welsh hills again

This is a funny time to have a week away from home.  The garden is overflowing with things to do and having done a lot of freelance work in March I have been snatching time in the garden in April.  But sometimes other parts of my life call. Younger daughter has got herself a puppy, a golden labrador straight out of the Andrex ad.  She is a thorough, forward planning, think things through kind of girl and had been planning and sorting out for this puppy for months.  In fact I suspect she has been wanting this puppy for most of her life and having a dog was part of her reason for making the big move from London to living in the country.  She took three weeks off work and I had arranged to come down for the first week she went back to be part of the transitional puppy care arrangements. The sign is a warning for children about llamas.  Possibly the puppy should have a sign on her too as she is still at the puppy bitey and nipping stage.  M has read al...

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 ...