welsh hills again

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...

Today I have a heavy head cold.  I woke this morning to light snow on the hills and in the garden.  I had a hammering headache and streaming nose and eyes.  This was not a day for venturing out.  It was a day for sitting by the stove, snoozing, doing a little comfort reading.  I couldn't even find the concentration to knit.  But the day has passed away in a warm and comforting way because of our woodburning stove. We have been using this stove for three seasons a year for nine years now and I could light the fire in my sleep. I start with quite a bit of scrumpled paper.  We use a broadsheet newspaper and I use about eight sheets.  I am pretty sure Ian uses fewer than that but that is what works for me!  Then kindling.  The kindling here was bought chopped during the period when Ian was languishing in bed with flu.  Normally he chops all ours.  How much kindling to use depends very much on how dry the logs are that we ...