Christmas carols with the male voice choir

I dithered for a few minutes about joining the choir on Monday night. It was raining and cold. I can't really sing. What if no-one I knew turned up? What if I was asked to sing something by myself and they could tell how rubbish I am? But in the end I went. I had said I would and in a little place like this you don't want a reputation for unreliability.

I arrived a bit early. I almost always do. As I opened the door I could tell the church had its heating on so maybe I didn't need my many layers. There were two older men there already, pleasant but slightly wary. I wondered how the older members of the male voice choir felt about allowing women to sing with them at Christmas. Perhaps they thought it was wrong, spoilt the traditional sound.

There has been a church here since the 13th Century. Much of this one, embellished and added to, dates from then. It is a lovely building of pale stone and polished wood and smells of warmth and flowers and use. Not for the first time I wished I had more religious faith than I do. I used to have it, lost it, can't get it back, but I am grateful for my upbringing which has left me with a love of hymns and churches and a head full of resonances from the King James Bible.

The area to one side of the nave which was filled with chairs for the choir practice began to fill up. Someone came in from WI, then the friend who had encouraged me to come. My Welsh tutor was there and someone from my Welsh class, lovely men both. One is a retired fireman and for ages I thought his surname was Tarn, only to discover that tan (pronounced tarn) is the Welsh word for fire. Another man from my Welsh class, a retired carpenter comes over to say hello. I feel comfortable, welcome and even excited. This will be fine.

The conductor of the choir is a woman. She welcomes the ladies for the Christmas choir . The men are already sitting in their places as tenors, baritones and basses. I have an indeterminate voice which fails on both high and low notes but I say I am a soprano so that I can sing the tune. There are perhaps thirty men and ten women.

"Let's just have a go at the first verse of We Three Kings to get ourselves warmed up a bit," she says. She is small and greyhaired with a gentle and encouraging manner combined with a quiet authority. As the carol rises to the rafters it sounds good. To my left I hear the warm low tones of the vicar's wife, singing a clear, true alto. To my right I hear my friend's soprano, strong and pure. This will be ok. As long as I am lost in the middle of this sound, surrounded by real singers, I can make a noise which won't spoil it.

We sing We Three Kings and The Holly and the Ivy, painstakingly taking apart the harmonies. I have never sung in a proper choir before. The closest I have ever got was at school, a girls' school so only alto and soprano voices. This is lovely, the complexity and the depth of the men's voices and the simplicity of the sopranos. I am amazed at how much I am enjoying it.

We finish with a Welsh carol, Hwiangerdd Mair, Mary's Lullaby. Both the words and the tune are utterly new to me. Some phrases emerge that my fledgling Welsh understands: Mary has a bed of straw, the child is being sung to sleep. Much of it I just sing without understanding, relying on the famous phonetic pronunciation of Welsh. Once you know a letter combination in Welsh it will always make the same sound. The sound is simple and pure. If I were listening to it rather than singing it would catch at the heart. This is just a snatch if you would like to hear it. http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/1422116

After an hour the ladies leave and the men remain. I hear their voices rich and true as I walk through the dark churchyard to my car on the other side of the lych gate. At home I try and fail to make a proper translation of the carol but I can now tell you that "bugeiliaid" are shepherds and "doethion" are wise men.

On Tuesday I go to London, back into the familiar world of work and striving. Is it Wordsworth: "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers"? Work is good this week but the gentle phrase of the Welsh carol plays quietly in my head, "cwsg, cwsg, cwsg" - sleep, sleep, sleep.

Autumn gets ready for Winter

The sun was bright this morning but the wind was cold. The last of the beech leaves whirled about the house, like giant golden snowflakes. Elder son had stayed the night and was up early to go back to Manchester. Ian made him poached eggs on toast for breakfast with our bantam eggs and home made bread. The eggs poach really well, the white keeping together instead of flying off like a jellyfish. By the time I came down in my sheepskin slippers and big dressing gown he was ready to go.

