What a week (plus diet update)

Living deep in my rural valley and continuing to work in London a couple of days a week means life is always schizophrenic and I can never decide whether that is ok or not. This week has been a ludicrously exaggerated version.

Saturday was a home day, the sun shone and we picked apples. The big tree in the field had a smaller crop this year, possibly due to over enthusiastic winter pruning (Ian and a pruning saw are a dangerous combination), but still filled a big wheelbarrow with Howgate Wonder, a fabulous apple which starts life as a cooker, keeps well and matures into something sweet enough to eat without sugar by March. The old apple trees in the kitchen garden have cropped heavily, much of it pitted or small but loads and loads. One of the projects for this winter is to prune in there and and to see whether, organically, we can bring the old trees round again. Even if we can't they are beautiful in spring and earn their place by beauty alone.

Then there is chutney making with the kitchen full of the smell of vinegar and spices and jars and jars out for washing and removing the old labels as I am much too mean to buy jars specially. By Saturday night there are nine jars lined up with their glossy dark contents ready to mature for a month or two. Hugely satisfying but barely touching the surface of the apples, the beans, the tomatoes which are still ripening but surely won't all go red. I just want to stay home and peel and chop and stir and I get all wound up and stompy about the fact that I have to go away.

Monday is looking after Sam day, my grandson now 18 months. He is absolutely beautiful but looking after him is a frantic juggle of things to keep him happy, with my blackberry (wonderful and cursed gadget) buzzing at me all day with things to do with my work meeting in Lisbon. I feel somewhat ashamed that I disguise the fact at work that this is what I do with my Mondays. I work in a harsh, male, young environment where my age and sex already distinguish me. I have carved out my authority in this world over the last 20 years or so and I need it to function. In my own time I will let it go but until then it is on with the suits and heels and goodbye to granny. Am I paranoid? I don't think so.

Tuesday Ian drives me to the airport which takes an hour and a half from where we live and I fly to Lisbon for the meeting. I am always wound up - have I got all my papers, have I got clean knickers, have I put anything in my hand luggage which will get me stopped at security, am I properly prepared, do I know my hotel, have I got any Euros. On Wednesday my older daughter and her husband are coming to Wales with a van to collect some furniture. They are having a nightmare time with a house purchase which isn't going smoothly so they are moving out of their rented flat, putting things into store and camping with friends and family, still waiting to exchange. So I am also wound up that I will not see them, wanting to be in two places at once. I have brought my Welsh with me for the class on Thursday so I sit in the airport lounge trying to master Nasal Mutations (don't ask). It sounds daft, but the bringing together of my home and work life soothes me and I cover pages with notes and the melody of Welsh.

Lisbon looks like a great city if only I could get out there. I have a walk for a couple of hours on Tuesday evening and a meal with a colleague. She is juggling work with two under fives and seems relieved to be able to talk to someone about it who doesn't regard it as a weakness. She is Italian with ten years of living in England and flawless, idiomatic English but still with a very strong Italian accent which I love to listen to.

The meeting on Wednesday goes well, twelve of us round the table, five nationalities, the whole thing conducted in English. How lazy it makes us, the predominance of our language, I think as Germans, Italians, Dutch and Belgians engage in rapid and complex discussion in a language not their own. It makes my halting attempts to say in Welsh that I have four children, two cats and chickens seem laughably pathetic, but no, I won't give up.

Back to London on Wednesday night and home on Thursday, longing for my bed and my place and for time with Ian. Thursday night is Welsh class night and miraculously it seems that reading my books on planes and trains has helped. We are played a tape and the first time it washes inpentrenably over my head, but the second time the meaning emerges shyly from the mist, patterns form, I make some sense of it. I am more elated by this than by anything else in my week so far. Afterwards we go for a drink with the class and Ian comes down and life slows a little. My own bed is a heaven.

