Why write?

 I started blogging in 2007.  What a different world, a different life.  I was fifty three, still working in a demanding job which took me away from our beautiful ancient house, high on a Welsh hillside.  I had one two year old grandson.  I loved my job but my life felt very fragmented, split between London and Wales, between professional me and personal me.  Both my parents were alive.  My active, funny brother had yet to have the stroke which for twelve years until his death confined him to a wheelchair and robbed him of much of his dry, witty personality.  

And now?  Now I am seventy and have been retired for years.  My mother died in 2013, my father in law in 2014, my father in 2015 and my brother last year.  We now have ten grandchildren, ranging in age from six to eighteen.  There have been departures and arrivals.  In the intervening years we have bought a building plot, sold our old house and built a new one with some eco-credentials on the edge of a village, down from the hills, down in the Vale.  

This is our old house.

And here is the new one.

This time of year is the anniversary of some of those departures and arrivals and I came back to my blog to read what I wrote then about my mother, my father, my father in law and the birth of two of those babies.  It was a revelation.  I thought I had remembered all those events with great clarity but reading what I wrote at the time I see how much detail I had lost.  I blogged weekly throughout the first year of the Covid pandemic but my last blog here was two years ago, in November 2022.  It was such an interesting thing to revisit my blogs of long ago that I have decided it is time to start writing again.  It won't be like the early years of blogging when a vibrant blogging community thrived and fizzed around the world.  Many of the blogs I used to read have been abandoned and much of the communication has moved to Instagram.  I do use Instagram myself, fairly sparingly, and I enjoy it but it does something quite different.  Writing a blog is a slow, thoughtful process.  I find I miss that and I loved the rewards of going back and reading what I wrote so many years ago.  

So here again is the documenting of an ordinary and not so ordinary life.  How long will I keep it up?  I don't know.  We will see.

This last week here in North Wales has been cold and snowy, schools have been closed on some days and we have hunkered down at home.  It is one of the pleasures of this stage of life that we don't need to go anywhere or do anything: no children to get to school, no meetings to make, no journeys on trains or on motorways that absolutely have to be done.  I made tomato soup with the last of our crop of tomatoes from the greenhouse.

I read and read, finishing the books for book club this week: "I heard the Owl call my name" by Margaret Craven and "Homecoming" by Kate Morton.  Bookclub was on Wednesday evening.  We slid up to the pub in my friend's car and spent a glorious hour and a half talking and laughing, discussing the books, agreeing and disagreeing.  I love this.  In a world where views are increasingly polarised and people seem increasingly unable to respect or even tolerate differences of opinion, giving other people a fair hearing while they explain the attractions of a book I had dismissed and finding pleasure and even amusement in our differences feels like letting in the sunshine.

I have been trying to do some resistance exercise, in my case with some hand weights, and I made myself do a session this week.  To my very great surprise over the last twenty years or so I have found that I enjoy exercise.  It must have been the relentless focus on competitive ball sports which put me off at school.  I never liked netball or tennis, hated hockey with its shuddering tackles and the raw cold of knees and noses.  But I like to walk, even to jog very slowly, to go to Pilates or yoga and to move my body.  We begin to see some of our friends failing.  To move, to try to be strong, to have energy and interest, to stretch and stride out, all these activities seem like things we should do now because we can, when so many can't.  

And now today is a strange quiet day.  The weather is changing and it is raining hard, the snow is washing away, the wind lashing the trees.  Ian is out this morning volunteering at our local hospice, looking after the car parking for their Christmas Fair.  I imagine he is getting very wet.  And I am having some quiet time to myself, writing this, reading, crocheting, trying in a quiet, ordinary day way to make the minutes count.