welsh hills again

The joys of book club

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 15:39:00 +0000

When we moved here, in June 2022, we met various lovely neighbours including a couple along the road who have been here much longer than we have but are incomers like us. There are quite a few people here who have moved in from other areas as well as plenty with deep roots and family connections in this part of North Wales. I often find it hard to tell which is which as everyone is generally very welcoming and friendly. This is interesting as it is not always the case. When my parents were alive and lived in Devon there was a clear divide between "real locals" and incomers in one of the villages they moved to which I just haven't noticed round here.

Quite soon after we got here this particular neighbour floated the idea of a book club. I can't quite remember how a number of us met in our local pub to discuss the idea but there was lots of interest and enthusiasm and quite quickly there was the inevitable Whats App group and an agreement to meet at a room in the pub on the evening of the third Wednesday of every month. There are about thirty of us in the group although the attendance tends to vary from fifteen or so up to twenty two or twenty three. We are mostly women (of a certain age as Gregg Wallace would say!) although we have two men as very welcome members and a couple of younger women.

Now I am a voracious reader, generally getting through three or four books a week, and I have been in book clubs before but this one is something special. I think the quite large number of members allows for a really wide range of suggestions and opinions. There is lively and sometimes noisy discussion and disagreement but the disagreement tends to lead to laughter not anger and there is real respect for other views and courtesy and warmth when we talk about what we have read. The group is beautifully chaired, managed, whatever you might call it with the lightest hand by Donna who suggested it. We never find ourselves having finished the discussion in half an hour and simply chatting and drinking wine instead, which has certainly happened in other book groups! It is an hour and a half or so of intensely book based talk!

Perhaps I am particularly sensitive at the moment with the new leadership in the US which seems to reflect an ever more polarised society, brashly rude and intolerant of criticism, but this monthly reminder of what intelligent discussion can be and of how differences of opinion can be handled really lifts my spirits every month without fail. The world has not been reduced to a shouting match in the Oval Office and insults flying on social media. Generosity, subtlety, kindness and humour remain.

And I have read some books I would simply not have come across without book club. I hadn't realised that I had got rather stuck in my ways but I think I had fallen victim to the way sites like Amazon make suggestions to you based on what you have already read, not at all unreasonably but not likely to throw you a curve ball and open your mind to something outside your normal realm of reading matter.

Here are three books which I would never have read without book club and all of them are wonderful discoveries:

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

This is set in a hotel in Moscow just after the Russian revolution. The gentleman in question is an aristocrat, placed under what is essentially a form of house arrest. He stays there for years. It sounds the unlikeliest setting for a book. But the humanity and warmth of the main character and the fantastic writing make it funny, uplifting, compulsively readable. I loved it.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Set in Ethiopia and the United States this is the story of a young boy who becomes a surgeon. I knew nothing about Ethiopia. I know practically nothing about surgery. This is a big book but I read it at a gallop to the extent that in a year or so I shall read it again. It is one of those rare books which subtly changes the way you look at the world.

As does this last one

The Pearl that broke its Shell by Nadia Hashimi

This contains two parallel stories of Shekiba in Afghanistan in the early 1900s and her great great grandaughter Rahimi more than a hundred years later. Rahimi is one of five daughters and between the ages of around nine and thirteen she dresses and lives as a boy under the tradition of bachu posh where a family without sons can use a daughter to go out into the world in a way in which a girl cannot, to shop, to play, to be educated. Then at thirteen she is married off to a man almost thirty years her senior. Again I would never have picked this up but if I hadn't I would have missed something wonderful, eye opening and extraordinary.

So thank you to book club. How funny that a small group of people meeting in a little village should remind you so powerfully that people are clever and funny and kind and interesting. The best of humanity in the front room of a pub.

Use it or lose it

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 18:49:00 +0000

In 2019, at the tender age of sixty four, I did the Couch to 5K programme, a running programme on an app designed to take you from no running at all (i.e. the couch!) to running for 30 minutes without stopping. I think the 5k is a bit of a misnomer as very few people who go through the programme end up running 5k in the 30 minutes at which the programme aims.

I had never been a runner, never been sporty at all. At school I specialised in sloping off from all sporting activity and sitting in the sun by the tennis courts with a book, joining in at the last minute by apparently returning from the toilets. As an adult I learned that I loved walking and yoga or Pilates. It was apparently ball sports or organised games that I didn't like. I did actually enjoy physical activity if it was the right physical activity. I only started couch to 5k because Ian was doing it, having committed himself, after a glass or two of wine, to running a half marathon with our elder daughter in Cardiff. He used to be sporty, a good footballer and an even better tennis player, and he used to run. He remains pretty fit and active but he hadn't run for a long time. I said I would do the running programme at the same time partly to show solidarity and partly because I was curious to know if I could.

And astonishingly, although I found it hard as hard can be, I could do it and I did do it and I came to enjoy the slow and gentle solitary jogging which followed. I never dared to stop because I was pretty sure that if I lost the hardwon fitness I would not do it again but in late summer last year I had to stop for a while when my blood pressure went haywire so I had about three months without any running at all. Now the blood pressure is sorted and I thought I would try to return to running. I had put on a few pounds during the more sedentary period and I had had my seventieth birthday. I thought if I didn't get back to running soon I never would. It would become one of those things that I used to do. I didn't want to lose it, so back I went, returning to the very beginning again. Could I do it?

It was nothing like as hard as I remembered from that first time six years ago which surprised me. I am older, surely it would be harder? But I must have developed some sort of increased baseline fitness over those years when I pottered gently around the lanes because it has proved to be doable. I think I am a little slower even than I was then but I will take that. It is a nine week programme although if you like you can take longer about it than that and this time I have done. I have just finished week seven of the programme, taking two weeks rather than one for each stage. That has included a couple of breaks with some sort of health set back like a cold or a stomach upset but I suspect that taking it so slowly is part of why I have not found it too hard. That having been said, this morning's run was supposed to be my first time of running for twenty eight minutes without a walking break.

I did not want to go. If it had been a case of waiting until I felt like running there is no way I would have gone out of the door but one of the things that last time did teach me is just to go. Decide to go, put it in the diary, get up and put my running clothes on, go, even if I am grumping my way out of the door.

This morning was bright but cold. I went back upstairs to put on a second pair of leggings and another lightweight fleece. The five minute warm up walk began and it was good to be outside. Birds were hopping in the hedges. The wind was cold but the sky was blue. Jo Whiley told me to start to run so off I went, slowly, easily. I felt surprisingly good. Getting towards the halfway mark I began to flag but I realised that if I added another two or three minutes on before turning for home I would be at a little churchyard which a friend has been telling me about. There should be snowdrops. The lane sloped gently down.

And there was the church, with snowdrops and daffodils just beginning to show.

The view across the vale is perfect.

I allowed myself a moment's pause to look inside.

And I arrived home bouncing with the sheer pleasure of being able to run again. I might have to incorporate more interesting places to run to as a destination!

Winter

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 14:48:00 +0000

I have always loved Spring and here we are in February. There are tiny signs of spring. In the bottom of the hedges along the lanes snowdrops are showing. Last week we visited a churchyard at Llantysilio, about half an hour from here, which is famous for its snowdrops.

We went on a Sunday afternoon, thinking the church would not be in use then, but as we wandered among the gravestones we could hear the sounds of singing and an organ playing. Under the lych gate at the entrance to the churchyard was a notice indicating the there was a service that day to bless the snowdrops. It was a strange idea, almost pagan. I am not aware of any Christian significance in snowdrops other than perhaps that they could be said to be an indication of new life to come.

Because I love spring so much and have never been keen on February I am making a particular effort right now not to wish the days away. I used to do this a lot, longing for sunshine and longer days, daffodils and warmth on my back. What remains of life is too short to waste February mumping around the house resentfully, waiting for the month to be gone. It is very cold outside here today with a vicious, knifing wind from the East cutting through you if you venture out. I decided it was a good day for a proper winter lunch: leek and potato soup and cheese scones. It amuses me that my favourite recipe for cheese scones comes from a book called the Farmhouse Kitchen, bought for pennies from a charity booksale more than thirty years ago. I have tried other recipes: Mary Berry, Delia Smith, random ones from the internet and the BBC good food website. Nothing is as good as these. I think it is the inclusion of dry mustard powder and cayenne which gives them the edge.

This afternoon there is rugby to watch, Scotland v Ireland in the Six Nations. There is knitting to do and a new book to read. I shall light the woodburning stove and put the kettle on.

Winter pleasures.

Legacy

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 16:57:00 +0000

Yesterday we went to the funeral of a very old friend, the first of our generation to die. This is not the place to write about the day, that is his story and that of his family. It may be the place to write about the effect of being brought up once again against the finality of death. How many times has that happened? How many funerals have I attended over my own reasonably long life? And yet the mind skitters away and refuses to engage with the hugeness and the inevitability of death. When I was younger I, like most people I imagine, simply could not feel in any way that death would apply to me. Of course I knew it would with my intellect but somehow it was impossible to take seriously as my own future. I could see the sadness and loss of those who were left behind. I could mourn my own loss. I could think about the wife or husband, the children and grandchildren who remained and how their lives might be without the person who had died. But the life force within me pulsed too strongly, made too much noise, for me to acknowledge my own inevitable death in anything but the most hypothetical way. "Yes, yes. Of course. But for now, what shall we have for lunch?"

Losing my mother made the first impact on the cheery inpenetrability of that life force. She died very suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack. She was a small woman, quiet, full of warmth, generous, forgiving, with huge tolerance of others and yet with very high standards of behaviour for herself and her children. My father was noisier, more extrovert, a man with a short fuse and a talent for story telling. Yet she was the person whose warmth suffused a room and whose wisdom and kindness made her someone of huge stature. She died in the air ambulance on the way to hospital. When my father, my sister and I arrived we were shown into the room where her body lay on a metal table. She looked very small and very alone. She was too small. It was not possible that this figure in the flowered nightie with the freckled forearms and the dimmed auburn hair could ever have held my mother. The body was everything to do with her and nothing. She was too big for it.