And today is sort out day for visitors this weekend. But first it is weigh in time. I have really tried to keep to my diet while I have been away although I did eat the chocolate on my pillow and I have had a drink every night. I have lost a pound. I try hard not to be disappointed - I did lose five last week so over two weeks it is pretty good - but I droop for a minute and have to give myself a talking to. I can tell I am thinner, my trousers are a bit looser. For a minute I long for a piece of buttered toast but the phone rings and saves me. When I put it down the moment of temptation has passed.

And now for shopping and bed changing and cooking and washing. It is a strange thing, balancing one's life. There is so much in mine that I love and I think I am better balanced than I used to be but still overwhelmed sometimes, as this week, by too much busyness. Shall I stop work? No money, no status but time? And I if do what will I do with the time and will I feel ok? Which is worse, too much to do or too little? Has anyone worked out how to get it right?

OK, this is it - weight loss time

I blogged a couple of months ago about women and weight and was knocked out by the number and the passion of the responses. Really struck a chord there! Well a week ago I started to diet and this morning I have lost five pounds so time to stop being secretive about it and have a look at what is going on.

I have never been a natural skinny but, varying up and down by half a stone or so (oh no, summer, time to lose the winter podge) I spent my twenties and thirties at around 9 stone, about right for me at 5 foot 4. Sometimes I resented people like my brother who can eat industrial quantities without putting on weight but mostly I just accepted that watching what I ate was part of the feminine condition and in the fight between greed and vanity, vanity usually just about won.

It got harder to maintain the equilibrium in my forties, needed more exercise and more deprivation so I settled for around 9 stone 4, accepted the flabby tummy as a badge of honour and got on with it.

Then my body got hit by my illness two years ago (see Journey in and out of darkness blog) and when I started the long slow process of recovery I was thin and bony, at a weight I hadn't been since I was about twelve. My collarbones jutted, my ribs protruded, my breasts disappeared and so did my bum. My operation scar ran huge and red from pelvis to sternum. I looked battered and breakable and I hated it. So eating my way back up to a normal person's weight was practically a duty! And I relished seeing my curves return and finding my clothes fitting again and eating toast and cake and puddings without guilt.

A couple of months ago I knew I had overdone it: I was 10 stone 5, starting to feel self conscious, to find some clothes too tight, to avoid the mirror, to dislike the sight of myself naked, inwardly blaming the scar which in reality is not too bad now, another badge of honour. While we were on holiday Ian took a photo in which I look old and fat, not at all how I see myself in head, so I came back thinking I would do something about it and just didn't, messed about, telling myself I was cutting down but not really doing it, being "good" all day and then having a couple of quick doorsteps of bread and butter before tea and not counting them because I had been hungry, had eaten them standing up, they weren't a meal, deceiving myself, knowing I was doing it but seemingly unable to stop.

It is strange what gives you a kick in the pants: in a week or so some friends are visiting. She is and always has been a great beauty, astonishing in her twenties and thirties with one of those faces you just want to keep looking at because its beauty is so satisfying to the eye. Now in her fifties she is still beautiful and a lovely person too, so you can't mind the perfection of the line of her brows and her steady eyes. I've never been beautiful but I scrub up ok. I am used to the fact that I am attractive, but suddenly the extra weight seemed to be hurtling me towards old age and invisibility. That will come soon enough whether I like it or not but it suddenly seemed utterly stupid that, while ageing is inevitable, I was choosing to be overweight when that at least was not.

I went out and bought the India Knight book "Neris and India's Idiot Proof diet" and decided I would take control. I read it from cover to cover and last Sunday I thought "OK, this is it." One week in, five pounds down. Not a lot of pain and considerable gain. It is a low carbohydrate diet which I know from the past works for me, but pretty healthy food and I feel good on it. I know my great weakness is bread, Ian's homemade bread in particular, but I am managing without it and oddly feeling less hungry than usual. Maybe it wouldn't suit everyone but it is suiting me. The book is great, full of the sense that the writers really know how it feels as they have, between them, lost ten stone. I would really recommend it.

So I thought I would go public. I am aiming to lose another ten pounds, maybe a bit less if I start looking too thin in the face, the face being what you see most of the time. I want to like the upper part of my legs as much as I like the lower. I want to regain my waist as I am one of these apple shaped people who puts weight on around the middle rather than on the hips. I want to put my illness even further behind me, not an excuse or an explanation for anything. I want to live my fifties as healthily and attractively as I can. I want to feel that I am choosing health and strength and energy.

