welsh hills again

Let's take advantage of all this austerity to have a simpler Christmas.  I know we are lucky to live in the country but you can have a simple Christmas anywhere. Let's start with Christmas cards.  I don't know anyone who really likes writing Christmas cards but I know loads who like receiving them.  But sending cards to people you see every day doesn't seem worthwhile to me - all those trees that go into cards!  Save the cards for those who really appreciate them: the elderly aunt who lives by herself who would notice and care if she didn't get a card; the friends who live at the other end of the country whom you rarely see but really want to stay in touch with.  If you are only sending a quarter of the number of cards you usually send, you can afford to spend a few minutes writing something personal in each one, not a round robin of achievements and middle class boasting, but a personal note that means something to the recipient.  And share it out. ...

Now I know this is my fault.  I don't have to read magazines and perhaps I shouldn't, especially not in the run up to Christmas.  I don't have to read weekend papers and watch television but, heck, I like all those things.  I am a real newspaper addict, love my particular magazines dearly (Country Living, Good Housekeeping, Woman and Home, Gardens Illustrated and The English Garden since you asked, with occasional diversions into Red) and while I don't watch a lot of television, what I do like are things that make me laugh like  "The Thick of It"  and cookery or gardening programmes, particularly ones like River Cottage which talk about growing and cooking the kind of food I like. So I don't really want to turn into Mrs Grumpy and give up my usual pleasures during the run up to Christmas but I am plodding through my usual reading feeling that the country is running mad.  Do people really give each other £900 headsets from Swavorski or is it a jo...

Am I losing touch? Have I spent too long in the country? Last week I went to the city for lunch with a friend who now lives in the Lake District. It wasn't precisely a halfway house, but meeting in Manchester worked for both of us. Having become a jeans and fleece sort of a girl, I really did try to make a bit of an effort. I shaved my legs, I put a skirt on and a pair of boots which last year made me feel like the bees' knees. I couldn't quite be bothered with the whole hair straighteners rigmarole but I bashed it for a while with a hairbrush and put on some make up and left feeling really quite smart. When I stopped in the village to buy a paper my friend in the newsagent said "Oh, where are you off to then?" so it clearly showed. I parked my car in the gulp inducingly expensive carpark at Kendals (a sort of smaller, Northern version of Harrods for those who have never heard of it) and found I had half an hour to kill before meeting S so I thought I would...

Have you heard of the mass observation project? At the end of the Second World War and for some years after thousands of ordinary people throughout Britain kept diaries about their daily lives. While we were in Newfoundland I read a book called Our Hidden Lives in which five of the diary keepers' stories were told. It sounds as though it might be dull but it was oddly compelling and you became fond of them all as you followed them through rationing and failing to win prizes in the allotment competition and buying new hats and riding London buses. The most vivid and most shocking thing in reading the book was the sense of how little they had and how careful and constrained their lives were: an amount of butter to last a week no more than I put on two slices of toast in the morning; recipes without eggs, without butter, without sugar; terrible food of the sort which sent Elizabeth David stomping off fuming to France and the Mediterranean; no waste, no packaging, no consumerism. And y...