welsh hills again

For a long time I felt like the line from T.S Eliot:  "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons".  When I was a student and a young mother coffee played a big role in keeping me awake.  When I was working away from home my life seemed to be measured out in train journeys, whizzing away at the beginning of the week, whizzing  back at the end.  For the last three or four years the focus has been very much on elderly parents and for the last couple of years the measure has been weekly motorway journeys, six hundred mile round trips, the weeks chopped up into going to Devon, being in Devon, recovering from being in Devon and a squished up ordinary life.  I am still getting used to life without that tempo and without my father and mother, for somehow looking after my Dad seemed to obscure the fact that my mother had gone.  So the new shape of life is taking a while to settle itself around my shoulders.  But as I knitted and puzzled my way...

What skills have you got?  And are there any you wish you had?  Skills are an odd thing.  They accumulate gently through life.  One moment you are a child wrestling with wool and knitting needles and dripping tears on the ladder of another dropped stitch in the scarf which is too loose and too narrow and curls up at the edges.  Next you are a young working mother with time so squeezed that the idea of knitting anything at all is simply ludicrous.  How can you possibly have time to knit when you don't even have time to cut your own toenails? And yet somehow you must have done enough knitting often enough because you find yourself years later able to knit and with time for knitting and finding it satisfying and pleasurable.  How did that happen?  Did I learn the skill when my back was turned? What else can I do that I must have learned?  Cooking, but that is an easier one to understand.  I learned cooking with my mother.  My mother ...

Time is a strange elastic thing.  A day at home pottering through the domestic routine just whisks away,  and in no time at all we are sitting by the woodburner and then going upstairs to bed.  Two days away in London and time seems to have stretched.  Driving back from the station on Friday afternoon it felt as if we had been away all week.  If you want to get more time out of your life do something different.  I can sort of understand that one. Time and memory though, that's a strange fluid thing, not the elasticity of stretching out the moment but instead a fluidity, moving, changing, like rushing water.   And just like water,  memory is sometimes cloudy and dark, sometimes pellucidly clear.  We spent Thursday morning last week in the Courtauld Gallery.  This was absolutely my territory when I was at university, forty years ago now.  Somerset House and the Courtauld are right next door to King's College where I studied, and ...

For the last couple of days the sun has shone in a clear blue sky.  Everything is diamond bright.  The hills have edges.  The bare trees make intricate shapes against the newly greening fields.  Snowdrops shine.  A jet trail rises against the vivid blue sky.  I love this.  For weeks we have been living in a grey world where the hills disappear and merge into the grey sky.  Grey and mud underfoot, grey and lowering cloud overhead.  It has been like living in a wet dustbin.  And all of a sudden everything sings. I wander round the garden and pick some hellebores for the kitchen table.  Everywhere the snowdrops, which have been lurking for weeks in tight bud, are open to the sun.  Under the apple trees are the promise of daffodils in great fat snouts, green but here and there the odd one faintly flushed with yellow.  There is enough warmth in the sun for me to sit outside, wrapped in my scarf and with three layers on,...

It is grey and blowing today.  Eight o' clock in the morning.  The wind lashes the yew tree.  I look through my bedroom window at the rain blowing in rippling curtains across the valley.   Ian has gone to work.  The house is quiet, apart from the noise of the wind, and dark, too dark to see without the lights on.  I pad downstairs in my slippers and go round turning some lights on in the kitchen and the sitting room.  The dog greets me with a wagging tail.   Sadness snatches at me but I turn away from it.  Today is mine to make.  I hear my mother's voice "I think to myself, what can I do to make this a good day for Graham and for me, and then I do it".  So simple.  So complicated. So how to claim the day, how to make it feel like home?  Breakfast first.  A cup of tea in my favourite mug and scrambled eggs.  The rhythm of making scrambled eggs is soothing.  I could do this in my sleep: the little pan on the...

Enough of all this deep stuff.  Time to make marmalade.  I had a cold after Christmas which could only be helped by copious amounts of whisky and hot lemon, which Ian duly supplied.  You can always tell I have a bad cold if I take to whisky, lemon and honey.  In normal times I don't even like whisky.  Ian bought lots of lemons (there must have a been a special offer on!) and when the cold had receded there were the lemons, about a kilo of them, still sitting in the fruit bowl looking as if they would like to be made into something. Marmalade is a great thing to make if you are new to preserving because it sets easily.  I don't have much patience with the traditional chopping of oranges or lemons.  This way produces a very similar marmalade with a lot less work. You need: As ingredients: 1 kilo lemons, 2kg (or slightly more) granulated sugar, water. As equipment: very large pan or preserving pan, sharp knife, food processor, twelve clean jam ja...

Thank you so much to everyone who commented on my last blog about my father.  I hugely appreciate your kindness, your sensitivity, and your readiness to share your own experience of the loss of your parents or others whom you have loved.  It was good to be reminded that everyone will go through something like this at some time in their life and that, ulitmately, we all cope in our different ways.  It was also good to hear in your responses that you had understood what I was trying to say about my father.  I felt somehow that in reading and responding people were honouring him and his life.  Thank you.  It meant a lot to me. And so here we are now in 2016.  I am not a great maker of New Year's Resolutions.  When I used to make resolutions, I would find that they were pretty much the same every year: the same losing weight, taking more exercise, eating well, drinking less.  Not a great advert for the efficacy of resolutions really.  Clea...