Are you the leaver or the left?

Ian has been away this week and I have had a bit of time here on my own. Visitors who come from the brightly lit city and look out into the velvet dark up here often ask if I mind being here on my own. The answer is not at all. Our neighbours at the farm are seconds away even though we cannot see them from the house and I don't mind being alone by the fire or snuggled down in bed.


For the last twelve years or so I have been the one to go away. It is curious now to find myself the one who stays at home.



So what is the difference in how it feels? Well, going away is a strange mixture. If you have children there is always a little bit of guilt (or even a lot!) no matter how well looked after you know they will be when you are gone. My children were in their teens by the time I was spending weeks away with work and didn't seem to mind too much. Perhaps they even liked the fact that I wasn't hanging around checking if they had done their homework and trying to encourage them to talk about their day. But there was always a bit of me that felt guilty about driving away on a Monday morning, leaving their care to my husband, not guilty enough not to go, obviously.



And then there is an odd lightness, a sort of relief. You are leaving behind all the minutiae of home life: the unpaid bills, the unwashed laundry, the shopping lists, the teetering piles of ironing, the cat to take to the vet, the insurance quote to find. You are not there so there is nothing you can do about it. If you stay in a hotel there is nothing to do at all except unpack your bag and look at the minibar. I never liked hotel life, the meals on a tray from room service or eating on your own in a hotel restaurant pretending to read a book, though both of those were sometimes better than finding yourself eating with people you didn't care for in a fug of drink and jollity. It wasn't always like that of course. Sometimes you found yourself in a beautiful city with locals who took you out for great meals with interesting people and allowed you to pretend for an evening that you too lived in Barcelona or Lisbon or Amsterdam. It was a far cry from changing beds or taking the bins out. There is an excitement, an energy in leaving home with your bag and going out into the world.



But very often being away from home for work contains vast tracts of time where the strongest emotion is boredom. Business travel gives you hours hanging around in airports, sitting on trains, having an evening to kill with nothing to do other than mess about with your presentation. And travelling is tiring too, even though it is sometimes hard to see why it should be if all you are doing is sitting on a train reading a report and drinking coffee.



Being in touch while you are away is tricky too. You already feel disconnected and if you don't ring and talk to your family you begin to feel even more distant and disorientated. But ringing can be a minefield. You find that your daughter is being bullied or your son is ill. Your partner is clearly struggling with the twin pressures of work and home and you suddenly can't talk about the success of a meeting or an enjoyable meal out without feeling uncomfortable and somehow disloyal. Or you are having a miserable time in a cheap hotel with sticky carpets and a client who stubbornly insists on the impossible and they are all clearly having a great week. You can hear them laughing in the background and you struggle not to feel sorry for yourself and left out.



I think if I had stayed home for years I might feel differently about staying home now. It is odd to be the one left holding the fort. It is disconcerting to find that the jobs of ringing the builder and renewing the road tax and finding a new dentist which you blithely said you would do are messy and hopelessly timeconsuming and frustrating with hours wasted hanging on the phone, listening to a chirpy girl telling you how important your call is to them. I never used to have time to do any of that so I didn't.



There is always a small sense of being left behind when the person who is leaving goes out of the door. You look at the dishes and the laundry and suppress an internal sigh. But then you remind yourself that you don't actually want to get on the train. You can go and walk round the garden, sit at the computer and read blogs. It is entirely up to you what you do with your day. And having an evening to yourself is actually rather wonderful. I have always liked it - no sound but the fire, no television, a glossy magazine or a new book or a shiny laptop hour. I like getting into bed by myself and stretching out on the cool sheets.



That enjoyment lasts for the first night but if I am by myself much longer the attraction fades. In a few days I am longing for company and conversation and a warm body to hug in the bed and someone to laugh with at Armstrong and Miller.



So just for now I think I like to be the one who is left. I like to be the still centre of the turning world, feeding the cats and sorting the chickens out and hanging up laundry and watching a thrush eating berries in the yew tree for long quiet minutes. As long as next week I can get in the car and drive away.



Are you the leaver or the left?

