Life in the Preseli Hills

A good walk, spoiled

2012-01-27T18:15:00.001Z

Today was my weekly ramble around Llysyfran dam with Jo. We love this walk, a nice strenuous seven-mile route where we can natter away, have a laugh and a bit of a moan if we need to and get a few things off our chest.

Today though? Disturbing.

We go along at a fair lick, pausing to admire the birds and today was no exception. A small group of black and white wildfowl caught our gaze. What were they? We peered. Then...

BANG!!!!!!

Shotgun. Right next to us. We leapt out of our skins. How dare whoever it was do that? Right next to a footpath. Somebody unseen, with a shotgun. We were suddenly very aware that we were in the middle of nowhere on our own. Jo got her phone out of her pocket.

We looked at each other. I said: "I don't want to be tomorrow's headlines." Two more shotgun blasts followed at uneven intervals.

We hurried on.

We rounded the far end of the reservoir and encountered a man and a dog. It's not unusual to meet a man and a dog around here but this was a tall young man with a big spool of blue nylon rope slung across and around his body leading a dog by another long length of the same type of rope. The dog looked like a pitbull (Jo's a vet; she knows a dangerous-looking dog when she sees one).

"Hello ladies," he drawled. The pitbull slobbered on my leg.

We hurried on.

The path at the far side of the reservoir is challenging at the moment. Slick with sucking sticky mud we slid sideways as much as made forwards progress. It wasn't fun but we made it out alive and breasted the hill into the top car park which is usually empty at this time of year.

This was not the day for it to be empty. Today it was full of a white van, which left as we approached, and two powerful pimped up muscle cars.

We hurried on.

We headed down the road and around the hair pin bends in a generally grumpy fashion, only to be passed by the pimped up cars.

Roarrrrrr VROOOOOOM!!!! said the cars.

"Tw@ts," said Jo.

So on our walk we had encountered a shotgun, a man with lots of rope (why?), a pitbull and two muscle cars. Call me paranoid but I spent six years as a reporter covering local courts and inquests and I've met a few murderers on the way. At that time this county had three unsolved double murders, one of which in the village in which I now live. Those murders all involved shotguns and rope. The man responsible for two of the crimes is now behind bars thankfully, but they still haven't solved the one in the village.

Next week we're taking a different, less muddy, less isolated route.

Signs of life

2012-01-26T10:37:00.000Z

There are signs of life in the new pond. This is one of two we had scraped out by a digger last summer. The other, higher up, hasn't filled yet (we left it to its own devices) but this one is fed by a sparkling little waterfall and we spent a day giving it a proper dam. Plants have arrived, I've seen a duck on it (twice) and this morning there were signs of other activity...

Someone has been extremely busy.

I'll keep an eye on this frogspawn. Hopefully the weather will stay mild and this will hatch into many fat tadpoles.

Thank you

2012-01-25T14:30:00.000Z

I had a letter this morning from Birmingham St Mary's Hospice thinking me for the total of £248.75 I raised by running the Cardiff Half Marathon last October.

So I'm passing on their thanks to all of the lovely people who sponsored me and contributed towards this sum.

I raised the money in the memory of Ann, who was my cousin Keith's wife (but was more like an aunt to me). She needed the love and care of the hospice volunteers in the last days of her life last August.

My subway art thank you note was created on Picnik, discovered via Nellie Dean's blog. Sadly Picnik is closing on April 19th so have a play with it while you can. I make my subway art by opening a collage and choosing a colour (then click done). Under basic editing choose 'resize image', then untick the green ticks from the boxes and set the size to 1920 x 2400 (click done). Then jump on into the texts, stickers etc.

Le weekend

2012-01-23T08:33:00.002Z

H9 (soon to be H10) had her birthday treat this weekend. We can't afford the extravagance of a party this year so her treat was to see War Horse with her best friend G10.

Brian went with them into Mwldan Dau while R8 and I saw Arthur Christmas in Mwldan Un. I really want to see War Horse but the trailer reduces me to such a sobbing mess* that I didn't want to embarrass myself or my children in public. Arthur Christmas was truly properly laugh out loud funny though and brought tears to the eyes for entirely different and much happier reasons.

Sunday was a day of doing catch-up jobs for Brian - a busy day from the darkness of dawn until well beyond sunset doing all the little jobs living on a smallholding (while holding down a full-time job with shifts) entails.

I meanwhile took my fledgling cold on a 10k run to frighten it away. The day was sunny but crisply cold with a frisky wind. Perfect for running.

I'd begun the day making wholemeal drop scones with maple syrup for breakfast. R8 arrived and took over part of the batter preparation.

"I'm not going to big school mummy," she announced, blending flour, milk and eggs.

"Aren't you?" I handed her the 50g of butter she had already weighed out and melted.

"No." She's emphatic on this point. Primary school is such utter perfection (despite the recent trauma of a broken nose she's deeply in love with every aspect of her school day). "No, I'm going to get a job instead."

"Oh?" Shall I tell her now that she has to go to big school? Perhaps not.

"I'll get a job as a..." she pauses to whisk the melted butter into the batter, "...as a chef."

Jamie.

* Regarding War Horse. It's not so much the brave war scenes, although those would bring a big lump to the throat, it's the happy ending. I had a Joey of my own, called Jamie. A big conker brown bay thoroughbred.

I loved him like no other other horse (some of my fellow college students thought Jamie was human and my boyfriend and I didn't disabuse them).

Jamie was taken away for me not by war but by illness (he got navicular disease and had to be euthanased. It rather broke my heart.)

No schmaltzy reunion against the sunset for me. Hence the tears.

Still baking

2012-01-18T16:57:00.000Z

I'm still baking. I haven't mentioned it for a while but my bakeathon through the River Cottage bread book is ongoing.

Okay, I'll admit I cheated a bit. My self-imposed rule at the beginning was to make EVERYTHING, one by one. That was fine in the chapters on normal bread, but then there were vetkoek (yuk) and a whole chapter on Bread Made with Wild Yeast.

I lovingly made and tended my sourdough starter. I made a loaf with it. My family tried it. Hated it. I think sourdough is the Marmite of the bread world; it's either love or loathe. They, my eaters, loathed. Me, I loved it, especially toasted with Marmite on, but even I'm not woman enough to eat my way through an entire chapter on sour dough breads single-handed. I may go back one day and make pumpernickel, but not yet.

So I skipped on to the Bread Made Without Yeast chapter. I baked, we ate and I forgot to take pictures. Here, in a nutshell, is what we had and the verdict (in brackets): Soda bread (a regular anyway, we love it and make it often); Walnut and honey bread (how much honey???!!!! Sweet, chewy, delish with strong cheese, probably won't make it again though); roti (another regularly-made already recipe, we adore it); tortillas (number one favourite from this book until I made the flatbreads which are even better. Still love these though, great for lunch); then Bannocks:

The Bannocks were more delicious than they looked.

Bannocks are thick, hot oatcakes, lovely eaten while still warm from the pan with thick vegetable soup. They looked uninspiring but were quick, easy and delicious. Just the sort of thing to knock up while you make the soup (actually they're so quick the soup wouldn't even have to be home made you could make these while opening a tin).

Yummy baked doughnuts

Next it was straight on into the fun stuff: Buns, Biscuits and Batter Breads (the chapter my children have been looking forward to most). First off was doughnuts but NOT, definitely NOT deep fried (the vetkoek put me off that for life). So I baked them, 10 minutes at the oven's hottest temperature then about seven minutes at gas mark 4, dabbed them with a bit of melted butter and tossed them in a bowl of cinnamon-spiked sugar. They were a big hit, little doughnutty-flavoured fluffy buns without the stink and palaver of deep frying. Perfect.

Meanwhile Brian finished a bit of DIY. We have a dresser but it's too tall for our low ceilings and too wide for our narrow railway carriage-shaped kitchen. In disgust I chucked it out into a barn a while ago (having tried and failed to live with it in various rooms). Instead I longed for a plate rack but funds didn't allow and the big white empty wall in my kitchen sulked plate rackless. Then, brainwave. Hang the TOP part on the wall, plate rack-stylee. Bingo! I rescued it from the barn, scrubbed it and bleached it, waxed it and Brian used coach bolts and mirror brackets (belt and braces) to hang it on the wall.

Dresser with dog in catalogue pose.

The box underneath is an ex-toy box Brian picked up for a song (he got three - one for each of his girls). I'm going to wax mine to match the dresser and then keep my ~~toys~~ cake tins and baking trays in it. I might even make it a comfy cushion for the top (no, not for the dog though!)

Frosty morning

2012-01-16T10:35:00.000Z

We've just had the coldest night of this winter season, the weatherman said this morning. What it's given us is a glorious winter day with frosty grass and wall to wall sunshine.

R8 went back to school today. She wasn't keen on the idea of being stared at because of her two black eyes and butterfly stitches on her nose but she's mended enough and I'm confident they'll look after her.

Her nose and both eyes went through all the colours of the rainbow this weekend, from deep maroon, through shades of lilac and then into the yellows. Yesterday she came out on the long dog walk and announced that she needed a stick "to walk with because I've got a broken nose". She found herself a nice big branch, at which point Mido, who is at least 50% Labrador, got the wrong end of the stick (so to speak).

I rescued the dog from his mistake and R8 found herself a second stick for the other arm. I've never known anyone need crutches for a broken nose before. The dogs assumed the sticks were one each and strained at their leads while the 'patient' shouted "put it down" at them.

This morning's walk was a little quiet by comparison, save for the roar of tractor engines. The ground is hard enough to drive on so the farmers are all busying about doing the work that had to wait because the ground was too wet. The sheep tell me they need to come inside the building. They're probably bored of the new field they've been on since one died last week.

Ivy swathes this ancient hawthorn tree.

Underneath it evidence of someone's winter larder. I presume these are hawthorn berry pips. Presumably the fleshy outside was consumed when fresh and the nutty middles were saved for later. The pips bear the marks of teeny little teeth. I can just imagine the tiny little mouse sitting in the dip at the foreground, nibbling away, then tossing the empty shells over his shoulder. Gruffalo crumble for dessert, one assumes.

Things that go bump in the day

2012-01-13T17:26:00.000Z

I had one of those makes-your-blood-run-cold telephone calls from school on Wednesday saying R8 had slipped during the swimming lesson, bashed her face and was on her way back on the bus.

The words set the level of worry. R8 has fallen and is in an ambulance on her way to hospital would have been so much worse. I parked my panic/worry on the next level down and headed to school.

The poor thing had slipped during a fire drill and had broken the fall with her nose. Apparently it had then done what noses do in such circumstances - it bled copiously. Swimming pool falls are never pleasant and those accompanied by lots of blood cause much shock to all concerned (judging by the calls from teachers and school friends in subsequent hours and days).

