Moving out of the city

In November we hit four years of living here. I think we can now safely say that we are not going to get cold feet and run away back to street lights and cinemas and delis. I think we are going to stay put.

A friend asked me the other day what we felt about moving out of the city and whether we felt we had made the right move. I could tell she didn't quite get it. People come up here and some say "You are living my dream" while others are too polite to say so but go away clearly thinking we are nuts. I am in list making mode today having been making Christmas lists as an alternative to actually doing something so here are

Things I miss about the city:

1. living round the corner from a really good delicatessen.
2. the view from Waterloo Bridge.
3. slipping out for a curry.
4. that sense of being at the heart of things.

and some things I don't miss:

1. dirt, rubbish blowing the streets.
2. crowds, especially
3. on rush hour tubes, where you end up crushed up against somebody's armpit.
4. noise and rush and the casual rudeness of a place which is too full.

And the downsides of living in the country?

1. Mud. In winter you can't go outside without walking socks and rigger boots and both boots and cars are mired in mud.
2. Distance from everything. You need to be organised to live here when running out of butter can mean a forty minute round trip.
3. Mud, did I say that?
4. Dust and spiders if you mind either or both. They don't really bother me. They are perhaps a reflection of living in an old house rather than a rural one.
5. Solitude could be a downside I suppose. There is quite a lot of time on your own but I don't mind that either as long as I have a blast of sociability every few days to stop me going peculiar.

And the upsides?

1. Space, a couple of acres to grow things in and wander about in and to really breathe.
2. Hens, scratching and clucking and running about and making me laugh and giving us the best eggs ever.
3. Views, green and trees down to the bottom of the valley and up to the ridge and the hills green and purple against the sky.
4. Silence, broken by the mewing of a soaring buzzard or the distant bleating of sheep.
5. The friendliness of people in the village, stopping, chatting, everything happening at a gentle, pottering pace.
6. Swallows in the summer and woodpeckers on the bird feeders in winter.
7. Starlight and a clear cold moon on nights that are truly dark.

I wouldn't change it for the world.

A new baby

On Wednesday my daughter had her first baby, a little boy. He was two weeks early and delivered eventually, after a long labour, by caesarean section. They are both fine and still in hospital, with E longing to go home!

It has been quite a journey for her with a pregnancy plagued by sickness. As always she has been her mainly cheerful and stoical self. She has always been like this, not one to fuss, not one to seek sympathy. As a two year old she had whooping cough. Even then, her face flaming and streaked with tears and her little body shaking with the spasms, as soon as the coughing stopped she would shake herself, blow her nose and say firmly "I'm all right Mummy." I have admired her so much as she has gone through this pregnancy, exhausted, sick, trying to hold down a difficult job, but, just as soon as the nausea faded, back to herself, strong and calm and without self pity. She is quite a girl, or a woman now I suppose. And her husband has been fantastic too: shopping and cooking and doing the laundry, singlehandedly looking after their allotment while doing his own work and keeping her spirits high.

You don't know what to expect or how you will feel as you watch your daughter approach the birth of her first baby. Underneath all other feelings there is a faint running surprise that time has whirled away like water down the plughole and your baby is now having a child of her own. How can that have happened so fast? If I close my eyes I can see her sleeping in her carry cot. There are whole stretches of the intervening years that are hazy, although bright images suddenly leap out from the mist to which I struggle to attach a date. But her birth and those first few months of caring for her are clear and vivid and instantly accessible. I don't have to strive to remember. It is all there behind my eyelids.

I did not find motherhood easy that first time. I bonded with her instantly and utterly but I took months to find my feet and to stop feeling adrift in a sea of exhaustion and incompetence. What to do with my memories of my own experience has been difficult. I haven't wanted her to be as totally taken aback as I was by how hard it is to look after a baby. I remember feeling that there must have been a great conspiracy of silence, all those people who had congratulated me on becoming pregnant who must have known how hard it was going to be but who had never told me. I was angry with them. I thought I should have been warned. But I haven't wanted to be all doom and gloom, the spectre at the feast, pouring cold water on her happiness. I have tried to walk a middle way but I may have said too much or too little, I really don't know, and she may have quite a different experience to mine. She might be one of the mothers I used to watch with the babies who never cry and sleep through at six weeks. I hope so.