A catch up

It is time for a blog about day to day things. I am sitting by the woodburner with a new load of logs in the basket and it is raining gently outside. Only a week ago we were hanging on to the last days of a golden autumn which almost converted me from my long held dislike of this time of year. The garden was looking better that it ever has in October, thanks to a combination of the endless flowering of masses of self seeded cosmos and a soft warm light which washed everything the pale straw colour of Fino sherry. I planted out a hundred tiny wild tulips, tulipa sylvestris, which will fling open their star shaped cream and yellow flowers in spring. I sowed Sarah Raven sweet peas and annuals, Orlaya Grandiflora, Ammi Majus, and white foxgloves by the box full. I considered once again cleaning out the aluminium greenhouse and once again found something else to do. That must be one of my least favourite jobs, on a par with cleaning the oven. I spent almost as much time outside as I do in summer, cradling my cup of tea and finding pockets of warmth and sunshine to share with the cats and the peacock.

But this week it is grey and cold and dank. There is no attraction whatsover in being outside and I am wavering about whether to succumb to the planning of Christmas. Quite a large part of me doesn't want to. It will be here soon enough and doesn't need me to rush towards it waving my arms. But I am hoping to keep my presents as far as possible hand made, either by me or by others, so perhaps I need to accept that I should get a move on. If I want to buy some things from the lovely and talented pipany I can't expect to do that the week before Christmas so I had better plunge in. And I enjoy making Christmas food, especially cakes and puddings, although it does seem strange to plan a stir up Sunday with none of the four children around to wander into the kitchen and help with the weighing or surreptitiously add a bit more brandy (you know who you are). This year there will be a new face at the table. My older daughter is expecting her first baby just before Christmas. I am not a sentimental person but just typing those words has made my insides leap with a mixture of joy and apprehension. How the world turns.

Last night was the first night of rehearsal for the one occasion in the year when our local male voice choir, Cor Meibion Caerwys, invites women singers to join them. We sing at the service of nine lessons and carols in our local church. I am not a church goer and I don't have much of a voice, I can just about hold a tune if everyone around me is holding theirs, but I love the experience of singing with a really good choir. I did this a couple of years ago and blogged about it here There is a wonderful forgetting of yourself in singing, utterly in the moment, carried along by the swell of the sound around you, and singing in Welsh has its own magic.

In the kitchen I have another great bucket of the last of the green tomatoes which need to be made into chutney. It is just long enough since the last frantic chutney making fortnight for this to be an attractive use of a dark, wet afternoon, filling the kitchen with the smell of vinegar and brown sugar.

A friend has given us a new hen, a Buff Orpington/Welsumer cross which is supposed to make a great broody. With luck we shall have some chicks in the spring. She is hanging sadly around by the house, the others off out in the field foraging. Every time a new hen joins the flock they go through the same process: first she stays by the henhouse, totally ignored by the rest of the flock as they charge off up through the kitchen garden to scratch under the bird feeders. After a few days she gets the idea and tags along at the back, far enough away not to be part of the group but close enough to see what is going on. In another day she might start hanging around right at the edge of the flock, like a child hoping to be invited to play, and then I will look up and see that she is right there in the middle as if she has always been there. She hasn't been allowed up on the perch yet and last night I found her sleeping in the nesting box with another Welsumer which came to me from the same friend a few months ago. Hens are clearly creatures of habit which does require memory. I don't really suppose they remembered each other but it was funny to see them fluffed up side by side.

Now I should really go and see if she is ok.

Yes, not only ok but safely away in the henhouse all by herself!

A little list

It's November, one of my two least favourite months, the other being February. It is dark by five, and going to be darker. The leaves are whirling and there are all those things queueing up in the garden which I haven't done yet, including planting ludicrous numbers of tulip bulbs. Last month it was warm and inviting outside. Now it is colder and wetter and I am feeling like a very fair weather gardener. Eventually I will be able to persuade myself into looking forward to Christmas, but I need to wind myself up to it so I am not yet ready to go into a wonderwoman, organisational whirl to distract myself from the beginning of winter.

So I am going to indulge myself with a list: ten things that make me smile.

