welsh hills again

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 ...

What do you do to look after yourself, if anything?  It might be physical, such as running or exercise classes, or mental, such as meditation or some form of intellectual challenge like crosswords or sudoku.  It could be to do with diet or with ways of elevating your mood. It is a tricky one.  It is perfectly possible to become so obsessed with your own health that you squeeze the joy out of life.  I love food, I love cooking, I love wine.  I don't want to live on brown rice.  But I do want to feel good and I am seriously wondering if I need to change the way I eat.   I don't normally use this blog to talk about very personal things but here we go.  I hope you don't mind if just this once I do. For the last twelve months or so I have been plagued with tiredness, with repeated colds and unhappy guts.  A lot has happened in that time, principally the last illness and death of my father in law and the continuing decline of my father with mot...

How I would love to have a really beautiful singing voice.  Unfortunately that is just not going to happen.  I have however decided to settle for good enough and I have joined a choir. At school I loved singing but I was never good enough for our really quite serious school choir.  I could hold a tune just about but couldn't get all the high notes with the sopranos and couldn't manage all the lower ones when I was sent to sit with the altos instead.  I could read music just about but I couldn't play any instrument (still can't) and struggled with sight reading.  So at around about seventeen years old I gently slipped out of the choir, following my teenage theory of "if you can't do it really well, don't do it at all". What a totally stupid philosophy of life.  Yes it meant I held onto the things I could already do well and got better and better at them (writing about English Literature, cooking, baking, walking, writing poetry) but all sorts of...

Tonight we sing at the service of nine lessons in our local church.  So it is tights under black trousers, thick socks, thermal vest under white shirt and a few deep breaths. I am not sure I would ever have sung with a choir if we had not come to Wales.  I am not particularly musical and have a voice which only works at all if there are other people around who can hold the tune.   I sing soprano because I find it easier to keep to the familiar tune but the very high notes are really beyond me and from time to time I am just opening my mouth.  But I absolutely love it, surrounded by the music, riding a wave of sound. The choir is a male voice choir, with rich bass voices that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.  Once a year for Christmas they invite the women from the village to join them for the Carol Service and I got swept along on the very Welsh assumption that every one can sing really, despite my protests.  For six weeks w...