It has got me right in the gut, wanting everything to be ok. When I found out she had had the baby a great surge of relief washed over me. She was all right. The baby was all right. A tiny tight knot which I had been carrying about in my stomach melted away. I had to see them to really be certain it was all ok. I drove for three and a half hours and arrived at the hospital just as visiting hours began. The joy at seeing her knocked me over like a wave in the surf. She was so happy with her baby and he was so perfect, tiny, with a surprisingly strong nose and E's long slender fingers and toes. There must be something about the handing on of one's genes. I felt I had handed her the baton. I could fall back, dropping my stride, letting the race surge on without me. As I drove back, stopping frequently knowing I was tired, the line from Othello came unbidden into my head "If it were now to die, t'were now to be most happy." Strange, strange, strange.

And now I feel connected to her as I used to be when she was a child. We are quite close and one of us will often ring to find the other was just about to pick up the phone. This happens with my other children too and there is just the same sense with them of being attached even though now that they are adults the line is long and loose, as it should be. But now as the baby is three days old I find myself thinking about her all the time, imagining the nights, wondering how she is, not quite able to settle to anything without the thought of her and the baby rising again and again to the surface of my mind. It must be something genetic, something primitive which focuses the efforts of the grandmother on the new generation, carrying the genes forward into the life after we will be gone.

But it is hers to do now, hers and her husband's as they make a new family. I hope I will be a good grandmother to the new baby as I think I am to my stepson's little boy who I love to bits. I hope I can give them support and love without interference. I hope I can make their lives easier and respect their instincts and their choices. I hope I can be as good a mother to her and grandmother to her son as my mother is to me and to my children.

A family can be a wonderful thing, in all its complexity. Perhaps the fact that mine is a step family makes me think about how it works more consciously - complicated, sometimes difficult, always sustaining, wonderful. Welcome to our family, new baby. Sleep well, my daughter and my grandson. I love you.

Christmas cake

Well here I am with another evening on my own and this time I am up here without a car. The wind has been battering the house all day so inside has been the only place to be and here by the woodburner the wind is blowing in the chimney and making the flames leap higher. All day the wind has shouted and shuddered and thrown great showers of rain at the house. Astonishingly the hens, who have been shut into the run all week while I have been away visiting my daughter, were so desperate to get out that they have spent the day being buffeted about the garden, their feathers blown inside out like a bad hair day, struggling against the wind and rain, hiding in the bottom of hedges but determinedly not going back into the henhouse until nightfall.

I, by contrast, have been huddled by the fire, half watching the rugby and half reading the paper. I decided that a good use of a few hours being shut in against the weather would be to make my Christmas cake and Christmas pudding so all day the raisins, sultanas, chopped apricots and currants have been soaking in rum and orange juice for the cake. At five o' clock I stirred myself sufficiently to get up from my chair and grease and line a loose bottomed cake tin, cream the butter and brown sugar, whisk in the eggs and then add the flour, spices and fruit mixture. Then the whole thing sits in a low oven for about three hours. It is stunningly easy. The kitchen smells gently of fruit and spice and rum.

Tomorrow I shall make the pudding and maybe, inspired by mountainear, I might even make some mincemeat if I have enough dried fruit left. I love doing all this Christmas baking. It reminds me of my mother making just these things in a warm kitchen. We carried on doing it when we moved to live in New Zealand for a few years so some of my memories are of the vivid blue sky beyond the kitchen window and of the odd dislocation of eating warm Christmas pudding and white sauce outside in the sunshine. I made them again with my own children and yesterday the phone rang and it was my son ringing to check exactly how to steam the Christmas pudding he has made which he wants to take with him to his in laws for Christmas Day. He seemed utterly matter of fact about it although I wonder how many men in their twenties have spent the day weighing and chopping and tying a pudding into a cloth.

Are you the leaver or the left?

Ian has been away this week and I have had a bit of time here on my own. Visitors who come from the brightly lit city and look out into the velvet dark up here often ask if I mind being here on my own. The answer is not at all. Our neighbours at the farm are seconds away even though we cannot see them from the house and I don't mind being alone by the fire or snuggled down in bed.


