welsh hills again

Have you ever tried to learn another language? This week I am giving a week of my all too short holidays to doing an intensive Welsh course to add to the once a week course down at the pub which I've been going to since February. Why? "Why bother when everyone speaks English anyway and it's fearfully difficult and you'll never be fluent?" asked the husband of a friend. This is a tricky one because the answer is a mixture of offensively holier than thou and staggeringly trivial. The pious sounding bit: it is a form of respect for the country you have chosen to live in (no egg throwing please); the trivial bit: it was driving me mad that I couldn't pronounce road signs. So far it has been one of the best things I have done since we came here. I love the class. I love the enthusiasm of the tutor, the gentle micky taking to and fro, the surprise of the new. One of our number is a woman in her sixties, warm and friendly and deceptively mild looking. After we...

Time has speeded up over the last week or two and I am running to keep up with myself. Now I have an hour to myself so here is a canter through last week. Saturday June 30th Younger daughter is a bridesmaid to her best friend (she of the hen weekend at our house) and we are invited. The wedding is in an Oxford college and her husband to be is in the RAF. It is all impossibly romantic: the cloisters, the gardens, the golden stone, the bride beautiful, her bridesmaids all slim and brown and gorgeous in their cream and navy printed dresses, elegant and calm. The groom and many of the guests are in uniform, sharp and so younglooking, their smooth and eager faces under the blue peaked caps like something from a Second World War film. They carry dress swords and make an arch of swords for the bride and groom as they leave the college chapel. As they pass through laughing we bombard them with bubbles. The meal is in the college hall, another beautiful building. We sit at long trestle ...

Why am I here? I have been in bed for hours and I should be sleeping. Too many things running round my head: Chris's book, Jane's book, luck , persistence. If it is all so hard why even begin to imagine of dreaming of doing it? Meeting people today:difference, vulnerability, resilience, courage. CCA's husband's courtesy in the face of the unknown female invasion. Her son's shy smile and raised hand as we passed him in the road. What makes others' lives difficult and how easy it is to believe that your way is the only way. How lucky I am. Ian has been away and is coming home tomorrow. If he were here I would not be at the computer in my dressing gown. Time to try to sleep again.

I haven't been around for a few days - weekend away followed by a lightning strike which took out the computer - so I am feeling a bit out of touch. It looks from comments here and there as though there has been some sort of upheaval which I don't really understand, and don't want to understand either. There are so many people here who seem so fundamentally kind and tolerant of difference that I am sure we can all be accepting of each other. So here is a quick run down of my week. Friday to Monday Last weekend younger daughter and her friends took over our house and cottage for a hen weekend. Ian and I absented ourselves by going to see some friends who now live in France. It was a good couple of days, full of too much food and too much drink (but in a good way). Our friend is now early retired having had an extremely demanding and successful career and has taken to serious cooking with focus and determination. When I got home and got on the scales on Tuesday morn...

This morning I should have been going to the hairdressers but it is pouring down here and if I had the car Ian would have to go to work on his motorbike. So here I am, hair needing attention. I am now supposed to go into overdrive cleaning and shining the house as younger daughter is hosting a hen weekend here for her best friend. Since it includes a new mother and her ten week old baby I think it is unlikely to be riotous. All the girls who we have met, more than half of them, are lovely and pretty sensible so I don't think they will be in gorillagram territory. I am so hoping the sun will shine. At the moment we are in a very wet cloud and this place responds powerfully to sunshine. Just now I would imagine that nine city girls will think it is a god forsaken windswept nightmare. When the sun shines it looks like paradise on earth. So M has gone off shopping with a mega list to begin a marathon cook in. She is so organised you would not believe: lists for this and lists for that...

Here we go with the eight things (I've decided to drop the interesting): 1. Although he is two years younger than me, my brother and I share the same birthday. Sadly it is the 11th September, now forever taken over by 9/11. 2. I have such long toes I can pick up pencils. 3. I spent my teenage years convinced I had a hideous long nose, only to realize when I was about 28 that it was pretty normal really. 4. I am a qualified Inspector of Taxes (no, don't run, I don't do it any more). 5. My husband is my mother's cousin (must be a name for it but I am bad at things like that). 6. I love people, food (growing it and cooking it and eating it), plants, gardens, books, sunshine, wine and Welsh classes. 7. I hate arrogance, selfishness, bad manners, parents being aggressive and rude to their children, huge shopping centres, crowded airports, in fact crowds anywhere. 8. I have been colouring my hair for so long I can no longer remember what colour it would be if I left it alone....

Why are women so odd about their relationship with their bodies? Actually perhaps I shouldn’t generalise, I don’t know about you, you may be perfectly relaxed, but I wish I were more like my husband. When he thinks he has put on a bit of weight he cuts down for a month or so and loses it. A couple of years on he might say again “Think I am getting a bit too heavy” and back he goes, cuts back a bit on the cream and the beer and the second helpings and gets back into his 34” waist trousers. None of it is very extreme or intense. Mostly he just eats what he likes, is very active and doesn’t think about it too much. I, on the other hand, think about it a lot. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t look in the mirror and think I could do to lose half a stone. The odd thing is that I think I have been doing this all my adult life although I am now about a stone heavier than I used to be. So that is thirty years of there being an elusive perfect weight at the end of the rainbow, never reac...