welsh hills again

Travelling There is a real tension for me between the desire to be rooted and the wish to travel.   As I get older this tension intensifies.   After a lifetime enjoying wandering about, loving moving house, feeling that home is where my people are and that place does not really matter, I find   myself living in a place which I love.   I would be happy to move house again but I don’t want to go very far.   I like the sense of becoming part of a community.   I love my choir, my yoga class, my Welsh lessons.   I like the fact that I know people.   I feel at home here.   There is a Welsh expression “a man of his own square mile” and it is one I have always loved.   But my own square mile, love it though I do,   has never been enough for me. I have always loved travel, change, new experiences.   And getting older makes me intensely aware that if there are places I want to go to, things I want to see and do, parts of the w...

Sometimes your body gives you a reminder that you are getting older, a quick kick in the shins which you didn't see coming.  I picked up my knitting the other day, as I do most days, for half an hour of quiet time.  I don't see enough written about the meditative properties of knitting but for me the peaceful repetition and gradual creation of something beautiful under my hands is a quiet revelation.  Not that day though.  A deep pain developed in the base of my thumb every time I picked up the needles.  I didn't believe it.  I kept putting my knitting down and picking it up again as if a slightly different grip might make all the difference.  It didn't.  I suppose it is arthritis of some sort.  Arthritis?  What a nonsense.  Arthritis is for old people.  I can't possibly have arthritis.  So for two weeks or so I have done no knitting, hoping that a rest will sort it out.  I miss it, but along with the fact of missing ...

Somehow I have rather lost the pattern of blogging.  Instead of that gentle insistence at the back of my mind that once a week is about right I have slipped to once a fortnight or even once a month.  There are plenty of great blogs which I like where the blogs appear about once a month but I know that for me a weekly blog is what feels about right.  It means that I get into the habit of sharing things and that I don't sit down thinking that so much has happened since my last blog that I don't quite know where to start.  I think this shift is partly down to having become fond of using Instagram.  It is so quick and easy and such a supportive and engaged community.  It is really easy to use little bits of  time to Instagram things and then feel that the longer time which you need for a blog is something you can't quite find.  But I don't want to stop blogging and I think if I don't give it a shake up and find time to blog a bit more often I might fi...

Well somehow I didn't manage to post December's extract from the year of being sixty two, principally because I didn't write it!  Somehow the coming of Christmas, trying to keep up with my Spanish and the upheaval of house redecorating just squeezed my writing time into non existence.  I had been intending to spend a chapter looking at the upsides of ageing.  From the volume of stuff you read about "anti-ageing" you might suppose that there aren't any upsides, but that's not true.  My mother used to tell me in her forties, fifties and sixties that she would not want to go back, that she was genuinely happy to be where she was in her life.  She would I suspect have stopped the clock before my father began to be ill but even that would have taken them both well into their seventies.  I never totally understood why she was so content with the age she was when we had those conversations but I could see that it was true.   Knowing that has given me a sense,...

The run up to Christmas might not seem the ideal time to get the decorators in.  Over the summer we flirted with the idea of moving house.  We found something that we liked which doesn't happen all that often because this place is a place we love.  But it didn't come together and, with something like relief, we have committed ourselves to this house again for another little while.  We won't live here forever.  With a house and a holiday cottage and six outbuildings, two greenhouses and a couple of acres of land, it is not a house in which to grow properly old.  But for now we will happily stay here and as part of falling back in love with the house I wanted to reconnect with it which means giving it some time and attention. So first of all we had our bedroom and the landing where we keep our books (well some of them) redecorated.  It is quite extraordinary how much stuff we have and how emptying a room makes the whole house overflow with things!...

I know that most of my readers are over forty. I have surely intensified that by writing about the whole process of ageing!  I make no apology for doing that.  I think how my generation is ageing is fascinating and the whole question is weirdly invisible in our society (unlike "anti ageing" which is everywhere!).  I also think I am not alone in having vivid recall of when my children were small.  And things that interest you when you have small children don't stop being interesting when your children grow.  Indeed lots of people of my generation are passionate about enviromental issues not simply from a political perspective but also in an intensely personal way.  How we live now matters for the future of our children and grandchildren. So I am going to get my entirely lovely daughter in law to guest blog here every few weeks to tell us about her life and the progress of her website, one baby owner.   She can speak for herself so here she is: ...

 I have only just managed to slip in November's selection from the Year of B eing Sixty Two before the end of the month.  Am I th e only person who thinks a lot about her hair? Hair colour defines us. Describe someone and it is one of the first things you will find yourself saying: the blonde woman, the dark haired man, the redhead.   Once you become grey haired you shift.    All the other hair colours say something about you, however stereotyped it may be.   Redheads are feisty and quick tempered.   Blondes are sexy and just possibly a bit dim.   Brunettes are sleek and glossy.   Grey haired people are just old.   So what do we do about the vexed question of hair? Perhaps how you think about this is affected by whether you have been colouring your hair when you   were younger.   I have had a lifetime of colouring mine.   I lived in New Zealand when I was a teenager where the sun ensured that my light brown h...