welsh hills again

A couple of years ago I wrote a number of posts on the year of being sixty two about the experience of getting older.  I was interested in the sense that our generation, in our sixties, is rather different from the women who have gone before us.  I don't remember my grandmother changing much from when I first remember her, when I think she was perhaps forty nine or fifty, to when she died at the age of seventy.  At fifty she was already a solid little barrel shape, encased in her corset which made her feel like a little hard barrel when she hugged me, which was often.  Her hair was already set in a tightly curled perm although I think at fifty she still had some of the red shade, which she handed onto my mother, which gently faded to white. My mother by contrast was immensely youthful looking so that the pictures of her at her sixtieth birthday show someone looking about fifteen years younger.  She always said that she would age very suddenly when she got to s...

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post.  I am feeling so much better now!  The consensus from the medical types in the family is that it was a viral infection (and how often have we heard that about the otherwise unexplained!?).  Whatever it was it has gone and I am back to normal and very thankful for it. Nerines.  Can you ever have enough? It is a good thing to be back on form because last week was a rush around week.  It began with a trip down to Devon for the christening of younger son's two younger children.  Addy who is three and nine month old Daniel both behaved impeccably while having water on their foreheads and being handled by someone they do not know.  Actually that is probably not quite true for the three year old.  Chris and his wife are churchgoers so I imagine that Addy knew the minister who was christening her. There were a few minutes before the ceremony when she decided she might like to take her shoes off b...

A strange week which has left me feeling out of sorts and out of shape.  Monday started with yoga in the morning and it was a great class which left me feeling invigorated and energised.  In the afternoon I set out to do some cooking as we had guests coming on Tuesday.  Late afternoon I suddenly began to feel very unwell, nauseous, dizzy and dreadful.  I sat down in the sitting room and stayed there for about an hour and a half.  Eventually I began to feel a bit more normal and I went to bed a bit early. The next day I felt quite wiped out in the morning and Ian launched into cooking for our guests with me sitting around offering instructions.  By lunchtime I felt rather better and on Wednesday I felt ok.  Thursday morning I woke feeling bad again, tired and a bit sick.  In all this time we used Ian's oxymeter and my blood pressure machine to see if there were any indications of what was happening.  It looked as if my oxygen uptake was a bi...