welsh hills again

Well a whole month has whizzed away since I last blogged and its hard to know where the time has gone:  a visit from a dear friend who lives in France was the focus of the beginning of July.  I love the way that a visitor makes us get out into this lovely part of the world in which we live rather than gardening and working and sticking to our admittedly delightful routine.  A highlight was a walk on the beach at Newborough Warren in Anglesey  (Llanddwyn in Welsh) and a meal at Dylan's in Menai Bridge looking out over the water.  Newborough Warren is large and wild, fringed by pine forest which is home to red squirrels, and crowned by an island accessible at low tide.  You can look across the sea to the mountains of Snowdonia or away out west towards Ireland.  Why do I love the west?  I do not really know but the North West, Wales and west Wales, North West Scotland and the South West of England all draw me and the sun going down over the sea alway...

It is six months to the day since I started couch to 5k.  So how has it been?  Is it worth doing?  Am I still running?  Have I lost two stone and become an elite athlete? Er, no to that last one. I am still running and to my surprise I really enjoy it now.  When I was going through the programme I always loved how I felt afterwards but I often struggled with the runs themselves.  It was hard.  My legs sometimes worked when my lungs didn't want to.  I kept going through the nine weeks of C25k as much because I am stubborn as for any other reason.  I didn't want to do it sometimes but I didn't want to give up more. Couch to 5k is a bit of a misnomer I think.  When I got to the end of the nine weeks I was astonished and delighted to find that I could run for 30 minutes but I was nowhere near being able to run 5km.  My first 5k was my first park run, six weeks later.  It took me 46 minutes and I was absolutely amazed that I cou...

Life in a campervan is a pretty close quarters experience.  It is a small space.  If there are two of you sharing it you come to know where to put yourself, when to sit, when to go out of the van, how to move around so that you don't spend your time falling over each other.  After three weeks travelling in the van in Northern Spain Ian and I had got very good at it.  We had also spent most of our waking and sleeping moments together so it was strange to hoist my rucksack onto my shoulder and turn my back on him to find the apartment which would be my home in Salamanca for a week while I did my Spanish course.   Ian was going to drive home to Wales through Spain and France.  I didn't watch him go.  I was too busy wrangling my bags into the tiny lift. I had decided to do another intensive week in the hopes of boosting my Spanish.  I seemed to have stalled frustratingly at a level where I could read quite well but struggled with speaking and l...

It is a month since I did that first parkrun, a month where I had a few days off for a sore knee and later a week off for a bad sore throat.  In between times I have tried to keep up with my running but I was starting to feel intimidated by the idea of parkrun and I thought I had better do another one, quick, before I began to feel that it was beyond me.  Part of the problem of having run one now is that I do know quite how hard it is, not for everyone but for me! So this morning off we went.  It was a bright clear day, sunny but cool, perfect running conditions.  I really didn't feel like going.  This was one of those occasions, of which there are many, where the fact that Ian and I were going out together helped to keep me on track.  I suspect that either of us might have slipped away and not done it if we had been on our own, but somehow neither of us said "Shall we just not bother" and so off we went. There were fewer people than the last time I ran...

When I started this running lark in January I had no ambition to run real distances.  I didn't want to run a marathon but I did think I would like to run 5k, maybe, if I could.    Going from being unable to run at all to running for thirty minutes, using the wonderful Couch to 5k app, was amazing.  I never thought I could run for thirty minutes without stopping.  In the early weeks I was daunted by the idea of running for five minutes!  But I did it and a few weeks ago I found I was able to keep going.  I was astonished.  I was delighted. But I am slow, the original snail runner.  When I completed Couch to 5k a few weeks ago I could indeed run for thirty minutes (yay!) but I was running just over 3k in that time.  I have got up to about 3.7k  but I had never run for 5k (actually I think I might have once, when I was about twenty nine, so around thirty five years ago) when I arrived at Bodelwyddan Castle this morning to do my first...

One of the things I love about having blogged for so many years is that I can look back on how things were and how things are now.  I know in my head that our garden was a field when we came fourteen years ago.  But it is hard to remember how it was.  What I see when I wander around has come about so slowly that I have lost the sense of how it was.  This picture shows the native tree bed at the bottom of our field.  It was planted first with trees and dogwoods about ten years ago.  In the picture above the bed is about three years old, with snowdrops beginning to spread and the dogwoods starting to grow. This is how it looks now, ten years on,  the trees large and shady, the dogwoods growing and the hellebores in full flower.   The trees tower above your head.  It is hard to think that they have not always been there. It is so easy to forget how things change.  This picture shows the newly planted orchard in spring...

A mixed up sort of week!  On Saturday last we went to Florence for a few days.  My niece has been studying there this year and we went to catch up with her, to revisit Florence and to have a few days away. It was cold at home in Wales once you left the warmth of the woodburner.  Italy was cloudy but milder and as we travelled by bus from Pisa airport to Florence there was blossom piled on the bare branches of trees.  I don't think I have been to Italy this early in the year before.  The grass was still green.  Even without the sun there was a faint sense of spring around the corner.  We had booked a place to stay through Airbnb, which we use a lot when we travel.  It was about forty minutes walk from the station or a taxi ride.  We walk a lot when we are in foreign cities so we walked there, in default mode, although by the time we arrived I was tired and hungry.  It seemed a long time since we had left home that morning when we fina...