1. Michael McIntyre. I don't know quite what it is about him. He makes me smile before he has even opened his mouth, a useful quality in a comedian you'd think.
2. My three year old grandson in the park, "Grandma, lets go in the woods and have an adventure". We did, we saw a squirrel. He was so excited he clamped himself to my leg. "That squirrel's not going to hurt me."
3. Derek Brockway, weather forecaster for BBC Wales, the loveliest, smiliest, campest forecaster in the business.
4. Younger daughter's friend A trying to do accents. I have no talent for this at all but even mine don't segue quite so seamlessly from Welsh to Pakistani to Irish. Still not sure what he was trying to do, Brazilian perhaps.
5. The sound of a cork coming out of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. I don't know if this sounds any different from a cork coming out of a bottle of red, but if it doesn't, it should.
6. My chickens racing up from the henhouse like road runner on a good day to try to get to the cat's food before she has finished it.
7. Many of the male members of my family: my son, my brother, my husband, my father, my stepson. It isn't that the female members aren't funny, they are, quick and witty and wry and unpredictable. But somehow female humour is my humour and I am in the thick of it, contributing as well as listening. Male humour is different, other, surprising me, making me laugh at things that wouldn't have sparked laughter without them. Actually I have just realised it is all of my funny family so
8. girls too.
9. Andrew Marr. I like him. I think he is clever, insightful, incisive but his ears always make me smile, shallow creature that I am.
10. The look on my husband's face when our elderly cat farts. I can't see it for very long because we both need to run for cover.

Maybe next week I will have something more profound to say.

Am I losing touch?

Am I losing touch? Have I spent too long in the country? Last week I went to the city for lunch with a friend who now lives in the Lake District. It wasn't precisely a halfway house, but meeting in Manchester worked for both of us.

Having become a jeans and fleece sort of a girl, I really did try to make a bit of an effort. I shaved my legs, I put a skirt on and a pair of boots which last year made me feel like the bees' knees. I couldn't quite be bothered with the whole hair straighteners rigmarole but I bashed it for a while with a hairbrush and put on some make up and left feeling really quite smart. When I stopped in the village to buy a paper my friend in the newsagent said "Oh, where are you off to then?" so it clearly showed.

I parked my car in the gulp inducingly expensive carpark at Kendals (a sort of smaller, Northern version of Harrods for those who have never heard of it) and found I had half an hour to kill before meeting S so I thought I would have a quick whizz round in case I could manage to start my Christmas shopping, startlingly early for me.

And the whole thing was dreadful.

First I caught sight of myself unexpectedly in a shop mirror and had the classic experience of wondering who that fat, miserable old bat was before realising it was me. I can't even say I looked like my mother as my mother looks loads better. I just looked ancient and slightly scruffy.

In a panic I flew to the ladies' and put some lipstick on and attacked the hair again. Now I didn't look quite so ancient but as I was putting the hairbrush away three girls came in who make me feel I had wandered into an alien world. Each was deeply tanned and highly blonded, with the straight glossy hair and glossy lips of a television presenter or a female X factor judge. Each wore heels so high that they towered above me (and I am middling, not short) and each examined her reflection in the mirror so minutely that they might have been looking for hairs unplucked or pores unsqueezed. They carried handbags loaded with chains and quilting and colour. They were dressed, at eleven thirty on an autumn morning, in tiny shiny dresses, tied under the bust and short enough to display miles of leg of varying degrees of beauty or sturdiness.

They looked like pictures in Grazia. They looked as if they were trying to be Cheryl Cole. They made me feel utterly out of place and uncomprehending. I would not have looked like that even when I could have done and I fled, wondering what had happened to the feminism which sought to abolish the idea of women as sex objects. As far as I can see all that has happened is that young men are now also fair game and are thus becoming as obsessed with their looks as women once were. A form of equality I suppose.

I wandered out into the store. I am not a great shopper but Kendals is as good as it gets generally, not too huge, lots of choice, things which shout "quality" or "expensive" depending on your mood. And perhaps it was my mood that made every rail a shuddering obscenity: shirts for toddlers at £60, hideous versions of those handbags for hundreds, shoes you could not walk in for a month's salary, a child's bed for the price of a small car.

I pushed out of the store and fell gratefully into Waterstones - ordinary looking people, piles of books, yes, a business, but one that made more sense to me, that didn't make me feel queasy with excess. And then I met my friend and the hours flew by as we drank too much coffee and stayed and stayed and laughed and were serious and laughed again.

Have I spent too long in the country?

So what is your dream?

One of the magic things about blogging is how one blog needs to another and you discover new favourites to add to your personal list. By just this sort of hopping along I found Sally at who's the mummy and another world of fascinating blogs. Sally blogged in response to a tag about her dream and has kindly tagged me to write about mine.

Well this is tricky. When I was younger I could have told you about the dream of living on a Scottish island, or running a bookshop with a coffee shop attached. I could have written about the dream of travelling through New Zealand in a campervan, revisiting the places where I spent my adolescence, finding out if the grass is as brown, the sky as blue, the sea as ultramarine as I remember it. I could have told you about the dream of having children (somewhat unrealistic as a I recall. I thought I could read novels while the baby slept contentedly in its pram. Huh.) Even a few years ago I could have told you about the dream of living in the country, away from the press of urban life, with a bit of land and a few chickens. But now I am, I suppose, living my dream and it is hard to write about it without sounding smug or sentimental.

