A wild wet day

Well our friends came over from Manchester and it is indeed pouring down. There was perhaps half an hour when they first arrived when it was dry which is perhaps just enough time to get some idea of why we live here.

They have gone on a long walk and I wimped out, needing to bake things for some afternoon tea, not wanting to walk in the wind and rain and being pretty sure that they, experienced long distance walkers, would want to go at a pace I would struggle with. So I have made some bread and a leek and cheese pie. I have rubbed the butter into the flour for some cheese scones and some fruit scones, ready to mix up so they will certainly be warm when the walkers come in. I have whipped some cream and decanted some gooseberry and elderflower jam into a pretty jar. The woodburner is lit and the house smells of baking and warmth. I have had the better of it today I think.

The rain is streaming down the windows and the wind is lashing the yew trees. The hens are out somewhere but clearly hiding in a place of shelter. Here from another world is proof that summer does come. Both of these photos were taken last summer, which was a wet and miserable one in my memory, but clearly there were raspberries and the swallows did fly above the pigsties. It takes a bit of a leap of faith to believe in summer today.

Seven things

Zoe has tagged me to do the seven facts about myself meme. Thank you Zoe. I like reading these about other people so although I'm not sure there is anything new to say about me here goes.

My father was in the RAF. He was killed in a flying accident when I was three. My brother was just twelve months old and my mother was twenty four.

When I was eleven we emigrated to New Zealand, my mother having remarried. We stayed until I was seventeen and I would love to go back and look at it again as an adult. Although we didn't have very much money it was a great outdoor life. Sometimes I wonder if that time accounts for tendency to take my cup of tea outside, to the amusement of my family, as long as there is the slightest hint of warmth. Wrong hemisphere now perhaps.

I trained as an inspector of taxes (don't do it now, don't panic). A colleague of mine was once investigating the tax affairs of a large, aggressive Northern comedian. When he turned up at his house to interview him, the comedian opened the door dressed only in baggy underpants and a string vest and the entire interview was conducted with my firend sitting nervously on the edge of his seat and the comedian lying on the couch in his underwear smoking, drinking beer and belching noisily. I suspect the result was comedian 1, Inland Revenue 0.

I can still adopt the Lotus position but I have never been able to touch my toes.

I can do a lot of things quite badly (for example sailing , speaking French, reading music). This used to bother me but the older I have got the more I am inclined to think that my younger self's desire not to engage with anything I couldn't do well is a real mistake. If the choice is between doing something badly and not doing it at all, doing it badly can be fine. I have however accepted that there are some things I won't do now: skiing and ice skating for example. If I wanted to do them enough I would already have learnt. There is not enough of life left to spend quite so much time falling down.

I live an awful lot in my head. This is both good and bad: good because you always have something to think about and you can use your thinking to help you to find a way to deal with the rubbish life throws at you from time; bad because sometimes action and not thinking are the better ways to cope. It does however mean that you are never alone.

I love olives and lavender so how come I am living on a Welsh hillside instead of a valley in Provence?

I am supposed to tag other people but I am pretty sure that we have covered most of us by now so I would just invite anyone who would like to give this a go to consider themselves tagged.

Where I live

The A55 belts through the north of Wales towards Snowdonia, Anglesey and the coast. Some of the coastal towns are rundown and flaking. Some are glossy with money, yachts and restaurants. In summer the road can be nose to tail with caravans. Very few people turn south and come inland. Here it is a different world, neither seaside towns nor spectacular mountains, we are in a gentler country.

If you come to us along the Denbigh road you are very likely to be stuck behind a tractor for a bit. Pheasants fly up and blunder across the road. The fields on either side are studded with sheep. As you come around a curve between trees the Clwydian hills rise up, gentle valleys, wooded sides, the long ridge marching southward. This is border country and the long distance path which runs along the ridge is named after Offa's Dyke. It takes you up and over Moel Arthur, Penycloddiau and Moel Famau and on down towards Powys and mid Wales. While this is not deepest West Wales, not Gwynedd where Welsh is most people's first language, it is still Wales. The names of the villages - Rhes y Cae, row of fields, Melin y Wern, alder mill - are all Welsh and the people have a deep love of their place. The Clwydians are a secret place, beautiful but little known. At the top of our valley live farmers who have no electricity. Sometimes it is like the rest of the country thirty years ago.

