welsh hills again

Why am I here? I have been in bed for hours and I should be sleeping. Too many things running round my head: Chris's book, Jane's book, luck , persistence. If it is all so hard why even begin to imagine of dreaming of doing it? Meeting people today:difference, vulnerability, resilience, courage. CCA's husband's courtesy in the face of the unknown female invasion. Her son's shy smile and raised hand as we passed him in the road. What makes others' lives difficult and how easy it is to believe that your way is the only way. How lucky I am. Ian has been away and is coming home tomorrow. If he were here I would not be at the computer in my dressing gown. Time to try to sleep again.

I haven't been around for a few days - weekend away followed by a lightning strike which took out the computer - so I am feeling a bit out of touch. It looks from comments here and there as though there has been some sort of upheaval which I don't really understand, and don't want to understand either. There are so many people here who seem so fundamentally kind and tolerant of difference that I am sure we can all be accepting of each other. So here is a quick run down of my week. Friday to Monday Last weekend younger daughter and her friends took over our house and cottage for a hen weekend. Ian and I absented ourselves by going to see some friends who now live in France. It was a good couple of days, full of too much food and too much drink (but in a good way). Our friend is now early retired having had an extremely demanding and successful career and has taken to serious cooking with focus and determination. When I got home and got on the scales on Tuesday morn

This morning I should have been going to the hairdressers but it is pouring down here and if I had the car Ian would have to go to work on his motorbike. So here I am, hair needing attention. I am now supposed to go into overdrive cleaning and shining the house as younger daughter is hosting a hen weekend here for her best friend. Since it includes a new mother and her ten week old baby I think it is unlikely to be riotous. All the girls who we have met, more than half of them, are lovely and pretty sensible so I don't think they will be in gorillagram territory. I am so hoping the sun will shine. At the moment we are in a very wet cloud and this place responds powerfully to sunshine. Just now I would imagine that nine city girls will think it is a god forsaken windswept nightmare. When the sun shines it looks like paradise on earth. So M has gone off shopping with a mega list to begin a marathon cook in. She is so organised you would not believe: lists for this and lists for that

Here we go with the eight things (I've decided to drop the interesting): 1. Although he is two years younger than me, my brother and I share the same birthday. Sadly it is the 11th September, now forever taken over by 9/11. 2. I have such long toes I can pick up pencils. 3. I spent my teenage years convinced I had a hideous long nose, only to realize when I was about 28 that it was pretty normal really. 4. I am a qualified Inspector of Taxes (no, don't run, I don't do it any more). 5. My husband is my mother's cousin (must be a name for it but I am bad at things like that). 6. I love people, food (growing it and cooking it and eating it), plants, gardens, books, sunshine, wine and Welsh classes. 7. I hate arrogance, selfishness, bad manners, parents being aggressive and rude to their children, huge shopping centres, crowded airports, in fact crowds anywhere. 8. I have been colouring my hair for so long I can no longer remember what colour it would be if I left it alone.

Why are women so odd about their relationship with their bodies? Actually perhaps I shouldn’t generalise, I don’t know about you, you may be perfectly relaxed, but I wish I were more like my husband. When he thinks he has put on a bit of weight he cuts down for a month or so and loses it. A couple of years on he might say again “Think I am getting a bit too heavy” and back he goes, cuts back a bit on the cream and the beer and the second helpings and gets back into his 34” waist trousers. None of it is very extreme or intense. Mostly he just eats what he likes, is very active and doesn’t think about it too much. I, on the other hand, think about it a lot. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t look in the mirror and think I could do to lose half a stone. The odd thing is that I think I have been doing this all my adult life although I am now about a stone heavier than I used to be. So that is thirty years of there being an elusive perfect weight at the end of the rainbow, never reac

I've known about the National Gardens Scheme for ages and have meant to go without ever making it happen. They open private gardens to the public for only one or two days and let you satisfy that glorious nosiness about other's lives you feel when you catch a glimpse of a garden through a gate or see into a lighted room when the curtains are open at dusk. This weekend my elder daughter is staying. We had a lovely day yesterday odding about together, going to Bodnant (again! she wanted to see the laburnum walk) and chatting both idly and seriously about life. I stay with her when I go to London so it is not that I don't see quite a lot of her but she is always busy and there are always other people around so a private day is a rare treat. She told me how, as a child, she had always waited impatiently while I insisted on looking in estate agents' windows and tolerated being dragged round garden centres with much sighing and lack of comprehension as to why anyone woul