That was the first time I ever had a real though fleeting sense of my own mortality. She was gone. I would be gone. I think about her a lot, with a profound gratitude that I had her, that she was my mother. I know what she would have thought about many things. I see her from time to time in my children. My daughter has much of the same care for others, generosity of spirit and inner strength. My son has her unshowy courage, her commitment and ability to laugh at himself. I see my son and daughter and their children as her legacy, taking forward her adventurousness, her independence, always ready for an adventure, always aware of sadness or fear in others and reaching out a hand.

One of my granddaughters was born just two weeks before my mother died and was a babe in arms at her funeral. She reads voraciously as my mother did, she is confident and clear sighted. When I asked her why she had been made head girl at her primary school she told me cheerfully that she thought it was because she keeps an eye out for the little ones.

I remember Mum talking to me about using the sense that we are only here for a short time to live well and I try to do that. She is gone. My father and my brother are gone. Our lovely friend has gone. In my turn I will go. So while we are here let us live well, love well. That way there will be something that goes on.

Yesterday we walked up the hill and visited the churchyard. In time I might lie here. Right now, live well.

2024

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 17:09:00 +0000

Years, galloping. In a swish of a tail, barely caught out of the corner of my eye, 2024 has gone and is racing away, over the hill, over the headland, over the sea. Is this what the blogging is for? To try to hold onto it? Who knows. Photos help.

January

Bright and cold, so unlike the grey dampness of the end of this year. In January 2024 I hit the fifth anniversary of starting to run, using the Couch to 5k app. Mostly I don't stop when I run, as I do very slowly, in case I find I can't start again. This is a view across the fields to the Clwydian Hills. It is part of my regular, short round of about 3k and I must have stopped to take it because of the blue of the sky. I never stop feeling lucky to live here in this little known part of North East Wales. It is very beautiful and very empty. Very slowly plans are moving to make this, now an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, into a new National Park. I am torn. I can see that perhaps we should share this glorious place with those who are not lucky enough to live here and I appreciate that many local businesses might be helped by more visitors, but I don't want the press of visitors and cars which swamp Snowdonia in holiday times. I do love the quiet villages and the almost empty hills.

February

February saw the first of what has become a very slow production line of crocheted toys. This is a little cat, christened Suki by her delighted six year old owner. I would never have thought while I was working with barely a moment to catch my breath as I jumped on to trains and planes and juggled with time zones, that I would ever take such pleasure in making things, especially things for grandchildren. I knew I could knit and crochet. My grandmothers taught me. When my children were young I made clothes but I was never very satisfied with them. I made them out of necessity in a period when I was frighteningly short of money. I bought things from charity shops and unravelled jumpers to reknit them or cut down adult clothes into pinafore dresses for my three year old. I always thought they looked second hand, like poor children's clothes. There was very little pleasure in it although some satisfaction that I could do it at all. Now I love it. I love showing the grandchildren patterns and letting them choose and going out buy soft, pretty wool and their delight when the toy finally arrives, just as they requested it, with clothes in a colour they have chosen. I love using my hands to make things.

March

March saw the first emerging of the new garden. I love our new house. I loved the old one too but this house, right now, feels like the right place for us at this time. When I come in I love the quiet and the warmth, the calm grey stone of the warm floors, the flood of light through the huge windows. If I ever miss anything from the old house it is a fleeting sensation and I would not swap what we have now for what we had, beautiful though it was. But when I have that fleeting sensation what I miss is the garden: the orchard full of the small Welsh daffodils that I planted myself over several autumns; the snowdrops growing by the walls which I kept track off, year after year, as they slowly increased, noting the number of blooms in my garden diary. So I have recreated, on a very small scale, some of the things I loved in the garden and we have snowdrops by the chestnut paling fence and primroses by the ferns and I love them too.

April

We drove the campervan down across Wales and England and took the ferry to France. We had a long cold drive down from Calais to Provence to celebrate a big birthday for a dear friend. In Northern France it was cold enough for socks and fleeces in bed at night. We researched small restaurants and paced our days with a long lunch in little places in city side streets. We arrived at our friends' house with balloons and a birthday cake and mused at how long we had been friends and how randomly the friendship had been found.

May

And then a very full May with a week in Gers, in South West France, with the lovely Beth, talking, reading and talking again. I had never been to this part of France and I loved it and I also loved meeting Beth. Time and again I have met someone through blogging or Instagram about whom I have thought "Oh, I love your writing. I think I'd like you" and it has always worked. Read what someone writes over months and years and you know them. She was just as clever, funny, kind and thoughtful as I thought she would be.

And then we moved on over the Pyrenees and into Spain. We had intended to walk in the Picos mountains in Northern Spain but the weather was cold and wet. One of the beauties of holidaying with your accommodation on your back is that you can follow the sun, so we did, driving further down into Spain with a couple of Parador stays to contrast with the campervan bed. It is a privilege of this stage of life to be away for so long. Even when we stopped working the needs of elderly or ill parents tied us here. Now we can be away from home for six or seven weeks. Life falls into a very simple pattern in the campervan of meals and walks and reading, the only decisions being when to move on and where to go.

June

And when we got back home the garden was in its full glory. It was its second summer and although the trees and shrubs remained small and spindly, the roses had grown and self seeders had popped up everywhere, feverfew and foxgloves, alchemilla and evening primrose. I know I will have to do some more editing this year but it did make the garden feel like home. Bindweed, buttercup and docks had popped up too. It will take a while for the garden to feel like a cultivated space, rather than an area at the edge of a field with room for weeds to blow in but that's ok! Looking after it is how I will get to know it.

The production line of toys continued. Why had then ten year old granddaughter chosen a sloth for her toy, and why on receipt did she gleefully name him Bob? I do not know but it makes me smile.

July

So after being away for so long July was the garden and the house and the pleasure of settling back into a routine of weekly Pilates and runs and calls to family and catching up with friends.

August

August was dominated by planning and having a big party on the 30th to celebrate my 70th birthday. My birthday wasn't until September but with adult children in work and grandchildren in school we tried to fit the party into the very end of the summer holidays so everyone could come. It was a perfect blue and gold late summer day. We rented the village hall here which doubles as the school hall. That meant that with the doors open the children could spill out onto the playing fields so they were either inside, eating lovely food or queuing up for cake, or outside playing football or running around. Friends came from all over the place. I have lived in a number of places and worked in London and Manchester and lived here now for nearly twenty years. Having most of my favourite people in the same place at the same time felt like the most amazing luxury. I don't think I stopped smiling all day.

September

A couple of days in Abersoch with some dear friends. This glorious colour of sea and sky is not the norm for Wales. Everywhere looked like the Mediterranean except that the hills and the mountains and the fields were a vivid Welsh green. I loved it.

We went to Chatsworth in Derbyshire with some friends who live near. Inside I found the whole house overwhelming, overbearing, overpowering, overstuffed. Outside the gardens were wonderful. Our friend had recently received a Parkinsons diagnosis and he managed a disability scooter with real aplomb. In the tiny amount of time since then he was also diagnosed with a galloping cancer and died just after Christmas. Spend time with those you care about. Tell them you love them. Life goes in an instant.

October

In October we went to Sicily. These images are a fine illustration of the inadequacy of relying on images alone. Much of Sicily is beautiful and fascinating. The ancient remains are astonishing. We stayed in beautiful hotels and ate wonderful food. Yet the entire holiday was not an unqualified success. We hired a car and the driving was something of a challenge for Ian who is a great driver and has driven in all sorts of places over the world without turning a hair. I had a couple of days of feeling unwell with diverticulitis. In some places stunning beauty sat cheek by jowl with piles of rubbish. We were glad we had gone but when we finally arrived home after a long delayed flight at around 3 in the morning I felt like staying in our lovely house for ever. Naturally this feeling has now passed off.

November

The greenhouse kept producing huge tomatoes, long after they are normally finished. A new animal began to come off the crochet hook. The mahonia bloomed. It is beautiful (Mahonia media Charity) but it is still only about two foot six inches tall. It will grow. Perhaps it is my intensified awareness of how time moves that makes me long to see it taller than I am. And as always the views through the grasses and to the trees or up to the hills were and are a reliable daily pleasure.

December

A month full of travelling. We had arrangements to spend some days in Devon in early December and then in South Wales to help first our son and his family and then our daughter and hers. So there was much driving around already planned. We expected a couple of weeks at home before going back to Devon to spend Christmas with Chris and family. While we were back home a message came in from older daughter "I am in hospital. Don't panic". We didn't panic but we were back down to South Wales and then up to Manchester before returning to Devon. Many, many motorway miles. These pictures are from Bantham Beach on Christmas Eve. All is well. We had a good Christmas and daughter is now home waiting to be recalled for an operation.

A full year, full of family and celebrations and good times and some sadness. 2025 is here. Nowadays I hardly ever use cheques to get used to writing a new date so how long will it take me to feel that 2025 is the year? In an odd sort of way I never really got used to it being 2024! Snow is forecast tonight. It is very cold. I wish you joy of the New Year. I wish us all joy, and contentment and the pleasure of an ordinary day but every now and then, like a shot of sunlight, a moment of joy. Here is one of my moments from this last year, seven out of the ten grandchildren, with the three oldest boys missing.

Some of my joys will be to do with them. Some will be the everyday joys of Ian coming in through the door, coffee in the morning, a perfectly cooked poached egg, a long awaited book to read, a glass of white wine, the colour of a Himalayan poppy. Take your joy where you can. Happy New Year.