Leave the road and come up our hill. It is breathtakingly steep and narrow, wooded on either side. It took me a year to become carefree about the idea of meeting someone coming down and reversing hairily into a passing place. Turn left down the track and come through the yard, past the big barns where workers will be moving horsefeed, and down our drive. At the bottom of the drive we are tucked into the side of the hill, the house built in about 1600, held in an embrace of rock, sheltered from the prevailing wind. The yew trees at either end also protect it, sheltering and serene, huge yet graceful. I love them.

At right angles to the house is the cottage, built as a barn and a forge but converted a few years ago. It faces across to the bakehouse and the pigsties. It is all small scale, domestic, but a little world of its own, a self sufficiency. In the bakehouse is the old oven. The pigsties are stone with a slate roof. These buildings have been lived and worked in for generations. Sometimes out of the corner of my eye I see people moving backward and forward to the bakehouse across the grass. I am not a believer in ghosts so this does not worry me. Somehow it is just a blurring of time, the boundaries are not quite so sure as in other places.

Inside, the house is simple, built as a long house, three rooms one after each other and extended thirty years ago to add a kitchen and bathroom. The beams are large and there are plenty of opportunities for banging your head. The spiders are as big as your hand as they hang lazily above the computer. Dust breeds around here too. No point in living here if you mind either of these things. There are lamps and stoves and books. In the winter inside is the best place to be, snug by the stove away from the whirling rain and wind.

In the summer the only place to be is outside. Outside cannot be gardened garden. We are too high on the hill; the soil is too thin and stony. Even the cultivated places have a wildness. The most intensively cultivated is the kitchen garden with raised beds, a greenhouse, fruit trees and bushes. The bottom boundary is a hawthorn hedge, with yew on the side boundary and the top a mixture of a tumbledown wall and an escallonia hedge. Everything is on a slope, even here. The water for the hens has to be propped against a stone to stop it all slopping away down the hill. But it is a gentle slope. Beyond the hawthorn hedge the hill drops down steeply to the woods and stream in the valley bottom. Buzzards hunt the valley at eye level or soar above your head in long lazy spirals as you are working. Swallows wheel and dive in the summer, zooming into the pigsties through the open doors, miracle aerobatics.

There are birds everywhere: black caps, coal tits, blue tits, great tits, chaffinches at the feeders. Robins hop on the fence while you dig. Blackbirds sing from the high beech trees behind the house. Nuthatches and woodpeckers are frequent visitors and pied wagtails walk across the bakehouse roof. In the spring you must walk higher up the lane to hear the cuckoo.

Another cultivated bit is the area around the old quince tree in front of the cottage and the sunny bank below, planted with pinks and penstemons, sedums and thymes. Beside the house is another area of bulbs and oriental poppies which will one day be a real flower garden. Just now the grass is churned up by badgers looking for grubs. I thought they were supposed to be shy creatures? This is about twenty feet from the house.

Through the gate and into the field is wilder again although the fruit trees are beginning to make the little orchard and there are daffodils pushing up by the wild cherry near the swing. Beyond the apple tree is an area which this year will be planted as a cutting garden. It was all supposed to be flowers but in a moment of incompetence, not sure whether mine or theirs, I have received two lots of seed potatoes from the seed merchants so some of them will have to be given a home in the bed this year. There will still be room for sweet peas, cerinthe, dahlias and cosmos. I sit by the fire and dream of spring.

Overload

Sometimes the weeks are just too full. I like having too much to do and I have often suspected that one of the things that forms part of the mutual attraction between my husband and me is that we both have a tendency to bite off more than we can chew. It's good to be married to a fellow sufferer who is up for all sorts and doesn't think you are mad or tiring.

