Time

Time is like water.  It slips through your fingers.  Sometimes it makes great pools of stillness when it hardly seems to move at all: endless childhood summers, langourous days in the garden.  Sometimes it gathers into stagnant ponds, dank and slightly smelly: those hours hanging around on chilly railways stations or dismal afternoons looking out of the rainstreaked window at grey nothingness.  Sometimes it charges and spills like a waterfall: the rollicking day at the fair, the morning spent learning to sail or hiking a high peak, shouting into the wind.

It changes with company: the doldrums of an afternoon with the tedious, querulous, elderly aunt; the fast flowing river of a night with a lover.

It changes with the time of your life.  I remember when the words "Maybe next year" were as meaningless as the idea that I might one day walk on the moon.  Now years sprint past like the channel crossing from a hovercraft, a blur of grey and white.

Sometimes you can pack things in so your day overflows like a fountain.  Other times everything slows.  It takes forever to do anything.  You are stuck, a canalboat with nowhere to go and nothing to do but watch the lock slowly fill.

I remember when I had babies how hard I found it to cope with how little I could do.  At eleven o' clock I was still in my dressing gown, the dishes still unwashed, the baby still relentlessly feeding.  When we got ready to go out I would forget that it would take me nearly an hour to prepare the baby, the toddler and myself and find that after only a few minutes I would need to come back again, friends unvisited, the park deserted.  What had happened to my ability to achieve in half an hour what took most people twice that, to the quickness, the speed of response which had characterised my childhood and university days?  All lost in a sea of milk.  I never really learnt to go with the flow, which I suspect is the secret of happily mothering small children.  I remember how much happier I was when I knew I could make a timetable again and the day had a shape and a structure.

Time at work was a different, more desperate matter.  There was never enough of it.  It poured through my days like water into a bucket with no bottom.  No matter how hard I worked, how much I did, how busily I tried to organise and prioritise, life with a demanding job and children was always rushing past me at full flood, with the major achievement being just to keep my head above the swirling water.  When I had an occasional day off I would think I could achieve masses at home and was always astonished at how little I actually crossed of my accusing list.

Time up here on my hill has slowed into a calmer backwater.  Here there is time to wander the garden just for the sake of it, time to water cuttings and make jams and jellies, marmalade and bread.  I have loved the breathing time of the last year or so and now it is changing again.  Time with my father in  law is astonishingly like time with small children, astonishing because he is an intelligent and competent adult and most of the things that need to be done to get him up and going for the day or not done by me but by Ian, yet still I find that by the time I have changed the beds and washed the dishes and checked the hens and been for his paper and made a cup of tea for him and sat with him for half an hour it is somehow a quarter to eleven which is practically lunch time and then  there is lunch and he has a snooze and I do some Welsh and whoops, he hasn't done his exercises and there is supper to be made and still some work I need to do and the whole day has trickled away like water from a jar which you didn't know was cracked.

I am better at slowness this time around.  Maybe it is a sharper awareness that he won't always be here that makes it easier to sit at the kitchen table, cup of tea in hand, talking about life on the brick wagon or in the bakery.  I steal away to inspect snowdrops and spend half an hour on the computer choosing varieties of mint for the herb garden.   He wants to walk faster than his competence with his sticks allows.  "Just stop for a minute," I say.  "Look out of the window, stroke the cat."  He paces himself.  So do I.

I will need some rapids and some waterfalls sometimes or I shall go nuts but I am better than I used to be at idling in the shallows, trailing my hand, looking for minnows.

photo blog tonight

Arum bought as a tiny plant at Great Dixter's nursery is now slowly beginning to spread and grow.  I love it.

In the curve of the fallen wild cherry, the native daffodils are starting to push up amongst the fallen leaves.

Frosty morning as the mist lifts and the sun comes through.

 The front roof is looking good.

And inside, marmalade.

So that's what's been happening here.

Any questions?

You never know what you can do until you do it

You have heard all the cliches: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, feel the fear and do it anyway.  I have been musing about difficult things and I find that one of the great things about getting older is that you know that you have dealt with difficult things in the past and survived.

Years ago I was a trainee tax inspector.  The first time I investigated someone for not paying enough tax I couldn't sleep.  The night before my first interview I woke every hour, my stomach churning.  That morning I couldn't eat my breakfast and when I got to the office I spent the first half hour in the ladies'.  I had written an interview brief so detailed it could have been a script for a play.  A more experienced inspector was sitting in with me.

"You ok? Ready for this?" he said.

"Yes, I'm ready."

"Don't forget.  It's much worse for him that it is for you."  And off we went.  And it was fine.  I asked the right questions.  The taxpayer was indeed much more nervous than I was.  I tried to be firm but fair and I slipped into it: the role of the kindly but serious official.  It might have been a bit of play acting but it was real enough.  It was really his livelihood.  He really had not been playing fair.  I could do it and it was never so terrifying again.

And what else have I done? 

Spoken to an audience of a thousand at a conference in Las Vegas.

Walked the length of Wales.

Sat on top of a peak in the Dolomites, hanging on to the metal cross which marked the summit because I get dizzy with heights, and come down facing into the mountain like going down a ladder as the sight of the drop would make me fall off.

Knitted a pair of socks (and I'm on my second pair now, although so slowly that I can only say it is a good thing I am not knitting for a child.  He would be in adult football boots by the time I had finished his bootees).

Made a stepfamily.

I could tell you about the difficult things I have not done (lost half a stone, become a runner, for starters) but let's quit while we are ahead.  That's the whole point.

What is the most difficult thing you have done?