I always wanted to live in the country sometime. When I sweated on tubes in London and sat in traffic jams in Manchester being in the city always felt temporary. One day I would look out onto fields and pick my own apples. But somehow life hardened round me. Jobs and children and their schools and friends all coalesced to form a life which was essentially suburban. Now don't get me wrong, there is loads to love in suburbia and I am not one of those who derides it. In many way I suspect my children had a more interesting life, especially as teenagers, with far more opportunities for independence than they might have had out in the sticks, dependent on adults for a taxi service. But rural life was something I was going to do one day.

And then one day, and I now can't remember how the dawning realisation hardened into resolution, we found ourselves thinking that if we were going to do this, when exactly was it going to happen? The children had left home. Yes, there were jobs and ties and responsibilities but it wasn't that we couldn't move away if we planned it carefully enough. And so we did. It took plenty of sweat and sleepless nights and planning and forethought and blind pigheaded determination but four years ago we moved here and swapped an Edwardian house in the leafy suburbs for a sixteenth century farmhouse with outbuildings and a holiday cottage and a view across a quiet valley in the Clwydian hills.

So now I wake every morning to silence or birdsong and the view across the valley. Nobody comes past, other than the occasional walker on a foot path, and I have swapped traffic noise for the bleating of sheep and sound of a tractor working on the far hill. Having spent years of my life trying to coax an oasis from tiny town gardens with sour soil and little privacy we now have a couple of acres of field and trees. I love it. Even now I have to shake myself every now and then to remind myself that I live here. I'm not on holiday, I am not just passing through. This is home.

I always wanted chickens and now we have them scratching contentedly in the garden. I am not one for anthropomorphism and at one stage I would not have been able to tell you if the idea of a contented chicken was a city dweller's fantasy. Now I know that you can tell when a chicken is having a good time and when it is not. They even have a chicken version of excitement. When they see you coming down to let them out they line up shouting to each other, rocking slightly on their feet like a runner at the blocks.

It is very green and beautiful and the seasons are up close and in your face. Summer is always at some point a hazy dream of shimmering grass. Autumn overflows with harvest in the garden and in the hedgerows. Winter can cut to the bone but is beautiful in its severity. Spring stuns you every year with snowdrops and daffodils and new lambs. Everything is as I expected it would be but writ large: more beautiful, harder work, hotter, colder, windier, quieter, more still. The birdsong is more rapturously noisy. The piles of apples waiting to be made into jellies are bigger. The difference between sun and rain, sunrise and sunset, solitude and company: they are all vivid and alive in a way my city life never was.

It is not all robins and lambs and apple blossom. Sometimes it can be lonely and it is always hard work. It might not suit everyone to be here all year round but I am a round peg in a round hole. I will put another log in the woodburner and go out and walk round the garden. This is where I want to be.

Indian summer

I have been mulling away about why I garden and almost sat down to do a philosphical muse but somehow I find I have so much to do outside that I can't spare the time. Must be a moral in there for another time! So I thought I would share some of what is pleasing me in the garden today. This is the new bed in the side garden, still full of foliage and, astonishingly, some of the white foxgloves which were thronging it in mid summer. Last year this area was a building site and after much digging and clearing this is what it looked like in spring this year.

The blueberries are turning a fabulous colour. We have had fruit this year for the first time and the bushes have had to be covered against the hens. It is wonderful to see the turning foliage without a draping of green netting.

At this time of year the hens are welcome in the garden as they scratch about in the empty beds.

The trees are starting to turn too. The sycamore is always first and this year is a buttery gold.

Logs are stacked waiting to be cut and stored in the stone pigsties.

But with all these signs of autumn the roses are showing a second flush of flowers, still dreaming of summer.

And here is the peacock, totally at home in his domain. I wonder how he will manage when winter comes?

Six months in...

It is six months since I walked away from my job and twenty years' worth of being focussed hugely on the twin gods of work and children. While we were in France last week I was asked a couple of times about how things are going and whether I miss my job. I have been carefully not thinking about it much for the last few months. I promised myself six months off, no strings, and I have found before that when you make a big change you need to live it for a while to acclimatise. Too much worrying and analysing and wondering if you made the right decision gets in the way of adjusting to your new job, your marriage, your new house or town or whatever. It is best just to leave it alone and let it happen for a bit.