Afterwards we pottered about, enjoying being home together after a week where Ian had come home only to go to bed. A trip to the village for the paper made me realise how we much we are beginning to be settled into life here. We chat, in the post office, at the deli buying homemade black pudding, in the newsagent. I rarely go to the village now without seeing someone I know. In the newsagent I meet a friend in her seventies (would I have crossed the generations in the same way in the city? I don't think so) who encourages me to join a choir. We have a male voice choir in the village, a serious one which enters competitions and has just been on a visit to Ireland. Every Christmas they invite women to join and make a mixed choir. I'm not a singer, can just about hold a tune if everyone else around me is doing so, but don't regard myself as having a singing voice at all. "Can you read, open and close your mouth and stand still?" she asked me. "Yep, I can do all of that." "Then you'll be fine." So that is Monday evening spoken for until Christmas. I've never done anything like that before. I am not a church goer. I am not a joiner of things or a member of clubs. I didn't even do Brownies or Guides. But it is part of what I promised myself when I sat for hours in my garden as I got better last year: more saying no to the familiar strident demands of work; more saying yes to family, friends and a wider community, more doing things I haven't done before.

For lunch we have bacon, egg and black pudding. This is perfectly in accord with the diet. Then the weather says that the afternoon is for outside. Although the sun has gone and the wind is cold it is dry and there are more bulbs to plant. Ian fixes chicken wire to the gate to the field. Theoretically when the chickens are out they stay in the side garden but actually they like to roam and can sometimes be found standing inquisitively on the kitchen step or striking out down the field towards the big apple tree. By the end of the afternoon I have another nine pots of tulips and only fifteen Orange Emperor still waiting to go in. They are the perfect excuse for buying another big terracotta pot.

Now there is chicken (not one of ours, they've got names) roasting in the oven with a pot of red cabbage. I had been intending to save the red cabbage for Christmas. It was huge and glossy and had survived when most of the cabbages I sowed had fallen prey to slugs and snails. This afternoon I found that something, probably still slugs but with massive jaws, had decided to have another go so Ian lifted it and brought it inside. The outside leaves caused gentle excitment to the chickens in their run. Now it is cooking slowly with red wine vinegar and brown sugar. The woodburner is lit and Ian is snoozing. It is too easy to look back and realise that you were happy once and did not know it. I'm happy today, right now, sitting here.

The great Christmas conspiracy

Do you think women's magazines conspire to create panic and stress? I was hanging around at Euston this week, waiting for my train, and flipped through some magazines for something to read. Issue afer issue had editorial on the lines of "Well, of course Christmas is great and it is my favourite time of year and I love it dearly but we all know how stressful if can be so we have got it all taped for you with the busy/stressed/frantic woman's guide to the perfect Christmas". Then follows page after glossy page of perfect houses, covered in fabulous hand made ribbon and ivy swags. Amanda is at the kitchen table with her delightful blonde children making decorations for the tree. There are stunning table centres and £30 appliqued stockings to hang from the carved wooden mantelpiece. There are pages of women looking sexy and glamorous in heels and fabulous party dresses, tossing their perfectly groomed hair, accompanied by angelic toddlers in velvet dresses.

Now I am a bit of a sucker for magazines but even I think this is a load of old cobblers. It seems to me that Christmas is only stressful if you set yourself these impossibly high standards of elegance, preparedness and sophistication with touches of home made craftiness as the ultimate in oneupmanship. "See, not only have I spent hundreds on my Christmas coasters and table decorations, and my collections of scented candles from Jo Malone but I am also the perfect mother and have spent hours of quality time with my children making perfect memories for them in the kitchen which is the heart of my lovely home."

Christmas is just a big roast dinner with some of the people you love. It's a reason to take a break from the rigours of winter and sit by the fire with a glass of red wine. It's a reason to buy and be bought nice things. If you are a believer, it has a religious meaning; if you are not, it is still a festival with thousands of years of history behind it, the middle of winter when the year turns.