Christmas through the times of my life

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 16:06:00 +0000

Christmas in my childhood was the classic 1960s British version. My brother and I were up very early. On Christmas night I was permitted to have the travelling alarm clock in my bedroom. It unfolded from a bright red leatherette box about two inches square, had a luminous golden face and I thought it was entirely beautiful. Six o' clock was allowed. Five o'clock was not. My younger brother and I shared a room. I would usually wake first and lie there watching the illuminated dial. At about 5.15 would come a stirring from the other bed as Paul felt his way down in the dark. "Liz, Liz. He's been. He's been. I can feel it." The torch would come out from under my pillow. It was just a stocking on the bed, one of my Dad's walking socks. Big presents were under the tree and we had to wait until our parents were up to go downstairs but we could open the stockings. There would be a tangerine in the toe of the stocking and half a dozen Quality Street chocolates, pencils and rubbers and tiny notebooks made by my father. Once there was a little jumping frog who jumped into the fire place and got covered in soot so when we finally went into see our parents our faces and pyjamas were smeared with black.

Christmas lunch was at about 1.30 and alternated between the grandmas' houses. There was more room at Nana's house and a garden to be turfed out into while the grown ups drowsed after lunch. At Grandma's house there were more roast potatoes and chocolates and after lunch the grown ups retired to the faintly musty-smelling front room. The room was so rarely used that a fire had been lit at about the time we children were waking up on the other side of town. By 2pm the room was stifling hot, still smelling of furniture polish and the faintest echo of damp.

I remember those Christmases as full of laughter and food. There was always a grandparent or an aunt or uncle ready to play your new game with you or read you a story. At some time in the afternoon one of them would sweep you into your coat and boots and whisk you around the block for a walk, the excuse being to look at other people's Christmas trees before it went dark and the curtains were closed.

When I was eleven we emigrated to New Zealand and Christmases were entirely different. It was not dark and cold and Lancashire wet. It was warm and bright and mid summer. We were a bit older and had separate bedrooms so it was not my brother who woke me but my four or five year old little sister, creeping in with the dawn at four o' clock. "Lizzie, Lizzie. Can I open my stocking with you?"

However hard my parents worked with stockings and presents and food, there was a gaping hole at Christmas where the grandparents and the aunts and uncles had been. After the first Christmas of walking sadly in the empty park in the sunshine my parents solved it by taking us on holiday on the afternoon of Christmas Day. Presents opened and bacon sandwiches eaten, we would pack up the car and set off for our neighbours' batch, a basic little tin hut by the beach. Teatime would be barbecued sausages and a swim, different enough to be exciting. I don't remember missing my grandparents. I just remember the hot sand on the soles of my feet and the sound of the sea.

As an adult Christmas became a tricky time after the collapse of my first marriage. My ex-husband and I tried to spend Christmas together with the children, often travelling to spend it at my parents' house where they and my brother and sister recreated the good cheer of my childhood's aunts and uncles. Marrying for a second time changed the dynamic again. There were two families with different traditions and expectations. It never felt right to take the children away from their other parent so Christmases were always spent in Manchester, alternating between a full house with four early teenage children and a nearly empty one when the children went to have Christmas with their other parent. I persisted in believing that I enjoyed Christmas and found that to make that be true it worked best not to be too elaborate, to eat a nice roast dinner and watch Christmas television and not to ask too much of anybody! Christmas with very little fuss was a pleasure.

And here we are now, nearly thirty years married with four adult children with homes and traditions of their own and ten children between them. This year we are going to our younger son's. I am not cooking a Christmas dinner. We will try to see all four families over Christmas and New Year and now we are the grandparents, not responsible for making the whole thing fly, able to sit to one side and have a post lunch nap. We are the people ready to play the new game or take the dog for a walk. I will love it. I will love the full house and the full plates and the grandchildren opening presents and rushing around. And then I will love it when we come home and sit together in the peace and calm and say to each other "This is a nice house, isn't it?"

Where I live

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 16:10:00 +0000

I look out this morning to the sun on the hills. For years my view of these hills was from the other side, the East. The hills are the Clwydian Range, running from Llangollen in the South up to the sea on the North coast of Wales. Clwyd (pronounced Cloo-id) means gate in Welsh and the range is the natural gateway between England and Wales, although for many centuries Wales has included Flintshire, to the East of the range as well. The hills are topped by a number of Bronze and Iron Age hillforts so my sense of them as a geographical barrier between England and Wales is perhaps an ancient one. Certainly these days and for a very long time back into history those who live to the East of them would consider themselves just as Welsh as those who live to the West. Nowadays we live just to the West. I see the hills from our sitting room and bedroom, from my study and from the garden. I love these hills. When we turn to begin to come up the lane towards our village the hills fill the view and my heart lifts. When we drive along the Vale towards our local market town and the long line of the range rises and falls to our left, rearing up above the rich farmland of the Vale, running away to the end of sight, their shapes and curves delight me. I like the fact that I can name each one.

This is Penycloddiau (Pen-er-clo-ddee-eye) seen from our garden. It is crowned with an Iron Age hillfort which is the largest in Wales and one of the largest in Britain. Archaeological digs on the site have also unearthed many Bronze Age artefacts, indicating human habitation going back some four thousand years. We used to live high on the other side of Penycloddiau. The name means hill of the trenches or dykes, referring to the earthworks which make up the hill fort. It would be easy to walk up there, high above the Vale with long views to the Denbigh moors and the mountains of Snowdonia (Eryri in Welsh) without any sense of this ancient history.

Only from the air can you see the outline of the fort and marvel at the scale of the place. This is a photo from the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust. How long people have lived here. If I think about it for long enough a slight dizziness comes.

I have been thinking this week about the impact of where we live. In so many ways we live very lightly on the ground now. Most of us no longer work the earth. Television, film, music, video, all give us a shared culture which has blurred much of our regional distinctiveness into mush. Much of the news here in the UK is from the United States or other parts of the world. The internet connects us in a vast global spider's web mostly to those who think as we do. We spend our days looking at images of celebrities, places, and of more and more things to buy. There is much that is good about this connection. It challenges a narrow minded parochialism. It promotes friendship with people you would never have met face to face. It allows those who do not fit the common mold to find their tribe. But it is not all good. It can promote a superficiality, a rootlessness, an obsession with shiny surface. Connecting strongly to the place where you live fights that and, despite the life online, where you live is still one of the most fundamental things about your life.

I have lived in many places during my lifetime. I spent my childhood in a village on the edge of the Pennines near a Lancashire milltown. As a teenager I lived in Christchurch in New Zealand. It was a sunny, beautiful, adventurous and open air life, a stunning change. Perhaps it was this first extraordinary contrast which made me realise how your life could be shaped by where you live, just as much as by the family you live in, your own personality, your education. The experiences you have come out of the place you live in, whether it is the shops, restaurants, theatres and galleries of the city or the fields, hills and woods of the countryside. Days are where we live, as Philip Larkin said. Bodies too are where we live. And places are where we live, dictating the shape of those days.

After we came back from New Zealand I lived for a number of years in various parts of London and then for twenty years in Manchester. I loved both cities but I always longed at some point to live more rurally. It is nearly twenty years now since we came to live in Wales. I feel rooted here in a way I never have previously as an adult. Villages and small towns give you a community. After a working life of travel, hopping on and off planes and trains, I like staying still.

So what does this place give me?

Physical beauty.

An insight into Welsh language and culture. In a world where globalisation is smoothing out difference, I love to live somewhere with a strong sense of its own identity. I know I could find that in parts of rural England and in Scotland and Ireland too and doubtless in many parts of Europe. Here the persistence of an ancient language offers a way into a way of life and a way of thinking which is strongly distinctive. I have tried to learn Welsh and I can speak it and understand it enough to see through a glass darkly. The best way I can show you what I mean is through music. Here is Welsh singer Rhys Meirion singing an old Welsh carol. I can sing this now myself. It only sounds good in a choir bacause I have a very ordinary voice but I would never have learnt Welsh and started singing if we had not come here all those years ago. A whole valuable part of my life would never have happened.

Community. My choir, my book club, my Pilates class, my Welsh chat group. There are communities in cities I know and I am sure that if I had to move I could find another one but communities take time to build and I am seventy now. Unless it were to live very near to one of my children I cannot think of any reason to give up all this. This is where I live and therefore how I live. I love it.

Why write?

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 12:32:00 +0000

I started blogging in 2007. What a different world, a different life. I was fifty three, still working in a demanding job which took me away from our beautiful ancient house, high on a Welsh hillside. I had one two year old grandson. I loved my job but my life felt very fragmented, split between London and Wales, between professional me and personal me. Both my parents were alive. My active, funny brother had yet to have the stroke which for twelve years until his death confined him to a wheelchair and robbed him of much of his dry, witty personality.

And now? Now I am seventy and have been retired for years. My mother died in 2013, my father in law in 2014, my father in 2015 and my brother last year. We now have ten grandchildren, ranging in age from six to eighteen. There have been departures and arrivals. In the intervening years we have bought a building plot, sold our old house and built a new one with some eco-credentials on the edge of a village, down from the hills, down in the Vale.

This is our old house.

And here is the new one.

This time of year is the anniversary of some of those departures and arrivals and I came back to my blog to read what I wrote then about my mother, my father, my father in law and the birth of two of those babies. It was a revelation. I thought I had remembered all those events with great clarity but reading what I wrote at the time I see how much detail I had lost. I blogged weekly throughout the first year of the Covid pandemic but my last blog here was two years ago, in November 2022. It was such an interesting thing to revisit my blogs of long ago that I have decided it is time to start writing again. It won't be like the early years of blogging when a vibrant blogging community thrived and fizzed around the world. Many of the blogs I used to read have been abandoned and much of the communication has moved to Instagram. I do use Instagram myself, fairly sparingly, and I enjoy it but it does something quite different. Writing a blog is a slow, thoughtful process. I find I miss that and I loved the rewards of going back and reading what I wrote so many years ago.

So here again is the documenting of an ordinary and not so ordinary life. How long will I keep it up? I don't know. We will see.

