welsh hills again

Christmas in my childhood was the classic 1960s British version.  My brother and I were up very early.  On Christmas night  I was permitted to have the travelling alarm clock in my bedroom.  It unfolded from a bright red leatherette box about two inches square, had a luminous golden face and I thought it was entirely beautiful.  Six o' clock was allowed.  Five o'clock was not.   My younger brother and I shared a room.  I would usually wake first and lie there watching the illuminated dial.  At about 5.15 would come a stirring from the other bed as Paul felt his way down in the dark.  "Liz, Liz.  He's been.  He's been.  I can feel it."  The torch would come out from under my pillow.  It was just a stocking on the bed, one of my Dad's walking socks.  Big presents were under the tree and we had to wait until our parents were up to go downstairs but we could open the stockings.  There would be a tanger...

I look out this morning to the sun on the hills.  For years my view of these hills was from the other side, the East.  The hills are the Clwydian Range, running from Llangollen in the South up to the sea on the North coast of Wales.  Clwyd (pronounced Cloo-id) means gate in Welsh and the range is the natural gateway between England and Wales, although for many centuries Wales has included Flintshire, to the East of the range as well.  The hills are topped by a number of Bronze and Iron Age hillforts so my sense of them as a geographical barrier between England and Wales is perhaps an ancient one.  Certainly these days and for a very long time back into history those who live to the East of them would consider themselves just as Welsh as those who live to the West.  Nowadays we live just to the West.  I see the hills from our sitting room and bedroom, from  my study and from the garden.  I love these hills.  When we turn to begin to come ...

 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 w...

I always used to hate November: greyness, wetness, short days and dank, dark nights.  It felt to me as if the world turned inward and the light left the sky and as the days darkened my energy dropped and so did my mood.  When did my feelings change?  I am not sure.  My mother died in November and my father two years later in December.  I think that these losses combined with my own growing sense of how fast time runs away with you have shifted me towards wanting to make the very most of each day.  I can't afford to discount three or four months of the year.  How many more years are there?  I have no idea but I should make my days count. And lo and behold! It is possible to change the patterns of a lifetime!  It is possible to find things to love in November and to be energised and excited, just as much as in Spring.  Over the last few years I have found lots of ways to feel good in November and for me that seems to require some particula...

I haven't blogged since March!  That's terrible.  No excuse and every excuse:  packing and moving and getting out of the rental house and into the new one.  I probably could and should have blogged but I didn't so here I am now.  We are here.  We are in.   The sitting room is calm and peaceful with our books on the shelves and our cushions on the chairs. The view across the field is almost as lovely as the one up to the hills. The amount of the glass still surprises me after so many years of our seventeenth century farmhouse, built for shelter, not for light.  I love the cladding too against the white render.  It feels like a house which belongs here even though it is yet to have a garden. I have got to know the sheltered sunny places to take a cup of tea and dream about the garden we will create. There are still things to do and in a couple of weeks the green roof will arrive for outside the guest bedroom and over the front porch. ...