welsh hills again

I am sure that when I lived in a city winter was never this dark!  The clocks went back this weekend and suddenly the glorious extended autumn hit the buffers.  I looked out of the window at half past five, the lights having been on in the house for ages, and saw the black night.  Partly it is the totally welcome absence of light pollution here.  Stand in just the right place on our land and you can see the faint amber smudge of light which is Mold to the East but turn your back on that and the valley is very black.  You can't see the line of the ridge opposite or of the ancient hillforts to the west against the sky.  Look up and on a clear night you can see stars, but wander around and it is can't-see-the-hand-in-front-of your-face dark on nights when the moon is, as tonight, a waxing crescent.  It is close to total darkness. We go out to the pub for a meal, driving our narrow lanes between the high hedges.  In the headlights the browns and gol...

I am not a winter gardener.  In the cold and wet I am much more likely to be found by the fire inside than outside pruning fruit trees.  When I started to garden seriously perhaps twenty years ago I would get all keen from March to July, go away on holiday in August, come back to a tired flopping mess and basically give up again until the following spring, apart from a few bad tempered forays outside during the autumn to tidy up. Gradually my gardening time extended.  I started planting bulbs in the autumn.  I planted one or two evergreen shrubs so that the garden was less of a blasted heath in winter.  And that was about it. Coming here has made a difference in two major ways: firstly I have become much more interested in autumn.  This is partly because the light here is liquidly beautiful in September and October and the hedges are full of hips and berries.  The michaelmas daisies which were here already in their hundreds throng with butterflies ...

When you live somewhere like this the seasons really matter.  I thought I was always someone who noticed seasons.  When I lived and worked in cities I would take out my knee length boots and winter coat in November and pack away my summer stuff.  I would lament the days when I left for work in the dark and came home in the dark.  I would chase the light at weekends, walking in parks, kicking leaves, hating that time when the leaves lost their crispness and turned to sullen slipperiness. But up here it is something else again.  Firstly autumn itself can be glorious in a way I have only glimpsed before, impossibly beautiful like the day in my header picture, so I have been quite won over by its beauty.  I have stopped treating each whirling leaf as a harbinger of doom and started living more firmly in the now.  Secondly there is a ludicrous amount of stuff to do in the garden.  I have never had so much garden as I do now, love it though I do, and ...

When I was a child I loved the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, especially "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe".  I also adored "The Magician's Nephew" and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader".  I remember sitting on the edge of my bed with a brand new copy of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" in a white paper bag on the bed beside me, a present from my mother.  I could practically feel it singing to me.  I took it out, and looked at the cover and turned it over in my hands and put it back in the bag so that I could have the pleasure of taking it out again.  I knew that once I started to read it I would gallop through it, reading on the lavatory and in bed and on the bus to school, until I started to feel travel sick, reading at the table with the book on my lap until my mother caught me doing it.  I was a voracious reader and a fast one and the book would soon be finished, so spinning out the time before I began was a necessary part of extending the...