welsh hills again

My first ever yoga retreat started in the week I turned sixty two.  I found yoga about five years ago, roughly at the same time that I gave up my frantic London job.  Probably not coincidence.  I had tried it a couple of times in my thirties and forties but it was always too slow or too hard.  I would lie there, surrounded by people apparently relaxing, my head whizzing with work and home and my juggling, plate-spinning life.  So no surprise perhaps that at the same time that I decided to step back from that life, to downsize and to spend my time and energy on different things I found a great yoga teacher and a great anchoring class.  Yoga was part of what kept me steady in the heaving seas of the last couple of years as my parents died.  I can't imagine life without it now but I am very, very new to it and very stiff. I think the idea of a retreat emerged in January when I was musing about reflection and adventure being the themes for the year....

Here is the September extract from the longer pieces I am writing about the experience of getting older.  I am a bit self conscious about this one.  It feels a bit "showy offy" to talk about going to the gym somehow.  It is not about that.  It is about trying to engage more with what the body can do than with what it looks like.  Easier said than done.  I love to hear what you think so please tell me! Let’s face it, the aging body is not a pretty thing:   wrinkled knees and elbows, the saggy skin which hangs on your arms, turtle necks, veined legs.   But it is not just what the body looks like, it is also what it can do.  For the last few years of his life my father in law lived with us.   He made it to ninety five and was always remarkably, even relentlessly cheerful.   As a young man and right through middle age and beyond he had been strong.   He missed that strength when it disappeared on him as old age took ho...

Some books shape your childhood.  They catch at the imagination and become a part of you.  Alan Garner's "The Moon of Gomrath" and "The Owl Service", C. S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising", Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons", Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock's "The Far Distant Oxus" were all books that I read again and again, trying to leave just long enough between rereadings so that they regained just a little of their magical strangeness or their ability to surprise.  One of these books which made me was Lucy M. Boston's "The Children of Green Knowe".  Around ten years or so ago I read somewhere that Hemingford Grey Manor was the inspiration for Green Knowe and that it was possible to arrange to visit.  The idea hung around on the edge of my consciousness.  Hemingford Grey is near Huntingdon in the East of England.  We live way over...

So here is the first slice of the longer piece I want to write, in fact this is what I wrote on my second day at The Hurst on the Arvon course in that sudden rush of realisation of what I wanted to say.  I don't intend to blog the whole thing, even assuming I can write it, but I thought I would try to put an extract on every month and this is August's.  I hope that the discipline of committing myself to do that will keep me writing and I also hope that you will tell me what you think.  I love feedback although I think that too much might make me too self conscious so with luck this will be a balance that works for me.  I hope it works for you too. The year of being sixty two. Ageing isn’t linear.   It happens in sudden leaps and swoops.   One day you look in the mirror and your chin has gone.    Your chin which has been with you all your life has suddenly disappeared and in its place is a soft fleshy decline from your head to your nec...

I have been wanting to do an Arvon writing course for years.  When I had the time I simply did not have the money.  When the money was not a problem it was because I was working so hard that I could not imagine giving a week of my hard earned holiday to something that did not involve the rest of my family.  But suddenly earlier this year I realised that I could do it.  I had the time.  I had the money.  Ian was going trekking with some friends in Norway.  There was not even the faint residual guilt of going away and leaving him looking after everything.  We would both go away.  Nobody would look after anything at all. I knew I wanted to write non fiction and when I found that a course on creative non fiction was offered in one of the weeks when Ian was going to be away it seemed entirely meant.  After years of writing with ease and pleasure, I have been struggling with writing the blog since my father died.  Maybe it would give m...

I am trying to reconnect gently.  From Monday to Saturday morning I was living in an unconnected world: no wifi, no television, no radio and only sufficient mobile signal for the odd grudging text message, with no guarantee of reply.  Air silence. I was at an Arvon course at The Hurst in Shropshire, spending a week with fifteen others and two tutors immersed in creative non-fiction.  I'm still processing that experience and may write about it sometime but right now I am just considering how it was to drop out of the digital world for a few days. I hadn't noticed the "no wifi" when I booked to go on the course.  Checking what I needed as I packed last week I saw it:  no wifi, poor mobile signal, payphone in the hall.  My heart sank.  I like my connectedness.  Email produces mostly selling these days but every now and then there is something interesting with news or photos from friends or family.  Facebook is much the same.  I don't ...

I have been writing this blog since 2007. That is an amazing thought!  In that time I have made lots of real and virtual friends and had a lot of fun with it.  I have been to Chelsea and to the Malvern and Tatton RHS Shows.  I have blogged about gardens and houses and cooking and had the occasional rant about consumerism and the way we bring up our children.  I have blogged as often as three times a week, although generally my pattern has been to write a weekly blog.  I have blogged with photographs and without and have found that the urge to write has been like an itch I need to scratch, a pleasurable itch, but the itch of a strong urge to connect and to find the words that make sense of my life. So why do I feel that I am grinding to a halt, losing it, letting it drift away from me? It is hard to put my finger on.  At one level I very much do not want to stop.  I love the connections I have made and I know my life would be poorer without them....