This last week here in North Wales has been cold and snowy, schools have been closed on some days and we have hunkered down at home. It is one of the pleasures of this stage of life that we don't need to go anywhere or do anything: no children to get to school, no meetings to make, no journeys on trains or on motorways that absolutely have to be done. I made tomato soup with the last of our crop of tomatoes from the greenhouse.

I read and read, finishing the books for book club this week: "I heard the Owl call my name" by Margaret Craven and "Homecoming" by Kate Morton. Bookclub was on Wednesday evening. We slid up to the pub in my friend's car and spent a glorious hour and a half talking and laughing, discussing the books, agreeing and disagreeing. I love this. In a world where views are increasingly polarised and people seem increasingly unable to respect or even tolerate differences of opinion, giving other people a fair hearing while they explain the attractions of a book I had dismissed and finding pleasure and even amusement in our differences feels like letting in the sunshine.

I have been trying to do some resistance exercise, in my case with some hand weights, and I made myself do a session this week. To my very great surprise over the last twenty years or so I have found that I enjoy exercise. It must have been the relentless focus on competitive ball sports which put me off at school. I never liked netball or tennis, hated hockey with its shuddering tackles and the raw cold of knees and noses. But I like to walk, even to jog very slowly, to go to Pilates or yoga and to move my body. We begin to see some of our friends failing. To move, to try to be strong, to have energy and interest, to stretch and stride out, all these activities seem like things we should do now because we can, when so many can't.

And now today is a strange quiet day. The weather is changing and it is raining hard, the snow is washing away, the wind lashing the trees. Ian is out this morning volunteering at our local hospice, looking after the car parking for their Christmas Fair. I imagine he is getting very wet. And I am having some quiet time to myself, writing this, reading, crocheting, trying in a quiet, ordinary day way to make the minutes count.

I love November

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 17:30:00 +0000

I always used to hate November: greyness, wetness, short days and dank, dark nights. It felt to me as if the world turned inward and the light left the sky and as the days darkened my energy dropped and so did my mood. When did my feelings change? I am not sure. My mother died in November and my father two years later in December. I think that these losses combined with my own growing sense of how fast time runs away with you have shifted me towards wanting to make the very most of each day. I can't afford to discount three or four months of the year. How many more years are there? I have no idea but I should make my days count.

And lo and behold! It is possible to change the patterns of a lifetime! It is possible to find things to love in November and to be energised and excited, just as much as in Spring. Over the last few years I have found lots of ways to feel good in November and for me that seems to require some particular things to shape my day:

Going Outside

Far and away the most important thing for me is to spend some time outside. Even in November the sun shines and our beautiful landscape burst into vivid life. This is halfway round my usual running circuit. Even when the days are not so brilliantly blue, there will be something outside to lift the spirits: the colour of beech leaves in the hedge, a robin hopping close to me as I plant tulips, the cows wandering across to look curiously over the fence.

Keeping the body moving

Walking with Ian, running by myself, a yoga class or a weights session. In winter a huge part of me wants to sit on the sofa under a blanket and eat biscuits. There is much to be said for all these things but keeping moving and going outside together transform my energy levels. This is a really hard one to do because actually getting myself moving gets harder and harder as November progresses: putting my running kit on when I get dressed is one strategy that usually works. Somehow getting changed again without having made it out of the door seems quite shameful so I am likely to get out there for a run even if it's only for twenty minutes. Promising myself something nice when I have run or done some weights is another. That might well be half an hour on the sofa with a book. Or it might be half an hour's knitting or crochet because that is my next strategy:

Making things

Years ago I read a wonderful book called Making Winter by Emma Mitchell. It is a thoughtful and fascinating guide to using craft and creativity to make something beautiful during the winter months. I love making things and after a working life of using the brain I have found real delight in returning to the pleasures of making things and using the hands. I generally have something on the go all year round but winter is the time I really dive into making things.

This November I am close to completing a cushion cover using a technique which is new to me called mosaic crochet. There are two designers who really do wonderful things with this technique: Moira Douglas and Tinna Hekl. This cushion is a Moira Douglas pattern but both designers make things which are a revelation in terms of what you can do with fibre and a hook. I love being able to see something beautiful emerging under my fingers. I love the focus which is necessary to do something quite complicated and the way it stills the whirring of the monkey brain and replaces it with a rhythmic peace.

And the last thing is

Company and communication

I like my own company but I also like contact. When we lived up the hill I associated the winter months with a falling off in the casual contacts which came with summer. No one ever called or walked past because we were the end of the lane. I learnt that I need to search company out and choir and language classes, WI, coffee with friends and time spent with Ian doing things together rather than each of us at our separate devices, all these things keep me full of life and energy.

So how do I feel about November now that I have learnt to love it rather than to endure it? I love the way the garden stops growing and gives me more time for dreaming. I love closing the curtains or the blinds and turning on the lamps. I love home made soups and home made bread. I love time for new books to read and new projects. I love it.

New house, new world, new garden

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 14:19:00 +0000

I haven't blogged since March! That's terrible. No excuse and every excuse: packing and moving and getting out of the rental house and into the new one. I probably could and should have blogged but I didn't so here I am now. We are here. We are in.

The sitting room is calm and peaceful with our books on the shelves and our cushions on the chairs.

The view across the field is almost as lovely as the one up to the hills.

The amount of the glass still surprises me after so many years of our seventeenth century farmhouse, built for shelter, not for light. I love the cladding too against the white render. It feels like a house which belongs here even though it is yet to have a garden.

I have got to know the sheltered sunny places to take a cup of tea and dream about the garden we will create.

There are still things to do and in a couple of weeks the green roof will arrive for outside the guest bedroom and over the front porch. This is something else we have never had before so reading and researching has been a learning process and I am keen to see how it will look and how much care it will need.

We absolutely love the house: the light and the space and the calm, quiet warmth. We have been here for five months now (where did the time go?). Boxes are unpacked, books are on shelves. The kitchen works and is a joy to use with its big island, induction hob and granite worktops.

I have never had any of these things in a kitchen before and have never designed a kitchen absolutely from scratch. Between us we mused and thought and drew up plans and it is just as lovely to work in as I had hoped.

From the kitchen it is open to the dining room, flooded with light from its large windows, sliding doors and roof light.

I love it. We love it. We still come home to it with such pleasure and find ourselves smiling at each other with the joy of it. Architecture matters. Good architecture and great building feeds the soul.

We moved in before the landscaping outside was done so the summer has been spent watching the outside move from a building site to something waiting for a garden.

This was the outside in early June.

First the hard landscaping was done with paths and terraces and brick walls.

Ian put wires up along the back fence and plants began to go in. This little bay tree had lived in a pot for about ten years. I am hoping it will relish its freedom.

Most of the garden is down to shrubs, small trees and flowers but Ian built two raised beds and behind it here is the structure for an espalier apple and a pear. It seems that if you have been growing productively for years it is hard to break the urge to grow your own food.

And slowly, slowly plants are beginning to go in.

I spent weeks and months thinking about this and even drew out a plan with the height and spread of all my shrubs in ten years carefully marked out to ensure everything had room to grow.

Here is a section alongside the sitting room which you look out on from the dining room so you can see the idea. It should not be a surprise that now that most things are in there remain acres of bare soil. I have made a garden before but never on a completely bare site. You have to hold your nerve I think. It is November now and in the spring things will grow. I have put in plants that were gifts from a neighbour and from family members and bought bulbs in quantity to fill some of the spaces while things become established. I am going to use this blog to record what has happened and to watch things change. How lovely after eighteen months or more in a rental house to have our own garden again and to be able to plant and dream.

There is not much to show you yet but here is Hydrangea Paniculata Limelight with Rosa Darcey Bussell. The hydrangea has a white flower with a hint of lime green and the rose is a dark, dark red. The soil here is rich and fertile and about as unlike the thin stony soil we gardened in our previous house as it is possible to be. How will it be? Will it become the oasis it is in my head? How great to have the chance to see.

And on we go

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 20:14:00 +0000

So much more to show you on the house. Loving the cladding and the contrast with the render and now that the scaffolding has come down it is possible to see the design of the house more clearly.

Loving the tiled floor downstairs and the colour of the kitchen and dining room.

Loving the front door and the gorgeous curve in the hall.

Loving the internal doors and the handles.

Loving the wood flooring upstairs

Loving the bathroom tiles, These are in the en suite bathroom.

It looks nearly done in these photos and in truth there is still a lot to do. We have no stairs yet so going up the ladder has become almost, but not quite, commonplace. We have no water although that is coming soon. There is much to do in the bathrooms, second fix electrics and lots and lots outside.

The kitchen is just beginning to be fitted. That will make a huge difference. In the sitting room all the drawers and cupboards are lined up ready for the carcasses.

And outside is still a building site. But the house is now clearly a house. Now I am beginning to ponder on how to turn it into a home!

A Year

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 09 Jan 2022 15:44:00 +0000

A year - a long time and no time at all. This last strange year has often felt stalled, coming round again and again, living in the groundhog day of lockdowns and restrictions but when I lift my head and really look at it I can see what a lot has changed and how far we have come.

This time last year we were living in our old house on the hill, waiting to exchange contracts on our sale, surrounded with boxes of books and china.

And exactly a year ago today it had snowed. We walked up to the top of the hills and tried out our snow shoes and were amazed by how beautiful the white world was.

And then in February we moved. It was sort of a wrench to leave the lovely old house and it sort of wasn't. The fact that the new house was beginning to emerge from the mudbath of the building plot was so interesting and so exciting that it felt right. It felt time to move on and shape the new stage of life and we knew that in our old house's new owner, we were leaving it in good hands.

Here is the house in February beginning to emerge with the foundations dug and the shape of the rooms in the low walls visible against the soil. The highest structure on the site at the beginning of February is next to Ian here - a taller pillar built to house the electricity connection.

And by May the walls begin to rise and the shapes of the windows start to hint at a house and not a building site.

