welsh hills again

As we get older, if we are lucky,  we live a life that suits us.  We find our tribe, we settle into our interests, we create our world from our family and friends.  We know what we like.  We know how we want to spend our time and what simply does not interest us.  We build a world around us in which we feel safe and happy.  When I look back at how life felt for me when I was in my late teens particularly so much of what I remember is the discomfort of not quite fitting and of not quite knowing how to behave.  I spent time with people whose values I did not share.  I did things I did not enjoy simply to fit in.  And then I slowly began to learn who I was and what mattered to me and to make my world in that shape. It is good to have made a life that fits you and to feel comfortable and happy within it but I have been thinking for the last few weeks about comfort and challenge, about the need for self care and the risk of complacency, about...

When we moved up here twelve years ago now I did not really think about roses.  I like roses but I like all sorts of things and there was so much else to think about with the prospect of trying to make a garden in a nearly one acre field high on a hillside.  But that first summer I found that there were some roses here. Mainly they were these: wild roses in the hedges, simple dog roses, simple perfection. And there was this one, an undistinguished looking shrub rose by the gate through to the field.  I have no idea what it is called.  The flowers are small but the colour is deep and the perfume is one of the strongest in the garden.  The first time I walked by and was hit by a waft of the scent I decided it could be as ordinary looking as it liked, as long as once a year it smelled like that. And there was this one.  At the time it was struggling in the kitchen garden, growing between two posts and looking sad and straggly.  As part ...

It is May.  Is there any month more beautiful?  I have been making a new herb bed in the kitchen garden, digging out an area which has become full of grass and ground elder.  At this time of year you could work in the garden all day long and still not finish what is to be done so if we are to seize the moment it is important not to fall prey to the endless to do list, either written or mental.  It is important to seize the day. We walk up the drive, through the farmyard and out onto the hill.  Cowslips are blooming at the edge of the drive.  In Welsh they are called Briallen Fair, Mary's primrose.   A little colony of these was growing up here when we came nearly twelve years ago now.  For a few years they appeared every spring, the patch never really growing.  Then a couple of years ago they took off and began to spread.  Now there is an area perhaps six feet long crowded with them.  Unlike primroses, they hold their heads hig...

I have been neglecting my blog again.  I suspect that the Open University Spanish course I am doing is partly responsible.  The time it takes, and at the moment the constant sense of being way behind following  our New Zealand trip, eats into the time when I might otherwise be writing and not doing my Spanish makes me feel far guiltier than not writing my blog.  Spanish also throws deadlines for assignments at me which the blog doesn't so it is slowly but surely squeezing the blog out.  I had lunch this week with a friend who also writes and she inspired me to get back to writing, as she always does (thanks Annie!).  I thought I would look back at when I began to write this blog so this morning I sat down and dug around in the archives and to my amazement I discovered that I wrote my first blog ten years ago yesterday!  And then of course I got lost in reading old posts and remembering things I had long forgotten.  It enthused me all over ...

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...