Time to look outward.

On Thursday night I whizzed down to Oxford to stay with elder daughter and her family.  I was there for a trustees' meeting of The Blackden Trust, held in Magdalen College.  Magdalen (pronounced Maudlyn) is an impossibly beautiful place of golden stone, quiet cloisters and green quads.  Many Oxford and Cambridge colleges are similarly beautiful.  I have never forgotten my father, a working class boy from the North of England, wandering the colleges on his first visit when he was about fifty and saying, stunned and appreciative but with a touch of sadness "When I was a child, I couldn't even have imagined that places like this existed."  Until he went away on National Service he did not realise that  it was not simply a fact of life that if you touched a tree you came away with black on your hands.  He and his generation thought that the sooty smudge was nature, not pollution.  Oxford colleges dreaming in the sun were a world away from rainy Rochdale.

Bur before the meeting I spent a sunny, warm couple of hours wandering the Botanical Gardens with my daughter and her sixteen month old little boy. I took no photos.  It was too perfect a morning to do anything but be in it, feeling the sun warm on your shoulders, warm on Joseph's blonde curly hair.  The magnolia denudata was in flower, a towering cloud of white chalices on bare branches against the warm stone.  There were daffodils and some tulips already out.  A Japanese family sat by a perfect stone pool where a fountain splashed softly.  A pair of ducks waddled across, to Joseph's delight.  On the edge of another pond a tiny girl watched entranced as tens of goldfish thronged looking for food. 

After the meeting younger daughter came over with her new puppy, also impossibly beautiful.  It, she, is a Golden Labrador puppy, all brown eyes, soft gold fur, waggy tail and lollopy feet.  The puppy has only been away from her litter six days.  Daughter is sleep deprived, the puppy keen to please.  Puppy care looks both wonderful and hard work, as so many worthwhile things are.

And home to a sunny hillside where the daffodils have blossomed in a yellow and cream wave while I have been away.  There are calves and ponies over the stile in the field by the kitchen garden.

Climb the stile and their curiosity is too much for them.

In the kitchen the old incubator holds eleven Light Sussex hatching eggs.  Yesterday they began to cheep.  It is very odd to look down at eggs which look just like any eggs but which are emitting faint cheeping noises.  They should hatch over the next day or so.

Spring is springing everywhere.

A simpler life? Ha

I really did think when we moved out to rural Wales that I would end up with a simpler life. When I left corporate life and had my year out I almost thought I had achieved it.  It might have been busy with gardening and growing things and cooking and family but it was simpler, for a few months!  I wasn't whizzing around the country and getting on and off planes and trains.  I wasn't trying to balance the demands of a job which I loved with the fact that I wanted time at home with the people who matter to me.  I wasn't always feeling that I was stretched too thin.  I sat outside with a cup of tea in the sun.  I turned over in bed in the morning and slept for another half hour.
So how come I am all stretched out again like an old hankie, practically see through?  Well some of it is to do with starting work again, working for myself and loving it but once again suffering from my usual tendency to say yes when I should perhaps say no.  Some of it is in getting involved in things on a voluntary basis for the Flintshire Tourism Association and The Blackden Trust.  These are things I want to do, they are all interesting and all worthwhile and I thought it was time to do some giving back after a lifetime of having no slack at all to do anything other than work and raise children.  Some of it is that spring is coming and two acres of garden need time and energy.  I would probably rather do that than most things but my garden time is getting squeezed hard.  Some of it is the way life has changed now that my father in law has come to live here.  It is not difficult and there is much pleasure and love in it but things don't half take a long time.  And some of it is the time that is going into visiting my brother since he had his stroke, another thing which matters to me very much.  And what about family and friends and really wanting to stick with the Welsh and the yoga and wouldn't it be great to do a bit of garden visiting with my blogging friends? 
Mmmm, time for a bit of pruning I think but this time it is hard to see what to prune.  I want it all.

Suggestions for achieving a simpler life on a postcard please! 

Alternatively there is keeping on spinning plates and wondering if I am just the type of person who will always be plate spinning.  Anyone out there with the answers?

Thinking about food

Last night younger daughter arrived with her best friends and their fourteen  month old little girl.  Today Karen from An Artist's Garden was coming for lunch so this morning I set to work in the kitchen.

Yesterday I had produced two lemon drizzle cakes, one perfect, the other with a surprising hole in the middle.  However we agreed that this was fine as you could persuade yourself you were not eating yet another slice of cake but a bit more hole, with cake surround.

Today has been a day for making Somerset Apple Cake, carrot and coriander soup and now a beef casserole with a cheesy scone topping.

There was a small break there for going away and eating.

I love being able to produce good food from the contents of my fridge and store cupboard.   I love the fact that there is always enough in stock to know that I can turn out something good.  I would hate not to be able to cook.  Of all the skills I have acquired as an adult I think cooking and driving are the ones I most value, maybe even more than gardening!
What are yours?

