welsh hills again

For weeks the weather has been playing an alternating game: a day of calm, blue sky, still trees and winter sunshine, followed by a day of wild wind and rain, making the yew tree stream and lash its branches while the kitchen window streams water. Weather makes a difference up here.  Filling the bird feeders, going for logs, shutting up the chickens: there is no escape from wind and rain when the storms come.  When it is still and sunny you stand and look at the view, notice the birds whipping in and out of the hedges, watch the buzzards soaring or stalking. But I am shut in a bubble of grey, wrapped in slightly grubby cotton wool.  I can see the blue stillness or the driving rain but somehow I can't tell the difference.  I take my camera out on a perfect day, hoping that the effort of making myself see will help me break out of my cocoon but I can't be bothered to look at the pictures when I come back inside. I need to look after the living, I can see that, so I...

My mother, Joan, died unexpectedly on the morning of the 14th November 2013.  My parents had decided to move to a flat in supported accommodation where they could have help with the care my father now needs.  Having decided that this was the best course of action, my mother tackled the move with her customary determination, organisation and flair.  It would have been such a good place for both of them.  They had been there ten days, all the boxes unpacked, pictures still stacked against the walls waiting to be put up, when my mum came into the room where the carer was getting ready to give my dad breakfast.  "Can you get some help?" she said.  "I think I am having a heart attack." She died in the air ambulance on her way to hospital. The last three weeks have been full of arrangements for her funeral and arrangements to put in place the care my dad will need if he is to stay where he is, which is very much what he wants to do.  He is facing his own...

Ten days ago my son and his wife had their first baby, just a few days early.  It was a long labour.  C rang me on the evening of the day K went into hospital having had some bleeding.  I went to bed but all night long I kept finding myself awake, looking into the darkness, wondering what time it was.  Why had I woken?  Oh yes, the baby.  Was it born yet?  How were they? He rang again the following morning.  No, nothing, not yet, just tiredness and contractions.  They would induce her.  Again in the evening.  Things were happening but still painfully slowly.  Another night of drifting in and out of sleep.  It is not a rational thing.  You know perfectly well that it makes no difference whether you sleep or wake.  But still that primitive tie, that tug of blood, keeps pulling at you, tugging you out of sleep into dark wakefulness. On the following morning their daughter was born, our first granddaughter, as ou...

When I was eighteen I was desperate to leave home and to live in London.  A city, a great big city, buzzing and alight all night long, was clearly the only place to be.  Now I live in the country and in between times I have had all sorts of houses but until now they all shared one thing:  whether close to the centre or farther out into suburbia, they were somehow or other in cities.  I didn't really mean to live in cities after that first determined flight from the nest, it just happened.  Cities were where the work was so London, Birmingham and Manchester all became, at various times, home. Eight years ago we moved here.  That was a very determined move too, a deliberate choice to live in the country and to undertake a big move while we still had the energy both to make it happen and to live it when it had happened.  Is this my ideal house?  Well in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't but it is a very good house and I love lots of things ...

Yesterday autumn roared in on a thundering wind, blowing over the bay tree, sending the wheelie bin rolling down the grass, filling the air with flying flowerpots.  On the heels of the wind came a downpour which overflowed the gutters, set the land drains spouting, hammered on the slates and turned the paths to water. It was a day for staying in the warm kitchen. Our bedroom faces east.  When I woke up this morning the sun was pouring in and the sky was a vivid blue behind the ridge on the other side of the valley.  Today has been a gold and blue day, the sun warm, the air still. The crab apple is loaded down with fruit.  This is malus Red Sentinel, planted to replace a little quince tree which slowly but surely lost the will to live.  I kept trying to persuade myself that the quince would survive, even though it would shed a branch or two every time the wind blew strong.  Eventually it split in two, falling open at its heart.  The crab apple we...

I have been thinking a lot about what makes a good parent this last few weeks as I watch my own parents cope with the difficulties of my father's illness and struggle to work out for myself how best to show my own love and support for them. I think I am very lucky.  On the face of it the fact that my own father died when I was three and my brother one was clearly a tragedy, for my mother, for his own deeply loving family and for us.  Yet somehow out of that my mother, and my stepfather, conjured for us a very happy family and an easy, adventurous childhood. It is very many years since I thought of Dad as my stepfather.  He is just Dad. When you are a teenager you do not know that your own family is not normal.  I have read much about the child of an unhappy family slowly learning that theirs is not the only way to live and finding that there are families out there which are places of sustenance and love.  Many of them build their own lives very consciously t...

This year I absolutely promise that I am not going to turn my back on the garden and just sneak off inside.  I am going to clean the greenhouse and cut back and mulch and all those good things.  Honestly.  But there is nothing like a rainy day to set me thinking about winter projects.  I am not one of those people who carefully finishes one thing before starting another but even I was surprised at how many things I seem to have on the go or waiting.  Confession time. It is a bit of a giveaway that the basket which holds all the wool waiting to be worked is my  parents' old log basket, i.e quite a big one.  The bag on the top contains the project which at the moment is at the top of the queue.  Younger son and his wife are expecting their first baby in November and I am making a blanket. Not a delicate white blanket for a newborn but a cheery, cosy blanket for the car and the pushchair. The wool is a soft merino aran and the pattern is fr...