welsh hills again

The wind blew back in early this week and after a sunny, warm weekend I turned back inside.  There was a huge floor cushion to be made for five year old grandson to accompany his curtains. There was more to be done on the project of knitting a cushion to reflect our hillside. The colours reflect the different greens of the fields and the open hills.  The darker brown rows are the lines of hedges and bare trees and the gold is the bracken.  I have spent an hour or two weaving in the ends, an oddly meditative kind of thing to do, before casting on the other side and seeing what comes. Then there was bread to be made before turning from the practical to the numinous. There was Alan Garner's last public lecture to go to.  Alan Garner is a great writer and counts amongst his admirers the author Philip Pullman and Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury.  The picture shows Alan's house where he has lived and written all his adult life....

We have just had a great weekend with some friends who live in France.  It is always a treat to see them, either here or in Provence.  Yesterday we went for lunch at Tyddyn Llan , a restaurant with rooms just outside Llandrillo further South and West into Wales.  It's a spectacular drive but there was no chance of seeing any of the marching range of the Clwydian hills or the beautiful hills at the head of the Vale of Clwyd up beyond Ruthin.  It was like driving into a wall of water.  The rain poured all day, drenched us as we sprinted from the car and threw itself at us in torrents as we drove home. The hills were spouting water in great gushes and falls of foaming brown.  Tyddyn Llan is a great place though with really exceptional food and gentle and discreet good service. You feel you could just settle down with good food and good company and while away a wet Sunday and that is what we did. On Saturday we went to Blackden.  If you have re...

On Thursday night I whizzed down to Oxford to stay with elder daughter and her family.  I was there for a trustees' meeting of The Blackden Trust , held in Magdalen College .  Magdalen (pronounced Maudlyn) is an impossibly beautiful place of golden stone, quiet cloisters and green quads.  Many Oxford and Cambridge colleges are similarly beautiful.  I have never forgotten my father, a working class boy from the North of England, wandering the colleges on his first visit when he was about fifty and saying, stunned and appreciative but with a touch of sadness "When I was a child, I couldn't even have imagined that places like this existed."  Until he went away on National Service he did not realise that  it was not simply a fact of life that if you touched a tree you came away with black on your hands.  He and his generation thought that the sooty smudge was nature, not pollution.  Oxford colleges dreaming in the sun were a world away from ...

It has been an odd few days.  Ian was laid low with the flu and spent Friday and much of Saturday in bed.  Most unfairly all that lying down affected his back so he was doubly stricken.  He is generally so energetic and so rarely ill that it quite takes me by surprise to have him really poleaxed by something.  Heroically he got up on Saturday afternoon and insisted that he was OK to go out in the evening. The reason for going out was a special occasion: a dinner at The Wizard Inn in Alderley Edge with family and friends of Alan Garner to celebrate the fact that Alan's book " The Weirdstone of Brisingamen " has been in print for fifty years.  In fact its fiftieth birthday was 10.10.10. I first read the Weirdstone when I was about eleven years old and I can  hardly now remember the time when I did not know the story.  Two children, Colin and Susan, are drawn into a battle with evil forces which seek to capture a bracelet which Susan wears on her wr...

Last week I went to Great Dixter. It is a garden built around a fourteenth century manor house in Sussex. The house was restored in the early 1900s by a businessman, Nathaniel Lloyd, with the help of the renowned architect Edwin Lutyens. Lloyd and his wife began the creation of the gardens but they were developed over fifty years or more by their son, Christopher, gardener and writer. For the last fifteen years of his life Christopher worked with Fergus Garrett who remains as head gardener following Christopher's death four years ago. It is one of the great gardens of the world. Sometimes it is a mistake to do something you have looked forward to for a very long time and I have been wanting to go to Great Dixter for almost twenty years. How can a place bear the level of expectation laid upon it? Surely I would be setting myself up for at best an anti-climax, at worst a major disappointment. I was taken aback to find myself so moved by being there that I could not stop the camera ...