welsh hills again

Today I thought I would tell you a bit more about why I have embarked on the 100 day project.  Gardening and blogging have been long standing passions for me and over the last three or four years I have in some ways lost touch with them both.  Gardening was the first to go.  We have nearly two acres here.  When we first came there was an intensively gardened kitchen garden and one or two small areas which were planted up but most of the land was a large field with two apple trees, one walnut tree and a lot of rough grass.  For the first six or seven years we were here making a garden out of a field became an obsession.  I read about plantsand gardens night and day.  I tested the soil.  I sketched and researched and made plant lists and planted and planted.  Some of that was successful: the fruit trees grew in the little orchard, the mixed native hedging grew and so did the native trees.  Daffodils grew although there were never enough....

Well the latest birthday has come and gone and I find that, despite how strong the urge was to write about the experience of growing older a year ago, I have actually written less in this last year than ever before!  It is now a whole three months since I blogged at all and I have even been considering giving up altogether but this morning I was delighted to see a new blog after a break from penny at homemadeheart and it gave me the kick I needed to have a real think about this.  So I thought I would use the blog to have a look at this last year, to think about why I have written and not written and to help me decide whether I want to keep on writing. So why, after years of writing something practically every week,  has my blog slipped away, especially when I really wanted to explore what it is like to grow older as a woman of my generation, with a life very different from that of our mothers and grandmothers? So many reasons, silly and serious! Instagram. I lik...

I have been neglecting my blog again.  I suspect that the Open University Spanish course I am doing is partly responsible.  The time it takes, and at the moment the constant sense of being way behind following  our New Zealand trip, eats into the time when I might otherwise be writing and not doing my Spanish makes me feel far guiltier than not writing my blog.  Spanish also throws deadlines for assignments at me which the blog doesn't so it is slowly but surely squeezing the blog out.  I had lunch this week with a friend who also writes and she inspired me to get back to writing, as she always does (thanks Annie!).  I thought I would look back at when I began to write this blog so this morning I sat down and dug around in the archives and to my amazement I discovered that I wrote my first blog ten years ago yesterday!  And then of course I got lost in reading old posts and remembering things I had long forgotten.  It enthused me all over ...

I have been wanting to do an Arvon writing course for years.  When I had the time I simply did not have the money.  When the money was not a problem it was because I was working so hard that I could not imagine giving a week of my hard earned holiday to something that did not involve the rest of my family.  But suddenly earlier this year I realised that I could do it.  I had the time.  I had the money.  Ian was going trekking with some friends in Norway.  There was not even the faint residual guilt of going away and leaving him looking after everything.  We would both go away.  Nobody would look after anything at all. I knew I wanted to write non fiction and when I found that a course on creative non fiction was offered in one of the weeks when Ian was going to be away it seemed entirely meant.  After years of writing with ease and pleasure, I have been struggling with writing the blog since my father died.  Maybe it would give m...