Why am I here? I have been in bed for hours and I should be sleeping.
Too many things running round my head: Chris's book, Jane's book, luck , persistence. If it is all so hard why even begin to imagine of dreaming of doing it?
Meeting people today:difference, vulnerability, resilience, courage.
CCA's husband's courtesy in the face of the unknown female invasion. Her son's shy smile and raised hand as we passed him in the road.
What makes others' lives difficult and how easy it is to believe that your way is the only way.
How lucky I am.
Ian has been away and is coming home tomorrow. If he were here I would not be at the computer in my dressing gown. Time to try to sleep again.
Friday, 29 June 2007
Saturday, 23 June 2007
A catch up
I haven't been around for a few days - weekend away followed by a lightning strike which took out the computer - so I am feeling a bit out of touch. It looks from comments here and there as though there has been some sort of upheaval which I don't really understand, and don't want to understand either. There are so many people here who seem so fundamentally kind and tolerant of difference that I am sure we can all be accepting of each other. So here is a quick run down of my week.
Friday to Monday
Last weekend younger daughter and her friends took over our house and cottage for a hen weekend. Ian and I absented ourselves by going to see some friends who now live in France. It was a good couple of days, full of too much food and too much drink (but in a good way). Our friend is now early retired having had an extremely demanding and successful career and has taken to serious cooking with focus and determination. When I got home and got on the scales on Tuesday morning I had put on five pounds. They are having a house built. After a few years of renting a beautiful old house in Provence they have decided to take the plunge and to commit themselves to France. So the weekend was full of plans and site visits. They are buying a sloping plot of about two acres full of pines and the sound of cicadas with views away to the mountains. The design is modern and clean but using local materials. It will be stunning.
Tuesday to Thursday
Back home with a bump to reality and a busy week. I was away over Tuesday night, knowing the house was full of washing waiting to be done from the weekend and longing to be sorting out and working in the garden. The hen weekend had been a fabulous success, a just reward for younger daughter's hours and days of planning and hard work. It culminated in a grand dinner on the Saturday night when our old kitchen was decked with pink balloons and fairy lights, white candles and pink flowers. The girls changed into their finery and there were elaborate printed menus. The bride to be sat down beaming. When she picked up her menu and realised that the dinner was to be three courses of spectacular puddings, a childhood dream, she burst into tears!
On Tuesday night while I was away there was a huge storm and an arc of lightning leapt from the phone socket and took out the computer. It made me realise just how used I am to checking the weather, my bank statement, looking something up on Google, reading my emails and reading other people's blogs. I kept getting up from my chair to go the computer and realising there was no point.
We are having one of those periods when all mechanical things are failing. The car has been off the road with two separate problems for about four weeks. Broken cars and computers, a major water leak, Ian very busy at work and me veering madly between working too much (no, no, want to be in the garden and to have time for other things) to working too little (no, no, emails piling up, lists of people to contact, meetings to schedule, paperwork sliding out of control). Our precarious sense of being in control of our complicated lives seems to have slipped away. A frantic scrabbling sense of running to keep up with ourselves and yet still not on top: missed appointments, ironing piles reaching to the ceiling, weeds pushing up in the vegetable beds, slugs and snails turning my borlotti beans to lace. Ian has purposely been making me laugh all week by responding to the rising sense of chaos by humming "Ommm" and schooling his face to calmness.
We know that getting back on top of the practical things will make us feel better (as Grouse so wisely says) so yesterday I cleaned and washed and gardened as if my life depended on it. I even mowed grass, not one of my favourite things. In the evening, feeling a bit more like myself, I met Jo and her family at one of the open gardens near here, an utterly beautiful 17th Century house with a two acre garden. There was much water, a formal rill running calmly through the centre of a flagstoned terrace, a deep well-like formal pond where toads sat on bricks set into the edge or flopped lazily into the water, a larger wilder pond with water lilies and moorhens. The house is for sale, the owners downsizing, but out of our league I am sure.
