welsh hills again

How I would love to have a really beautiful singing voice.  Unfortunately that is just not going to happen.  I have however decided to settle for good enough and I have joined a choir. At school I loved singing but I was never good enough for our really quite serious school choir.  I could hold a tune just about but couldn't get all the high notes with the sopranos and couldn't manage all the lower ones when I was sent to sit with the altos instead.  I could read music just about but I couldn't play any instrument (still can't) and struggled with sight reading.  So at around about seventeen years old I gently slipped out of the choir, following my teenage theory of "if you can't do it really well, don't do it at all". What a totally stupid philosophy of life.  Yes it meant I held onto the things I could already do well and got better and better at them (writing about English Literature, cooking, baking, walking, writing poetry) but all sorts of...

Has someone speeded up time?  What have I been up to since I saw you last?  Loads and loads, here is a whistle stop tour. Drove to Devon (car just does the three hundred mile journey by itself these says while I snooze on the back seat, I wish). Spent a week volunteering with the National Trust  helping to decorate Killerton House for Christmas. Good things: great company, good food, fabulous instruction from the fabulous Sarah Pepper  so that I now know how to make wreaths and swag mantelpieces.  I am not an experienced or talented flower arranger.  Every day after a few minutes of working away on my own I looked at what I was doing compared to everyone else and felt such a rush of shame and embarrassment that I contemplated just sneaking out and not coming back.  Yet every day when I persevered, following the guidance I had been given, not giving up, remembering that with Christmas decoration "more is more",  whatever I was working on ...

Yesterday was a fabulous bright and glowing day.  How easy it is to spend every hour of every day working and worrying, looking after people, driving up and down the country, baking, gardening, shortening curtains, making jam, working through the endless to do list.  Sometimes you just need to walk away from it all.  Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother's death.  It was a good day to look up, to breathe, to pull on our boots, lock the door and to set off over the hills and far away. Up the hill from our house, the Clwydians were bright in the sun.  It takes half an hour to get to the top, walking first a lane and then a rough track, gaining height with every step. On a clear day you can see forever, across to Snowdonia and right down the Vale of Clwyd to the sea.  Yesterday was as clear as could be, with tiny puffs of riding cloud. See what the wind does up here.  It was still and calm as we came out onto the top but the hawthorn t...

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...

Who am I? Daughter, nearly a year on from the sudden death of my mother, trying to support my father as he falls away into motor neurone disease, holding on to the self they created in their parenting of me: happy, resilient, loving, amused and amusing.  This self is buffetted hard by the rain and wind of loss and sadness but she still stands up, most of the time.  Thank you Mum and Dad for that. Wife, sharing with my husband the loss of his father and receiving his help with my own demands.  Torn by living in one place and loving in another.  Having his company on the road as the miles pile up under the wheels.  Needing to find time to focus on each other Mother and stepmother, feeling at the moment most strongly myself when I talk to my daughter and my son, loving their deep sympathy and understanding, their practicality, watching them in their turn parenting their children and seeing how totally they are adult, responsible not only for themselves but ...

I have always loved cyclamen.  When we first came here nearly nine years ago I longed to establish cyclamen, both autumn flowering cyclamen hederifolium and February flowering cyclamen coum.  I must have bought ten plants of each variety and most of those have simply disappeared.  I longed for them to naturalise and to fill the dry shade under the tree in the side garden but it seemed that only one or two hung on.   Then suddenly this autumn I saw the slender flowers gathering quietly under the tree, certainly twice the size of last year's patch.  Now the flowers are going over and the equally beautiful marbled leaves are patterning the dry soil.  I love them.  They can double and treble and multiply to their hearts' content and I hope they will.  This is an image from the RHS which perfectly captures the delicacy of the flowers. I have written before about Plant me Now , an online plant sales business, and I have always been impressed with t...

I have been wandering about through my September photographs.  2009 seems to have been a great season for mushrooms in our garden.  It's interesting how the harvests vary from year to year and how easy it is to forget.  This year is the season of damsons and tons and tons of autumn raspberries. In September 2010 I find we were visiting our friends in Provence, driving through the Camargue and wandering the glorious stone buildings of Avignon.  I find bulls and white horses and stone streets and a brightness of light that is rare here in North Wales. In September 2011 our then nearly two year old grandson was busy playing trains.  What has changed?  He and his family have moved house and acquired land and pigs and he has grown tall and gone to school.   He still likes trains as a nearly five year old but the trainlines have become extraordinarily complex! Oh look, in 2012 I went to Nant Gwrtheyrn , the Welsh language centre on the beau...