welsh hills again

For a long time I felt like the line from T.S Eliot:  "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons".  When I was a student and a young mother coffee played a big role in keeping me awake.  When I was working away from home my life seemed to be measured out in train journeys, whizzing away at the beginning of the week, whizzing  back at the end.  For the last three or four years the focus has been very much on elderly parents and for the last couple of years the measure has been weekly motorway journeys, six hundred mile round trips, the weeks chopped up into going to Devon, being in Devon, recovering from being in Devon and a squished up ordinary life.  I am still getting used to life without that tempo and without my father and mother, for somehow looking after my Dad seemed to obscure the fact that my mother had gone.  So the new shape of life is taking a while to settle itself around my shoulders.  But as I knitted and puzzled my way through a new baby surprise

What skills have you got?  And are there any you wish you had?  Skills are an odd thing.  They accumulate gently through life.  One moment you are a child wrestling with wool and knitting needles and dripping tears on the ladder of another dropped stitch in the scarf which is too loose and too narrow and curls up at the edges.  Next you are a young working mother with time so squeezed that the idea of knitting anything at all is simply ludicrous.  How can you possibly have time to knit when you don't even have time to cut your own toenails? And yet somehow you must have done enough knitting often enough because you find yourself years later able to knit and with time for knitting and finding it satisfying and pleasurable.  How did that happen?  Did I learn the skill when my back was turned? What else can I do that I must have learned?  Cooking, but that is an easier one to understand.  I learned cooking with my mother.  My mother was a very good cook who loved food and liked the