Further updates next week. Lunch is a salad nicoise (you do have to plan a bit).

Things I wish I'd known about gardening.

My lovely daughter is about to acquire her first house and her first garden. After years of wandering around gardens with her and having her say "But how do you know all this stuff?" she is about to start getting to know it herself. Well here to start her off are a few things I wish I had known about gardening when I started.

1. Things die.

You will waste a lot of money on plants which turn up their toes. It is best to be philosophical about this and regard it as the opportunity to buy another plant. I used to beat myself up about all the things I put into my garden which simply disappeared. Now I realise that you can do things to minimise plant loss but sometimes it is just a mystery: you thought something would be happy in your garden and it isn't. Never mind. Move on. There are so many plants out there. Have a go with something else.

But the business about things being happy in your garden is important and it took me years to garden to my soil and not to be led by glorious visions in other people's gardens and by fabulous photographs of roses to die for. I am a huge believer in composting and in feeding soil but the best possible advice (which I can't always bring myself to follow) is to find out what kind of soil you have and grow the plants that like it. I have stony, fast draining soil. Lavender loves it as do all herbs. Penstemons and poppies grow like weeds and I am planning foxtail lillies (eremurus) and red hot pokers (kniphofia), evening primrose and euphorbia. Years ago I would have refused to believe I couldn't have delphiniums and clematis which I love. I would have carried on buying them in a moment of weakness and having them die on me. Time to focus on what wants to live here.

2. What doesn't die will grow.

I hate bare soil and for years planted things far too close together looking for an established look. Somehow this both never really worked when the plants were small and quickly meant that what didn't die was fighting for space, needing splitting and cutting back, things needing moving all the time because they had no space to breathe. It is worth establishing how big a longlived plant will get and giving it room when you plant it. Put beautiful easy annuals in the gaps: nicotiana, Shirley poppies, marigolds and nasturtiums. Everything will look more settled in the second year if you don't have to get in there moving things around because they are cramped together in a huddle.

3. Some plants are easy.

A sucker for instant gratification, I used to buy large perennials already in flower (and still do, it's a great way of being sure of what you are getting). But the most pleasure I have found in gardening comes from bulbs, the reverse of instant gratification, going into the ground with some work in the autumn and then nearly forgotten as winter takes over. But snowdrops and bluebells and daffodils and tulips will astonish you with their beauty and once in they just keep coming up, always delightful like the friends you don't see from one year to the next but see across a room at a party with a shout of pleasure.

Perennials are also easy, middling or hard and it is worth buying beautiful, easy things like lady's mantle and hardy geraniums that you can plant and rely on to come up again and again, getting bigger and producing new plants for free. Things your friends give you when you are starting out will be easy because that is why they have some to spare. Eventually you may get to a stage where you feel you have too much and start giving it away yourself but there is such satisfaction in watching things flourish that deliberately starting and continuing with easy plants is a great way to get your garden fix.

4 Some vegetables are easy too.

I thought for years that vegetable gardening was an arcane pursuit, best undertaken by my grandad in his flat cap with his pipe smouldering in his pocket. Now I have learned that some veg are hard work but some things are easy: potatoes, courgettes, runner beans, herbs and tomatoes if you have a greenhouse or a porch. and the satisfaction and pleasure in picking something you have grown yourself, bringing it into the kitchen and having it on your plate the same day is extraordinary. And it tastes better. And you know where it's been. And it is as green as green can be.

