welsh hills again

For a long time I felt like the line from T.S Eliot:  "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons".  When I was a student and a young mother coffee played a big role in keeping me awake.  When I was working away from home my life seemed to be measured out in train journeys, whizzing away at the beginning of the week, whizzing  back at the end.  For the last three or four years the focus has been very much on elderly parents and for the last couple of years the measure has been weekly motorway journeys, six hundred mile round trips, the weeks chopped up into going to Devon, being in Devon, recovering from being in Devon and a squished up ordinary life.  I am still getting used to life without that tempo and without my father and mother, for somehow looking after my Dad seemed to obscure the fact that my mother had gone.  So the new shape of life is taking a while to settle itself around my shoulders.  But as I knitted and puzzled my way...

Five of the good things about today: Eleven month old grandson on the swing, giggling with delight. Roast beef and yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings for lunch, cooked by lovely daughter. Being told by exceptionally nice Swiss family that the holiday cottage is the best they have ever stayed in. Roast beef sandwiches for tea. Eleven month old grandson concentrating hard on eating carrots, picking them up with the utmost care, moving them carefully around his mouth, carefully expressing them onto the high chair tray, and then carefully picking up another. I was going to combine this with some not so good things in the interests  of balance but I am having trouble coming up with five.  This is the best I can do: The hens have just about stopped laying and even good, free range shop bought eggs are not the same. Claudia Winkleman's dress and makeup on Strictly.  Seriously? Perhaps it is meant to be ironic and I am just missing the joke. No, sorry.  It was ...