And in May we went to Scotland before the midges struck and I fulfilled a long held wish to see Iona. I had been reluctant to go when things were busy in case the sheer press of people and commercialism ruined the image of the place which had been in my mind for years but one of the unlooked for results of the pandemic was an empty Iona, quiet and still and luminous.

And the house carried on growing. Here it is at the beginning of June with the first floor emerging and the sense of ceilings and more shapes. I can't tell you how exciting it is to see something move from a plan to a reality. Even the smallest bits of progress entrance me and an appreciation of the amazing complexity of the machine that is a house will be with me for life now.

In June we went to Bodnant Garden which was throwing out its glory whether we were in lockdown or no, vaccinated or not. Still things grow.

Double vaccinated with a French covid pass and tested at every turn we made it to France for some time with family and then friends and Italy for a few days with some friends from the States. The world was still out there.

And back at home the house continued to grow. Here is Ian upstairs in what will be our bedroom and the outside of the house with a real roof!

And we end the year with windows in and rendering going on outside with plastering inside. There is still a long way to go but it feels real. We have started to choose door fittings and paint colours and to plan where furniture is to go.

It is not a quick thing to have a house built and lots of people have asked me if it is stressful to which the answer is that it is and it isn't. By that I suppose I mean that we have decided to enjoy the process as much as we can. We won't do this again. Once you are committed to enjoying it as much as you can it is easier to let some of the stresses go. We have decided to go with the flow and accept that it takes as long as it takes. It helps enormously that we have a great builder with a great team and that we are not trying to do this while living on site in a caravan with a number of small children and jobs to run! I don't think we could have contemplated doing this at any earlier stage of life and we feel very lucky to be able to do it now. It takes a lot of engagement on our part and I would not dream of attempting it by myself. Ian has an eye for things which might pass me by and a practical cast of mind which is endlessly valuable. Again we are fortunate that we are both interested in the whole thing and that our strengths are a little different and I hope complementary.

Where will we be in another year's time? Who knows. We may be in the house. That would be good. But as long as we and those we love are happy and healthy it will be fine, whatever it is! What a difference a year makes.

Changing seasons

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 15:00:00 +0000

I always was and I remain a lover of spring. I love the lengthening days, the growing warmth, snowdrops, cyclamen and the daffodils standing in breeze. And most of all I love the point when spring begins to turn to summer in May. There is nothing more glorious than the dazzling intensity of May's green, the new leaves bright against the blue sky, blossom falling over itself, birds rushing in and out of the hedgerows intent on the overwhelming need to grow their chicks. I just love it.

I was a late comer to the joys of autumn. For years and years even the glories of September seemed to me to be shadowed by the knowledge that summer had gone, winter was coming, days were shortening, things were dying. It was a friend whose enthusiasm for autumn encouraged me to try to see it differently. There is a quality of light principally in October which suffuses everything with a gentle gold. There is a beauty in grasses in autumn, shimmering and holding the light. There is a vividness in red berries or crab apples against a blue sky.

I also think that the death first eight years ago of my mother and then six years ago of my father had the inevitable effect of bringing me up short against the knowledge of my own mortality. How many years have I got left? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Who knows. But it seemed a pity to waste half the year waiting for spring and summer when time is finite! So firstly it was a conscious choice to look at the beauty of autumn and to try to see it for what it is, right now. The more I looked the more I saw and in the last two or three years I don't think I have to make any effort at all. My mindset has shifted. A glorious autumn day makes my heart sing just as much as a balmy April one. I don't think anything will quite knock May from its throne for me but nowadays I do love a crisp autumn morning or a warm long shadowed afternoon just for itself.

I would admit that I still struggle with the shorter days and the long dark nights and I will never be a fan of the grey and wet of a dismal December or February day but there are compensations: fires, soups, frost or snow on a cold bright day.

Do you have a favourite season? Or if like me winter is not your thing, what are your winter pleasures?

New House update

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 14:39:00 +0000

One of the striking things about having a new house built is that it is not a linear process. Rather than following an even curve. slowly growing week by week, it moves in leaps and bounds followed by periods of inactivity. We seem to be having a leaps and bounds period right now so I thought it would be a good time to record where we are up to.

The whole structure is up now, with the roof on, but with no windows. There has been a bit of a delay with the windows but we hope to have them installed by mid November. This will make an amazing difference to the house, both from the point of view of making it watertight and of giving it some soul. If the eyes are the windows to the soul in a person, the windows are a huge part of what gives a house character and personality. I can't wait to see them.

Inside the stud work is up for the walls. Ian is standing here in what will be our bedroom looking down across the landing, which runs like a bridge across the double height hall, towards the other bedrooms and bathroom. Seeing the shape of the rooms emerging is making it feel more and more like a house and less and less like a building site. We notice we have without conscious thought slipped from calling our visits "going over to the plot" to "going to see the house".

Over the last couple of weeks the electrician has been doing the first fit electrics. That is really the first time that the detail of living there has become real. How many sockets in the living room? What is the design of the kitchen? How will we light the hall? Where do we want light switches when we come into the house on a winter's evening or leave the kitchen for an evening by the fire? It is all very real suddenly.

We have chosen all the sanitary ware for the bathrooms, planned and chosen a kitchen and spent yesterday looking at tiles. Ian has been writing a very detailed blog here which records the process in all its nitty gritty complexity.

The garage is going up now and next week the preparations for the air source heat pump will move forward. We had intended to have ground source heating but have had to abandon that because of the possibility of hitting water in the drilling process. There is still a huge amount to do inside the house and rendering and cladding to do outside, never mind the landscaping and garden creation which will follow. We are not expecting to be moving in any time soon but now for the first time I am thinking about paint colours and looking at the spaces as rooms, thinking about how they will work. There are two more skylights to go in, one in the dining room and one in the porch together with some rooflights for the garage which will be Ian's workshop. We have chosen worktops and appliances for the kitchen, even though they are not yet ordered. It is all very real.

There are no stairs yet so going upstairs still requires a precarious (for me) journey up a ladder. But you are rewarded by looking, through the scaffolding, through our bedroom window, up to the hills. I love it already. Good thing really when you look at all the time and money and energy that is pouring into it!

I have been musing about how it feels to be doing this on my other blog here if you are interested.

Thinking about travelling again

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 14:19:00 +0000

Months and months ago we booked a ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff. Our son and his family were going to be in France and we decided we would take the campervan and go and visit them. It all seemed very up in the air and like something that could not possibly happen. At the time it was not possible either to go specifically to France or to travel at all in and out of the UK. The rules kept changing, switching about and moving like shifting sands under your feet. In the end I decided that I wouldn't keep checking and trying to keep up with whether or not it would be possible to go. We would just park the whole idea. We would wait until we were much nearer the time and then, with only a couple of weeks to go, we would be able to see if it would happen. It was just a dream.

So here we are and it looks as if we can go. France is letting in people from the UK who are double vaccinated. The UK is at last allowing people returning or coming in from France not to quarantine if they are double vaccinated. Our son and family are happily in Brittany having travelled without trouble and suddenly it has moved from a vague possibility to a plan. Gulp.

I am not sure I can remember how to travel! Staying home and going nowhere has become normal. When we first drove down the border of Wales and England a few weeks ago to see our older daughter we got quite giddy when we went past Wrexham! Our world had become very small. So crossing the Channel, using a passport, speaking another language - all of a sudden that all sounds quite a big deal. I am glad we will be going on a ferry. I am not keen on flying at the best of times, not as a nervous flyer because fortunately I am not, but I never like the crush of airports, the queuing, the people towing mammoth suitcases, the overheated, overpriced shops. At the moment I think I would not wish to fly but a ferry is a different matter. You go onto a ferry in your own vehicle, travelling in your own little world, and in the campervan especially it is always a little like having your home on your back. Ferries are large and spacious and there is a lot of outside space. I am quite excited about going on a ferry again. Taking a ferry always feel like real travelling. That moment when the boat pulls away from the port and the wake creams out behind you and seagulls wheel overhead is always a time when my spirits lift.

This was the ferry from Oban to Mull in May. Yes, the ferry will be fine.

And there will be croissants for breakfast and the menu du jour for lunch in cafes and bistros. The air will smell different. There will be sunshine and markets and my rusty French will have to unearthed from under the layers of Welsh and Spanish which have piled up on top of it over the last few years. The camper will become home again and we will get used to sleeping on the harder, narrower bed to the extent that we will simply stop noticing. We will pick up the rhythm of moving aside and not getting in each other's way in what, for the first few days, will feel like a very small space. We will travel light and life will become very simple, focused simply at what to eat and where, where to sleep and when to wash up. Books will be read. Wine will be drunk. For so long I have not allowed myself to think about travelling because it has not been possible and it still seems like a dream but I need to wake up and believe it now so that I can plan and pack.

I feel like a child again, seeing the occasional and rare gipsy caravan clopping along with the owner up high in the driving seat. I, a real home bird, would suddenly feel the lure of the open road. I feel it again right now: the leap of excitement, the air moving, the clouds changing, the landscape rolling away under the wheels.

I think it might be really happening.

I need to dig out my sunhat.

How do you feel about travel? Would you think about a ferry and a campervan?

Exercise and getting older

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 14:13:00 +0000

I was never a sporty kid. I looked as if I should have been sporty but I wasn't. I didn't like games and had no ball skills to speak of. I hated hockey and the clattering clash of sticks that made your teeth shake. I was never last to be chosen for netball because there was the heavy fat girl and the girl who could hardly see. I could run and I could see so I was generally the third last to be chosen. My problem was that I really was not interested so could be relied upon to be looking the other way when the ball was passed to me or not to be in the right place when I should have been helping someone to take a shot at goal. I spent my tennis lessons sunbathing and reading by the court. I could swim but not really well. I could run but not very quickly. As a teenager I read and dreamed and lived in my head.