For the last twelve years or so I have been the one to go away. It is curious now to find myself the one who stays at home.



So what is the difference in how it feels? Well, going away is a strange mixture. If you have children there is always a little bit of guilt (or even a lot!) no matter how well looked after you know they will be when you are gone. My children were in their teens by the time I was spending weeks away with work and didn't seem to mind too much. Perhaps they even liked the fact that I wasn't hanging around checking if they had done their homework and trying to encourage them to talk about their day. But there was always a bit of me that felt guilty about driving away on a Monday morning, leaving their care to my husband, not guilty enough not to go, obviously.



And then there is an odd lightness, a sort of relief. You are leaving behind all the minutiae of home life: the unpaid bills, the unwashed laundry, the shopping lists, the teetering piles of ironing, the cat to take to the vet, the insurance quote to find. You are not there so there is nothing you can do about it. If you stay in a hotel there is nothing to do at all except unpack your bag and look at the minibar. I never liked hotel life, the meals on a tray from room service or eating on your own in a hotel restaurant pretending to read a book, though both of those were sometimes better than finding yourself eating with people you didn't care for in a fug of drink and jollity. It wasn't always like that of course. Sometimes you found yourself in a beautiful city with locals who took you out for great meals with interesting people and allowed you to pretend for an evening that you too lived in Barcelona or Lisbon or Amsterdam. It was a far cry from changing beds or taking the bins out. There is an excitement, an energy in leaving home with your bag and going out into the world.



But very often being away from home for work contains vast tracts of time where the strongest emotion is boredom. Business travel gives you hours hanging around in airports, sitting on trains, having an evening to kill with nothing to do other than mess about with your presentation. And travelling is tiring too, even though it is sometimes hard to see why it should be if all you are doing is sitting on a train reading a report and drinking coffee.



Being in touch while you are away is tricky too. You already feel disconnected and if you don't ring and talk to your family you begin to feel even more distant and disorientated. But ringing can be a minefield. You find that your daughter is being bullied or your son is ill. Your partner is clearly struggling with the twin pressures of work and home and you suddenly can't talk about the success of a meeting or an enjoyable meal out without feeling uncomfortable and somehow disloyal. Or you are having a miserable time in a cheap hotel with sticky carpets and a client who stubbornly insists on the impossible and they are all clearly having a great week. You can hear them laughing in the background and you struggle not to feel sorry for yourself and left out.



I think if I had stayed home for years I might feel differently about staying home now. It is odd to be the one left holding the fort. It is disconcerting to find that the jobs of ringing the builder and renewing the road tax and finding a new dentist which you blithely said you would do are messy and hopelessly timeconsuming and frustrating with hours wasted hanging on the phone, listening to a chirpy girl telling you how important your call is to them. I never used to have time to do any of that so I didn't.



There is always a small sense of being left behind when the person who is leaving goes out of the door. You look at the dishes and the laundry and suppress an internal sigh. But then you remind yourself that you don't actually want to get on the train. You can go and walk round the garden, sit at the computer and read blogs. It is entirely up to you what you do with your day. And having an evening to yourself is actually rather wonderful. I have always liked it - no sound but the fire, no television, a glossy magazine or a new book or a shiny laptop hour. I like getting into bed by myself and stretching out on the cool sheets.



That enjoyment lasts for the first night but if I am by myself much longer the attraction fades. In a few days I am longing for company and conversation and a warm body to hug in the bed and someone to laugh with at Armstrong and Miller.



So just for now I think I like to be the one who is left. I like to be the still centre of the turning world, feeding the cats and sorting the chickens out and hanging up laundry and watching a thrush eating berries in the yew tree for long quiet minutes. As long as next week I can get in the car and drive away.



Are you the leaver or the left?