January garden

I am not a winter gardener.  In the cold and wet I am much more likely to be found by the fire inside than outside pruning fruit trees.  When I started to garden seriously perhaps twenty years ago I would get all keen from March to July, go away on holiday in August, come back to a tired flopping mess and basically give up again until the following spring, apart from a few bad tempered forays outside during the autumn to tidy up.

Gradually my gardening time extended.  I started planting bulbs in the autumn.  I planted one or two evergreen shrubs so that the garden was less of a blasted heath in winter.  And that was about it.

Coming here has made a difference in two major ways: firstly I have become much more interested in autumn.  This is partly because the light here is liquidly beautiful in September and October and the hedges are full of hips and berries.  The michaelmas daisies which were here already in their hundreds throng with butterflies and I found myself falling in love with a season which had for me previously been too heavy with the loss that was to come.  Maybe I have just got better at living in the now as I have got older.  I would also not underestimate the impact of Karen at An Artist's Garden.  She loves autumn and her own garden shimmers and glows in autumn in a way which was a revelation to me, eye-opening, exciting.

Secondly I have become addicted to early flowering bulbs, mainly snowdrops so far but naturalising crocuses too.  That is a country thing I think.  When you have a couple of acres of empty scrub as opposed to the suburban gardens I have always had before you can afford to give space to naturalised bulbs.  That is how I love to see them, in sheets and drifts and streams.  I can't say I have got there yet.  You wouldn't believe how many bulbs you need for a drift and so far mine are more puddles.  But I know what I am aiming for.  Winter in deep country is also a far more profound thing that a city winter with streetlights shining and shops and bars and restaurants offering warmth and food and company.  Winter is hard and cold or wet and cold.  Grassy paths turn to mud.  Ice and snow create a ferocious cruel beauty that reminds you how vulnerable people are, away from their cars and their central heating.  Winter is hostile.  So the signs that winter will end are far more precious out here.

This morning I went looking for signs of life.  The snowdrops are pushing up their glaucous green snouts in the side garden although there are none yet to be seen by the dogwoods or at the bottom of the stone wall by the gate.  The marbled leaves of the arum, bought as a tiny plant and still small, are full of quiet beauty.  There is a flower on one of the hellebores and fat buds crowding at the base of the plants.  There are even some signs of the early native daffodils pushing up amongst the dead leaves in the curve of the fallen tree by the swing.  The witchhazel is starting to flower.  All this makes me realise how very much I need these signs of life and hope.

So I have just ordered nine more hellebores from Sarah Raven's site.  We will have primroses here too and Carol Klein's wonderful new gardening programme (which I think deserves a blog to itself) last night showed how easy it is to sow seed from primroses so that is another thing I will do in the spring.  And now I will make a big vat of chicken soup and some cheese scones.

What do you do in January?

A plea

On New Year's Eve my much loved brother had a massive stroke.  He is only fifty four.  He had further complications last week.  It seems his life is no longer in danger but his condition is still serious.  I don't intend to blog about this much as he would not want me to but I think he would forgive me saying this:

It seems likely that the cause of the stroke was untreated high blood pressure, perhaps combined with the stresses of a high pressure job which he loved.  He knew his blood pressure was high I think but I am sure, in not taking the time to engage with medical appointments and treatment, he had little sense of how great a risk it could pose.

If you don't know what your blood pressure is, find out.  If it's high, see your doctor.  If you have any inclination to put your head in the sand think of my witty, active, workaholic brother, who loves sailing and his family, lying in his hospital bed unable to move, and sort it out.  Please.

To resolve or not to resolve?

I wonder if I am getting too old, too lazy or too awkward for New Year's Resolutions.  The beauty of writing a blog for quite a long time (since 2007! how amazing is that?) is that you can go back and check and see what was happening in your life in earlier Januaries.  Pottering back through the New Year entries I see that some years I have made resolutions and some years I have not.  One year I see that I resolved to be more glamorous on Thursdays.  I think we can safely say that did not happen.  On other years I have blithely ignored the very idea.  I see that I have however kept the resolution to stop resolving to eat less, drink less and exercise more.  I haven't done any of those things but at least I have stopped boringly girding myself up to do them and then berating myself for failing yet again.

We have had a challenging few months to finish off 2010 and this morning I learned that my much loved younger brother is ill.  This is not a year for making life any harder with worthy exhortations and rafts of negatives.  So here are some resolutions which might make life easier, funnier, happier, healthier; little ones  which I hope can be slotted in to full days.

1. I will make more time with friends and, if going away from home is a bit tricky just now, more invitations for people to come here.  This is such a good one that I am going to pick the phone up just as soon as I finish writing this blog.
2. I will do something every day that is just for me: a bath, a glass of good wine, half an hour upstairs on the bed with a book.
3. I will do something every day that is just for Ian.  This is harder than it sounds.  He is a great one for sorting everything out for himself and looking after other people all the time.
4. I will take the time every day to listen to my FIL, just to sit and chat for half an hour without trying to fill the time with jobs and chores.  I am getting my ear in now, beginning to understand both the strong regional accent and his own idiolect which means that he can expect you to fill in missing words and translate phrases.  Soon I may even always understand the meaning of "the old one, two", a phrase which slides around with, as far as I can tell, an entirely variable meaning, often tripping me up and leaving me grasping at empty air.  I will slow down and, for some time every day, let him set the pace.
5. I will buy and wear some clothes in gorgeous colours.  I fancy a singing blue and green like the peacock feathers in the vase behind me.
6. I will go to yoga every week and become a truly bendy person.
7. I think I might join a choir.
8. I think I might get a dog, maybe not right this minute though.
9. I will plant yet more flowers for butterflies and bees in the field around the fruit trees.
10. I will ensure that I see all the blogging friends I have been lucky enough to meet so far and also add some new ones to the "met in real life" tag.
11. I will paint my toenails, even though it is winter.