welsh hills again

I wake up.  The light is streaming in because we never shut our curtains up here.  It is half past six and I turn over and drift back to sleep.  After years and years of dawn starts with small children and work and commuting, is there a greater luxury? As usual Ian must have got up without waking me because when I wake again it is a quarter to eight and he is not in the bed.  From downstairs I hear the sound of him in the kitchen.  He will have already made tea and porridge for his father and now the kettle is boiling again and he is making a cup of tea for me.  Double luxury! It is quiet here.  On a school morning faintly from the farm next door will come the sound of mothers calling and car doors slamming.  The cockerel might be heard crowing from the kitchen garden.  But there is no traffic, there are no trains or planes, just birds squabbling on the feeders and the cat calling meekly yet insistently for more food (not birds!). Break...

All sorts of things are crowding for attention here on the blog after a few days when my laptop died and went away to be resuscitated.  (Thank you Alison of the Allyway ).  It's just like a car breaking down: one moment you are taking it entirely for granted and the next you realise that your whole life is built around having access to it.  It showed the blue screen of death and I began to prepare myself for its funeral but Alison not only retrieved all my data but got the whole thing working again, slicker than ever. So here is a canter through some of things that have been happening. I spent a few days down in Devon with my parents.  It was that beautiful week when the sun shone so warm that the smell of spring was everywhere.  My sister and I, with my son and his wife, took the dogs up onto Dartmoor one afternoon.  The grass was not yet greening up on the moor but the stream was brown and clear like whisky. There was swimming to be done if yo...

Outside my window   the moon is riding high and clear in the night sky.  I stood at the door  half an hour ago and heard an owl hooting from further up the valley and a fox barking.  I hope the hens are tucked safely away for the night. I am thinking    of all the things to do in the garden and of the need to get my own laptop fixed.  I am writing this on Ian's laptop while mine displays the black screen of death.  Have I everything backed up on memory stick?  What do you think? From the kitchen    comes the smell of white thyme bread.  Ian has been experimenting with sour dough bread again and today I had a go with the natural leaven.  If you haven't come across this before, it is a way of creating leaven using the natural yeasts in the atmosphere.  The process of making the leaven takes a few days but when you have it you can take from it every day and keep the leaven alive for as long as you wish.  I...