A catch up

It is time for a blog about day to day things. I am sitting by the woodburner with a new load of logs in the basket and it is raining gently outside. Only a week ago we were hanging on to the last days of a golden autumn which almost converted me from my long held dislike of this time of year. The garden was looking better that it ever has in October, thanks to a combination of the endless flowering of masses of self seeded cosmos and a soft warm light which washed everything the pale straw colour of Fino sherry. I planted out a hundred tiny wild tulips, tulipa sylvestris, which will fling open their star shaped cream and yellow flowers in spring. I sowed Sarah Raven sweet peas and annuals, Orlaya Grandiflora, Ammi Majus, and white foxgloves by the box full. I considered once again cleaning out the aluminium greenhouse and once again found something else to do. That must be one of my least favourite jobs, on a par with cleaning the oven. I spent almost as much time outside as I do in summer, cradling my cup of tea and finding pockets of warmth and sunshine to share with the cats and the peacock.

But this week it is grey and cold and dank. There is no attraction whatsover in being outside and I am wavering about whether to succumb to the planning of Christmas. Quite a large part of me doesn't want to. It will be here soon enough and doesn't need me to rush towards it waving my arms. But I am hoping to keep my presents as far as possible hand made, either by me or by others, so perhaps I need to accept that I should get a move on. If I want to buy some things from the lovely and talented pipany I can't expect to do that the week before Christmas so I had better plunge in. And I enjoy making Christmas food, especially cakes and puddings, although it does seem strange to plan a stir up Sunday with none of the four children around to wander into the kitchen and help with the weighing or surreptitiously add a bit more brandy (you know who you are). This year there will be a new face at the table. My older daughter is expecting her first baby just before Christmas. I am not a sentimental person but just typing those words has made my insides leap with a mixture of joy and apprehension. How the world turns.

Last night was the first night of rehearsal for the one occasion in the year when our local male voice choir, Cor Meibion Caerwys, invites women singers to join them. We sing at the service of nine lessons and carols in our local church. I am not a church goer and I don't have much of a voice, I can just about hold a tune if everyone around me is holding theirs, but I love the experience of singing with a really good choir. I did this a couple of years ago and blogged about it here There is a wonderful forgetting of yourself in singing, utterly in the moment, carried along by the swell of the sound around you, and singing in Welsh has its own magic.

In the kitchen I have another great bucket of the last of the green tomatoes which need to be made into chutney. It is just long enough since the last frantic chutney making fortnight for this to be an attractive use of a dark, wet afternoon, filling the kitchen with the smell of vinegar and brown sugar.

A friend has given us a new hen, a Buff Orpington/Welsumer cross which is supposed to make a great broody. With luck we shall have some chicks in the spring. She is hanging sadly around by the house, the others off out in the field foraging. Every time a new hen joins the flock they go through the same process: first she stays by the henhouse, totally ignored by the rest of the flock as they charge off up through the kitchen garden to scratch under the bird feeders. After a few days she gets the idea and tags along at the back, far enough away not to be part of the group but close enough to see what is going on. In another day she might start hanging around right at the edge of the flock, like a child hoping to be invited to play, and then I will look up and see that she is right there in the middle as if she has always been there. She hasn't been allowed up on the perch yet and last night I found her sleeping in the nesting box with another Welsumer which came to me from the same friend a few months ago. Hens are clearly creatures of habit which does require memory. I don't really suppose they remembered each other but it was funny to see them fluffed up side by side.

Now I should really go and see if she is ok.

Yes, not only ok but safely away in the henhouse all by herself!

A little list

It's November, one of my two least favourite months, the other being February. It is dark by five, and going to be darker. The leaves are whirling and there are all those things queueing up in the garden which I haven't done yet, including planting ludicrous numbers of tulip bulbs. Last month it was warm and inviting outside. Now it is colder and wetter and I am feeling like a very fair weather gardener. Eventually I will be able to persuade myself into looking forward to Christmas, but I need to wind myself up to it so I am not yet ready to go into a wonderwoman, organisational whirl to distract myself from the beginning of winter.

So I am going to indulge myself with a list: ten things that make me smile.