5 Fruit is easy

Raspberries and strawberries, gooseberries and apples: not difficult, not time consuming, just delicious. Making a apple crumble with your own apples and perhaps some blackberries (not pinched from Tattie) makes you feel a true domestic goddess.

and finally and most passionately, a garden which feeds the soul is not an "outdoor room". This is not about space. A tiny garden can be a marvellous place but a garden of decking and concrete and a couple of elegant granite pots gives no scope for the pleasure of watching things grow, of picking flowers for the house, of cutting your own herbs for cooking. A space which is somewhere to sit and to barbecue is no doubt useful and pleasant and adds square footage to your living space but a garden for me is about plants and soil and seasons, moves slowly, takes time, produces a mess. Grass is good and trees, a reminder that we are part of a living, growing world.

scents and sounds

My homework:
the smell of Ian's homemade bread warming the kitchen and making my mouth water.

the smell of a compost heap when it is ready for use, earthy and strong but pleasant, the smell of life.

the smell of a baby's head, milky and sweet.

the smell of sweetpeas, faint and evocative, catching the heart unawares.

the smell of a wood fire when the woodburner is being lit and I am outdoors, promising warmth and comfort inside.

the sound of running streams on the hillside.

the sound of Ian's key in the door (back when we lived somewhere where the door was locked!).

the sound of silence, followed by the distant sounds of the valley emerging, sheep far away on the other side, a tractor moving, birds coming and going, bustle not silence at all.

the sound of my chickens clucking and busying themselves contentendly in the garden.

the sound of a cork coming out of a bottle of wine.


I could go on and on!

Marriage

Ian has been away walking in Scotland for a few days and is coming back this afternoon. It's always the same when he goes (and I go away quite a bit as well but the dynamic is different when you are the departing): first I don't want him to go and feel quite unreasonably sad as he departs, then I shake myself off and get down to enjoying the business of having the house to myself, doing just what I feel like, loading the dishwasher without the inevitable complaint, catching up on sewing or reading, loving having the bed to myself and most of all loving the glorious silence that comes from the absence of Radio 4 or even worse Radio 5 following him around the house.

As the time comes for him to get back I get all excited, can't quite settle to anything for looking out of the window and listening for the car or the motorbike. I change the bed and tidy the bedroom, knowing he loves the feel of clean sheets after a few nights camping. I choose something to cook that I know he likes and fill the kitchen with the smell of baking. I change out of the disgusting jeans I have been gardening in and put on a clean T shirt and some mascara (yes, it's push the boat out time). After all these years my heart still lifts when he comes in the door.

So I have been thinking, as someone who failed at marriage the first time round, about what makes a marriage work or fail. Ours is not a calm or easy relationship and in the first year we were married we argued so much I dreaded coming home. We can still flay each other in a desperate, agonising way but that is rare now. We have got better and better at not arguing, at coping with the fact that we are both strongminded, used to our own way, utterly convinced we are right. And that is one of the answers to a happy marriage I think: not insisting on being right, accepting that it might be better to be happy and together than right and alone, looking for the answer that works for both of you because you care about the other person's happiness, even as you wonder why they can't just see it your way!

And then there are the things that "glue" you together: sex is one, the way to connect without words, easy to let slide when children and work begin to overwhelm you but devastating in its absence; houses are another, an attachment you both share to a place, a garden, somewhere you can work together to create a home, doing something together rather than talking when talking isn't working; and family, your wider family in which you play a part.

Children are both the most powerful glue there is and the thing that can blow a marriage apart. It is impossible to describe to a friend who hasn't yet had a child the impact a baby will have on a marriage, overturning everything, throwing your life up in the air so that nothing is the same when everything comes down again: the incessant demands, the lack of sleep, the earthquake of becoming parents rather than lovers. But if you can survive that (and I didn't first time round) sharing the raising of children is like nothing else. I still feel a profound attachment to my first husband as a result of the years in which we did that.

And what unglues? Infidelity, unkindness, boredom, a sense that somewhere there will be something better, too much or too little putting yourself first, too little shared life and shared aspirations.

Writing about it makes it seem unfathomable. To be married can be both the best and the worst thing, a good marriage the foundation of your life, your rock, your place of safety; an unhappy one a brutal cause of pain or a slow demolition of the soul. We ask so much of it and need to give it so much if it is to deliver.

Perhaps the only truth is that what makes a marriage work is wanting to be married, an utter commitment to being there. Is that easier as you get older? I suspect it is.

I'm going to go now, to change the bed and to make him a cake.