welsh hills again

For some reason this has been a quieter week.  Perhaps we are getting used to being confined?  Somehow I have done less.  Perhaps the Protestant work ethic of filling every moment with activity, which used to be my default approach, has been smoothed out by the sense that the days pass whether I fill them with Welsh and Spanish and yoga and gardening and reading and communicating with family and friends, or not.  So I seem to have settled to a pattern of doing a bit less, getting up a bit later, spending longer over a cup of coffee or a wander around the garden, more watching the birds, accepting that if I have the structure of my Spanish Skype calls or my Welsh Zoom class, I probably won't also spend much time at the computer doing on line learning.  The garden continues to take a lot of time and Ian has made real inroads on clearing the fruit bed, which had been determinedly returning to the field from which it came, and emptying a raised bed ready for plantin...

Of course it would be nice if the sun always shone and the swallows swooped and everyone kept their spirits up all the time and mostly I think we are doing pretty well.  On Thursday though I had a dip.  The weather has been fabulous, bright blue skies, warm breeze, day long sunshine.  On Thursday morning I had my Spanish conversation class which has moved online with a fair degree of success.  Afterwards I looked at the sunshine and decided to go for a run.  I have been having trouble getting into any kind of running routine since the lockdown as most of my running normally takes place a little away from home so that I don't have to cope with the fact that going anywhere on foot from here requires going up or down a pretty steep hill.  This week I thought I would combine running and walking up the hill when the lane gets steep and see if I can improve by reducing my time for the haul up the hill and back.  It was great and running downhill I felt like ...

You might think that all weeks would be the same: nothing different to do, nowhere different to go, no new people bring their energy and life.  But you would be wrong.  Perhaps it is a version of getting used to the isolation, perhaps it is a form of adjustment, but it changes. The big change outside our little life here has been the steady increase in coronavirus deaths.  For the last couple of days they have hovered at just under a thousand a day.  It seems we might hit the peak over the next few days but there is still no indication of how we can escape this lockdown.  I read about the search for a vaccine.  I try to continue to find the balance between knowing what is going on and being overwhelmed. I can tell when I have got it wrong because it becomes harder to tune into the here and now.  If in doubt, less news seems to be the answer for me, a disconcerting feeling for a news and current affairs addict like me. The Prime Minister, Boris John...

There was an energy last week: planning what to do, what to eat, how to manage.  This week has been lower key.  The pattern of the days starts to emerge.  If I am not careful they will blur into each other.  I am looking for markers, staging posts, a rhythm to the week. Three times in this last week we have walked to our local village and back.  It is not very far but it involves a long haul down one steep hill and up another.  Walking out in the world is strange.  A new etiquette is developing.  You see somebody coming towards you and you try to stand to one side to make sure there is plenty of space between you.  On the station path there are places where there is not much room.  Here I raise a hand when the other person approaches and say hi from a distance.  As they get closer I turn in to face the hedge.  It feels a little strange but necessary.  Most people do some version of what we are doing, trying to combine a ...