welsh hills again

I expect heat in summer.  That is daft really.  I don't live in the South of France or Italy, I live in North Wales, but somehow an adolescence spent in New Zealand where the sky is reliably blue for months and the natural colour of everyone's skin is a light tan has left me with an expectation that in summer the sun will shine and I will eat breakfast outside and walk in bare feet and seek the shade.  The last few summers have been so wet and grey and cold as to be non existent.  I don't think I had realised quite how much the absence of sun had got to me until the temperature soared and the sun was hot on my skin and every morning I woke to sunshine and warm wind.  I find I have relaxed deep down inside myself.  The brightness of the light has made me smile.  Walking around with bare feet has made me feel young again although the green valley is bleaching with the sun. Our house is great when it is really hot.  The old stone walls create a ...

Well that was good.  First before Christmas a visit from older son, his fiance and our older grandson with older daughter and her three year old flying through to see them.  Older grandson has decorated the Christmas cake with Santa and two reindeer and carrots, possibly as well as I would have done. A quiet Christmas Day with Ian and my father in law, although with a full trimmings turkey dinner, followed by three full and busy days as younger daughter, younger daughter's dog, older daughter and her husband and three year old son, and younger daughter's boyfriend all arrived.  The house was full, the cottage was full.  The house was so full that the big kitchen table was the only place where we could all sit down on chairs. Henry the beautiful ginger cat demonstrated his only character flaw: an unstoppable tendency to attack dogs, even one as beautiful and generally unthreatening to the human eye as younger daughter's labrador.  To cope with this Henry goes...