welsh hills again

Run one.  Well, today was run one of week three and I was nervous.  This run required me to go for three minutes for the first time and three minutes seemed a big jump from ninety seconds.  We went to yoga this morning and I was feeling very stretched and ironed out by that.  I had missed breakfast so by the time we got home I was starving and immediately made scrambled eggs with tomatoes and spinach.  I decided I shouldn't run directly after that and sat down to do some knitting instead.  An hour or so later I looked out of the window.  It was raining gently.  This did not make me feel like going out. However one of the good things about this fitness drive is that Ian is also doing the couch to 5k and I find that the fact that I am not alone motivates me when I might well give up if I was.  He ran before lunch and came in reporting that it wasn't so bad.  Now he is fitter than I am so that didn't mean I would think the same but it did...

For a long time I felt like the line from T.S Eliot:  "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons".  When I was a student and a young mother coffee played a big role in keeping me awake.  When I was working away from home my life seemed to be measured out in train journeys, whizzing away at the beginning of the week, whizzing  back at the end.  For the last three or four years the focus has been very much on elderly parents and for the last couple of years the measure has been weekly motorway journeys, six hundred mile round trips, the weeks chopped up into going to Devon, being in Devon, recovering from being in Devon and a squished up ordinary life.  I am still getting used to life without that tempo and without my father and mother, for somehow looking after my Dad seemed to obscure the fact that my mother had gone.  So the new shape of life is taking a while to settle itself around my shoulders.  But as I knitted and puzzled my way...

What skills have you got?  And are there any you wish you had?  Skills are an odd thing.  They accumulate gently through life.  One moment you are a child wrestling with wool and knitting needles and dripping tears on the ladder of another dropped stitch in the scarf which is too loose and too narrow and curls up at the edges.  Next you are a young working mother with time so squeezed that the idea of knitting anything at all is simply ludicrous.  How can you possibly have time to knit when you don't even have time to cut your own toenails? And yet somehow you must have done enough knitting often enough because you find yourself years later able to knit and with time for knitting and finding it satisfying and pleasurable.  How did that happen?  Did I learn the skill when my back was turned? What else can I do that I must have learned?  Cooking, but that is an easier one to understand.  I learned cooking with my mother.  My mother ...

I do love a good project and living somewhere like this means there are always things on the go. Inside there is usually something on the needles or on the sewing machine, especially in winter. Outside is ignored when it is cold and wet but it begins to call about now and I have spent a couple of days working in the garden.  So just for the record before inside gets abandoned for the spring and summer, here are this winter's projects plus a new one cast on yesterday. Here are some curtains made from dinosaur material for grandson number two, aged five.  The material comes from textile express , a great business based in Oswestry with a really good website and web presence.  I make lined curtains about once a year and every time I have to go back to square one in terms of reminding myself about the order of events.  Last time I did it I made three pairs in one marathon effort for the holiday cottage so I took the time to write down all the th...

Did I tell you we bought a Landrover?  There is a justification for a four by four vehicle up here on our hill and we also need something from time that will tow the trailer.  I test drove one (not a new one, an oldish one!) to establish that I was happy to drive it, we bought it and then very conspicuously I did not drive it at all.  I am not generally a driving wimp.  I happily drive on motorways and up and down the country and in all sorts of weather conditions.  So why wasn't I driving it?  I think I was just a little bit nervous that I would meet someone coming up our single track steep hill and, instead of merrily reversing up hill, down hill or around the corners,  as I do in the cars, I would make an idiot of myself.  But Ian is away working at our son's house in Manchester today so I had the Landy and, without anyone to watch me, it was time to have a go.  And it was totally fine, although I did not have to reverse downhill around a ...

Last year we had a precious few days away in the Outer Hebrides.  I had wanted to go for years.  We hired a campervan and drove and ferried and kept on driving to the edge of the world. It was a special snatched few days of sun and wind and the simple, slightly uncomfortable but ultimately calming life that is life in a van, away from home, with nothing to do but look and listen and walk and read and eat.  I have almost lost it now, under the huge tides of this winter with my mother's death and my father's illness and the care of my father in law and the flood of need.  Almost but not quite. While we were away I bought some wool from the Hebridean Woolshed , handspun fine Merino in the colours of the seas around South Uist. Here it is far away from home on my kitchen table in Wales.  I was going to make a cowl with it but after a couple of false starts I decided I wanted to have a go at doing something of my own, not a pattern or a design made by so...

This year I absolutely promise that I am not going to turn my back on the garden and just sneak off inside.  I am going to clean the greenhouse and cut back and mulch and all those good things.  Honestly.  But there is nothing like a rainy day to set me thinking about winter projects.  I am not one of those people who carefully finishes one thing before starting another but even I was surprised at how many things I seem to have on the go or waiting.  Confession time. It is a bit of a giveaway that the basket which holds all the wool waiting to be worked is my  parents' old log basket, i.e quite a big one.  The bag on the top contains the project which at the moment is at the top of the queue.  Younger son and his wife are expecting their first baby in November and I am making a blanket. Not a delicate white blanket for a newborn but a cheery, cosy blanket for the car and the pushchair. The wool is a soft merino aran and the pattern is fr...

What do you do when your mind gets stuck in a track, running round and round in a repetitive, fruitless worrying at something you can do nothing about?  It doesn't happen to me often.  I don't think of myself as an anxious person at all.  I am naturally quite calm and even tempered, cheerful by default, inclined to have a good time whenever I can with family and friends, good company, a glass of wine and good food.  So it always surprises me when one of the inevitable anxieties of life somehow gets a hold of me and I find my mind running round and round with it, like a hamster on a wheel. Sometimes gardening helps but it didn't today.  I was weeding down in the native tree bed.  The mindless, repetitive nature of pulling weeds can be calm and soothing, the sun on my back, almost like a meditation.  But today all that mindless repetition  just seemed to allow me to run round and round in my mindless nagging worry.  I tried all the stuff abou...