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...

Today I drove the border between England and Wales, a glorious green journey.  I stopped and drank coffee from a flask in a layby full of lorries, overlooking fields singing with vivid blocks of green and gold, the Black Mountains of Wales rising away towards the horizon, half hidden by scuds of rain against the sunshine. I thought about family.  My brother is still in hospital, four months on from his stroke.  Today he made me laugh and, driving home when no one could see, made me cry.  I marvelled at his wife's strength and his own determination to hold onto himself. I thought about all the things I am doing and not doing, gathering in lists of duty and interest and clamour.  I will carve out time to plant things and to weed endlessly, mindnumbingly, and have been mining for hogweed root in the native tree walk and planting hardy geraniums.  I will cook and clean and prepare the cottage and talk to my parents and children on the phone.  Somehow I...

I once got talking to a friend about houseworky things.  We were both speakers at a conference in San Diego before you get too stereotypical an idea.  She was saying how much she hated emptying the dishwasher and doing the ironing and I was quite surprised because, while I am not a great housewife, those are two of the jobs that I don't much mind.  Then I read in a blog the other day about the writer's dislike of potting on and pricking out and thought "Oh, I quite like that" so it got me musing about what I do and don't like doing in the garden. Things I like: I love sowing seeds, preferably in the greenhouse in spring when it is cold outside but warm enough to take my jacket off inside out of the wind .  My resolution this year is to label everything, not just the first few trays I sow, but everything, all the time.  Chances of success? Low. I like cutting things back, not the large scale pruning which needs pruning saws and loppers, but the tidying up sor...