welsh hills again

Today I have had a quiet day, quiet and still and mostly outside in the vivid green of May sunshine.  It has been a frantic few weeks with change on the cards for both my father in law, who has moved to a residential home nearby, and for my father.  It has also been my father’s eightieth birthday, celebrated with an afternoon tea party in the village hall in Devon where my sister lives, crammed to the gunnels with family and friends.  There has been much visiting and much whizzing up and down the motorway.  It is too early to tell how these new arrangements will play out.  Time will tell. But today Ian went into Manchester to work on elder son’s new house and there was nobody here but me, a garden full of birds and the blowing sun.  I sat for a while in the side garden with a cup of tea and the unopened newspaper on my knee. In the trees behind the garden a heavy woodpigeon flapped to and fro, repeatedly crashing back into the top of ...

A night on my own?  This is an odd thing to say  really.  Ian is away down with my family but I don't have a night on my own because his father is still in the house.  So I am not on my own and yet it feels very different. I have always liked a night or so to myself.  I like the silence.  I like the absence of football on the television or the noise of the radio.  I like the way I can sprawl all over the bed when I am on my own.  Knowing there is someone else here stops me from falling down quite so utterly into a bed of silence and luxurious solitude.  But still there is a quiet and an indulgence.  I am here at the laptop with no sense that I should be stopping, going upstairs, going to bed. Tomorrow I will notice the absence of laughter and chat.  By the time Ian comes home again I will be desperate for company and conversation.  Already I miss him but how do you notice absence if you never have it?  So tonight I wil...

Yesterday Ian packed the car and the trailer with a piece of furniture he has been making for younger son and his wife and an assortment of things to go down with him to Devon.  This morning at eight o' clock he drove away before it was properly light, going to Devon via my brother's house in Chepstow on a long drive south and west through a cold January day.  Ages ago I blogged here about whether you are the leaver or the left, whether you are the one who stays and holds the fort or the one who goes away, briefly or for longer stretches.  In our marriage I have tended to be the leaver, working away, travelling for work, always looking forward to coming home but very used to the idea that home went on without me.  It was hard to begin with but I got used to it and there were pleasures in solitary time too.  Since I did my downsizing when I left my big job three years ago I am home most of the time and since my father in law came to live with us both Ian and I l...

You know those irritating statements which begin "There are two sorts of people....."?  I never believe them. There are all sorts of people and people are more complex than any sort of labelling can convey, particularly the kind of labelling that sets one description against another: you are either an x or  y. Take the long recognised distinction in personality testing between introvert and extrovert.  I can accept that some people take their energy from interaction with other people while others find it from within but I know plenty of people, including me, who do both.  Whenever I do the Myers Briggs type tests which look at introversion, extroversion, thinking styles and ways of interacting with people and problems, I am always an extrovert.  I see that in myself quite clearly in that if I have too little engagement with people I begin to have less and less motivation to do things.  I feel myself become grey and blurry round the edges.  Leave me w...

A lovely week full of visitors, first from family, then from a gardening friend who has moved from a virtual to a real friend but whom I would never have met without blogging.  We share a passion for gardening and it was great to wander around and have my ideas both understood and challenged and to hear a new perspective on my field and my trees.  It has made me look at my garden again, appreciate the progress I have made and decide what to do next.  The wildflowers under the orchard trees need more time, thought and attention.  Zoe suggested planting rattle which weakens the grass.  I have been meaning to look into this for ages but will actually do it now!  She also had a wonderful idea for making a window onto another view, not the compelling view from the house across the valley of the ridge and the bronze and iron age hillforts, but the view down the fields towards the hidden river, where the wild cherry trees shine with white blossom in the spring....