Brian was on an early shift and already on his way home so when he got back we had a family trip to A&E (H9 was material witness). R8 had a pretty star shape of butterfly stitches applied to her gash and gained an offended look thanks to the clip that squeezed her finger to monitor her blood oxygen and the cuff which (horror!) squeezed her arm really tightly to take her blood pressure.

The verdict was 'probably broken, look forward to swelling, snoring and two black eyes', and we left with leaflets on head injuries and broken noses.

We took the injured party to M&S (handily and newly built near A&E) and stocked up on ice cream (which, as every parent knows, is essential for such circumstances).

I'm not allowed to show you a photo of the nose.

Two days later R8 looks like a cross between a post-bout prizefighter and a Star Trek Klingon, especially at 6.30 this morning when her eyes were so swollen she could barely open them. Details have been trickling out about the incident too: I saw everyone else was out so I hurried up (then fell); I looked at my hands and they were all red; it took them (teacher and lifeguard) three bandages (to staunch the bleeding); I was really scared for lots of yesterday.

It could have been so much worse. She still has all of her teeth and both of her eyes and her nose will mend (hopefully without scarring). She could have broken her arm or collarbone. (My brain ran through all the what ifs on Wednesday once she was in bed asleep and the phone had stopped ringing).

Such things are character building. She's a bit self-conscious (I look weird), refused to get out of the car when we went to pick H9 up from school today (except to talk to one of her best friends) and she's refused a Friday library trip (because there'll be talking about noses).

Ah well. We've had two lovely days with no school, doing sewing and cooking and she watched the first of the last two Harry Potters last night as a special treat.

Research and development

2012-01-10T19:17:00.000Z

My birdy (in very bad light on a dull day).

I've been meaning to have a go at freestyle machine embroidery for a while (since I saw Kirsty Allsopp doing it on her crafty programme) but I only got as far as the phrase 'drop the feeder dogs on your sewing machine'.

So we had a bit of research (where the flipping heck is the thing that drops the feeder dogs on this berludy machine? Oh, there, hidden) and development (with the aid of some scraps of fabric).

It wasn't love at first sew like it was for Kirsty but then I was tackling it without the help of a handy expert. I sought Mum's advice on things like the weight on the presser foot and the tension and eventually made the birdy (following the instructions on this website). Not bad but not good enough yet. Fun though.

A kite and the circle of life

2012-01-09T13:25:00.000Z

The enthusiasm of my two dogs for a walk as soon as I get back from the school run is undimmed by heavy grey skies. Today we were joined by a red kite, wheeling in swooping curves.

Kites are occasional visitors here. I've seen as many as three at once and never get tired of them. They make a change from the ubiquitous buzzards. The kite headed off in the direction of Parc Maen Hir, home to the sheep at the moment, where it was greeted by heckling from a group of carrion crows and cackling laughter from a bunch of unruly magpies.

Ah. Carrion birds, all. This requires further investigation, dog-free.

I collected mum and we headed back up to the sheep. Sure enough, there she was, man down. Not long, but bits already picked clean by busy beaks. Mum headed back to the house, made a call for the corpse to be collected and then went back up to the field again to bring down the remains. I doubt if it crossed her mind for a moment not to do this sort of thing at her age (but she's bloody minded enough to have thought 'sod it' and done it anyway). Old age? So not yet (but thanks for the free bus pass and fuel allowance).

Those left behind: "Oh someone's dead. How interesting. Who's next?"

Why did this ewe die? Who knows? She was one of the older ones but she had all her teeth (unlike some). She seemed in good condition too. Something could have killed her; the flock looked a little disturbed. But (farmer's shrug) these things 'appen. We can't make her better so there's no point in fretting. We have some delightful little ewe lambs saved as replacements, perhaps one of her daughters. She wasn't one of the named ones either (that's when it feels sad). It's all part of the circle of life.

Sunday

2012-01-08T15:41:00.000Z

This is the last day of the Christmas holidays, which have seem to have lasted for ages. I don't mean that to sound like a complaint though. We've had a lot of fun over the past two weeks but we all need to get a bit of routine back.

I need to get back to running. I haven't been since December 27th when I stepped onto what I thought was a grassy verge which turned out to be a very soft muddy puddle. The resulting unexpected jolt hurt a bit and overstretched a bit. I hippety-hoppitied home with a sore and very muddy ankle and foot and decided running was cancelled until after the end of the school holidays (especially as the wind was so windy too).

What follows now is the start of my good intentions (a term I've pinched from Zoe Lynch's lovely blog). Running is one, as is losing a little of the luggage I've gained over Christmas thanks to giving in to things (like mince pies and pannetone) rather than resisting them. I need to get back to a more regular kettlebell routine too (because it works and I quite like the effect on my 'abs'.)

Another of my good intentions is to eat more salad, so I'm joining Veg Plotting's 52 Week Salad Challenge. I have a head start on this thanks to salad transplants I planted in October from Delfland Nurseries (having failed to sow anything to overwinter because we'd been so busy building the polytunnel) knowing I'd want salad in January.

Another intention is to start a business. Mine's called Magatha Bagatha and is pretty things hand made by me. At the moment my products are pretty ribbon-trimmed bags but I plan to expand into things made using the fleeces from our organic sheep. This means learning how to felt and dye wool and possibly how to spin too.

It's early days for Magatha Bagatha yet - I only decided I was definitely going to set it up as a business at the end of last month so things are very much in the early planning stages. Any help and suggestions would be enthusiastically and gratefully received.

Of wind and vegetable plotting

2012-01-05T19:36:00.000Z

It's blowing a gale. If you're reading this somewhere in Blighty it's blowing a gale with you too.

We knew this was approaching. I was warned by my Godmother (who lives in the North West where they speak of 'buggerlugs' and 'sodpots' - she taught me such colourful language when I was a very small girl) that the isobars were looking a little tight for this week.

I went out, with mum and two rolls of tape, to repair a few gaps in the cover of the old polytunnel. It was a bit of a performance, it being wet, but we managed. Then I looked up from the small gap I was patching and spotted that the plastic was ripped right around the end hoop. I stuck my hand through it and waved a cheerful red gloved hand at mum who was fixing it from inside.

"Ah," we said and abandoned our taping attempts. We left the wind to do its worst. That cover has been on for much longer than 10 years so it doesn't owe us anything. Having spent last summer fighting for gaps in the weather to build the big polytunnel and vowing 'never to do that again' it looks like we'll be re-covering the little one this summer. It'll be a doddle compared to hauling the acre of plastic required to cover the big one though.

Oddly enough the cover is still there after three days of gales. I was expecting the spectacular, but it's hanging on, stubborn old thing that it is.

Instead we had other excitement when the Bouncing Garden briefly became the Being Flattened by a Flying Trampoline Garden when the wind tossed the trampoline into the Drying Garden. It landed on (and was fortunately caught and held by) the twirly clothes line.

The Drying Garden, summer 2011.

We unplugged the netting on the trampoline, having returned it to the Bouncing Garden, weighed it down with the rocks I've been collecting for walling projects and put the arms of twirling thing down (something I said I'd do days ago but forgot).

In the meantime I'm staying indoors with seed catalogues, vegetable plotting.

First harvest of 2012

2012-01-02T13:47:00.000Z

I investigated the polytunnel this morning. The sun was shining (sort of) and inside it was warm and springlike. There was a compete absence of any of the brassicas. Whatever it was that took a shine to the calabrese, kale and spring cabbages ate the whole lot.

A big gap where once there was cabbage.

But the whatever it was left the lettuce, rocket, chards, spinach, land cress and mustard alone. All were hot and thirsty so I hoed a little, watered a little, picked my first harvest of salad for 2012 and left the doors open to give the tunnel a good airing.

All is not lost.

Here be lunch.

It's still raining

2012-01-01T15:06:00.001Z

Happy new year. It's still raining and what's abundantly clear, as I skid disgracefully around the garden between the back door and the two hen coops in ankle deep sloppy mud, is that we need to do the paths this year.

One path needs to skirt around the house, past the hens and then be divided to each polytunnel. Another needs to go past the new lawn in the bouncing garden (thanks to Monty Don for that term - he's got one too - the vital ingredient is a trampoline). The paths need to be nothing fancy, just gravel, simple but perhaps back-breaking.

The house does have a path around it, installed under council orders when this house was renovated with a grant. It had to be a metre-wide wheelchair-friendly concrete because mum's late partner Michael was disabled. The fact it included several steps and was therefore unfriendly to wheelchairs was lost on both the council and the builders. It also causes water to wick up the insides of the walls of our stone-built damp-proof-course-free house. It has to go.

The polytunnel path is important. I still haven't been back into the polytunnel since I fell over in the mud and then then discovered the tunnel had a) a mole and b) something had swiped a few of my cabbages. I'm easily demoralised. There's winter salad in there though so I should gird my loins and go back to investigate.

We took the dogs up to the hay fields this morning in a gap between rain showers. Children and dogs set out with enthusiasm. We all had a good splash in the dew pond on the first hay field. It's pretty full, unsurprisingly.

When we reached the most far flung point of our walk (admittedly not far on 22 acres, but far enough) it started to rain heavily. We headed back to the comforting hug of the wood burner and mugs of hot chocolate. Our rain coats (Scamp's too) are now hanging on the ham hooks in the cimne fawr drying off ready for another probable soaking on this afternoon's walk.

At least my feet stay dry - one of my best presents this Christmas was a pair of fleece welly socks (thanks Dad and Pat!) so I now have toasty warm tootsies on my dog walks.

Muddy

2011-12-31T12:03:00.000Z

It's the last day of a very wet year. I have just walked the dogs in what seems to be unending drizzle. Sometimes it is difficult to stay upright it is so squelchy and slippery underfoot.

The fields are full of little pockets of muddy water. When you slide into them in your welly the water is squeezed up in a fountain of cold brown water which plasters up the front of your jeans.

The big dog seems largely impervious to mud. It doesn't show up on his black fur, not even on his paws. He leaves prints on the cream tiles. The small dog is more attractive to mud and water than a sponge. He has housedog privileges so judicious application of the hose and much towelling is required before he's allowed in.

It's been like this for months and it will be like this for months to come - unless we have a cold dry spell or even snow like we had last year. We were snowed in last year and hold secret hopes for the same again.

This time last year

Meanwhile the birds sing happily in the treetops, despite the drizzle. At the end of our walk I noticed Scamp had something in his mouth. A stick? No! Is that a feather sticking out? PUT IT DOWN! He put. A bird, swollen with rainwater and unrecognisable. Canine treasure.

Back inside and it's time to light one of the wood burners. The small dog and I quietly steam while the girls paint.