So it is something of a surprise to find that now I am in my sixties I do really quite a lot of exercise. For the last two or more years, since doing the Couch to 5k running programme, I run two or three times a week. I generally go to yoga and Pilates once a week. I walk a lot and I have recently taken to doing some handweights at home a couple of times a week.

So what changed? I think firstly I realised that while I don't want to play sport I do like movement, not competitively, not in a team, but the pleasure of using your body crept up on me starting when I was in my thirties and has been with me ever since. More recently I discovered that I like the sense of physical competence that comes with being able to run, to hold a yoga pose or to lift a weight. But more than anything I think coming to exercise later in life is to do with an increasing sense of how short a time we have here.

Slightly to my surprise I have got older! How did that happen? I am retired. We have loads of grandchildren. For the first time in my life I am not whizzing around keeping all the plates spinning, doing my job, looking after children, falling into bed exhausted with my head full of things needing to be done, constantly running a massive to do list. I have time to take a leisurely breakfast with a cup of good coffee and the newspaper. I have time to walk after dinner just because it is a beautiful evening. I have time to read in the sun. I have time in a way I have never had before. And yet if I lift my head from the day to day and take the longer view, I don't have time. Astonishingly I am sixty six. How many more years do I have for travel and adventure? Ten? Fifteen? I have no idea. Time no longer stretches out in front of me rolling away towards the distant mountains of old age. I have ended up in the foothills while I was too busy on the journey to notice.

Philip Larkin said that "Days are where we live". That is true. It is also true that bodies are where we live. If I want to do all the many things I now have time for I need energy, strength, stamina, balance and those things can no longer be taken for granted as they could when I was the girl who dreamed by the tennis court. I need to keep my body moving in order for it to be able to move. I need to be grateful to if for having brought me so far along life's journey and look after it. So for the last seven years or more that is what I do.

Perhaps this sense of having all the time in the world and no time at all has been accentuated by the pandemic and the quiet days at home and an increasing wish to see the world again. When the world opens up again I hope I'll be ready. There is still time for some more adventures!

Building a house

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 13:56:00 +0000

I have just been for coffee after yoga outside in a friend's garden. We were catching up after our last week away and I was telling her about the progress which my sister and her husband are making on building their house (a real with their own hands sort of build) when another friend said "You mean you and your sister are both having new houses built? That's odd! I don't know anyone other than you who is building a new house and then there are two of you from the same family! How did that happen?"

I hadn't thought about it as an oddity but I suppose I see what she meant. And as to how did that happen, I am not really sure!

I am not even sure who began the whole process. I know that my brother in law, who is an intensely practical man and an electrical contractor by trade, has always wanted to build his own house. I know that Ian and I have always been interested in houses and that for some years we had the idea that building a new house might the one thing that would lead us to leave our ancient and beautiful house up the hill. We have had our plot for nearly four years now. Good plots are scarce and we bought it when we found it before our house was sold. My sister and brother in law bought theirs a little after we bought ours but are further on with the build by quite some way. I suppose the interesting question is why, when most people don't do this, we are both engaged in the same endeavour.

I was thinking about it when I was walking home. It must have a lot to do with our parents. My mother loved houses and loved rescuing them from neglect. My father was the practical one who liked the whole process of making and mending and fixing. Over a period of about twenty years they bought and renovated five different properties. This was after my brother, my sister and I had all left home. It gave them a shared focus and played to their very different strengths. My mother was good at looking at a run down place and seeing what it could be. It became a family joke. We would be standing in a god forsaken tumble down farmhouse somewhere. Mum's enthusiasm would begin to rise. "No, no," she would say. "Don't look at the damp on the walls. Just narrow your eyes a bit and look over here. If you took down this wall you would have the light from this window...."

I never really understood the purpose of narrowing your eyes! I think she meant that you had to look not at the detail of damp and dirt but at the shapes of things. Dad by contrast was good at understanding what you had to do practically to make the vision happen. So I suppose the sense that things were possible was strong in us as we grew up and as we started families of own. And in that way in which families repeat themselves, both my sister and I married practical men, men who like to do things and who know how things work. Certainly there is no way that I would be undertaking the adventure of our housebuild on my own. I would be up for moving, buying a new house, maybe even renovating and making something my own but the sheer scale of a new build would daunt me if I were alone. Ian brings a forensic eye for detail and a readiness to grapple with technicalities that I don't have and which reassures me. Together we can bounce ideas of each other, check each other's thinking, one can be upbeat when the other is down and vice versa. It is a genuine joint undertaking.

And despite the fact that it sounds as though my sister and I are doing the same thing, what they and we will produce will be very different. They have a sizeable plot on what was agricultural land with what is known as Class Q planning permission which allows for residential conversion of agricultural buildings. This dictates the shape and size of their house. We have a smallish plot of unusual shape which has needed an imaginative architect's eye to produce plans which will make the best of it. We will produce very different houses, both interesting and I hope beautiful in their very different ways, both environmentally friendly but each rooted in its very different landscape.

So having been thinking about buildng I thought you might like an update about the process and where we are up to.

Here is Ian at the very beginning of the build in November last year. It seemed like a muddy wasteland.

By February the site is gravelled, the foundations are in and the shape of the house begins to emerge. You can see the line of hills, the view of which is part of why we bought the plot.

By May the walls are going up and the steels for the large windows are in.

And here at the beginning of July the walls are up and the roof trusses have been delivered. It is a long, long way from being finished. One of the fascinating things about watching my sister and brother in law build their house is a glimmer of insight into just how much more work there is to do even when the shell of the house is complete and watertight (and we are not there yet). But it begins to be a house. When the builders have gone in the evening we go to see what progress has been made. I watch how the sun moves and where the light falls. Sometimes I have glimpses of what the house will look like and how it will be to live there. "Just narrow your eyes...." comes my mother's voice. It is almost eight years since she died yet I smile at her.

Summer

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 11:24:00 +0000

I love summer. I love longer days and sitting outside. I love sunshine and flowers. This summer is a strange one, living in a rented house amid the uncertainty and stagnation of the pandemic. Here is a record of a day for when all this is behind us.

I wake naturally, without an alarm at about half past seven. This is one of the great pleasures and privileges of being older. After years of being woken by children or the demands of work when the morning was a frantic time of juggling and school bags, of taking the dog out and leaping in the car, using the journey to connect with work, always feeling rushed and on overdrive, these days I wake quietly. Ian usually gets up first and makes himself a cup of coffee and me a pot of tea. I drink it quietly in bed, reading the paper on my ipad. The road where we live is quiet too. From here we can hear the church bells striking and they might call me to get up.

Going downstairs here is very different from coming down at our old house. There the outside was always calling with the view changing from day to day and from season to season. I would open the kitchen door to sunshine, rain or wind and judge the day by how far I could see across the valley.

Here there is no real view but still I open the door, take my coffee outside and check the progress of my sunflower seeds, growing in pots, ostensibly for a WI competition but really just to have something to grow. The back garden here is small, private and sunny in the morning. I have given up eating breakfast but the habit is strong so I need to find something to do to stop me going onto automatic pilot and making my scrambled eggs so mornings are generally planned. On Monday morning I will probably go to yoga, on Wednesday Pilates. Tuesday morning is Spanish time with my friend in Valencia and Thursday morning my online Spanish class. On a yoga morning we return home at about a quarter past eleven. I like walking back through the churchyard. It is strange. I am not a churchgoer but the sound of the church bells, the path through the churchyard, both make me feel somehow anchored. It is one of the things I like most about living here.

Lunchtime almost always involves eggs in some fashion: scrambled eggs, poached eggs, boiled eggs. I love them all. At the moment Ian likes to watch the Daily Politics Show over lunch and then the news. I am having one of my periods of finding politics and politicians intensely annoying: the point scoring, the predictability of party political responses to questions, the fudge, the lies, the lack of honesty. Listening to it raises my blood pressure and undermines my hardwon equilibrium. So I will lunch with a book in the dining room or outside only arriving as the news starts to catch the headlines.

Afternoons are often for exercise, maybe some childcare for our locally living daughter, Spanish or Welsh homework and keeping in touch with family. There might be something to do in the community for book club or WI and we might go to the building plot to see the progress on the new house. It is surprising that, apart from the quiet start to the day, life feels quite busy. I think it is partly as a contrast to those periods of lockdown when there really was nothing in the diary.

We eat our evening meal quite early, around six or six thirty. We try to cook all our meals from scratch and it is surprising how much time thinking about food, preparing food and eating it take in our day! Evenings are for reading, knitting, watching television and doing the crossword. Right now there is an enormous amount of football on the television as a result of the Euros. I am not a football fan but I will watch if Wales or England are playing.

We generally go to bed at about 11.00. I will read for a while. Coronavirus has increased my reading time so I am getting through three or four books a week. I read so fast I barely remember some of them and it is one of the pleasures of book club that it makes me read things I might not otherwise choose and also slows me down because I know I will have to discuss the book.

And so there we are: another day gone. It is happy enough and shot through with calls with our children and grandchildren which give it connection and meaning. It might be a bit short of adventure at the moment but adventure and coronavirus don't easily combine. But the world is still beautiful. The sun still shines. One day we will go adventuring again. I will sit on a clifftop overlooking a blue blue sea. I will eat food I have not cooked. I will speak a language which is not my own.

In the meantime the church bells mark the hours and the days are good.

This week's diversions

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 14:35:00 +0000

Well I am running out of things to say about coronavirus It persists. The new variant first identified in India seems to be more transmissible and is now dominant here in the UK. Case numbers remain relatively low but are rising. Will the big opening up which we are expecting in England on 21 June happen? I don't know. Will we get to France towards the end of the summer? I don't know. Will we be allowed to mix inside here in Wales soon? I don't know. So here is a taste of the variety of ways in which I have been distracting myself.