And today we have done the same push to reinstate order but together this time: washing, ironing , weeding, mowing, planting out yet more tomatoes, potting up geraniums, planting up two big lead planters with dahlias and fuchsia (a bit of a punt this one, it might look awful). It is amazing how a clean house and a weedfree onion bed makes you feel better. I say clean in the loosest of ways, this house is never clean between the cats and the dust and the man eating spiders, but the cushions are shaken and the magazines are in piles. The swallows have stopped swooping and wheeling over the pigsties and soon the light will go and the bats will be out. I am glad to be here.
Ommmm.
Friday to Monday
Last weekend younger daughter and her friends took over our house and cottage for a hen weekend. Ian and I absented ourselves by going to see some friends who now live in France. It was a good couple of days, full of too much food and too much drink (but in a good way). Our friend is now early retired having had an extremely demanding and successful career and has taken to serious cooking with focus and determination. When I got home and got on the scales on Tuesday morning I had put on five pounds. They are having a house built. After a few years of renting a beautiful old house in Provence they have decided to take the plunge and to commit themselves to France. So the weekend was full of plans and site visits. They are buying a sloping plot of about two acres full of pines and the sound of cicadas with views away to the mountains. The design is modern and clean but using local materials. It will be stunning.
Tuesday to Thursday
Back home with a bump to reality and a busy week. I was away over Tuesday night, knowing the house was full of washing waiting to be done from the weekend and longing to be sorting out and working in the garden. The hen weekend had been a fabulous success, a just reward for younger daughter's hours and days of planning and hard work. It culminated in a grand dinner on the Saturday night when our old kitchen was decked with pink balloons and fairy lights, white candles and pink flowers. The girls changed into their finery and there were elaborate printed menus. The bride to be sat down beaming. When she picked up her menu and realised that the dinner was to be three courses of spectacular puddings, a childhood dream, she burst into tears!
On Tuesday night while I was away there was a huge storm and an arc of lightning leapt from the phone socket and took out the computer. It made me realise just how used I am to checking the weather, my bank statement, looking something up on Google, reading my emails and reading other people's blogs. I kept getting up from my chair to go the computer and realising there was no point.
We are having one of those periods when all mechanical things are failing. The car has been off the road with two separate problems for about four weeks. Broken cars and computers, a major water leak, Ian very busy at work and me veering madly between working too much (no, no, want to be in the garden and to have time for other things) to working too little (no, no, emails piling up, lists of people to contact, meetings to schedule, paperwork sliding out of control). Our precarious sense of being in control of our complicated lives seems to have slipped away. A frantic scrabbling sense of running to keep up with ourselves and yet still not on top: missed appointments, ironing piles reaching to the ceiling, weeds pushing up in the vegetable beds, slugs and snails turning my borlotti beans to lace. Ian has purposely been making me laugh all week by responding to the rising sense of chaos by humming "Ommm" and schooling his face to calmness.
We know that getting back on top of the practical things will make us feel better (as Grouse so wisely says) so yesterday I cleaned and washed and gardened as if my life depended on it. I even mowed grass, not one of my favourite things. In the evening, feeling a bit more like myself, I met Jo and her family at one of the open gardens near here, an utterly beautiful 17th Century house with a two acre garden. There was much water, a formal rill running calmly through the centre of a flagstoned terrace, a deep well-like formal pond where toads sat on bricks set into the edge or flopped lazily into the water, a larger wilder pond with water lilies and moorhens. The house is for sale, the owners downsizing, but out of our league I am sure.
And today we have done the same push to reinstate order but together this time: washing, ironing , weeding, mowing, planting out yet more tomatoes, potting up geraniums, planting up two big lead planters with dahlias and fuchsia (a bit of a punt this one, it might look awful). It is amazing how a clean house and a weedfree onion bed makes you feel better. I say clean in the loosest of ways, this house is never clean between the cats and the dust and the man eating spiders, but the cushions are shaken and the magazines are in piles. The swallows have stopped swooping and wheeling over the pigsties and soon the light will go and the bats will be out. I am glad to be here.
Ommmm.
Thursday, 14 June 2007
Upcoming weekend
This morning I should have been going to the hairdressers but it is pouring down here and if I had the car Ian would have to go to work on his motorbike. So here I am, hair needing attention. I am now supposed to go into overdrive cleaning and shining the house as younger daughter is hosting a hen weekend here for her best friend. Since it includes a new mother and her ten week old baby I think it is unlikely to be riotous. All the girls who we have met, more than half of them, are lovely and pretty sensible so I don't think they will be in gorillagram territory.