I have been reading the Ivington Diaries by Monty Don (Christmas present from my mum) and this has inspired me to take a more diary like approach to my blogging. It's a sort of New Year resolution. Short pieces recording what's happening on the farm and in the garden. I always find Monty Don rekindles my enthusiasm for my garden, especially after a difficult year. I might even order some seeds now.

Another year gallops on by

2011-12-30T10:36:00.000Z

It flashed past, 2011 did. Is it old(er) age that makes the years fly past? So what happened?

We started the year with a new puppy and a house full of newspaper, red tops, which brought out the Margot Leadbetter in me. "Why can't we have something suitable like the Telegraph?" I wailed as the puppy squatted over the boobs on page three.

Where's the newspaper gone?

We got new hens, then the sun came out in February and we rejoiced not knowing that would be pretty much it sunshine-wise for the rest of the year.

The lambs were born to an F1 theme (what shall we have this year? Open to suggestions!) flowers bloomed and the oil price shot up so I turned off the heating. (December 2011: It's still off. Because it's broken.)

We went to Devon in April and cuddled lovely friends and donkeys. The garden went nuts with flowers in May.

In June Tardis sat on a clutch of eggs and produced a brood of pretty chicks. The following month saw the arrival of a trampoline, new bicycling skills and and I got the sewing machine out and started to make things.

In August we headed back to Devon (and Dorset again), H9 and R7 went riding (twice), we went to the beach (only twice and on one of those visits it rained) and we dashed down to the Cafe on the Quay in Lawrenny to do the walk/cake thing another twice (or it might have been thrice). I started to bake my way through the River Cottage bread book.

In September I took lots of pictures with my new (old) DSLR and they dug up the road outside school causing mad chaos.

Let them eat dog.

By October the car bills had reached new heights of disaster, I threatened to cook the dog in lieu of meat (we decided to go mostly vegetarian instead) and I ran Cardiff half marathon while my children met the Olympic torch.

It rained in November. We had sickness and head lice. I baked and maked and we oohed and aahed at Bonfire night fireworks.

In December I continued the making and baking theme, discovered I could make a pony out of marzipan and broke all my previous records on how to maintain the required standards at Christmas without parting with too much money.

The year is quietly fizzling out. I'm not one for big New Year parties (I don't think I've ever been to one!) Onwards now to 2012.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-22T10:42:00.000Z

Merry Christmas to everyone who visits my blog. Have a lovely festive season.

Scenes from a long run #4

2011-12-18T21:01:00.000Z

Today's run was the first for a week. This picture is just over a mile from home and I wanted to capture the colour of the sky; brooding dark clouds illuminated by the bright sunshine. I'm glad I did take it so soon because by the time I got to the hills, another four or so miles straight on at the crossroads, the clouds had scuttled over the sun and it was mostly just a grey sky.

The Dog's Blog

2011-12-14T10:00:00.000Z

I sid on das compootar cadair today. You dere? I sehen you. De mummy she say GED OFF DAS COMPOOTAR CHAIR! I hignore har. Dis is my blog.

I say TIDY ZIS DESK! IST MESS! She say GEDDOWN DOG! I hignore har 'gain. She rool das eyes at mir. Vat I sehen of das blog? You haf problem? You tell Schnauzer. I fix.

Today I hav visdom vor you. Dis visdom is vrom Johan Wolfgang von Goethe. Das not easy nach type mit paws. Vot he? Volf? Goat? Anyways. He sehen: Courage is the commitment to begin without any guarantee of success. He right. I tell dat to de mummy 'bout desk. She sehen: GEDDOFF DAS COMPOOTAR DOG!!! I hignore 'gain.

Das ist the end of dis blog. My favorit ist auf dem TV.

An alternative Christmas tree

2011-12-11T09:42:00.001Z

Things are a little tight this Christmas (I'm tempted to add 'as usual' here!) so this year we decided not to buy a traditional fir tree but to look for something a little more alternative. For the last two years we've done the excited trip out in the car to choose a tree and bring it back on the roof with happy little faces watching it through the sun roof.

This year our expedition was a little closer to home...

This tree has been growing behind the old churn cooling shed (this used to be a dairy farm) for - ahem - a year or two and we've been meaning to move it. It has a sort of Christmassy shape, I thought, so why not.

A quick buzz with the chainsaw...

Trying it for size. We have low ceilings so it needs to be about the height of Brian. I grab my secateurs and we take it indoors...

A bit of trimming here and there and it fits. (There then follows a short delay while we hunt down the ball that screws into the bottom of the trunk so it can sit in the tree holder. This takes a few hours so I start my new project which is to scrub the top of my old dresser so it can be brought into the kitchen.)

Finally the ball reappears (it was in the bottom of last year's tree of course, which was on the bottom of the wood pile in the big shed which is why it took Brian all afternoon to find it) and the tree is decorated. I'm rather strict about colour scheme. White and gold for this one...

...red for the dining room tree (which is ancient and artificial but no trees were harmed in the making of this tree. If I find a cheap potted tree in the next few weeks this one might head back into the loft.)

On sleep and the lack of it

2011-12-07T19:27:00.001Z

I'm having one of my not sleeping terribly well times. I keep waking up at 4.35am, feeling bored and going over lists in my head.

Annoyingly I've just had a period of good sleeping; whole glorious nights of deep slumber, waking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at about 6am. I say annoyingly because that phase seems to be over and I'm back to tugging fretfully at the duvet, trying to get comfortable and longing to fall into the comforting arms of oblivion.

Some of it is worry. Things that seem small irritations during the day can assume giant proportions in the middle of the night, only to dissipate with the beep of the alarm clock.

Experts talk of sleep hygiene. Go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every day. The latter is easy, I'm usually up and about by 6.30am having been gently awoken by my sunrise wake-up light. Going to bed at a set time is difficult with a husband who works shifts and doesn't get home until after midnight. Sometimes I can go to sleep before he comes home; sometimes I can't.

The flip side of late shifts is the earlies and it's difficult to fall back asleep when you've been awoken at 5.30am by a symphony of alarms accompanied by angry percussion from your nearest and dearest. He also has the habit of going back to sleep or forgetting to set either of his two alarms the night before. Both of these put me on red alert. I've saved him from being late for work on more than a couple of occasions now.

This leads me to the next problem; the clock in my head. It knows Brian needs to wake up at 5.30 for an early shift, so it wakes me up at 5.25am just to make sure he does.

I can shock myself back into sleeping by making myself stay up until 3am. This breaks the cycle, especially if my brain has set its internal alarm to 4.35am which it has this week. Why 4.35am? Who knows. It used to be 3.03am. Exactly. Every. Single. Night. But shock tactics are tiring and not conducive to a happy time the day after.

Not sleeping at night can turn into sleeping during the day. I have a lull at about 4pm which can turn into sleeping at 4pm if I'm not careful. I once woke up in the armchair, tucked in with a blanket and cushions. My children, preferring sleeping mummy to grumpy tired mummy, had taken the law into their own hands.

Hmm. So it will be Horlicks last thing. A wee dram is a good thing too but the cupboard is bare of such treats at the moment (austerity cuts!) Then off to bed at a sensible time with Radio 4 and a Book at Bedtime. If I see 4.35am again I may be a little cross with it.

Scenes from a long run #3

2011-12-04T18:22:00.001Z

Plenty of water around today. On my favourite nine mile route the road crosses many little streams and rivers. At this time of year they gush off the hills with musical enthusiasm.

The water is in such a hurry to get to lower ground.

How ancient is this stone bridge I wonder? This is a drovers' route and I imagine they needed this little bridge to cross this stream before the road was built.

How to make a marzipan pony

2011-12-04T08:41:00.001Z

My youngest daughter always asks for a pony-shaped chocolate birthday cake. This year I decided that a simpler option would be to make a chocolate cake and sit a pony on top of it.

I don't like fondant - it's completely inedible - and at least marzipan has almonds in it. So this was the solution I came up with for my marzipan-loving pony-mad eight-year-old.

A quick Google search brought up this charming YouTube tutorial and my efforts in marzipan are pictured above. I coloured the chocolate marzipan by kneading it in cocoa powder until the desired colour was achieved. For other colours use paste food colours as the liquid type make the marzipan too wet to model. I stuck to a two tone au naturel palette.

The ponies were a huge hit and I sat them on a chocolate cake (basic choccy sponge recipe) on a bed of custard-based buttercream (less sugary than the icing sugar sort) fenced in with chocolate fingers.

St Fagans

2011-11-28T19:23:00.001Z

On Sunday we went to the National History Museum at St Fagans, near Cardiff for our annual family Christmas present swap. This has become a habit in recent years; Brian's sister and her partner always fly off somewhere hot for Christmas so the present swap and get together has to happen in advance.

St Fagans is about half way between them and us, in fact it's half way to so many places we go to that we often use it as a stopping off point on journeys east (instead of the motorway services which are expensive and soul-destroying). Here you just pay £3.50 to park and the museum is yours to explore.

We generally wander around houses and indoor displays according to the weather, in between scoffing a roast dinner in the Vale Restaurant (of locally produced meat) and topping up our caffeine levels in cafe Bardi.

This is Kennixton, a typcial Gower farmhouse. The glorious red colour was thought to protect against evil spirits.

I love the shape of Kennixton's roof trusses.

These lovely bronze turkeys were in the farm yard. The farm is the only original building at St Fagans, the others - and there are more than 40 - were painstaking moved there stone by stone.

Who would eat this handsome chap? I wouldn't! We'll be having chicken so he's safe from us (but I suspect he's destined for the restaurant).

The mill was grinding wheat after lunch. H9, R7 and grandmother are waiting for the flour to arrive down at the bottom of the watermill from the stone above. St Fagans is very much a living museum and you can buy the produce from the craftsmen who demonstrate their skills.

The resulting flour ready to be bagged and sold in the gift shop.

So many traditional Welsh cottages were thatched - but there's only one left in Pembrokeshire which is Penrhos, near Maenclochog. Like this one at St Fagans it was a ty unnos, a house built in one night. If you could build a house in one night on common land, you owned the freehold of that land. Tai unnos are single storey and have tiny windows.

The cottages have their own productive gardens.

There's also a Celtic village with a collection of roundhouses to give a taste of Iron Age life in Wales. We warmed ourselves by the fire in the comforting gloom of the biggest roundhouse and emerged smelling like kippers.

Scenes from a long run day #2

2011-11-26T18:16:00.001Z

Today's route is my absolute favourite - over the cattle grid and along the feet of the Preselis. The pictures are taken with my mobile phone, so excuse the quality. Today's conditions were grey and windy but there was good visibility right along the hill range.

Carn Bica with a lone walker (one third down on the right. I could see him/her anyway!)

No sheep for company today. I've chased hundreds along here in the past. They always run on ahead assuming I'm rounding them up.

