welsh hills again

My father, Graham, died on the 3rd December after a long and hard fought battle with motor neurone disease.  It's a cliche to talk about battle with illness but in his case I think it is right.  He fought the good fight, cheerfully, positively, with immense courage and determination.  It is over now and I am glad that he doesn't have to fight it any more.  Who would have thought that such an active, physical, practical man, such a talker, a joker, a story teller, could find a way to live with profound physical disability and eventually with his own silence.  But he did.  In a life filled with action and achievement that was perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of all. I feel now, in relation to this blog, as I felt just over two years ago when my mother died.  My mother's death was sudden, unexpected, terrible, full of the anguish of a loss which was totally unprepared for.  My father's death was a long time coming and because of what he l...

My friend (I hope I can use this word about a relationship in its early tentative real stages but further along perhaps in virtual life) Friko has inspired me with her miscellany blog so I hope she won't mind my pinching the idea. What has touched me, meant something to me, this week, large and small? Last Tuesday I went to a service of thanksgiving for the life of a blogging friend who died far too young.  She was one who had made the leap from virtual to real friend.  A group of us living on the borders between England and Wales (she on the English side, I on the Welsh) met  a couple of years ago and found a mass of things in common.  She had struggled for years with serious ill health but was the liveliest, sparkiest, least self pitying person you could find, looking outward when she could have been forgiven for looking in, fascinated by the world and by people, the kind of person who is quietly, consistently kind.  We gathered in a tiny c...