1. Michael McIntyre. I don't know quite what it is about him. He makes me smile before he has even opened his mouth, a useful quality in a comedian you'd think.
2. My three year old grandson in the park, "Grandma, lets go in the woods and have an adventure". We did, we saw a squirrel. He was so excited he clamped himself to my leg. "That squirrel's not going to hurt me."
3. Derek Brockway, weather forecaster for BBC Wales, the loveliest, smiliest, campest forecaster in the business.
4. Younger daughter's friend A trying to do accents. I have no talent for this at all but even mine don't segue quite so seamlessly from Welsh to Pakistani to Irish. Still not sure what he was trying to do, Brazilian perhaps.
5. The sound of a cork coming out of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. I don't know if this sounds any different from a cork coming out of a bottle of red, but if it doesn't, it should.
6. My chickens racing up from the henhouse like road runner on a good day to try to get to the cat's food before she has finished it.
7. Many of the male members of my family: my son, my brother, my husband, my father, my stepson. It isn't that the female members aren't funny, they are, quick and witty and wry and unpredictable. But somehow female humour is my humour and I am in the thick of it, contributing as well as listening. Male humour is different, other, surprising me, making me laugh at things that wouldn't have sparked laughter without them. Actually I have just realised it is all of my funny family so
8. girls too.
9. Andrew Marr. I like him. I think he is clever, insightful, incisive but his ears always make me smile, shallow creature that I am.
10. The look on my husband's face when our elderly cat farts. I can't see it for very long because we both need to run for cover.

Maybe next week I will have something more profound to say.

Am I losing touch?

Am I losing touch? Have I spent too long in the country? Last week I went to the city for lunch with a friend who now lives in the Lake District. It wasn't precisely a halfway house, but meeting in Manchester worked for both of us.

Having become a jeans and fleece sort of a girl, I really did try to make a bit of an effort. I shaved my legs, I put a skirt on and a pair of boots which last year made me feel like the bees' knees. I couldn't quite be bothered with the whole hair straighteners rigmarole but I bashed it for a while with a hairbrush and put on some make up and left feeling really quite smart. When I stopped in the village to buy a paper my friend in the newsagent said "Oh, where are you off to then?" so it clearly showed.

I parked my car in the gulp inducingly expensive carpark at Kendals (a sort of smaller, Northern version of Harrods for those who have never heard of it) and found I had half an hour to kill before meeting S so I thought I would have a quick whizz round in case I could manage to start my Christmas shopping, startlingly early for me.

And the whole thing was dreadful.

First I caught sight of myself unexpectedly in a shop mirror and had the classic experience of wondering who that fat, miserable old bat was before realising it was me. I can't even say I looked like my mother as my mother looks loads better. I just looked ancient and slightly scruffy.

In a panic I flew to the ladies' and put some lipstick on and attacked the hair again. Now I didn't look quite so ancient but as I was putting the hairbrush away three girls came in who make me feel I had wandered into an alien world. Each was deeply tanned and highly blonded, with the straight glossy hair and glossy lips of a television presenter or a female X factor judge. Each wore heels so high that they towered above me (and I am middling, not short) and each examined her reflection in the mirror so minutely that they might have been looking for hairs unplucked or pores unsqueezed. They carried handbags loaded with chains and quilting and colour. They were dressed, at eleven thirty on an autumn morning, in tiny shiny dresses, tied under the bust and short enough to display miles of leg of varying degrees of beauty or sturdiness.

They looked like pictures in Grazia. They looked as if they were trying to be Cheryl Cole. They made me feel utterly out of place and uncomprehending. I would not have looked like that even when I could have done and I fled, wondering what had happened to the feminism which sought to abolish the idea of women as sex objects. As far as I can see all that has happened is that young men are now also fair game and are thus becoming as obsessed with their looks as women once were. A form of equality I suppose.

I wandered out into the store. I am not a great shopper but Kendals is as good as it gets generally, not too huge, lots of choice, things which shout "quality" or "expensive" depending on your mood. And perhaps it was my mood that made every rail a shuddering obscenity: shirts for toddlers at £60, hideous versions of those handbags for hundreds, shoes you could not walk in for a month's salary, a child's bed for the price of a small car.

I pushed out of the store and fell gratefully into Waterstones - ordinary looking people, piles of books, yes, a business, but one that made more sense to me, that didn't make me feel queasy with excess. And then I met my friend and the hours flew by as we drank too much coffee and stayed and stayed and laughed and were serious and laughed again.

Have I spent too long in the country?