On the main road, once I've run through a corner of Mynachlogddu. These signs are sprouting at the end of farm lanes. I need one too. The scrap dealers call and ask for "the boss" meaning a man. They ask for scrap while surveying your farmyard with greedy eyes. If you're not in they help themselves if they think they can get away with it. Parasites.

Hmm

2011-11-23T19:13:00.001Z

I had a nice blog post lined up about all the lovely things I have been making recently for Christmas presents, complete with pictures and everything.

Then I realised that bunging the aforementioned on the blog would rather defeat the element of surprise should any of the recipients happen to read it.

Ah.

You see Christmas this year is rather on the home made side on account of us being cash poor since the cars ate our savings. This left us being in the position of being skint but with access to raw materials. Recipients of home made things have been complimentary in the past (more fool them!) so I've been preserving, sewing and generally crafting my little cotton socks off for the past few weeks.

Even H9 and R7(nearly 8) have requested home made items, as has mum. Others are having them sprung upon them, not that our gift giving list is that huge (fortunately).

Santa examines R7's list

There is one small cloud on the horizon, however. The offspring have sent their letters to Santa by the medium of smoke and R7 is confident that Santa will be able to get her a Nintendo 3DS and Mario 3D game to go with it because (I quote): "Santa makes all of his presents so he doesn't need money to buy them".

Hmm.

I gently explained that even Santa has to get his Nintendo 3DS from Nintendo and that Santa is strapped for cash this year too on account of the global economic situation. I would have gone on to explain the about the crisis in Europe and the plight of the Euro but her eyes had glazed over.

"You won't be disappointed if he doesn't bring you one?" I asked (gingerly).

"Oh no," said R7. "But he DOES make them so you never know..." (Exit R7 stage left with a confident skip.)

Hmm.

Good things

2011-11-22T09:34:00.001Z

As it's the dark and dismal days of November I thought I'd share with you some of the things I think are useful and good (and you never know, they might make nice presents). NB: This is not a sponsored or paid for post, these are just things I own, like and recommend.

Ten minute solution ultimate kettlebell

I have a few of the Ten minute solution DVDs and they are all good but this is the one I use the most because it's fun and it gets results fast. I tend to be a bit half-arsed about using fitness DVDs - mainly because they take ages to get results. Kettlebells are like nothing I've ever tried before. Because of my back injury and post-natal diastasis I can't do sit-ups but I can do Turkish curls with a kettlebell and I've now got abs for the first time. Kettlebell work outs make you strong quickly. You'll notice the results within a month - if you do use the thing (but only two 10 minute workouts, three times a week). I rarely do the recommended hour per week (as I said, I'm a bit hit and miss) but the results are still obvious. I do more if I can't run for any reason (if it's snowing, for example).

Kettlebell

Metal kettlebells are smaller and easier to hold. Vinyl ones tend to be bigger, full of rattly bits (annoying) and the handles are too fat and slippery. I use a 1kg dumbell and this 5kg kettlebell. I'd probably get a lighter kettlebell too if I could afford it, perhaps 2.5kg. Some of the over the head exercises are a bit too challenging with a 5kg bell (at first). If you want a stronger core, get a kettlebell and swing it. See Kettleworx for inspiration.

R and B hair moisturiser

This is from Lush. I chuck a big handful of this onto wet hair and it turns straw into silk. It smells divine (orange flower and jasmine) too.

I'm a big fan of Lush - their solid deodorants are good too and I love the It's raining men shower gel. I'm not such a big fan of the pushy sales people in the shops though. I like to be left alone to make my own decisions.

River Cottage Everyday and Veg Everyday

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Everyday is well-named as I use it almost every day. It's full of simple, tasty ideas for breakfasts, lunches, dinners and treats. My children like to cook from it too.

We often make the apple and almond pudding cake and the ten miniute chocolate chip cookies (to which I add 75g dessciated coconut and 75g porridge oats and cook like flapjacks). We've got into a Sunday morning drop scones habit and there are some good fish ideas and some excellent soups. I tend to dip into it for inspiration and then adapt recipes according to what I have got in the fridge.

Veg Everyday is the newer one of the two and full of lovely ideas for making veg the star of the meal. As a family of fussy meat-eaters this is a godsend for good non-meat ideas.

So far we've tried and enjoyed Raid-the-larder bean and spelt broth; pasta with greens, garlic and chilli; vegetable biriyani; curried sweet potato soup; Brussels sprouts, apple and cheddar salad and the Kale speltotto (but made with pearl barley). The biriyani was the biggest hit so far.

The humiliation of the school PE lesson

2011-11-21T08:35:00.001Z

There's an interesting article on the BBC website today by Dr Andrew Franklin-Miller about the 'Missed Olympic opportunity' to get children exercising.

Dr Franklin-Miller, an expert in sport and exercise medicine says: "Teachers and parents need support with training and a curriculum that builds on the lessons learnt in athlete development, and sport talent identification, not to build potential superstars but to change a lifestyle."

Children are fat and don't exercise enough, we are constantly told, and the finger of blame is variously pointed at parents, schools, junk food manufacturers, the government and computer games.

I'm not sure who is to blame (probably all of the above and more) but I agree with Dr Franklin-Miller that PE is not properly taught at schools. The focus seems to be on achievement of certain skills, not how to be fit. Where are the lessons, at the beginning of term, that suss out who is fit enough to run a cross country race and who needs a bit of training first? Just telling a class of kids to run a mile long cross country course serves only to establish who is already fit and put right off those who are not. Everyone is different - some can sprint, others better at endurance. (Just because a girl is tall doesn't mean she can throw a shot putt or discus Mrs Richards, she might prefer - and be better at - running.)

I would hope PE has changed since I was at school. I remember being terrified of my first cross country run. There had been talk about people fainting and coughing up blood (you know how dramatic kids can be!) There was no training in how to do it nor any preparation like running shorter bits first. There seemed to be the basic assumption that children were fit and able to do it and had been born with the knowledge of how to do it. No wonder so many people grow up hating running, particularly of the cross country variety. (Although I loved cross country running there was no way I would have admitted it at school. I wasn't considered a 'runner' then and I wouldn't have put myself forward for the school team. I just have the satisfaction of knowing that the last time I ran cross country at school I came back first.)

Perhaps schools should take a look at the resurgence of running among women in their 40s and older. This has been encouraged by the Race for Life series, non-competitive 5k runs raising money for Cancer Research. I and so many other women like me started off that way. We read Running made easy by Susie Whalley and Lisa Jackson and followed their six week plan to go from walking to running for 20 minutes. (This is probably the most inspirational book I had read - the fact I have now run three half marathons is testament to its efficacy!) It breaks training down into achievable bite-sized chunks, makes it fun and tops it with a liberal sprinkling of motivation and inspiration. At the end (presuming you do the 5k Race for Life) you get a goodie bag and a medal. It's fun, it's addictive and its contagious.

Back to school days though and the weekly popularity contest of netball or hockey team selection (chosen in order from prettiest to fattest and lamest) and the humiliation of the changing rooms and showers. Why was it vital for a fully clothed female teacher to stand in front of the showers and take a register of who was showering and who was not? If you couldn't shower you had to shout across the changing rooms that you had your period. That was in addition to the naked scrutiny of your peers. Who wants to be unclothed in front of bitches and bullies? You had to have a thick skin and a lot of body confidence to survive that unscathed.

I look at my own children and wonder if they are to be put off sport at school as I was. Not yet, but then they are at primary school in Wales where sport is the second religion. I suspect the rot might set in at of secondary school so I plan to teach them what I have learned about being fit first. They are both rather envious of my running medals and have ambitions to get their own. That, funnily enough, has been the plan all along.

Long run day

2011-11-20T12:48:00.001Z

I always have my mobile phone with me on my runs and I thought I'd share some of the things I see as I'm plodding around the roads.

Today's run was just six and a half miles. This is an easy week in my Smartcoach running plan designed, I think, to give tired muscles a rest.

I took these at the top of the long straight upward slope, past Elizabeth Haines' gallery, before I turned right to continue my clockwise circuit past the forestry. There's nothing but sheep and fields between this road and the top of the Preselis and it has lovely sweeping views of the hills on a clear day. Today though, the hills had stayed in bed.

Who's pinched Foel Cwmcerwyn then?

I'm sure the road must have gone straight on here in days gone by (before tarmac). My mobile isn't so good at showing it but this gate has a twin along a pretty much straight green lane. It's a footpath and theoretically goes up on to the hill but I've never walked it.

Spoilt for choice

2011-11-19T15:39:00.001Z

There were Christmas craft fairs everywhere today. We went to the one at Colby Woodland Gardens which gave us free entry and Claire of Cake Carousel was there with her delicious cupcakes which H9 and R7 are quite fond of sampling.

But we could have gone to two in Narberth - one foodie one vintage - or one at the Steiner School or another at the hall in Clynderwen.

Colby though is one we've been to before and after you've perused the stalls you can wander the pretty walled garden.

The fuchsias are still in full bloom, despite the fact it's only five weeks to Christmas.

The rill looks pretty all year round. The octagonal house at the top hasn't been open to the public before this year and all we've done previously is peer in through the windows.

Now though, they let you inside. It's a real sun trap and has clever trompe l'oeil pictures on the wall. You can hire it now for fully catered functions. I just have to work out some sort of a function I might need fully catering. It would be lovely here.

H9 and R7 had raspberry and white chocolate cupcakes and then bought bug catching pots from the National Trust shop. I bought beads and other sparkly bits and bobs for Christmas decorations from Carole at Begelly Beads. All the while the sun shone and it felt more like March than November.

In defence of food

2011-11-18T08:15:00.001Z

Yum. Food (she says sounding like Homer Simpson). I love food so much I carry it as a spare tyre around my middle. Just the one though, since I'm now back at the weight I've always been. I'm the same now as I was when I was 20 and I wanted to lose that extra bit then too.

I've been reading Jane's blog posts about dropping four stone (not four actual stones, 56lb) and it reminded me of Michael Pollan's rules in his book In Defence of Food.

I read it and then gave up dieting (apart from a brief and foolish foray in to the Dukan diet which was awful. I just don't like meat enough to do that one). Pollan says (on an ad for the book I clipped from a magazine and stuck to my fridge):

FORGET THE DIET AND FALL IN LOVE WITH FOOD AGAIN

The ad also conveniently lists his The Rules of the Real Food Revolution. My comments in italics:

1. Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food. Quorn, for example. What the heck is Quorn anyway? Ugh.

2. Eat a wide diversity of species. Pizza is NOT a species. Don't eat anything that's on the 'at risk of extinction' list though.

3. Pay more, eat less. This absolutely applies to ALL types of meat. Eat good meat or none at all. Free range chicken is more expensive but it's worth it.

4. Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce. I don't think this means avoiding Szechuan pepper and chorizo. It means things like butylated hydroxytoluene.

5. Shop at the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle. The cakes, chocolate and junk are in the middle. Run in, grab some Green and Black's 85% plain chocolate, run back out to the vegetables, pulses and nuts.

6. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. This means the likes of Twinkies. Sugar doesn't rot (except your teeth). Honey doesn't rot either but I think that's an exception to the rule (in my world). Does chocolate rot? I've never managed to keep it long enough to find out...

7. Avoid food products that carry health claims. I can't think of any examples - slimming tea? In the UK this sort of thing is quite strictly regulated. I assume it doesn't include blueberries and other such fruit although I'm deeply suspicious of goji berries...

8. Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does. Or, in other words, you don't need chocolate just because the car needs petrol and sandwiches from that sort of a place are just plain wrong.

Grow your own if you can. This year's winter salads (half of them) pictured today.

9. Cook and, if you can, grow some of your own food. Cook from scratch. Cheap, easy, more delicious. Home made doesn't require additives to keep it 'fresh'. If you've made it you know what's in it (and you've only got yourself to blame!)

10. Eat meals only at tables, with other people and always with pleasure. The BEST bit. Families that eat together stay together. The table in front of the TV doesn't count (except on Saturdays with home made pizza and the X Factor - or is that just us?!)

Sound advice from Mr Pollan. Eat good food, not rubbish. Simple. (Oh and move more - run! - but that's a whole other blog post.)

Reflections on duty

2011-11-17T09:31:00.001Z

Should you, as a parent, force your child to do something they don't want to do? H9 has a thing this weekend which basically involves singing a song in a group of children to entertain adults at a meeting.

She doesn't want to go.

"It will be boring," she says.

Well perhaps it will, perhaps it won't but should she give up her Sunday afternoon for it? We had a similar dilemma over Remembrance Sunday. We bought poppies and she went (in torrential rain) with the school to the village war memorial on the 11th and on Sunday could have gone to a service with her Brownies pack.

But she has a father who works every other weekend and does shifts during the week so they spend time together when they can. For the past two years their Sunday swimming treat has coincided with Remembrance Sunday and she's gone swimming instead. Should we feel guilty?

I try not to. Perhaps life sometimes is set up for those who work nine to five on weekdays and have every weekend free. Perhaps it's set up for people who don't have a longish commute and who don't work night shifts which mean that for half of each month they don't get to say goodnight to their children.

Sometimes we have to do what is best for us so I don't plan to force H9 to go and sing on Sunday if she doesn't want to. Then I'm going to do my very best not to feel guilty about it.

The ridiculous and the sublime

2011-11-15T13:34:00.001Z

I found something in the River Cottage Bread book that I didn't like. Vetkoek (pronounced 'fet cook' meaning fat cake in Afrikaans) are basically deep fried bread rolls. Nothing fancy about the dough, just fried not baked.

I hate deep frying - it makes your house, clothes and hair smell like a chippy - but I was willing to try in the name of the Big Bread Bakeathon.

Fresh out of the pan they were almost acceptable - crispy on the outside, soft bread within.

Vetkoek. Hot, crispy, glistening with vet.

Two minutes later, once they were cool enough to eat, they had the taste and consistency of a squash ball. I cooked seven and we all tried one each (with three spare for the hens). I used the rest of the dough to make some very nice white rolls. Never again. The vetkoek were odd, like a tasteless doughnut, and as chewy as a car tyre. There are doughnuts and churros later in the book and for them I will have to contrive some method of cooking that does not require hot oil.

Next in the book was Flatbread, a Turkish bread a little like pitta made with yoghurt in the dough and cooked in a dry pan and then under the grill.

They were divine. We tried the first hot from the pan sprinkled with cheddar cheese and the rest (seen here) we ate with a Moroccan-inspired veggie stew the following day having kept the dough overnight in the fridge (which, if anything, made it taste even better). These were soft pillowy breads with a useful pocket like a pitta but fluffy like a naan. They are really intended to be eaten with taramsalata and hummus and I can see me making more of these in the future.

Next should be pizza, which I make most Saturdays (so that one is done) and then barbecue breads. I thought about barbecuing in November and postponed that one to next summer. Instead it's full speed into the Bread Made with Wild yeast chapter and sourdough.

Half term sucked

2011-11-03T12:54:00.000Z

I was looking forward to half term. A rest from making packed lunches at 6.30am, a rest from "where on earth are all the school socks?" and a rest from the school run, fraught with "have you got your lunch/clarinet/sports kit/my marbles?" angst. Instead we would do fun things and go on nice autumnal trips wouldn't we?

No.

On day one H9 was sick. On day three R7 was scratching her scalp. On investigation I found some rather grown up head lice and many, many babies. ~~Bugger~~. Oops.We haven't had head lice for ages (years) but I constantly check because there's the threat you will be asked to remove your child from school should they be found to be infested. The week I ran the Cardiff half marathon I forgot to check. ~~Bugger~~. Oops.

They're all dead now (not the children, the head lice) but I'm paranoid they'll come back. I chase, brandishing comb, while my offspring run away shrieking "no mummy I have NOT got head lice," with me in hot pursuit (and gaining because I can still outrun my children...ha ha) wailing "but that's what you said last time and you DID!"

Meanwhile it rained. Biblically. Everywhere is ankle deep in slippery mud. The small dog goes out, absorbs it all in his wiry fur and shakes it all over the kitchen floor. Then he wipes his face on the dining room carpet drawing big muddy stripes. The carpet is Scotchguarded but I'm not sure this sort of treatment is entirely good for it. Perhaps I should put down canvasses and sell the results as canine art?

This Monday it was a school inset day (and payday - yippee!) so we went to Tesco. When we arrived the CR-V was doing an excellent impression of being on fire. I sniffed at the smoke - it was steam. A broken radiator. I left it simmering while we shopped and it calmed down enough to be topped up with coolant and driven home. Another ~~bloody~~ big bill. Sigh.

What can a woman do in the face of such (relatively minor really) adversity? Bake, that's what.

What we have here is brioche (bread bakeathon #15), Halloween cupcakes, bagels (bread bakeathon #16), naan bread (so easy to make and heaps cheaper than bought) and green tomato chutney.

Bread bakeathon #14 and sheep

2011-10-27T21:25:00.000+01:00

The next instalment in the River Cottage Bread book bakeathon is bread sticks. This is a dough similar to focaccia but is a simple enough thing. Mix it together, leave to rise, go for a five mile run, return (wearing the contents of a puddle courtesy of a Land Rover), roll out the dough, cut into strips, spread with oil, sprinkle with seeds, rise for a bit and then bake. They are shepherd's crook shapes because as you lift the strips of dough they stretch and become too long for the tin. I quite like the shape.

We ate them with what I call 'Trail soup'. It's a vegetable soup based on a recipe that I originally read in 'Trail' magazine, hence the name. Chop two carrots, a slice of swede, a leek, onion, garlic and a potato into smallish cubes and leave to sweat in a tablespoon of olive oil with a teaspoon of butter added. Then wash the horrid sauce off a can of baked beans and add those along with some stock or water and maybe some green leafy bits like Savoy cabbage or cavelo nero and a chopped tomato. Add a handful or two of tiny soup pasta shapes and cook until everything is soft. Adjust for seasoning and serve with grated Cheddar cheese and bread sticks. A bit of pesto is lovely stirred into the soup too. Next bread: Brioche.

This afternoon's task was to sort the sheep. They've been quietly eating grass in the fields over the summer and now we need to sort the ewes from the lambs, check the ewe's teeth (if they've got no teeth they can't eat enough to rear lambs so they have to go). The ones we are keeping also get a dose of worming medicine at this time of year. We're organic but this has the blessing of the Soil Association.

In the race they go, two or three at a time. We check they've got ear tags and replace any as necessary. The rules on ear tags change annually. A year or so ago they had to be tagged in each ear as lambs. Now it's one tag but they're plastic and are a ~~real bugger~~ very difficult to insert in the ears. Ewes and ewe lamb replacements are drafted through the gate to the left; lambs for meat and cull ewes go to the right.

Toby the cat is there purely in a supervisory capacity. He chose the wrong place to sit as shortly after I took this picture he was bounced on by a siily lamb. After that he supervised from inside the building.

A purple dot of marker spray shows that this ewe lamb is being kept and will go on to have lambs of her own. The dot also means we can tell the two groups apart which is lucky because when we thought we had finished and were herding the ewes out to the field again the lambs made a break for freedom and the whole flock got mixed up again.

I'm afraid I may have lost my temper a little (a lot!) at this point. We managed to herd them back into the yard, with a bit of shouting and chasing (there's always a stubborn one. I chased it, furiously. It being temperamental, stupid and intractable, flattened mum into a pile of sheep poo before we rounded it up. I hate sheep.) I redrafted the dots from the non dots, then we tied the gates really tightly this time and now (phew!) the ewes are on the hayfields, the cull ewes and lambs for fattening are on the field by the house and the ram and the pet sheep Chops are (noisily) in one of the little paddocks.

Bread bakeathon #13 and winter planting

2011-10-26T17:51:00.000+01:00

The next bread from my recipe-by-recipe bake through of the River Cottage Bread Book was ciabatta. It's a bit of a palaver to make but the results are well worth it.

It's a really wet dough involving a mix of flour and semolina and you ferment it for three hours. Every half an hour or so you add a slug of olive oil and fold the dough up, lovingly, like a big soft blanket. This gives you a silky soft dough which is pretty impossible to handle. The only way to deal with it is with prodigious quantities of semolina to stop it sticking to your hands, the work surface and the dog. Daniel Stevens talks of bake stones, linen cloths and the like but when I tried that last time I lost all of the air from the dough transferring it between them. This time I proved it on the tins and it was more successful.

The result is six lovely little loaves, delightfully crispy on the outside and pillowy soft within. We ate the first ones hot from the oven, torn open, drizzled with a little olive oil and stuffed with grated mature cheddar and sliced home grown cucumber. The next meal we had them sliced into fat fingers, dipped into extra virgin olive oil and then into home made dukka. Divine. If I wasn't baking my way through this book recipe by recipe I'd make more ciabatta but I have an agenda and next on it is breadsticks.

The Delfland Nurseries Organic winter plants arrived on Tuesday all neatly snuggled into two brown cardboard boxes. They consisted of the winter vegetable selection (nine star broccoli, spring cabbages Duncan and spring hero, calabrese pacifica, perpetual spinach, bright lights chard, giant red mustard) and the winter salad selection (winter purslane, corn salad, land cress, lettuces winter density and Arctic King and wild rocket). Today with children out and husband working late I dodged biblical rain and headed into the polytunnel for a planting session.