Running. I am trying to get back to being able to run 10k in readiness for the Chester 10k which with luck will take place in July. I have only run 10k once before and that was last year just before the lockdown struck when Ian and I ran the Chester 10k together on the 8th March 2020. I was totally delighted to do it, even if I am slow as a slow thing. I don't really care if I am slow. That is just the way it is. I finished last year's 10k determined to do another one and intending to keep training.

Then the first lockdown threw my running badly off course. We had to exercise from home and I was living up a very steep hill where there was no way to go which did not involve ferocious inclines. I lost my way a bit and then returned to running last summer when we were once more allowed to drive for exercise. By October last year I was back to running two or three times a week and getting up to about 8k. Then a mini disaster struck. I had a suspected TIA and was told to stop running. After a month or so my GP said I could start again and then we hit winter and we were moving house. Running slipped down the priority list. I always tried to do something but by the time we moved here in February I had lost a lot of fitness. So since February I have been trying to get back to doing longer distances and to running more frequently. Somehow I had got myself into a mindset that left me wary of running longer than 5k, feeling that the longer distances were beyond me, feeling intimidated by them again.

This morning I really wanted to run at least 8k, perhaps even 9k if I felt ok. And I have done it. I had to walk a couple of the steeper bits of hills and I really should have carried water with me because I was aware of struggling with the heat. But I did it. It is so good to be able run in a rural area. Birds were whipping in and out of hedges. The wildflowers were overflowing on the verges. The hawthorn is in bloom and every now and then the breeze hit it and a great waft of warm scent drifted past. I will do a couple of short runs this week and maybe next week have another go at 9k and see if I can run all of it. But I am chuffed. I am getting back to where I want to be.

Reading. All through this period of coronavirus I have read as I used to read when I was a child and a teenager, gulping up books, racing through them, losing myself in them so that it is a slight surprise to lift my head and find that I am here, in 21st century Wales, not in New Caledonia (Rachel Joyce's Miss Benson's Beetle) or 1930s India (Alys Conran's Dignity), the Swiss Alps in the 1950s (Stella Gibbons' A Swiss Summer) and, at the moment, 17th Century London (Andrew Taylor's The Royal Secret). I haven't read anything I haven't enjoyed. I have become far more ruthless as I have got older. If a book does not draw me in within the first hundred pages or so I abandon it. There are so many wonderful books out there to read and reread and life is short.

Knitting and making things. My beloved Icelandic jumper continues on its slow way.

A couple of days ago we met up with younger daughter and her family for a walk and a cake and five year old granddaughter offered me a ball of blue wool wondering if I would be able to make a dress from it for her baby doll.

I like having lots of things on the go. I shall start this today probably as if I put it in the queue behind the jumper Grace may be waiting some time.

And this is my absolute favourite time of year. There are swallows in the sky, Queen Anne's lace by the path, and the sun is warm.

And there is salmon and mango to cook for tea and Michael Palin to watch on the television. Is all of this my own way of putting my fingers in my ears and singing to drown out the sound of politicians talking fudge and scientists predicting doom? No doubt it is but it works for me!

What is keeping you sane in insane times?

And this time we go North!

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 16 May 2021 14:57:00 +0000

There is no holding us now! Last week the campervan took us to Scotland. We have always loved Scotland and Ian in particular has an attachment to walking Scottish hills which for him is not quite replicated anywhere else. We stayed with friends who have some really great self catering accommodation at Bonawe House in Taynuilt near Oban. A self catering apartment and evenings round the fire pit sorted out the Covid regulations. It is a very beautiful place. Thank you so much to Damon and Renate for your wonderful hospitality and kindness.

We took the foot passenger ferry from near Oban to the island of Kerrera and walked out to Gylen Castle. The castle was built by the Macdougall clan in 1582 but was occupied only until 1647 when it was besieged and burned out by the Covenanters. It seems a very short time for such a beautifully built and designed place to be lived in. There has been considerable renovation work in recent years and it is easy to see how people lived. We found a sheltered spot for lunch where the primroses spilled down towards the sea and ate our sandwiches sitting on a rock under our two big umbrellas. I have never walked with a rucksack and a golf umbrella before but I recommend it.

On another day Ian climbed a hill and I did a couple of hours with him before returning to the van for an afternoon of quiet, watching birds, reading, knitting, drinking coffee. The quiet seeps into your soul.

On another day we took the car ferry to Mull, drove across the island and then caught the passenger ferry to Iona. Iona is a small and beautiful island, famous as the birthplace of Celtic Christianity following the arrival of St Columba from Ireland in 563. I have wanted to see Iona for years but it has become a tourist destination (while remaining a religious community and working island) and is hugely visited.

A rainy Wednesday towards the end of lockdown during a global pandemic produced an oddly quiet time to go, a strange upside to a dark time. The Abbey was closed to visitors but we wandered around the graveyard and walked up to a beautiful beach.

Coming back we managed to miss the ferry from Mull to Oban by five minutes and had to wait a couple of hours for the next one. Slowly as we waited, an ordinary day transformed into one of those magical evenings on the west coast which Scotland and all of the west can surprise you with, when the sky and the water fill with light.

A couple of days in a campsite in Glencoe rounded off a memorable week and on Saturday we drove home, down and down the country. It is a long way. We wanted to get to the building plot in the light to see what had been happening while we were away. A lot, is the answer.

Double skin walls up to first floor height and steels in place for the large windows which will look up to the hills.

It was a very good week and it was good to be home again. That is something I had lost in this great protracted period of staying home because of coronavirus: the pleasure in returning home. And here in the UK the world is opening up again. Hospitality businesses are allowed to reopen. Soon it will be possible to spend time in other people's houses again. Will be able to travel overseas? The spectre of the Indian variant hovers. We do not know. But for now it feels as if the world has expanded. How is it for you?

Life opens up

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Mon, 03 May 2021 13:16:00 +0000

Sometimes having a campervan is a wonderful thing. So here is why: we are allowed over the border into England now, we are allowed to travel within England and to spend time in gardens with another household. We are not yet allowed to stay overnight in other people's houses but the great thing about a campervan is that you bring your own bedroom with you. So a week last Friday we set off for Devon to spend time with younger son and his family and then with my sister and her husband. Devon! That is the furthest we have been in months! It is a familiar drive down the M6 and M5, round about a six hour journey including a stop. A few years ago when my father was alive we did this journey every week. Doing it again now, especially after a long period of staying home, it seems astonishing that we managed it. It felt like a long way. But it also felt like a glorious way. The sky was a brilliant blue as we drove and the trees and fields were the brilliant, vivid green of early May. And we were off, on the move, out in the world!

And oh it was good to see more of our people again. The grandchildren seemed entirely unaffected by the time that had passed since we last saw them, clamouring for stories and games and delighted to be with us again. We went to the beach. We walked beside the river. We ate delicious food and talked and talked.

Devon was doing its glorious spring thing with primroses and bluebells.

And then on to my sister's where she and her husband are building their own house, literally themselves. It is a marvellous endeavour and we are deeply admiring.

Here is my brother in law helping the digger driver to move a host of concrete panels. Every where it was so lovely to see people. I kept finding myself bursting out yet again with "It's so good to see you!" Did I know how much I have missed seeing my special people, all of our children and grandchildren and wider family? No, oddly I don't think I did. I have been sitting on it, keeping the yearning tamped down tight so it would not overwhelm me. Now it has been released like a jack in a box, bursting out all noise, colour and gaiety.

And since we came home, look, we have walls starting to go up on our building plot!

Spring is well and truly sprung!

A week's diary

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 13:38:00 +0000

Monday 12th April was the day for the opening up of some restrictions in England, not here in Wales where some things (hairdressers!) had already opened and others (outside hospitality) remain closed until the 26th of this month. So here, in case I forget as I surely will, is a day by day account of this last week.

Monday

We drove to Manchester for the first time in months to see our older son and his family. You know that little children grow very fast but even so it was a shock to see how tall the six year old has become and that the two year old has gone from a toddler to a chatty little girl in the months since we had seen them. The oldest, at fifteen, is very clearly a young man now. How fast it goes. We shared lunch and walked and played in the park. At one point the six year old said with some satisfaction "You really like me don't you Grandma?" How lovely. That is one of the great gifts grandparents can give their grandchildren, that sense of other people who think they are wonderful. "Yes Ted," I said. "I really do."

Tuesday

Tuesday is language learning day every week: an hour's conversation with my Spanish friend in Valencia in the morning, a three hour zoom class with the Welsh tutor in the afternoon. At the end of the day, as I am every week, I was shattered. It is the concentration I think. How did I hold down a demanding job and travel all over the place and work every hour God sends? I have no idea. But now this is the one thing that I do that works the brain and is hard. It is good to do something hard amidst the easy gentle pace of retirement, well it is for me. Without it I would turn to mush.

Wednesday

I went for a run, if you can dignify my slow speed with that term. Ian and I signed up for the Chester 10k again and at the moment it is scheduled to be run in July. There is no way in the world that I could run 10k right now after a winter of little running. I don't know if it reflects not having been a runner at all until I was sixty four but my fitness disappears very quickly and it is a battle to regain it. After a month of trying hard to get back to running three times a week since we came here I am just starting to have the occasional run which feels good instead of impossibly hard. That is what I do it for, that glorious sense of your body moving, doing what it was made for. You don't get it all the time but when I run more often it is reasonably frequent, and even when, as now, it feels hard while I am running, it always feels great afterwards.

Thursday

Thursday was a red letter day. I went to the hairdressers. I will happily never go to a big sporting event. With much more difficulty I could I suppose forgo theatre and concerts (but I don't want to!) but the one thing I was looking forward to that was not to do with family and friends was having my hair cut and coloured again. I am not one of those people who loves the process but I do love the result. It makes me feel like me again! Despite the wearing of masks and the temperature taking and the social distancing in the salon it felt so good to be back.