I am so hoping the sun will shine. At the moment we are in a very wet cloud and this place responds powerfully to sunshine. Just now I would imagine that nine city girls will think it is a god forsaken windswept nightmare. When the sun shines it looks like paradise on earth.
So M has gone off shopping with a mega list to begin a marathon cook in. She is so organised you would not believe: lists for this and lists for that and timetables and schedules. When I had my 50th birthday she catered for two meals for 50 people so this should be a breeze. She is so talented and I am so proud of her.
I am going to remove all the piles of things awaiting attention - photo frames waiting for photos, material waiting to be turned into cushion covers, papers waiting to be filed, recipes waiting to be cooked, gardening books that I am in the middle of consulting (just the eight of those), washing waiting to go in the machine, ironing waiting to be done. What is it with all this stuff, all the lovely detritus of living, hanging around waiting for people to bring it to life?
So must go and get sorting and polishing! Have a good day.
I am so hoping the sun will shine. At the moment we are in a very wet cloud and this place responds powerfully to sunshine. Just now I would imagine that nine city girls will think it is a god forsaken windswept nightmare. When the sun shines it looks like paradise on earth.
So M has gone off shopping with a mega list to begin a marathon cook in. She is so organised you would not believe: lists for this and lists for that and timetables and schedules. When I had my 50th birthday she catered for two meals for 50 people so this should be a breeze. She is so talented and I am so proud of her.
I am going to remove all the piles of things awaiting attention - photo frames waiting for photos, material waiting to be turned into cushion covers, papers waiting to be filed, recipes waiting to be cooked, gardening books that I am in the middle of consulting (just the eight of those), washing waiting to go in the machine, ironing waiting to be done. What is it with all this stuff, all the lovely detritus of living, hanging around waiting for people to bring it to life?
So must go and get sorting and polishing! Have a good day.
Monday, 11 June 2007
8 things
Here we go with the eight things (I've decided to drop the interesting):
1. Although he is two years younger than me, my brother and I share the same birthday. Sadly it is the 11th September, now forever taken over by 9/11.
2. I have such long toes I can pick up pencils.
3. I spent my teenage years convinced I had a hideous long nose, only to realize when I was about 28 that it was pretty normal really.
4. I am a qualified Inspector of Taxes (no, don't run, I don't do it any more).
5. My husband is my mother's cousin (must be a name for it but I am bad at things like that).
6. I love people, food (growing it and cooking it and eating it), plants, gardens, books, sunshine, wine and Welsh classes.
7. I hate arrogance, selfishness, bad manners, parents being aggressive and rude to their children, huge shopping centres, crowded airports, in fact crowds anywhere.
8. I have been colouring my hair for so long I can no longer remember what colour it would be if I left it alone.
Couldn't resist showing you these photos of the garden.
Tuesday, 5 June 2007
women and weight
Why are women so odd about their relationship with their bodies? Actually perhaps I shouldn’t generalise, I don’t know about you, you may be perfectly relaxed, but I wish I were more like my husband. When he thinks he has put on a bit of weight he cuts down for a month or so and loses it. A couple of years on he might say again “Think I am getting a bit too heavy” and back he goes, cuts back a bit on the cream and the beer and the second helpings and gets back into his 34” waist trousers. None of it is very extreme or intense. Mostly he just eats what he likes, is very active and doesn’t think about it too much.
I, on the other hand, think about it a lot. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t look in the mirror and think I could do to lose half a stone. The odd thing is that I think I have been doing this all my adult life although I am now about a stone heavier than I used to be. So that is thirty years of there being an elusive perfect weight at the end of the rainbow, never reached and clearly not a real weight, more a sense of never quite being satisfied. Sad eh?
When I was ill I lost over two stone and was the weight I must last have been at about thirteen. My collar bones stuck out and you could see my ribcage. My trousers hung sadly around my non-existent bum and my jawline was sharp for the first time for years. I hated it. There were many reasons at that time for not feeling like me but my thinness was certainly part of a sense of frailty. I felt I would break if you dropped me.