After a bit of determined dibbing we now have neat rows of winter food - brassicas at the back, little salads at the front - all lined up like soldiers in the new big polytunnel and ready for the worst winter can throw at it. A polytunnel is quite coddling for some of these varieties but past experience has taught me that they hate the wet we get here no matter how good they are at surviving the cold.

My mini cucumbers are still going strong - astonishingly considering it's almost November - I think they like the new polytunnel too.

Guilty cake, bread bakeathon #12 and a lovely thing

2011-10-22T08:59:00.000+01:00

This is carrot cake but it's also a guilty cake too. I made it yesterday after a particularly shouty morning before the school run. Brian's been on early shifts this week (why can't criminals stick to 9-5? Then he could work normal hours...) which left me outnumbered. On Friday after a shower interrupted by BANG, BANG, BANG on the door and MUMMMEEEE and then getting dressed which involved the door being slammed back on its hinges so the other one could go MUMMMEEEEE at me, starkers, and complain about the previous one I got, shall we say, a little stressed.

It ended with the eldest saying "calm down Mummy" in an irritating Michael Winneresque way (is anything guaranteed to have the opposite effect to calming?) But we made friends, I took them to school, then I made cake.

It's a honey-soaked carrot cake from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Everyday and I've just had a great big slice of it for Saturday breakfast. Breakfast is the best time of day to eat cake. Your appetite is unblunted by previous meals and you've got the rest of the day to use up the calories and there's not much difference between cake and toast and marmalade, except this particular cake's got nearly a pound of carrots in it which makes it one of your five a day.

While the cake was baking and as it was a chilly day which makes it a good idea to have the oven on (since turning on the oil-fired heating is Banned) I made the next instalment in my Big Bread Bakeathon. This is focaccia from the River Cottage bread book and is something I make regularly because it's so lovely with a bowl of veggie soup. I'm not sure mine would come up to Paul Hollywood's exacting standards on The Great British Bakeoff but it's delicious and is a big family favourite. We ate it with roast butternut squash soup which is, basically, autumn in a bowl.

While I was baking the postman arrived with an unexpected parcel. Inside it was a 'Peter's Seedling Pot Maker'. You use the top punch part to wrap newspaper around and then press it into the die part with a little water which fixes the base of the pot. This is perfect for seedlings as you can plant them out in the pot (which then degrades) without disturbing the roots and checking the growth.

The lovely thing about it is that it was made by my Dad who has taken to woodturning at his new home on Mull and the even lovelier thing is that the top part is made from wood from a tree that grew here on our little farm on the Preselis. Paper potmaking can now be a nice indoor winter activity for me ready for the spring sowings. In the meantime it is sitting in pride of place on the mantelpiece.

Gardening, swearing and sewing

2011-10-21T11:05:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we grabbed the bit of sunshine and used it to help us finally finish tensioning the polytunnel. This was achieved with much swearing. I now know (having watched that wonderful bit on Fry's Plant Word where Stephen Fry and Brian Blessed swore like TV chefs while inflicting pain on themselves) that, when one has hit ones thumb with a hammer (again and again) saying f@ck and b@ll@cks helps with the pain.

Anyway we achieved our objective, the far right hand corner of the tunnel no longer flaps so I'll stop nagging Brian about it anxiously when the wind blows. I cleared out the tomatoes too, made the happy discovery of a tennis ball-sized butternut squash and started getting ready for a delivery of winter plants from Delfland Nurseries. I had intended to grow my own winter plants but we were delayed so long by the weather that everything backed up (and suddenly it's October!)

I've also got my leeks tucked up for the winter under a nice thick mulch. Note the handsome chaps in the background? Those are the cockerels. We keep squeezing them in the hope that there might be some meat on them and then using the fact that there isn't to put off the inevitable. When the four of them are in full voice at the crack of doom, it's quite a racket, but a cute racket that I quite like. (I CAN'T keep four cockerels, I really can't!)

I've also been turning an old pair of Ikea curtains into cushions; a housewarming one for Dad and Pat, a cupcake one for R7 and a horsey hearts one for H9. I was inspecting the remaining pieces of material recently (the tab top and hemmed bottom) and wondered, if I sewed them together again, they would fit the dining room window. They did.

I used a piece of scarlet ribbon to hide the join, bordered by gingham ribbon from eBay and finally edged one side of the panel with some lovely pom-pom trim I bought from Nellie Dean at the recent craft fair in Maenclochog. The result? One re-purposed curtain for less than £10 (and plenty of spare bits of ribbon and pom-pom trim for other things.)

Bread Bakeathon #9, #10 and #11

2011-10-19T08:26:00.000+01:00

This blog should be sub-titled 'end of the second chapter of the River Cottage Bread Book'. I've baked the Basic Loaf and now I have baked everything in the Variations on the basic bread recipe chapter.

The final three included monstery bread (heavy with oats) and hazel maizel bread, a lovely concoction involving maize meal, apple juice and nuts which made for lovely crusty brown rolls - both of which I forgot to photograph (but they just looked like brown rolls).

The last bread in the chapter was Empty-the-shelf bread, the opportunity to use up tail-ends of whatever bags of flour are to hand and anything else that might be leftover, like nuts or muesli (but Daniel Stevens advises against empty-the-Hoover-bag bread...)

My Empty-the-shelf bread included maize meal and apple juice from the previous bread, a handful of wholemeal flour, white flour, a handful of porridge oats, walnuts and sesame, pumpkin and sunflower seeds with a bit of walnut oil for luck.

I was bored with rolls by this point (and had been watching Lorraine Pascale's Home Cooking Made Easy on BBC2) so when it came to shaping we got a pain d'epi (at the front) and a fougasse. The latter is a lovely shape for tearing and sharing with a bowl of soup and is a shape I think I'll be making a lot in the future. It bakes well too and gives lots of lovely crust.

So having baked all the basics (and I think my bread has improved in the process) we now head off into the realms of 'Beyond the basic loaf'. This promises such delights as focaccia, ciabatta, brioche, bagels, muffins and pizza, all of which I have cooked before, but also includes Vetkoek (which are deep fried. I NEVER deep fry!) and barbecue breads at not really a barbecuing time of year. This should be interesting!

Cardiff Half Marathon

2011-10-17T11:28:00.000+01:00

Running hurts. Have I mentioned that before? Sometimes I can't think why I do it but, like any true addict, I can't stop. Some days you feel you could run everywhere at high speed. Why walk? It's so slow! Other days running feels impossible. Too much effort! Too painful! When you get out of bed and pull on your trainers you never know what sort of a day it is. Yesterday was one of those 'running is hard' days which was a shame as it was also Cardiff Half Marathon.

The Doctor wasn't in.

My running legs didn't turn up for this year's race. At some points I felt I was running on the spot as people streamed past me. At mile seven, plodding along a four mile section of scorching dual carriageway, I was going so slowly I was able to dig out my phone and send Brian a text saying "too hot!". What I actually wanted to text was "HELP!!!!!!" or "call me a taxi!"

But I'm no quitter so I abandoned my plans for a PB of around two hours and 15 minutes and aimed just to complete. I had a low moment when the 2:15 pacer just ran away leaving me running on the spot (at least that's what it felt like!) but then Brian, H9 and R7 were there on the side cheering and yelling "only 500 metres to go!" and I managed to resist asking for a piggy back to the finish line.

My time was two hours, 25 minutes and ten seconds. It's easy to lose ten minutes on a half marathon looking at the view, eating jelly babies, drinking water and stepping over those who had collapsed, fainted, vomited or pulled something (so many this year). It wasn't my fastest ever time, but not my slowest either and I'll be back next year to have another go at the 2:15 mark.

Mrs Relievedtohavefinished wearing medal and hideously unflattering huge t-shirt.

Afterwards I was virtually immobile, tearful and in quite a bit of pain. Running half marathons HURTS! Next year (yes, of course I'm doing it again next year) I plan to start my training earlier (you see I really wasn't going to do it this year so I'd got a bit lazy in my running). Having discovered what to do to avoid back pain I find I now need to find what to do to avoid ankle pain.

I ran this year to also raise money for Birmingham Hospice who cared for Ann (who was like an aunt, but was my cousin-in-law) until her death in August. Ann was one of life's truly lovely people, always there at family weddings and christenings with a big hat and even bigger smile. It was a privilege and and honour to run in the hospice's running vest in memory of Ann. As a member of her wider family there was little we could do when she was so ill but raising money for the hospice was something I could do.

There's still time to sponsor me so anyone who would still like to do so can click the button on the right hand side of this page. Enormous thanks to everyone who has sponsored me so far and helped towards my total of £175 - but I have had other monies pledged so I expect to reach £200. THANK YOU!

Eat dog

2011-10-14T11:59:00.000+01:00

It's Thursday. Brian is at work at HQ patiently recording crimes. I'm at home attempting to balance the household budget. In the drizzle the postman arrives bearing two brown envelopes marked DVLA.

A series of texts follows from Desperate Housewife to Hardworking Husband:

DH: "BOTH cars need taxing. That's really made my day. :-("

HH: "Oh bugger."

DH: "I'll do both now and then at least we'll know where we are."

HH: "Ok x"

DH: "Both cars taxed. Ouch."

HH: "Yes, never mind. Have to pull horns in even further."

DH: "Dehorned. None left to pull in."

HH: "We'll do what we can. x"

DH: "Put dog on eBay?"

HH: "Eat dog x"

DH: "Too smelly."

HH: "Shave, stuff, roast"

DH: "Oven temp for dog?"

HH: "Hot (dog)"

DH: "PICTURE"

HH: "U forgot to shave him x"

DH: "That's why he's finding oven temp too hot! Doh!"

NB: No, we didn't eat him (and never will!) He's not going on eBay either. He loved having his picture taken on the work surface and I did wash the roasting tin afterwards. Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall says in the Radio Times this week that "puppy meat is no worse than a pork chop". Me? I'd rather be vegetarian.

Oh BT, how I loathe you so...

2011-10-06T20:02:00.000+01:00

As soon as I saw the BT Outreach van I knew there was trouble ahead. Four times I drove past the engineer as he frowned over the pole and the wires. He looked a little confused, especially with a bundle of disconnected telephone cables in each hand. Poor dear.

Oh dear.

Sure enough, off went the broadband and phone. This time, as an added twist, when I dialled our number to check the line I got someone else (who had a witty Loyd Grossman voiced answerphone message). I had to laugh.

In the meantime I'm still baking bread from the River Cottage handbook. This is Festival bread, made with spelt flour, cider (lovely), sporting slivers of almonds and studded with apricots.

Rolls seem to be the preferred shape rather than loaves and this bread was sweet, nutty and delicious accompaniment to bowls of vegetable soup and chunks of cheese. Next up is Monastery bread.

