welsh hills again

Over the summer for six weeks I had one or the other of our children's dogs while our children and their families went on holiday.  Different dogs, different temperaments but one constant: every day for around an hour I went walking with them.  I walked when it was wet, when it was windy, when it was cold.  I walked when it was so misty the view had entirely disappeared.  I walked when I was tired and when I didn't feel like it.  I admit that by the end of the summer I was quite "dogged out", love them though I do, and I have settled back into my usual pattern of two or three walks a week.  But I should also admit that at the end of that six weeks I had lost three pounds and now, eight weeks later, I have put it back on again. So I am trying to walk every day again, not primarily for the weight control but for health and wellbeing.  Walking every day seems to be one of the best things we can do for our health.  It helps prevent the o...

Do you remember the Ian Dury song which provides the title for this post?  I loved it, back in the day. So I am going to take a series of blogs to celebrate the things that are helping me look to this day and today I am going to start with a dog. A couple of weeks ago my son and daughter in law with their new baby daughter set off for a few weeks in Australia, visiting Katie's sister who has herself just had a new baby.  The sisters wanted to spend a little time together while their babies were small.  So Flora the black labrador came to stay up here for a month or so. She has been many times before, both on her own and with Chris and Katie, so she knows the ropes and quickly settles down. I love her quiet, calm agreeableness.  Lie here, wait there, eat it, don't eat it, come, go?  Certainly she seems to say as with a wag of the tail and a quick upward look to check what you want she settles right to it.  Yet she retains all the joyousness which chara...

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 ...

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. ...