welsh hills again

Well we survived 2014 and all that it threw at us and here we stand at the dawn of 2015.  Today I am not going to look back or look forward.  Let us just be in today. It is cold and crisp, the sun is shining.  Now, approaching noon, those fields which face the sun have been  washed green.  Those in shadow still hang on to the grey frost which silvered all the landscape as the sun came up this morning in a wash of pink and grey. Ian is in bed with the worst flu I have seen in a long time.  I take him a sweet tea and another blanket and go outside to check on the hens. There is ice on the pond and I break the ice on the hens' water drinkers.  The hens are congregating on the roof of one of the houses to catch the sun. This is the point of the year when I feel the need to poke around, searching for signs of new growth.  Yes, the yew tree is full of birds.  Yes, the holly shines and the ivy flowers catch the sun.  Yes, th...

I can't be doing with all those big retrospectives for the New Year: the highlights of 2011, whether the big news stories of the year or the nation's favourite television.  And yet there is something about the closing year which makes one pause.  Partly it is the sheer swiftness of the passing of time.  How can I have just dated a letter 30th December 2011?  That is a whole year gone in a whirl and a blur, a year older, possibly a year ever so slightly wiser, a year closer to the grave.  Not that I feel remotely sad or morbid.  We have just had a lovely family Christmas full of all the things which I love (family, food, feasting) and entirely free from the angst and stress and consumerism which seem to colour so much of the journalism in the lead up to Christmas, when we aren't being sold a perfect, unachievable, sentimentalised dream.   Ours is a simple Christmas and maybe that is why it generally (not inevitably mind) works.  I can give you...