The weather has reverted to autumn, as it should be at this time of year and today's wind neatly blew one of the wooden doors on the outbuildings off its hinges. I worry constantly about the new polytunnel and its cover, although it is sheltered by a big fat hedge.

While the sun was out we were invaded by lovely Golden-ringed dragonflies which busied themselves laying eggs in the reeds around the new pond. Mum found one floating on the water and brought the 'dead' dragonfly in for a closer look. She forgot it overnight (we had visitors) then the following morning we retrieved it to take its picture. It was somewhat livelier than the night before and I managed to snatch a few snaps before it had to be let outside again.

Otherwise I'm running, running, running in preparation for the Cardiff Half Marathon. This week I'm out every day which is unusual for me and feels like hard work. Today's run was my eight mile loop which takes me from home, up to the village and past the school, on and on (up and up) to the top road. It's an energy-sapping uphill climb but the views across south Pembrokeshire are well worth it. Back down then past the forestry and round the 90 degree corners, past Holly the collie (who wasn't there today but scared the living daylights out of me yesterday) and, finally with a few short sharp shocks of hills left to bite me, gratefully home.

I've just counted and I have only five more runs before the big day. My race pack has arrived - I'm number 5665 - as has my running vest for Birmingham Hospice (still time to sponsor - see top right of blog). Just over a week to go - I can't wait!

God speeded summer's end

2011-10-02T08:24:00.000+01:00

It seems odd to be sweltering in this sort of heat at the beginning of October. Shorts have been dug out of the back of drawers where they have been hiding since last summer. Floaty cotton dresses have reappeared and even vest-lover R7 has ditched her winter underwear for the first time in 2011.

Yesterday involved a trip to the metropolis that is Carmarthen in search of the perfect school sock. Tender little toes are fussy about such things apparently so a visit to M&S was in order. I also needed to part with a Boots gift voucher, which required a Clinique counter. We accomplished our chores speedily, grabbed a carrier bag full of sandwiches from M&S and headed home in the heat.

It was in my head, as it was so hot, that a picnic would be nice on a big open beach somewhere. We attempted Pendine but it was stuffed to the gills. Nowhere to park unless we were willing to part with three quid and carry our picnic which, being hungry and grumpy, we weren't.

Instead we turned round and went back to Laugharne which has the virtue of being on the way home from Carmarthen while having a nice big shade-providing castle and a famous dead writer. It also has pushchair/toddler friendly paths (so useful in the past), free parking and very good ice cream.

It was lovely and it was cool sitting by the estuary eating our sandwiches and then we walked along the path that Dylan Thomas used to tread on his way to the pub and went to peer into tiny green-painted garage with incredible views that served as his writing hut. This is where he wrote Do not go gentle into that good night (although I don't know how anyone could write anything sitting in front of such a distractingly stunning view. Perhaps it was raining.) Thomas lived in Laugharne with his wife Caitlin and their children Colm, Aeronwy and Lewelyn until he died in 1953 and the couple are buried in St Martin's Churchyard.

We peered from the path into the front door of the seashaken house and then climbed back down the path and scrambled over the breakneck of rocks back to the path along the estuary.

PROLOGUE by Dylan Thomas

This day winding down now

At God speeded summer's end

In the torrent salmon sun,

In my seashaken house

On a breakneck of rocks

Tangled with chirrup and fruit,

Froth, flute, fin, and quill

At a wood's dancing hoof,

By scummed, starfish sands

With their fishwife cross

Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,

Out there, crow black, men

Tackled with clouds, who kneel

To the sunset nets,

Geese nearly in heaven, boys

Stabbing, and herons, and shells

That speak seven seas,

Eternal waters away

From the cities of nine

Days' night whose towers will catch

In the religious wind

Like stalks of tall, dry straw,

At poor peace I sing

To you strangers (though song

Is a burning and crested act,

The fire of birds in

The world's turning wood,

For my sawn, splay sounds),

Out of these seathumbed leaves

That will fly and fall

Like leaves of trees and as soon

Crumble and undie

Into the dogdayed night.

Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,

And the dumb swans drub blue

My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack

This rumpus of shapes

For you to know

How I, a spinning man,

Glory also this star, bird

Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.

Hark: I trumpet the place,

From fish to jumping hill! Look:

I build my bellowing ark

To the best of my love

As the flood begins,

Out of the fountainhead

Of fear, rage red, manalive,

Molten and mountainous to stream

Over the wound asleep

Sheep white hollow farms

To Wales in my arms.

Hoo, there, in castle keep,

You king singsong owls, who moonbeam

The flickering runs and dive

The dingle furred deer dead!

Huloo, on plumbed bryns,

O my ruffled ring dove

In the hooting, nearly dark

With Welsh and reverent rook,

Coo rooing the woods' praise,

Who moons her blue notes from her nest

Down to the curlew herd!

Ho, hullaballoing clan

Agape, with woe

In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!

Heigh, on horseback hill, jack

Whisking hare! who

Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's

Clangour as I hew and smite

(A clash of anvils for my

Hubbub and fiddle, this tune

On a tongued puffball)

But animals thick as thieves

On God's rough tumbling grounds

(Hail to His beasthood).

Beasts who sleep good and thin,

Hist, in hogsback woods! The haystacked

Hollow farms in a throng

Of waters cluck and cling,

And barnroofs cockcrow war!

O kingdom of neighbors, finned

Felled and quilled, flash to my patch

Work art and the moonshine

Drinking Noah of the bay,

With pelt, and scale, and fleece:

Only the drowned deep bells

Of sheep and churches noise

Poor peace as the sun sets

And dark shoals every holy field.

We will ride out alone and then,

Under the stars of Wales,

Cry, Multitudes of arks! Across

The water lidded lands,

Manned with their loves they'll move,

Like wooden islands, hill to hill.

Huloo, my proud dove with a flute!

Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,

Tom tit and Dai mouse!

My ark sings in the sun

At God speeded summer's end

And the flood flowers now.

PICTURE: Paddlers at New Quay by Maggie Christie.

Sun, sea, sand, sausages

2011-09-28T21:22:00.001+01:00

The sun came out as promised so we hit the beach after school.

The sea was cool.

The sand was sculptural.

The sausages were al fresco.

Bread Bakeathon #6 and #7

2011-09-28T08:54:00.000+01:00

I haven't forgotten the Bread Bakeathon, I'm still working my way, recipe by recipe through the River Cottage Bread book.

Number six was a malted and seeded loaf. This uses granary flour and a mix of sunflower, pumpkin, linseed, sesame, poppy and a few fennel seeds both in the dough and as a coating. Packed with seeds, a lovely chewy bread and utterly delicious.

Number seven was breakfast rolls. These are made entirely of wholemeal flour but with the addition of milk as the liquid and butter as the fat in the dough. I used to find wholemeal bread leaden and heavy but (following Daniel Stevens' breadmaking method to the letter) these were soft and light and, yes, perfect for breakfast.

Next: Festival bread.

Diamonds are a girl's best friend

2011-09-26T21:37:00.000+01:00

Today the sun came out and the world sparkled with diamonds.

So I took my new camera out for a play...

A wet Preseli walk and a bit of World War II history

2011-09-19T12:03:00.000+01:00

On Saturday we headed off for a walk on the Preseli Hills with H9's friend G10 and her mum Lins and their dog Topsy. Scamp led the way with an energetic enthusiasm that remained undimmed for the entire walk.

Rain skirts the hills, heading in our direction.

We were chased along the path by heavy showers interspersed with bright sunshine.

Brian had no choice but to head off into the distance hauled along by a small but determined dog.

The rest of us attempted to keep up. Heavy rain forced cameras into bags at this point. Between showers we had views across to the north Pembrokeshire coastline and to Cardigan and beyond. We ate our sandwiches and drank coffee and hot chocolate perched on Bedd Arthur then decided to head back to the cars.

On the short drive from our home to where we parked for the walk I'd been telling H9 and R7 about the aeroplane that crashed onto the Preselis during World War II. I had vague ideas about where the site of the crash was but had never found it. Of course, when I wasn't looking for it, I fell over it in the rain.

The RAF Coastal Command Liberator EV881 crashed on the slopes of Carn Bica on September 19th 1944. We stumbled upon the site just two days before the 67th anniversary of the crash.

Six crewmen were killed but three survived the crash. This memorial was erected at the site by a local aviation group on the 50th anniversary in 1984.

Parts of the melted fuselage can still be seen, 67 years later.

R7, G10 and H9 hurtle back to the car in the wake of Brian and the astonishingly still enthusiastic puppy.

Going back down was a fast process. Meanwhile the sun suddenly reappeared and Lins disappeared with her camera (she was taking some fabulous pictures of the clouds and the view).

This shows the steepness of the side of Carn Bica. The Liberator crash site is at the top of this slope. If the aircraft had been able to fly about 50 feet higher it would have cleared the hill.

Just call me Mrs Furious

2011-09-16T12:59:00.000+01:00

Yesterday morning I was Mrs Furious on the school run. It's all to do with the resurfacing of the road in Maenclochog which seems to need to be done all at once to the maximum inconvenience of everyone.

It was bad enough on Monday when it started. Stop/Go signs at three ends letting you into chaos and mayhem within. On Tuesday at 3pm they planed the road outside school just as the buses and cars turned up to pick up the children. It's not fun walking with a child in each hand past a machine that is ripping up the road surface and throwing it into a lorry. It was intimidatingly noisy too.

On Thursday I dropped my girls off at school, got back into my car and indicated to pull out. A roadworker arrived in a flat bed truck full of tarmac and one of those jiggedy-jiggedy rat-tat-tat-tat things that digs holes in roads. He carefully parked on my driver's side bumper, blocking me in.

When I did my Furious-Mum-On-the-School-Run-in-a-4x4 face he just smirked. In fact I've never seen anyone look so happy and delighted. Then he walked away with an I'm-digging-the-road-so-the-road-is-MINE-ALL-MINE-ahahahahahahah power-crazed swagger. Bastard.

Furious? I was fuming. Luckily the car behind me moved so I was able to reverse back, do a neat seven-point turn and stomp off. Back at home I said "AARRRGGGHHH!" on Facebook to anyone who would listen.

Then I went on a 7.5 mile run. On a gorgeous September day. Under blue sky, with crisp autumnal air. I ran towards the hills which were looking gorgeous with their slopes of purple heather.

I stopped and took this photograph:

The point at which I remembered I don't have to dig roads for a living.

Then I had a bloody good laugh at myself and ran on, smiling like the mad, idiot long-distance running woman that I am.

What's your word?

2011-09-13T22:21:00.000+01:00

What's your word? I ask because I am currently reading Eat, Pray, Love (One Woman's Search for Everything) by Elizabeth Gilbert.

