welsh hills again

There are foods which take me straight back to childhood: meat and potato pie, cheese and onion pie, shepherds' pie. Now I realise that these were foods for the poor, ways of making a small amount of protein go a long way, and not the treats I thought them as a child but these dishes are still to me redolent of comfort and good cooking. My mother made great pastry and loves to taste and stir and experiment. Sometimes I would go to a friend's house for tea and find that their version of meat and potato pie was all grey: grey cardboard pastry, grey meat with gristly lumps, grey potatoes, indistinguishable from the grey gravy. I would do my best to eat it, except for the gristly lumps which could be stealthily hidden under the knife, but always felt so sorry for my friend. How could she bear it, when the pastry should be crisp and golden, the meat cooked long and slow into tastiness, the potatoes just firm enough to be a distinct mouthful in the bubbling gravy. I loved to co...

This has been a week of not being at home and I am filled with a need to stay here and be quiet. On Sunday I caught the train to Exeter to visit my parents who live near Okehampton on the edge of Dartmoor. Ian and I had been going to go together but his sister is in hospital, his father worried and not able to get about very well so we decided he would stay home and I would go to Devon. I love seeing my parents. After all this time I still look forward to a visit (although living with them would drive me quite quite mad). When I got off the train in Exeter my mother and my niece were there to greet me. My niece is ten, all long legs and brown hair, and just getting to the age when the woman she will be catches you unawares from time to time and looks out of the child in a move of the head or the line of her cheekbones. My father was waiting with the dog by the exit, sitting on a bench and shocking me as he stood up to hug me with the grey age in his face. He is having a lot of pain fro...

I've been musing about mothering this week. I did not immediately take well to motherhood. Did I have postnatal depression? I'm not sure and even if I did it was not profound but I did struggle with the sense that I did not know what to do. I loved my baby from the start but she cried and cried and I couldn't seem to stop her. We moved when she was six weeks old to a town where I knew no one and my husband was working long hours as a junior doctor. I remember vividly the sense of desperation and isolation and the feeling that I had given away a life I had been happy with in exchange for this relentless anguish. But by the time she was six months old things had improved. I had come to know how to care for her and made some friends. She laughed at me when I went into her. With the second baby we had again moved just before he was born and his first few months are a blur of utter exhaustion in my mind. I envy those who have easy babies and settle comfortably into a milky world...

Some days just work. Yesterday was one of those. The sun shone and we worked together in the garden. Ian was laying bricks for the base of our new greenhouse - can you imagine, a cedar greenhouse, my birthday present - and I was painting the shed. The shed has had to be moved as it was occupying the flat, sheltered, sunny site where the new greenhouse is to go. Now flat up here on the hill really means just a gentle slope, but still, prime land. So Ian had painstakingly taken the shed to pieces. We imported additional labour in the shape of older son to move it around the corner down to the end of the big pigsty and here it was rebuilt and given a smart new roof. I don't think I have ever painted a shed before. It had previously had a dark green stain, now very faded, and there was new wood as well where Ian has replaced a rotten windown with new shiplap so the whole thing needed a new coat of dark green. It's mesmerising, the rhythm of a brush backwards and forwards a...

Well our friends came over from Manchester and it is indeed pouring down. There was perhaps half an hour when they first arrived when it was dry which is perhaps just enough time to get some idea of why we live here. They have gone on a long walk and I wimped out, needing to bake things for some afternoon tea, not wanting to walk in the wind and rain and being pretty sure that they, experienced long distance walkers, would want to go at a pace I would struggle with. So I have made some bread and a leek and cheese pie. I have rubbed the butter into the flour for some cheese scones and some fruit scones, ready to mix up so they will certainly be warm when the walkers come in. I have whipped some cream and decanted some gooseberry and elderflower jam into a pretty jar. The woodburner is lit and the house smells of baking and warmth. I have had the better of it today I think. The rain is streaming down the windows and the wind is lashing the yew trees. The hens are out somewhere bu...

Zoe has tagged me to do the seven facts about myself meme. Thank you Zoe. I like reading these about other people so although I'm not sure there is anything new to say about me here goes. My father was in the RAF. He was killed in a flying accident when I was three. My brother was just twelve months old and my mother was twenty four. When I was eleven we emigrated to New Zealand, my mother having remarried. We stayed until I was seventeen and I would love to go back and look at it again as an adult. Although we didn't have very much money it was a great outdoor life. Sometimes I wonder if that time accounts for tendency to take my cup of tea outside, to the amusement of my family, as long as there is the slightest hint of warmth. Wrong hemisphere now perhaps. I trained as an inspector of taxes (don't do it now, don't panic). A colleague of mine was once investigating the tax affairs of a large, aggressive Northern comedian. When he turned up at his house to in...

The A55 belts through the north of Wales towards Snowdonia, Anglesey and the coast. Some of the coastal towns are rundown and flaking. Some are glossy with money, yachts and restaurants. In summer the road can be nose to tail with caravans. Very few people turn south and come inland. Here it is a different world, neither seaside towns nor spectacular mountains, we are in a gentler country. If you come to us along the Denbigh road you are very likely to be stuck behind a tractor for a bit. Pheasants fly up and blunder across the road. The fields on either side are studded with sheep. As you come around a curve between trees the Clwydian hills rise up, gentle valleys, wooded sides, the long ridge marching southward. This is border country and the long distance path which runs along the ridge is named after Offa's Dyke. It takes you up and over Moel Arthur, Penycloddiau and Moel Famau and on down towards Powys and mid Wales. While this is not deepest West Wales, not Gwynedd where Wels...