So from time to time I have had to come up with something to say when people have asked me how it was going but I haven't done any real thinking or stocktaking. I've just said how busy I am, how nice it is not to get on the train every week and how good it is to have time in the garden. All true, all glib. So I thought I would have a proper think in this blog about what I have lost and what I have gained and maybe even what to do now.

There are certainly some things I miss from my working life:

• my colleagues, both those who are contemporaries and friends and the young shiny ones full of enthusiasm and energy. I miss that sense of being surrounded by lots of people with a common goal.
• the heady rush of the close of a successful negotiation meeting when you feel you have been riding five horses at once, turning and wheeling, keeping everything together, apparently calm but working furiously under the surface. Nothing outside work has ever given me quite that particular adrenalin surge.
• that moment which would happen to me every week when walking down the street in London and relishing being just myself, no-one's wife or mother, not defined by my relationships with others but only by what I did.
• the money, but astonishingly only a very little bit. I thought I would mind financial dependency very much indeed and would miss, not so much the restaurant meals and the new suits, as knowing that I did not have to worry about affording them. Having worked my way out of being very short of money I wondered how I would feel about needing to be careful again. Amazingly this, which I thought would be a big deal, is a very small one. It's fine. If you don't work you need less money and if you live in the country you have very little opportunity to spend it if only you can control your plantaholic tendencies.

And what have I gained?

• time most of all, even though it feels as full to bursting as it ever did. I think this is mainly because if you have lived for a long time biting off more than you can chew, you just keep on doing it. Now however the time is thronged with things I have chosen and have never had time for before: yoga, Welsh, gardening on a silly scale. I found myself agitating today as I went to visit my father in law about the hundreds of bulbs I have still to plant. I had to give myself a quick slap about the head. If I have daffodils which should already be in the ground and tulips which can wait a bit, it is because I choose to. If I have a to do list which runs to several pages just as it always did, it is because I keep feeling that having left work means that I can do everything. There are still only twenty four hours in the day and still a need to sleep. I had a flash of memory today of when the children were small and I was on my own and trying to work as well and would find houseplants dying because I had not had time to water them. That sounds like a poor excuse but at the time it did feel that a plant would always be just a bit further down the priority list than the children, the job, the shopping and cooking and washing, doing all the utterly essential things to keep life afloat. I would mind a lot when I found another plant that had turned up its toes from neglect but it would happen again. I wouldn't let a plant die now.
• And the other thing I have gained which I suppose is connected with time is freedom. This time which is so full is not directed by others, or only in so far as I commit myself to looking after my grandson or going to visit my parents. Even when I am rushing about cleaning the holiday cottage or hanging out yet more washing I am my own mistress now. Sometimes I am so used to reacting to the demands of colleagues and clients that I lose momentum all by myself, drift about from room to room, unable to settle to anything, listening to yet more news on the radio or spending far too much time on the computer. Usually the next day I wake up and am anchored again. I am learning, slowly. I really don't think I want to work for anyone else again now. I am already starting to take for granted the freedom to choose whether to make curtains or work in the garden, to rush over to Blackden or to spend thankless hours on the phone harrassing lawn mower menders. I should remember what a privilege it is.
• Lastly I am gaining something in attaching myself to this place although I find it hard to understand or explain. We lived in New Zealand for a bit when I was a child and after coming back to the UK and going to university I moved about a lot. Even when I found myself living in the same city for twenty years I worked all over the place, often dividing my time between two cities, trying to keep a home and a home away from home going. Now I love just being here, waking in the morning and walking round the gardens and the field, watching the changing light on the other side of the valley, starting to know what the turning year does to the different parts of the garden, knowing my trees and my hedges. I don't yet know this land in the way I would have known it as a child, where to hide, where to find conkers, where to pick the grass which screeches for you when you blow it between your fingers, but I know some things. I know the order in which the trees come into leaf, where the snowdrops flower first, what happens if you walk up the hill into the view. My roots have always been my family and a sense that I could live anywhere. Slowly - we have only been here four years - I am beginning to feel an attachment to place which seems important for the first time in my life. I hated leaving it every week to go to London and being here most of the time is a great gain.

Well I am not sure that this takes me anywhere towards what to do now! Perhaps we haven't got there yet. Maybe it is significant that writing about what I have gained takes a bit longer than setting out what I miss. I wouldn't change it back, that is for sure.