welsh hills again

It's lovely to be inside in the warm, especially when the kitchen smells of this morning's bread baking, but sometimes you just need to get out. You just need to wade down to the viewpoint and wonder if there is more snow in the air. You need to wander around the field, inspecting things. If you are a cat you need to help with this. Sometimes at quite close quarters. You need to admire the only artichoke head left unpicked. Or the sedum heads. And then you need to come inside again into the warm.

Bakehouse and pigsties Ian inspecting the roof.  The roofer and his father worked so hard to get it all battened and felted before the weather came.  It should be fine now until they can slate it. The yew tree produces a good area of shelter. Somehow I think I took my eye off the ball.  The geraniums never made it into the greenhouse. We always call this the sunny bank.  Doesn't look too sunny just now! Rosehips  make me smile.

When I was a child I loved the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, especially "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe".  I also adored "The Magician's Nephew" and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader".  I remember sitting on the edge of my bed with a brand new copy of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" in a white paper bag on the bed beside me, a present from my mother.  I could practically feel it singing to me.  I took it out, and looked at the cover and turned it over in my hands and put it back in the bag so that I could have the pleasure of taking it out again.  I knew that once I started to read it I would gallop through it, reading on the lavatory and in bed and on the bus to school, until I started to feel travel sick, reading at the table with the book on my lap until my mother caught me doing it.  I was a voracious reader and a fast one and the book would soon be finished, so spinning out the time before I began was a necessary part of extending the...

And the world glistened white and shining.  It is cold as cold but the sky is vivid and the air sings with cold.  The birdfeeders are thronged with birds who fluttered and twittered in the trees as I filled them.  Even the woodpecker has been swinging and tapping on the peanuts all day long. The valley is perfect and untrodden.  If you watch for long enough you will see a quadbike making its way along the other side, down the steep slopes, a bale of hay strapped to it .  You will see the sheep gathering or the sharp black shape of a horse moving across the field towards the black shape of the woods.  A tractor makes it way along the road in the bottom of the valley but no cars move.  No post comes. The hedges are works of art. We have spent the day shovelling snow, bringing in logs and kindling, tramping down to the pumphouse which controls our water supply, checking and sorting, feeding the chickens and the cats and the peacock.  The weath...