welsh hills again

Like Silverpebble , I am not a fan of winter - far too much mud and rain and greyness for my liking. But this year my aim is to embrace winter, to revel in all the good things and to do more than simply hide in the house and wait for spring to come.  Life is short, much too short to discount a whole season, and winter can be fun.  Even a spring fanatic like me would have to admit that every winter I do enjoy some things.  So my aim is to find more to love about winter and more ways of filling the winter days with good things.  To this end I think we could learn a lot from the Danes. The Danes have a concept called hygge (pronounced hoogah).  Most articles I have found about hygge tell you that the word translates literally as cosiness but then immediately go on to explain that the whole idea is far more multilayered than that.  This blog , written by Alexandra Beauchamp who has a Danish mother and a French father, contains the most helpful explanation I have found and is a lovely re

I've always been good at sleep.  My mother used to say that as a baby I slept through the night well before any of her friends' babies.  She thought that was something to do with her mothering skills until she had my brother who didn't, and she realised that babies will do what they are suited to!  As a child I loved my bedroom and I loved my bed.  I liked to have the door closed so that nothing could get in during the night (I still do, to my husband's amusement) and I loved the sense of my bed as a nest, warm and snug and mine.  In winter I loved my flannelette sheets and the comforting weight of the blankets.  In summer I loved turning over my pillow to get the cool side against my cheek.  Bed was a place for dreaming, for reading.  I was an outdoor child and for me inside was for making and eating food at the kitchen table or for bed.  You can tell I was a child from an age where television was a rare thing! I love sleep and I need it.  When my children were sma