As I got better I moved through “ideal weight” territory, somewhere around nine stone, and kept going slowly upward, deliberately indulging in doorsteps of Ian’s homemade bread with great wodges of butter, my particular weakness. I ate chocolate and cheerily made cakes and had several slices. I have a friend who, like me, had a cancer scare and who says she felt that she had wasted so many years of her adult life dieting, going to the gym, determinedly keeping herself at the eight stone weight she had been when she was twenty. When the cancer struck she felt her body had failed her and as she recovered she decided she would just give up weight control and eat whatever she liked. Now she is about two stone heavier than she was before her illness and, with her calm and beautiful face, still an attractive and striking woman. The only loss she says is that she has stopped being interested in clothes, as in fashion, because clothes shopping depresses her now she is heavier. So she wears a sort of uniform of soft linen shirts and trousers and is happy in her skin.
I am now about a stone heavier than I used to be and have been thinking in recent months about whether I want to do anything about it. I understand my friend’s point of view and see what she means. Do I want to do it her way and let it go, accept that I am older now and lucky to be here and stop weighing myself and looking in the mirror? Or do I want to return to the way I used to do it, always slightly restricting myself, never really satisfied with my body but liking being a size twelve and regarding maintaining that as a priority? Or is there any chance at all that I could do it Ian’s way, a man’s way? More low level but constant activity, a pair of trousers as a guide, just eat a bit less. Not a big deal.
Answers/experiences/advice on a virtual postcard please. What do you do?
I, on the other hand, think about it a lot. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t look in the mirror and think I could do to lose half a stone. The odd thing is that I think I have been doing this all my adult life although I am now about a stone heavier than I used to be. So that is thirty years of there being an elusive perfect weight at the end of the rainbow, never reached and clearly not a real weight, more a sense of never quite being satisfied. Sad eh?
When I was ill I lost over two stone and was the weight I must last have been at about thirteen. My collar bones stuck out and you could see my ribcage. My trousers hung sadly around my non-existent bum and my jawline was sharp for the first time for years. I hated it. There were many reasons at that time for not feeling like me but my thinness was certainly part of a sense of frailty. I felt I would break if you dropped me.
As I got better I moved through “ideal weight” territory, somewhere around nine stone, and kept going slowly upward, deliberately indulging in doorsteps of Ian’s homemade bread with great wodges of butter, my particular weakness. I ate chocolate and cheerily made cakes and had several slices. I have a friend who, like me, had a cancer scare and who says she felt that she had wasted so many years of her adult life dieting, going to the gym, determinedly keeping herself at the eight stone weight she had been when she was twenty. When the cancer struck she felt her body had failed her and as she recovered she decided she would just give up weight control and eat whatever she liked. Now she is about two stone heavier than she was before her illness and, with her calm and beautiful face, still an attractive and striking woman. The only loss she says is that she has stopped being interested in clothes, as in fashion, because clothes shopping depresses her now she is heavier. So she wears a sort of uniform of soft linen shirts and trousers and is happy in her skin.
I am now about a stone heavier than I used to be and have been thinking in recent months about whether I want to do anything about it. I understand my friend’s point of view and see what she means. Do I want to do it her way and let it go, accept that I am older now and lucky to be here and stop weighing myself and looking in the mirror? Or do I want to return to the way I used to do it, always slightly restricting myself, never really satisfied with my body but liking being a size twelve and regarding maintaining that as a priority? Or is there any chance at all that I could do it Ian’s way, a man’s way? More low level but constant activity, a pair of trousers as a guide, just eat a bit less. Not a big deal.
Answers/experiences/advice on a virtual postcard please. What do you do?
Saturday, 2 June 2007
Gardens:compare and contrast
I've known about the National Gardens Scheme for ages and have meant to go without ever making it happen. They open private gardens to the public for only one or two days and let you satisfy that glorious nosiness about other's lives you feel when you catch a glimpse of a garden through a gate or see into a lighted room when the curtains are open at dusk.
