welsh hills again

For the last couple of days the sun has shone in a clear blue sky.  Everything is diamond bright.  The hills have edges.  The bare trees make intricate shapes against the newly greening fields.  Snowdrops shine.  A jet trail rises against the vivid blue sky.  I love this.  For weeks we have been living in a grey world where the hills disappear and merge into the grey sky.  Grey and mud underfoot, grey and lowering cloud overhead.  It has been like living in a wet dustbin.  And all of a sudden everything sings. I wander round the garden and pick some hellebores for the kitchen table.  Everywhere the snowdrops, which have been lurking for weeks in tight bud, are open to the sun.  Under the apple trees are the promise of daffodils in great fat snouts, green but here and there the odd one faintly flushed with yellow.  There is enough warmth in the sun for me to sit outside, wrapped in my scarf and with three layers on,...

Like Silverpebble , I am not a fan of winter - far too much mud and rain and greyness for my liking. But this year my aim is to embrace winter, to revel in all the good things and to do more than simply hide in the house and wait for spring to come.  Life is short, much too short to discount a whole season, and winter can be fun.  Even a spring fanatic like me would have to admit that every winter I do enjoy some things.  So my aim is to find more to love about winter and more ways of filling the winter days with good things.  To this end I think we could learn a lot from the Danes. The Danes have a concept called hygge (pronounced hoogah).  Most articles I have found about hygge tell you that the word translates literally as cosiness but then immediately go on to explain that the whole idea is far more multilayered than that.  This blog , written by Alexandra Beauchamp who has a Danish mother and a French father, contains the most helpful explanation I ...