Lower your expectations would be my advice to the supposed hordes of stressed women out there - do they exist? I don't seem to know them - maybe they wouldn't be stressed if the magazines would stop selling this impossible dream. If you don't like doing things , don't do them. I stopped sending cards for a few years and it didn't seem to make any difference to the number I received, not that I would have minded if it had, but it did seem to indicate that people don't really read them, or that perhaps they think someone else must have opened the envelope. We send them again now mainly because Ian does half the work, possibly more than half because he prints off address labels as well as writing his share.

Delegation is a great help too. I don't mind buying presents but I am rubbish at wrapping them. They look as though they might have been wrapped properly at one time but the dog got them (we don't have a dog). So Ian or younger daughter who has inherited the wrapping gene from him will do it and produce something that looks like it should. Older daughter often makes the cake and younger one decorates it. I only do a roughened snow effect but she does extravagant scenes like this one, not for any other reason than that she likes it.

If you have to involve people you don't like very much (and I am not ignoring the fact that Christmas does come freighted with duties) just make sure you have enough people around who you do like. Then there will always be someone to sneak off with for a giggle in the kitchen.

I like Christmas. I like seeing my family. I like cooking and eating and all the food is the kind I like. I like not going to work for a few days and eating too much and going out for walks afterwards. Ian is not really bothered - different childhoods, different experiences - so that probably helps us to keep it reasonably low key but I still love it. Even in the years after I separated from my first husband when we had to negotiate the minefield of how to parent at Christmas, I still enjoyed the dinner and the tree. So I am not being a Scrooge here. I just feel like saying to magazine editors everywhere less fuss, less consumerism, less fantasy perfection please. Let's use it for a pause, as much love and laughter as comes and an excuse to eat cold turkey and stuffing sandwiches standing up in the kitchen.

A nice day out (of the Wallace and Gromit variety)

It is so easy to keep your nose far too close to the grindstone. This is a beautiful place but it is full of jobs to do and things to sort out. The house fills with ever increasing lists and half of what we do doesn't even make it to a list but yet takes all day. So on Thursday we had promised ourselves a day out, of the old fashioned variety with a packed lunch and a flask.

Probably about thirty years ago (gulp) Ian had been to a beach on Anglesey called Newborough Warren and had recommended it to younger son Chris and his girlfriend as a place to visit. Chris is not one of life's natural gushers so when he came home and said it was one of the most beautiful beaches he had ever seen, it had to be good. It features from time to time on the nature programmes on BBC Wales which I never knew about until I came here but which are a lovely and gentle way to settle into an early evening. The beach has a colony of wild ravens which live in the pine woods by the dunes and there is a plan to reintroduce red squirrels.

I made ham and chutney and cheese and tomato sandwiches with homemade bread and homemade chutney, local ham and our own tomatoes, made up a flask of coffee and packed bananas and Green and Blacks Chocolate. First we went to Ruthin, one of my favourite places around here, to its fabulous deli and then to a material shop packed like an Aladdin's Cave with rich and glowing fabric. As soon as I have made the cushion covers with my last haul of material I shall allow myself a trip back all by myself to linger and feel and come home armed with folds gold and red.

We drove slowly, through Betws Y Coed and over the high mountains, beautiful but bleaker and harsher than our soft green hills. Crossing the Britannia Bridge into Anglesey - Ynys Mon in Welsh - the landscape changes, is flatter, windswept, feels like an island. Newborough Warren is on the south west side of the island, a huge nature reserve of pine woods, sand dunes and wide sandy beaches. To the south are the mountains of Snowdonia, today barely seen looming darker grey against the dark grey sky. To the west is Ireland. Standing looking west across the sea in Cornwall or Wales or Scotland always gives me a strange tug at the heartstrings. However far west you are there are always more westerly islands just beyond the horizon, either shimmeringly seen or just out of view, towards the sunset, the promised land.

We walked to the lighthouse, the ravens flapping silently past us out to sea, talking and catching up with each other after too much time focussed outwards on other people and other duties. The wind whipped our faces, warm for the first day of November. Out towards the lighthouse stood an ancient celtic cross, inscribed more recently in the last century with a Welsh beyond my infant understanding.

Dark when we got home, the clocks gone back and winter around the corner. Time to light the stove and close the curtains. A good day out.