Singing in Welsh

Amongst the press of responsibilities and anxieties of the last couple of months, I had rather lost the fact that I had agreed to sing with a choir from my Welsh class at the Learners’ Eisteddfod in Flint last Friday.  An Eisteddfod, for those who don’t know, is an ancient Welsh tradition where people come together for song, poetry, literature and music.  It is a competition but it is also a social event, a cultural high and a community occasion.  The National Eisteddfod for Wales is a huge deal.  It moves between North and South Wales and this year it will be held in Wrexham.  Just in case anyone is reading who might be intending to come, we are about half an hour’s easy drive from Wrexham, and the holiday cottage is still free for the Eisteddfod dates.  Do have a look at the link alongside and come and stay.

The Learners’ Eisteddfod, by contrast, is not such a big deal.  I’m not sure how our Welsh tutor got us all to agree to sing.  His wife and son in law and best friend are in the class and he and his wife are good friends of ours too.  That might have helped. It seemed churlish to say no.  And besides I like singing.  I have an adequate rather than a good voice and in order to sound ok I need to be surrounded by others, singing with gusto and in tune.  In those circumstances, I can just about hold a tune myself, most of the time.

We were singing Lleucu Llwyd, which translates as Lucy Grey.  Our tutor was a learner himself, Welsh and proud of it but not a native speaker (mam iaith, mother tongue they call it here) so he was allowed to be part of our little choir of six.  He and his best friend have good voices and easily carried the rest of us along.   This, I should make clear, is not us!  I hope we sounded something like this.

We had rehearsed on and off at the end of class for a few weeks but still I felt stupidly under-rehearsed when we rolled up on Friday.  It was only that week that I had finally got all the words by heart and agreed to abandon the security blanket of holding on tight to the music.  Cornist Hall was heaving with people.  We could hardly get inside the room and there was no chance of a seat.

The choral singing was the last competition of the evening.  By that stage beer and wine had been drunk, someone had played the bagpipes – oddly Scottish in such a Welsh gathering but warmly received – and one of our choir had won first prize in the solo unaccompanied singing.  We had spoken a lot of Welsh and got cheerful and careless and switched back to English again. 

Our name was called.  We trooped up.  One, two and off we went.  There is nothing like a glass of wine to loosen the tongue.  We romped through it, hitting all the notes, remembering all the words, smiling and singing and loving it.  It was good.  We knew it was.  We even thought for ten minutes or so that we might have won until the last contestants came on and sang, in Welsh, a selection of Abba songs.  There is something about Abba songs, isn’t there?  We just couldn’t compete.

We were second, an honourable performance.  The taxi came.  We wobbled out and sang our way home. 

End of month view for February

Hurray!  February, my least favourite month of the year, is gone and March is here and surely it must be spring?  Early spring maybe, but spring nonetheless.  I am joining in again with the end of month view posts, hosted by Helen at Patient Gardener.  The discipline of taking photographs at month end is really useful and the record really interesting.  I am so glad I did it last year.  Especially when you are making a new garden, it is easy to think nothing is changing.  These photographs show that things are growing, the garden is filling, never mind that it is so slowly.

Here is the side garden.  The first photograph is last month's view at the end of January.  The garden still feels quite empty to me now and yet the two photos side by side show that foliage is appearing and the beds are filling.  The grass has not started to regrow yet and is still churned to mud on the way out to the field.  One day we will have a hard path going through the gate so that we don't descend into mud every winter!  The hellebores are out.  These are the flowers you can see in the foreground of the picture.  I love them, would love them whenever they flowered but at the end of winter they seem quite extraordinarily beautiful.

There is not a lot to see in the little orchard, although there is this cat in the big apple tree.

Get close enough and you can see daffodils pushing up.  Here in the field they are Tenby daffodils, narcissus obvallaris, the Welsh native daffodil.  They are small and upright, more robust that the other native daffodil, narcissus pseudonarcissus, which was Wordsworth's dancing daffodil.  These flower early and keep their flower well until the taller white Thalia begins to take over.  Around the swing there are lots more: February Gold (which never flowers in February and is in fact a couple of weeks later than the Tenby daffodil), Sweetness with a strong, sweet scent, more Thalia and some of the old double daffodil, Telamonius, which has been flowering in gardens in Britain since the early 1600s when our house was built.  It has been a labour, planting daffodils for the last few years, but a labour of love.  I have a record somewhere of how many I have put in but I don't want to think about it!  I want them to spread and naturalise and take your breath away.  They aren't doing that yet but they are beginning to clump up a little, flowering in fives and sixes rather than ones and twos.  It's a plan for the long haul.

Nothing happening in the cutting garden, zilch, nada, nowt.

The grandly called "Native tree walk" is beginning to show the snowdrops around the dogwoods.  I shall plant more snowdrops here, and winter aconite, and wood anenomes.  I must get ordering quick while I can still get them in the green.  I order from John Shipton and daughters in West Wales.  It's not a great website but it is a great nursery.  Send for their paper catalogue if you like native bulbs and flowers and while away a cold evening making lists and getting your tongue around the beautiful Welsh names.

By the drive the snowdrops have been joined by crocuses, crocus tommasinus, another one to spread and taske over I hope.

There is not much happening on the sunny bank yet although walk down to the stile and you will find that the heather is open for early bees.

The kitchen garden is the tidiest it will be all year.  The hellebore argutifolius, terribly prone to blackspot so kept well away from the hellebore orientalis in the side garden, is looking at its best too.

Signs of life, signs of spring.