This weekend my elder daughter is staying. We had a lovely day yesterday odding about together, going to Bodnant (again! she wanted to see the laburnum walk) and chatting both idly and seriously about life. I stay with her when I go to London so it is not that I don't see quite a lot of her but she is always busy and there are always other people around so a private day is a rare treat. She told me how, as a child, she had always waited impatiently while I insisted on looking in estate agents' windows and tolerated being dragged round garden centres with much sighing and lack of comprehension as to why anyone would think either of these an interesting thing to do. Now she is thinking about buying her first house and finding herself becoming interested in plants and turning into her mother. "Not a bad thing, my dear" I say with a flourish. She laughs at me.
In the early evening we went to a large house about five miles away under the open gardens scheme. A huge Victorian house in a sweep of gravelled drive it stood in two acres of gardens at the foot of the Clydian hills. Something more different to our garden would be hard to find. We are much higher on the side of the hills, most of the land sloping and the scale of everything small and domestic, much left uncultivated and nettles and goosegrass always encroaching. We have large scale vegatables and fruit and old apple trees and bent yews.
This garden was divided into four large rooms by immaculate hedging. In one a beautiful lawn swept in front of the house and deep flower borders overflowed with roses and shrubs and mixed herbaceous planting, everything perfect to the last twig. Another area was a tennis court and nearby a perfect circular herb garden; another an area of woodland with foxgloves and aquilegias at the edges. My favourite room held some fruit and a gravelled area with box balls and lavender. Small apple trees were lined up across the centre of the garden and on the far side there were borders so full of paeonies it looked as if the garden was set for a summer wedding. Every time you looked out of the garden the hills were rising up, golden and green in the evening light.
We had a glass of wine and I bought some plants. It was lovely in a particularly middle class way which I don't really associate with this part of Wales. Ringing English tones and lovely manners and well behaved Golden Retrievers and everyone (including us obviously) being utterly charming.
It was a beautiful place and a lovely way to spend an hour on a summer's evening but also great to get back to the little house and the cultivation encroached upon by wildness and the warm wind. We made rainbow trout stuffed with thyme and sage from the garden and baked with sliced lemon, with new potatoes and salad and white wine. As it grew cooler we lit a fire and sat and talked until it was suddenly midnight and time for bed.
This weekend my elder daughter is staying. We had a lovely day yesterday odding about together, going to Bodnant (again! she wanted to see the laburnum walk) and chatting both idly and seriously about life. I stay with her when I go to London so it is not that I don't see quite a lot of her but she is always busy and there are always other people around so a private day is a rare treat. She told me how, as a child, she had always waited impatiently while I insisted on looking in estate agents' windows and tolerated being dragged round garden centres with much sighing and lack of comprehension as to why anyone would think either of these an interesting thing to do. Now she is thinking about buying her first house and finding herself becoming interested in plants and turning into her mother. "Not a bad thing, my dear" I say with a flourish. She laughs at me.
In the early evening we went to a large house about five miles away under the open gardens scheme. A huge Victorian house in a sweep of gravelled drive it stood in two acres of gardens at the foot of the Clydian hills. Something more different to our garden would be hard to find. We are much higher on the side of the hills, most of the land sloping and the scale of everything small and domestic, much left uncultivated and nettles and goosegrass always encroaching. We have large scale vegatables and fruit and old apple trees and bent yews.
This garden was divided into four large rooms by immaculate hedging. In one a beautiful lawn swept in front of the house and deep flower borders overflowed with roses and shrubs and mixed herbaceous planting, everything perfect to the last twig. Another area was a tennis court and nearby a perfect circular herb garden; another an area of woodland with foxgloves and aquilegias at the edges. My favourite room held some fruit and a gravelled area with box balls and lavender. Small apple trees were lined up across the centre of the garden and on the far side there were borders so full of paeonies it looked as if the garden was set for a summer wedding. Every time you looked out of the garden the hills were rising up, golden and green in the evening light.
We had a glass of wine and I bought some plants. It was lovely in a particularly middle class way which I don't really associate with this part of Wales. Ringing English tones and lovely manners and well behaved Golden Retrievers and everyone (including us obviously) being utterly charming.
It was a beautiful place and a lovely way to spend an hour on a summer's evening but also great to get back to the little house and the cultivation encroached upon by wildness and the warm wind. We made rainbow trout stuffed with thyme and sage from the garden and baked with sliced lemon, with new potatoes and salad and white wine. As it grew cooler we lit a fire and sat and talked until it was suddenly midnight and time for bed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)