Friday

Friday was another run in the morning and a visit to younger daughter's garden in the afternoon. We have also had our electricity supply for the new house laid on this week. The road outside the plot had to be closed while the trench was dug and the cable brought to the house. Apologies to our new neighbours for the inconvenience this must have caused them! This feels like real progress after several weeks in which the house itself has not grown at all. Friday evening has become an evening for fish and chips from the local cafe and a zoom call with friends over a bottle of wine. Perhaps it won't be long until we can eat outside together in the garden or on their deck. It just needs a few degrees more warmth!

Saturday

On Saturday afternoon we watched the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh. To my surprise I was very moved by the music, a choir of only four singers filling St George's Chapel with a glorious sound, and by the sight of the Queen alone, small and frail with her head bowed. A fitting send off for an unusual man who took the chaos and instability of his own childhood and transformed his life into a strength and stability in support of his wife which cannot have been easy for a man of his generation I imagine.

Sunday

And today we went for a coffee with a friend and to look at some of her new lambs, impossibly sweet and cuddly like illustrations from a children's book. Again we had not seen her for months. Life is slowly slowly opening up. Little by little things are changing.

What have you done, if anything, with your new found freedoms?

Journeying at last

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 10:34:00 +0000

On the 28th March we were at last allowed to stop "staying local" and travel within Wales. Two of our children and their families live in Wales and two in England. We had managed to see our North Wales daughter and her family through the lockdown from time to time, for childcare or, as things relaxed a bit further, outside for a walk or a play in the park. The South Wales family we had not seen for months although we facetime and talk pretty often. We would have to stay outside if we made the four hour journey down the border. So Emma and I plotted together. We could bring the campervan which would be our place to sleep and retire to. She would buy a firepit so we could spend the evenings together outside on their terrace. The weather forecast was consulted and two or three days of unseasonal warmth were predicted with winds from the south bringing some sunshine and higher temperatures so that was when we would travel. Plan made.

On Tuesday morning as we drove south past Wrexham we were as far from home as we had been for months. It was warm and sunny and the sky was an intense Mediterranean blue. The van was packed and ready for overnight stays. It felt as though we were on an adventure. Down, down the border we went, past Oswestry and Welshpool, Newtown, Llandrindod Wells, Builth Wells. It is a great drive at any time with hills and woods and fields and the glorious climb into the Brecon beacons but Tuesday was magic. The fields were full of sheep and lambs, sprawled dreaming in the sun. Daffodils sparkled by the roadside. Miles whizzed away under the van's wheels. I felt intensely happy with that deep happiness which comes sometimes when you are aware of it singing in the blood, right now, not in retrospect, not as a form of nostalgia but right there in that moment as the van surged up the hills and the beacons shone in the clear light.

And it was indeed lovely to see them. Emma and I kept smiling at each other over the heads of the children. Eleven year old grandson fetched and carried for the table outside with alacrity, proudly mixed the perfect gin and tonic and read to us with enthusiasm and expression from his book about people who had survived in amazing circumstances: in snow and mountains or deserts and deep seas. We had not seen three year old granddaughter for more than six months but she quickly decided she was perfectly happy with us and kept turning up reaching out her hand for me to go with her. "Grandma, can I show you something amazing?" Twice it was our own campervan, often the stream that runs close to the house which is her special place to climb and play demonstrating a breathtaking (and for me a heart in mouth) confidence in her own strength and ability to balance. In the early evening we played Bird Bingo and then sat by the fire pit, talking and talking. How I have missed this.

Joseph pushes Izzy on the swing.

Izzy spends hours making a pig house for tiny fairy pigs.

By Friday the wind had turned and blew icily from the North. Time to go home. We packed up to come home again and as we drove I realised that somehow seeing this part of our family again had made me feel much more strongly myself. I cannot explain it any better than that. It is as if managing without so many of the people we love has reduced us somehow. We have managed the lockdown as well as we can and in many ways it has been fine with the proximity of younger daughter and her family making a huge difference to us. Now we have dates in the diary, as we are released into being able to travel into England, to see our sons and their families, in Manchester and in Devon, putting the jigsaw of ourselves back together.

And yesterday we sat in the sunshine outside with our friends, drinking prosecco and planning an autumn trip to Leiden together.

So it has been a very good week. How was yours? Has the easing of restrictions opened things up for you? I hope so!

Has it really been a year?

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 17:15:00 +0000

Has it really been a year since the first lockdown struck and we all retreated to our homes? I went back and read my first blog about coronavirus and see that I wrote it on 28th March 2020, so yes, a year ago almost exactly. How long ago it seems. This long slow year has chugged away and here we are now, with the vaccination roll out offering hope and the emergence of new variants reminding us that maybe, in some ways, coronavirus is here to stay and the world must adapt to it with annual vaccinations perhaps, as for flu. We shall see. I hear people talking about getting back to normal and I wonder what that will look like. Somehow I find it hard to believe that it will be exactly as life was before the pandemic hit.

A walk through the churchyard

But there are lots of things to lift the spirits, chiefly from today that here in Wales we are allowed to travel anywhere in the country. By "country" I do mean Wales as the rest of the UK is still off limits for the moment. Pubs and cafes and restaurants remain closed except for takeaway food but self catering accommodation is reopening and we are taking advantage of the fact that we have a campervan to travel down next week to see that part of our family which lives in South Wales. We will have to see each other outside but we will have our home on our back so that should be fine. Our daughter tells us she has bought a fire pit and the weather forecast looks quite good for a couple of days next week. The journey down will take us four hours or so and it will be much the furthest we have travelled for months. I am pretty sure I will be excited. In fact when I start to think about it I am already excited by the very idea! We have learnt to live without excitement over the last year but it bubbles away under there if I let it!

And it looks as though travel into England will open up later in April which will allow us to see our sons and their families who we also have not seen for months. At the moment seeing family in all its combinations is the limit of my ambitions. Would I like to travel and socialise, go to theatres and concerts and engage with the world in all its richness and variety? Of course I would. But at the moment it is a small number of deeply loved people whose absence I feel, despite the zoom calls and the whatsapps and all the wonders of technology. This is especially true of the younger grandchildren who need games and stories and hugs and the blessing of shared time.

I think it is interesting how thoroughly we seem to have adapted to this strange local life. We exercise from home and live and shop locally and most of the time it feels ok. Little things become the focus of a good day: a successful run, a walk through the churchyard, a cup of coffee in a new mug. Like the frog in hot water, we have adjusted. Everyone we know seems stoical, complying with rules with a surprising amount of good cheer. I think part of the story we tell ourselves in this country is that this is a particularly "British" response to hard times but I doubt whether this is true. I think it is a human response and I expect that all over the world there are people getting on with it, doing their best.

A cup of coffee in a new mug

But oh I am ready for warmth and company, colour and sunlight and playing with children and long chats into the evening with people I love.

New house, new month, new rules?

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Musgrave) — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 10:17:00 +0000

So here we are in the middle of March and on Friday the Welsh Government announced some small changes to the rules in Wales. The vaccination programme is going well with more than 23 million people now having received their first dose of the vaccine across the UK and nearly 1.5 million having had both doses. Across the UK we have also been in lockdown which itself has an impact in reducing the spread of the virus. Deaths have fallen sharply as have new cases and hospitalisations. The death figures for today in the UK are 175 and there are 6,609 new cases. There has been some pressure mainly from business and some politicians for coronavirus lockdown rules to be eased and in England the Westminster government has published a "road map" giving various dates when changes will be made, assuming that cases continue to fall or at least to remain low. Schools have gone back in England this last week and in Wales many more years of school will reopen next week so there is a concern among medics and scientists that time should be taken to assess the impact of this on case numbers before other changes to the rules are made.

Wales has its own rules on handling the pandemic and is probably generally a bit more cautious than England. The changes that were announced yesterday are very much in keeping with that slow and cautious approach. Since Christmas we have been supposed to stay home except in very limited circumstances such as essential shopping or medical appointments or work if work cannot be done from home. We have also been supposed to exercise from home and not to meet others even outside although that has been relaxed a little very recently to allow two people to meet outside, first for exercise and then without the need to be engaged in exercise. Well now the stay home rule has been replaced with a stay local requirement which will still not help us to see our wider family. We shall have to wait to the end of March to see if the rules are relaxed again to allow us to travel within Wales although that still would keep half of our children and grandchildren out of reach. We can however now meet in gardens within the stay local restrictions so if it warms up a little we might return to our weekly meet up with local friends which has been taking place on Zoom over the winter. It will be good to be able to have a face to face conversation in our garden or theirs and to chat over coffee or cake.

These changes were fairly widely trailed so we were not expecting things to shift very much, although hairdressers can reopen which will be great. I am not sure when I will be able to get an appointment. If my hairdresser's facebook page is anything to go by I am not the only person longing for one! So I have been distracting myself from being unable to plan to see our people. Some of this distraction is directed towards buying things (not that usual for me. I am not a keen shopper.)

Here is a beautiful new lampshade, hand printed and hand made by Hannah Madden I have liked what she does for a couple of years now but as we were getting ready for moving I had quite a thing about not buying more stuff. Now that we are here and settled I decided to go for it. There is something really special about having something designed and made from start to finish by one creative person. I love the design and the sense of having something unique and most of all I love the sense of supporting one person's creative venture rather than pouring my money into big business.

And here is my second bit of retail therapy: a new dress from White Stuff. I feel as though I have worn the same clothes for weeks and weeks as we got ready to move: stretchy leggings, top, fleece. Even though I don't like shopping I do like clothes so I decided I wanted something to take me out of my covid uniform. This is great. It is warm and comfortable to wear and it has pockets!

And as a further distraction from not being able to see our family I am continuing with more exercise. For the third week in a row I have run three times, slowly as always, but I think that this coming week I will get back to being able to run 5k. From there I need to gently increase if I am to have any chance of running 10k in the summer. I have registered for the Chester 10k again but at the moment there is no way in the world I could run that far so that is my aim.

We are about to see our local grandchildren outside for a short play so there is that to look forward to. Maybe we are inching towards being let out. How is it for you?