welsh hills again

A couple of years ago I wrote a number of posts on the year of being sixty two about the experience of getting older.  I was interested in the sense that our generation, in our sixties, is rather different from the women who have gone before us.  I don't remember my grandmother changing much from when I first remember her, when I think she was perhaps forty nine or fifty, to when she died at the age of seventy.  At fifty she was already a solid little barrel shape, encased in her corset which made her feel like a little hard barrel when she hugged me, which was often.  Her hair was already set in a tightly curled perm although I think at fifty she still had some of the red shade, which she handed onto my mother, which gently faded to white. My mother by contrast was immensely youthful looking so that the pictures of her at her sixtieth birthday show someone looking about fifteen years younger.  She always said that she would age very suddenly when she got to s...

I think I went a bit off piste today.  This morning we went to yoga and this afternoon I decided that, before I did anything at all in the garden, I would walk down the track to the river.  Is this part of the 100 day project?  Well sort of.  I am sure that being aware of the seasons is a crucial part of connecting with the garden.  I knew that this is the time for the wood anemones to be out under the trees by the track.  It was sunny and blowy, not particularly warm but bright and breezy and full of spring. Over the stile, along the top of the scrubby wood and down through the big field.  Everything is greener than it was a week or two ago even if the trees are not yet in leaf.   Moel Arthur, the Iron Age hillfort on the horizon, is crisp and clear against the sky. The wood anenomes are holding their starry faces to the sun.  They are a slow spreading plant so a woodland with a lot of anemones in it is likely to be an old one...

Sometimes your body gives you a reminder that you are getting older, a quick kick in the shins which you didn't see coming.  I picked up my knitting the other day, as I do most days, for half an hour of quiet time.  I don't see enough written about the meditative properties of knitting but for me the peaceful repetition and gradual creation of something beautiful under my hands is a quiet revelation.  Not that day though.  A deep pain developed in the base of my thumb every time I picked up the needles.  I didn't believe it.  I kept putting my knitting down and picking it up again as if a slightly different grip might make all the difference.  It didn't.  I suppose it is arthritis of some sort.  Arthritis?  What a nonsense.  Arthritis is for old people.  I can't possibly have arthritis.  So for two weeks or so I have done no knitting, hoping that a rest will sort it out.  I miss it, but along with the fact of missing ...

Over the summer for six weeks I had one or the other of our children's dogs while our children and their families went on holiday.  Different dogs, different temperaments but one constant: every day for around an hour I went walking with them.  I walked when it was wet, when it was windy, when it was cold.  I walked when it was so misty the view had entirely disappeared.  I walked when I was tired and when I didn't feel like it.  I admit that by the end of the summer I was quite "dogged out", love them though I do, and I have settled back into my usual pattern of two or three walks a week.  But I should also admit that at the end of that six weeks I had lost three pounds and now, eight weeks later, I have put it back on again. So I am trying to walk every day again, not primarily for the weight control but for health and wellbeing.  Walking every day seems to be one of the best things we can do for our health.  It helps prevent the o...

For the last couple of days the sun has shone in a clear blue sky.  Everything is diamond bright.  The hills have edges.  The bare trees make intricate shapes against the newly greening fields.  Snowdrops shine.  A jet trail rises against the vivid blue sky.  I love this.  For weeks we have been living in a grey world where the hills disappear and merge into the grey sky.  Grey and mud underfoot, grey and lowering cloud overhead.  It has been like living in a wet dustbin.  And all of a sudden everything sings. I wander round the garden and pick some hellebores for the kitchen table.  Everywhere the snowdrops, which have been lurking for weeks in tight bud, are open to the sun.  Under the apple trees are the promise of daffodils in great fat snouts, green but here and there the odd one faintly flushed with yellow.  There is enough warmth in the sun for me to sit outside, wrapped in my scarf and with three layers on,...

I love walking.  The simple act of putting one foot in front of another always calms me, cheers me and makes me engage with the world outside me and stills the chatter of my internal world.  One of the great things about living here is that you can walk straight from the door into countryside that people would travel miles to find.  I used to walk in cities too, pounding the streets at dusk when you can look through newly lit windows into other people's lives.  I still like that but I love the fact that here I can walk out of the door and straight into the green world. I have been here by myself for the last couple of days as Ian was working at our son's house in Manchester.  I am still catching up from our week away with the family, washing and ironing and gardening and shopping.  It was a glorious day here yesterday and as I trudged in from the car with bags to unpack I suddenly thought that rather than sit down with a cup of tea as a break I would walk...

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...

Yesterday was a fabulous bright and glowing day.  How easy it is to spend every hour of every day working and worrying, looking after people, driving up and down the country, baking, gardening, shortening curtains, making jam, working through the endless to do list.  Sometimes you just need to walk away from it all.  Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother's death.  It was a good day to look up, to breathe, to pull on our boots, lock the door and to set off over the hills and far away. Up the hill from our house, the Clwydians were bright in the sun.  It takes half an hour to get to the top, walking first a lane and then a rough track, gaining height with every step. On a clear day you can see forever, across to Snowdonia and right down the Vale of Clwyd to the sea.  Yesterday was as clear as could be, with tiny puffs of riding cloud. See what the wind does up here.  It was still and calm as we came out onto the top but the hawthorn t...