welsh hills again

Yesterday was a day full of movement: dance class in the morning (and yay!  I have finally cracked hulahooping), a walk and some gardening in the afternoon and yoga class in the evening.  I don't want you to think this is my normal programme.  Usually if I aim to do even one of those things I feel I am doing ok and don't attempt to fit in anything else.  But yesterday for some reason I just like felt like moving and I am glad I did. Today is a more sedentary day, even though I keep reminding myself that sitting is the new sugar.  I started the day with a visit to the dentist and the hygeinist.  I might as well be honest about this.  I don't mind the dentist because he generally doesn't find anything to do but I really don't like going to the hygeinist.  This is not the fault of the hygeinists themselves who are all lovely.  I am a wimp.  I don't like the scraping and the pushing my mouth about and the sense that there are more things i...

Sometimes your body gives you a reminder that you are getting older, a quick kick in the shins which you didn't see coming.  I picked up my knitting the other day, as I do most days, for half an hour of quiet time.  I don't see enough written about the meditative properties of knitting but for me the peaceful repetition and gradual creation of something beautiful under my hands is a quiet revelation.  Not that day though.  A deep pain developed in the base of my thumb every time I picked up the needles.  I didn't believe it.  I kept putting my knitting down and picking it up again as if a slightly different grip might make all the difference.  It didn't.  I suppose it is arthritis of some sort.  Arthritis?  What a nonsense.  Arthritis is for old people.  I can't possibly have arthritis.  So for two weeks or so I have done no knitting, hoping that a rest will sort it out.  I miss it, but along with the fact of missing ...

What do you do to look after yourself, if anything?  It might be physical, such as running or exercise classes, or mental, such as meditation or some form of intellectual challenge like crosswords or sudoku.  It could be to do with diet or with ways of elevating your mood. It is a tricky one.  It is perfectly possible to become so obsessed with your own health that you squeeze the joy out of life.  I love food, I love cooking, I love wine.  I don't want to live on brown rice.  But I do want to feel good and I am seriously wondering if I need to change the way I eat.   I don't normally use this blog to talk about very personal things but here we go.  I hope you don't mind if just this once I do. For the last twelve months or so I have been plagued with tiredness, with repeated colds and unhappy guts.  A lot has happened in that time, principally the last illness and death of my father in law and the continuing decline of my father with mot...

I went to Malvern.  I took some pictures and thought some thoughts but I have read a number of Malvern blogs now and don't think I have anything much to say that hasn't been very eloquently said already.  I can tell you that Monty Don is not as tall as I thought he was, that I don't like blackboards and lava lamps in gardens, that there were fewer nettles and wildflowers in this year's show gardens than there were last year.  This last observation is a bit sad as I had felt very on trend last year.  I wasn't too keen on the garden dominated by a pterodactyl, although it did include some shapes of real beauty.  I could have moved into the Garden for Life and lived there.  Malvern's version of the Wicker Man was truly fantastic. So I am going to tell you about my lifelong changing relationship with exercise, just because I have been thinking about it. When I was a child I used to run down the road along the edge of the common and know that I was running l...