!

Lots of fun lizards and snakes and things.

Just kidding - this was a model

I'd not seen zebra mice before.

The meerkat cafe overlooked the meerkats, which made for some fun viewing while partaking of refreshments. 

There was a very tame kookaburra who was happy to pose for photos. 

The kune-kune pigs were called Bert and Ernie and liked having their backs scratched.

And the rooster with a very fluffy bum was hilarious as well, strutting around in his feathery britches. 

We had a thoroughly enjoyable day out at Pilipalas and it's now on our list of places we would happily visit again. 

Recap of the month - February 2023

This monthly round up is a bit late because the end of February and the beginning of March proved to be very busy with a work trip to North Wales, followed by adventuring to the eastern side of England - but there will be more about that when I review March!

I didn't blog much in February because it was a very busy footballing month, including a new milestone on the first Saturday when I travelled with one of my footballing friends called Paul to the Kassam Stadium in Oxford. This was my first visit to that football ground and it became the 100th ground I've watched football at since I started keeping a record of football matches in 1992. 

The Friday night immediately before hitting my century of grounds on the Saturday I went to Abergavenny Town's rather dilapidated old ground, which was my 99th ground where I've seen a game. On both the Friday and the Saturday I was supporting the away team - Barry Town and Shrewsbury Town - and both times the team I supported won 1-0.

In total I went to 8 games, which was a new record monthly total for February. In addition to Oxford and Abergavenny, I saw two games at different grounds in Port Talbot. The Viking ship on the Port Talbot Town logo caught my eye.

I went to two Barry home games, and saw Barry play a game in Taff's Well too. I dragged my buddy Connor along to one of the games at Jenner Park. It was the first time he'd seen them since before the pandemic.

I even had a trip to Caldicot where I saw my friend Ben play for Caldicot Town against Tredegar Town. 

Due to an injury crisis at the club, Ben was playing in an unfamiliar role at right back. Despite that his team won. 

It wasn't all football though. In the middle of the month, we had a lovely Saturday with my sister, Sarah, and her three kids. We met them in Bristol and visited The Wild Place, which is a well-planned zoo park with a variety of animals kept in nice environments. The highlight was the walkways through woods populated with lynx, wolves, wolverines and bears. The bears were hibernating but we were able to watch them snooze on the den-cam. (Even if they had been awake, you're not allowed to play with them anyway.)

I went back to Oxford for a second time later in the month, this time with Cathy. We stopped to have lunch with a friend on our way to Haddenham, which isn't too far away.  Our friend, Colin, had passed away and we were on our way to his funeral. 

We got to know Colin because we became good friends with his daughter, Viv, when we started attending the same church as her back at the start of the century. He was a kind, gentle man with a good sense of humour. He was also a skilled potter and he gifted us several ceramic items that will remind us of him. 

Colin's funeral was in the parish church of St Mary the Virgin in Haddenham. We had visited the church before, when Viv and Ian got married there just over 15 years ago. 

Outside the church is the village duck pond. This is an important cinematic landmark because it was the film location for the scene in The Great Muppet Caper when Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo land in the UK after being thrown out of the cargo hold of an aeroplane. I feel Colin would have appreciated that we stopped to take a selfie with it (see the picture at the top of the blog post).

Snack of the Month - we're going to eat the zoo, zoo, zoo

My final "Snack of the Month" for 2022 is a packet of cute animal-shaped biscuits that make up the "Leibniz Zoo". These are another Snack of the Month that was sourced by Cathy, who nabbed the last bag on the shelf in our local Lidl. 

The cute giraffe on the front caught her eye. Packaging design for the win!

There's a cute design on the back along with a recommendation for deer snacks - which is a tenuous enough link to Christmas to make this a seasonal snack!

There is a decent volume of bite-size biscuits in the bag. I was reasonably impressed by how many were in there. 

And the variety of shapes was impressive too. A proper zoo of creatures, including ducks! This is one of each type - but there were three or four of most of them. The duck was the rarest as the one in the picture was the sole one in the bag. There were lots of horses. 

As plain biscuits go, these were nice. They tested like a more buttery version of a rich tea biscuit. They weren't very sweet and they were good dunked in tea.

I won't be rushing back to the zoo, having tried these once. But I did really like the rhino biscuit - here's a close up to close the review!