welsh hills again

Ten days ago my son and his wife had their first baby, just a few days early.  It was a long labour.  C rang me on the evening of the day K went into hospital having had some bleeding.  I went to bed but all night long I kept finding myself awake, looking into the darkness, wondering what time it was.  Why had I woken?  Oh yes, the baby.  Was it born yet?  How were they? He rang again the following morning.  No, nothing, not yet, just tiredness and contractions.  They would induce her.  Again in the evening.  Things were happening but still painfully slowly.  Another night of drifting in and out of sleep.  It is not a rational thing.  You know perfectly well that it makes no difference whether you sleep or wake.  But still that primitive tie, that tug of blood, keeps pulling at you, tugging you out of sleep into dark wakefulness. On the following morning their daughter was born, our first granddaughter, as ou...

When I was eighteen I was desperate to leave home and to live in London.  A city, a great big city, buzzing and alight all night long, was clearly the only place to be.  Now I live in the country and in between times I have had all sorts of houses but until now they all shared one thing:  whether close to the centre or farther out into suburbia, they were somehow or other in cities.  I didn't really mean to live in cities after that first determined flight from the nest, it just happened.  Cities were where the work was so London, Birmingham and Manchester all became, at various times, home. Eight years ago we moved here.  That was a very determined move too, a deliberate choice to live in the country and to undertake a big move while we still had the energy both to make it happen and to live it when it had happened.  Is this my ideal house?  Well in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't but it is a very good house and I love lots of things ...