welsh hills again

Well somehow I didn't manage to post December's extract from the year of being sixty two, principally because I didn't write it!  Somehow the coming of Christmas, trying to keep up with my Spanish and the upheaval of house redecorating just squeezed my writing time into non existence.  I had been intending to spend a chapter looking at the upsides of ageing.  From the volume of stuff you read about "anti-ageing" you might suppose that there aren't any upsides, but that's not true.  My mother used to tell me in her forties, fifties and sixties that she would not want to go back, that she was genuinely happy to be where she was in her life.  She would I suspect have stopped the clock before my father began to be ill but even that would have taken them both well into their seventies.  I never totally understood why she was so content with the age she was when we had those conversations but I could see that it was true.   Knowing that has given me a sense,...

Today the newest member of our family, Grace Lois Joan, first child of younger daughter and her husband, is two weeks old.  Welcome to the world little girl. I have written before about the birth of a new grandchild.  They are all different and this one has made me very aware of something I have thought before and never tried to articulate.  It is one of the great pleasures of life to see your children parenting their own children.  I never realised this when I was younger and I haven't seen much written about it.  The pleasures of being a grandparent are widely celebrated, and they are very great, but the pleasures of seeing your adult children caring for their children have rather taken me by surprise.  I never expected them to be so great and so lasting. When my children were young I both dreaded and longed for the days when they would be grown and responsible for themselves.  I could not imagine them not needing me and not being at the centr...

I can't tell you how much I wish that my children lived nearer to me, or I nearer to my children.  This would be difficult as we have one in Manchester, one in Derby, and two near Oxford.  When my children were young I used to look at my friends who had local family and wish that my parents were not so far away and now that older son and older daughter have children of their own I am once again very aware of how different life would be if we were nearer.  The ease with which you could slip in and out of daily life looks very different from long distance keeping in touch, travelling, staying, being wholeheartedly in or entirely out of the picture. This week I am with my older daughter in Oxford, helping her and the baby as they readjust to life back at home after three weeks in Japan.  It is odd to be in a rural place so different from mine.  The fields are big here, not flat like those in East Anglia but still open and mainly level, stretching away under crops...

Every now and then I read those surveys about happiness which tell you that people in their twenties are happy, those in their thirties and forties less so (the twin pressures of work and family no doubt) but the happiest people of all are the over fifties.  This seems entirely convincing to me.  As you get older, if you are lucky, you are likely to be less worried about money, you have the entirely selfish pleasure of time to yourself back as your children leave home, you might well have worked out how to live happily with your partner, either through years of practice or as a second time around with the benefit of more life lived, or if you are single you may have got to the stage where you are comfortable with where life has taken you.  You probably know what is important to you by then and you probably care less about what others think.  You are probably more comfortable than you have ever been in your own skin, even if it is a bit wrinklier than it used to be. ...

It was my birthday yesterday. Since the 11th September now has a meaning all over the world which is not just my birthday, the date itself has been hijacked, so the day after seems a better time to reflect on getting older. It is a beautiful day here, the sun warm through milky cloud, the air very still, hanging between summer and autumn. The cats are sunning themselves outside on the path and the stonemason has started to build up the wall of the utility, slowly and methodically sorting the stone. I like the fact that this is the stone which grows here as surely as the trees, our own stone from our own land. It is the stone which prevents you from growing delphiniums or roses, but allows penstemons and salvias to flourish with cistus and helianthemum. It is good to see a building which so surely belongs to its place. So it is a good day here to be alive. I am not working, the sun is shining, there is a lot to do in the garden and the day stretches ahead of me, my own time to do ...