However, it can get out of hand. This week for example started with an intense gardening weekend followed by a Sunday afternoon and evening driving all over the place visiting ailing family. Monday was, as usual, looking-after-two-year-old-grandson-day, lovely and exhausting in almost equal measure. On Tuesday I caught the train to London, having fed cats and chickens, filled bird feeders, written notes, packed bags and charged mobiles. After work I was meeting Ian, who was also in London for a couple of days, and going to Kensington for a meal with a friend who normally lives in France. He has bought a little flat as their pied a terre in London which is about as beautiful and perfectly finished and formed as a little flat can be. We ate a lovely meal and drank fine wine in luxurious surroundings. The evening whizzed away and soon it was time to leap in a taxi and zoom off to Finsbury Park to stay with younger daughter.

The alarm went the next morning as far as I could tell while I was still putting my pajamas on. A work day in Canary Wharf full of ten person conference calls and wall to wall meetings passed in a blur, like the view from a train window. At one point I went to the lavatory just to sit down for a minute. At six I jumped on a tube to go to see the Tutenkhamun exhibition in what was the Milennium dome, followed by a pub meal. In a determined, push the boat out attempt to get back to younger daughter's flat early enough for some sleep we ordered a taxi. The driver got hopelessly lost following his satnav, we crossed the river three times and a forty minute journey took an hour and a half.

Thursday again dawned after a three minute sleep and Canary Wharf beckoned. Fabulous views from the 38th floor; meeting; handshakes; meeting; coffee; Cadbury's cream eggs brought by a young colleague whose energy and enthusiasm lights up the day. I am only working to lunchtime and I am determined to get home in daylight which means that I can't catch the through train. I am telling another colleague about my journey home which will take four hours and involve two changes of train and I can see her total incomprehension. Why does having forty minutes at home in daylight matter a shake of a dog's tail? I don't try to explain. It's a country thing. I want to check my chickens, look for signs of badger incursion, see if the later daffodils are coming out under the quince tree, bring in the logs while I can still see where I am going. Amazingly I do all that and still get to Welsh class. I fall into bed at half past nine and sleep the sleep of the truly exhausted.

This morning the sun woke me at around half past six. I dozed and drifted, warm in my bed. At eight I got up and padded about the house in my giant dressing gown and furry slippers. Light was pouring in everywhere. The walls are feet thick and the windows small but when the morning sun is bright the light dances on the walls and reflects from mirrors and pictures. Bodran was coming for lunch today. I let the chickens out. After three days in their run, cared for by a friend but confined, they practically bounced with excitement when they saw me coming across the kitchen garden. The run is grassy and, according to everything we have read about space per bird, quite generous, but they like to be out, scratching, sitting under hedges, wandering about under the trees, making dust baths and the cockerel flying up to sit crowing on the tops of gates. When I let them out they ran like cartoon chickens, clucking and muttering, to the wooded area behind the house and settled down for a really good rummage amongst the twigs and leaves. As I went back inside one said just loud enough to hear "About bloody time too".

I made soup but when Jo came we decided to take a long circular walk with a lunch at the craft centre at the bottom of our hill which is about half an hour away on slow foot. Jo is a great person to walk with: she sees the first wood anenomes and notices the strange sculptures which are made by mature ivy thickly twining on bare trees. In a few weeks they will have disappeared under foliage. We climbed over stiles and walked down the track which in summer is a sunken green tunnel. Now there is light and openness and you can see the views out across the valley. At the bottom of the track we turned and walked along the side of the river, rushing clear and swift, almost too small to be a river but more than a stream or a brook. In Welsh river is Afon, pronounced Avon. One of the many words used in English which are Celtic in origin.

We walked slowly along the wide flat grassy path which was once a railway line and along to the craft centre. It is always busy, all these retired people drinking coffee and eating cake. Looks great, so much to look forward to. We eat a restrained main course and ruin it with coffee cake, knowing that the long haul up the hill will make us feel virtuous. Once home we sit and chat in front of the woodburner until Jo goes at about half five taking seed potatoes and horseradish with her. She has brought me another old map of our area. There is a chicken casserole in the oven, Ian is on his way home and the weekend is to come. A sane and satisfying day.