welsh hills again

D for departure. Four more weeks of work to go. I have been in London this week with long days, early morning starts, a roller coaster of commitments and meetings. While I am actually in a meeting or on the phone to someone I can hold on to the sense of doing the job, but when I sit by myself in front of a computer screen I can feel the world of work beginning to fade from me, becoming less distinct, muted, a corridor on the other side of a glass screen where you can see people move but cannot hear their conversations, don't know where they are going. I arrived home last night tired to my bones, not feeling entirely well and just uncomfortable enough as a result of that not to be able easily to fall into the sleep for which I was longing. I am not good without sleep and I had spent the previous night wrestling with a work problem. I lay looking up into the darkness. Although the curtains were open it was still very dark with that black, thick darkness of the countryside. I a deep s...

I have done it now. I have put my notice in. I have no job to go to and no immediate plans to find one. What kind of idiot puts their notice in during a recession? I am surrounded by people at work worrying about redundancy and I know some people who have already been made redundant and who are coping with the knocked sideways shock of it all. I feel almost guilty for walking away from a job in these circumstances but I am doing so, and it is not even a job I hate. Work has been a huge part of my life for the last twenty years or so. When my first marriage failed I had to earn some money so I was pushed back into the world of work when my children were quite small. I remember vividly going into Manchester for an interview, wearing my pre-children work clothes, feeling like a child dressing up, and finding that walking along the pavement in my high heels with no push chair in front of me felt strangely naked and vulnerable, as if my children were my protection. But work was a he...

Astonishingly January has gone. I have always tried to hold onto the idea of February as the very beginning of spring, partly because I begin to long for warmer weather, for bulbs and lambs and catkins on the trees. However both Karen and Weaver tell me that Candlemas, which was yesterday, 2nd February, is the halfway point between the winter and the spring solstice and so, in truth, the dead of winter. That is certainly how it feels today. The snow was deep enough to make getting up our track look an impossibility this morning even for the 4x4. We did manage to get in last night, leaving our other car in the village and making our way home through dark and driving snow, tentatively nudging up our icy hill in the Suburu. The house was cold but sprang to life with a fire in the stove, the oven on, the old oil boiler noisily churning out heat. Arriving home in the dark it was impossible to tell anything other than that the hill and the hedges, just seen in the headlamps, were heavy ...