EPL is one of those books - like One Day - which has sold millions and everybody has read. A copy found me and I interrupted Stuart - A Life Backwards because I was so intrigued. (I'm always doing this. I will read Stuart, eventually. I currently have three books started and not finished but I usually do finish them.)

I've just reach the point where Liz is in Rome and Giulio has asked her what her word is.

"Don't you know the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn - what is the word of the street?" Giulio says. He affirms that Rome's word is SEX (Liz uses upper case for the words, so I'll follow suit). He goes on to explain that the Vatican's word is POWER and Liz suggests that the word for New York is ACHIEVE and the one for Los Angeles is SUCCEED.

What was the word in Liz's family when she was growing up? FRUGAL and IRREVERENT.

Then Giulio asks her: "What's your word?"

What a fabulous question! Liz cannot answer (if she could there would not have been a book, I presume.)

Can a single word define a person? I love words, their power is awesome (which is a rubbish word, by the way but it would be a good word for a person - what's your word? AWESOME. I like that but I don't think it's me.)

Of course I put the book down to think what my word would be (I was sitting on the laundry bin in the bathroom assisting my children showering. My role is to adjust the temperamental temperature of the shower and avoid scalding sensitive skin.) At that precise moment my word could have been MOTHER or it could have been EXASPERATED. The two words are inescapably connected but they are too specific.

Would I be a noun or a verb? Sometimes you meet someone and they are so complete that if you cut them in half (you wouldn't, obviously) like a stick of rock they'd have their word running through them in big, pink minty letters. Like ROCKSTAR (Freddie Mercury), POSH BOY (David Cameron) or TOSSER (Tony Blair). The Queen (as opposed to the lead singer of Queen) would be MONARCH. Bankers would all be W... well you get my drift.

My word might be ENIGMATIC. I'm going to try it out for size and see if it fits. Meanwhile, what's your word?

The Big Bread Bakeathon #5: Oaty Wholemeal

These wholemeal rolls were supposed to be rolled in a coating of three different types of oats - pinhead oatmeal, medium oatmeal and oat flakes - which would have meant buying, and then being left with the tail-ends of, three different types of oats. Instead I used rolled oats, linseeds and sesame seeds, which were not strictly correct but made a lovely coating nevertheless. These are my favourite type of rolls; unapologetically wholemeal and crusty with virtuous seeds.

They didn't last long. Their word was: YUMMY!

Next: Malted and seeded loaf.

Anniversary and the Big Bread Bakeathon #4: Spelt

2011-09-05T17:00:00.001+01:00

It's our wedding anniversary today. I'm not one for big, soppy displays of affection (I'm the one who forgets our anniversary, not Brian!) but we did buy this bottle of Glengoyne malt whisky on our honeymoon and we've saved it up to drink a tot of it every year.

The level is dropping a bit, so we must have been married a long time (she says, taking off shoes and socks to help with the sums). Thirteen years this year.

There isn't a traditional UK gift for the 13th wedding anniversary, but the US suggests lace (traditional) or textiles or furs (modern). Hmm. I think I'll stick to the single malt, thanks.

Glengoyne is an unpeated malt. We enjoyed a heady day visiting the distillery sticking our heads into vats of fermenting gorgeousness followed by a tasting. Brian was driving so I (apparently) had everything he was given in addition to my own. I suspect I wore a fixed silly grin for the rest of that day. Strangely my memories are slightly hazy.

Anyway we bought this bottle in the shop at the distillery. I don't remember how much it was but it was a bit of a stretch for two journalists' wages. When we've finished it we'll have to go back and get another one.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, I'm on loaf #4 in my bakeathon, cooking my way through the River Cottage Bread handbook. Spelt is a new one for me, but apparently it's an ancient relative of modern wheat and the Romans used it for their bread.

It worried me slightly as a breakmaker. I don't think I have ever baked a loaf using an entirely different kind of flour own its own.

Daniel Stevens reassures in the recipe's intro that you just have to knead it a bit longer - an extra five minutes - and prove it in baskets or make smaller loaves.

I don't have proving baskets, but worked out that a similar container could be a colander lined with a linen tea cloth, sprinkled liberally with rye flour, so that's what I used.

The result was two round flattish loaves. I assumed they'd be heavy, leaden bricks but the crumb itself is surprisingly light. They have a nice flavour too, like a good wholesome wholemeal. My sternest critics tested it and gave it the verdict of (a somewhat surprised) "yum!" so my fears were unfounded.

I have also been playing with my new DSLR and continuing my annual obsession with taking pictures of the fennel seedheads. This is a single floret. I love the way the individual drops of rain each contain a reflection, upside down, of the rest of the fennel plant, the blue sky and the dark hedge behind. This was cropped and a little bit enhanced using Photoshop Elements which I have for a 30 day trial and am loving. Geek? Moi?

September

2011-09-02T14:55:00.000+01:00

Cosmos Dazzler

So it's the dénouement of the summer holidays. We've ground to a halt after weeks of doing things, seeing friends and going places. H9 and R7 are looking forward to going back to school on Monday. I think they miss the routine, the tick tock of the weeks. I'm not sure we have done everything we planned so a bit of mopping up of things - our aborted trip to Folly Farm is one - must happen between now and ~~Christmas~~ the end of the year.

The haylage has been made. It was mown on Tuesday (by a neighbour with his mower-conditioner so it doesn't need turning or rowing up.) Yesterday afternoon it was baled - 22 big round bales in total, nine in one field, 13 from the other. Last night as the sun set H9, R7 and I took the dogs up to see (I forgot my camera). The sky was a hazy lilac, with the pink of sunset on the horizon. When we got to the field about 200 crows were sitting on the electricity wires chatting amongst themselves. As we approached they flew off cawing chased by the ever hopeful but invariably futile dogs.

This morning Brian brought the haylage bales down one by one then our neighbour came back and wrapped them. As a small farm with just the one rickety tractor it is vital to have helpful neighbours with useful machinery. We have tried contractors but they can't get their monster tractors through our little gateways and I don't think our agri-environmental scheme would look kindly on us if we hauled out centuries old slate gateposts to make way.

The 22 haylage bales are now in a neat orderly row in the field by the house and will be stacked when it is convenient (and not raining!)

The sloes are ripening. It looks like a good crop this year. We have blackthorn in every hedge surrounding every field on our 22 acres so there are always a lot of sloes. I still have about 3lbs in the freezer that I picked last year and couldn't quite afford the gin.

The Gallery: Animals

2011-08-31T22:09:00.000+01:00

She who would like to be obeyed

Life on a farm is rather ruled by animals. There isn't much we can do without thinking of their needs. I can't just go out for the day without making sure the ponies are fed and watered, that the dogs will be okay, the hens are settled and the sheep are in the correct place*.

One thing I don't have much to do with is cats but when The Boss, aka my mum, is away like today (she's at a family funeral that I can't go to because someone's got to stay to look after the animals) I get to look after the three black farm cats and the one house cat, Calico, pictured.

Calico expects a certain level of care and if the Boss is away Calico is disgruntled. She will vanish on day one of the Boss's absence and then reappear in high dudgeon half an hour before the Boss returns. Once she's given the Boss a dose of haughty ignoring she will then make it quite clear she was not treated in the manner to which she has become accustomed and that my care was severely lacking in the caring department.

It's difficult to look after a cat who just isn't there. I rest my case.

So Calico, who for once is indoors while the Boss is away (I don't think she's realised she's not coming back tonight, yet) is the subject of my The Gallery this week. Pop on over to Sticky Fingers and have a look at the others.

* As for sheep, on Monday when we were seal-spotting and ice cream eating the flock left the farm en masse and headed down the drive and onto the road. Mum set off in hot pursuit, leaving the gate open should the sheep discover the error of their ways, only to encounter them coming back up from a neighbouring farm's driveway. Mum executed a neat three point turn, managed not to squash any of the sheep in the process and then herded them home in her little Nissan Micra. Who needs a sheep dog or Quad bike? Actually we do, but in the meantime apparently one woman and her Micra is sufficient.

Birthday, Bank Holiday and the Big Bread Bakeathon #3: White

2011-08-30T09:47:00.000+01:00

It was my birthday on Sunday. I was 45 and I celebrated by going for a nine mile run, which felt mathematically correct. Then I watched the Belgian Grand Prix happily clutching my birthday presents which included lots of lovely books.

I wonder if all Virgos are the same? All I need on my birthday is a gadget (my new secondhand DSLR), books (on gardening, sewing and food), gift cards (Virgos aren't great with surprises - gift cards are very welcome), something pretty (Cath Kidston plates for cake), sport on the TV (always the Belgian GP), chocolate (Thorntons Viennese truffles) and a glass of wine or two. You can keep your noisy parties thanks. Happy day.

Mr and Mrs Common Blue - ahem - having some private time.

The August Bank Holiday Monday is usually on or around my birthday and this time we were in the fortunate position of having a generously sized banknote and the order (courtesy of Brian's mum) to spend it on ice cream. So, in the afternoon, we headed off for a quick seal-spotting walk at Pwllderi (we saw one seal, briefly and some lovely common blue butterflies) followed by ice creams from the van (actually it's a bus) that sits in the Goodwick car park between April and October. This is proper stuff, none of your soft whipped piped swirls, this is scooped yumminess in chocolate-dipped wafer cones. I had mochaccino with toffee fudge, the girls had double toffee fudge and Brian had lemon cheesecake topped with cherry yoghurt.

Mr Common Blue. A handsome chap.

Also on Bank Holiday Monday I made the next bread in the Bread book: White. It is, according to my bread guru Daniel Stevens, far harder to make good white bread than any other kind of bread.

Fortunately I started making white bread longer ago than I can remember and certainly before I knew it to be a tricky thing. This time I made rolls and I followed Daniel's advice to use half and half yoghurt instead of all water. In my head I think it's the additional protein in the yoghurt which makes the bread so fabulous, but I might be wrong. This is the type bread I make most often, but I might sneak in some wholemeal flour and a handful or two of sesame seeds and linseeds. Next: Spelt bread.

Moroccan chicken

2011-08-26T20:05:00.001+01:00

I had one of those times tonight when I knew what I wanted to cook but I hadn't quite got all of the ingredients. What transpired in the kitchen could only be described the Russian roulette of cooking - you don't know if it's going to be a hit or a miss, especially with fussy children to please.

I wanted to make Tana Ramsay's Moroccan chicken with couscous from Family Kitchen or Delia's Moroccan baked chicken with chickpeas and rice from her Winter book. What I needed was peppers, chicken and prunes or olives. What I had was a huge bag of carrots, three chicken breasts and the second half of a bag of wild rocket.

The carrots made me think of Nigella's The Rainbow Room's carrot and peanut salad which is my most favourite of all salads (it's in Forever Summer). So what I ended up making took inspiration from that and the other two recipes.

I sliced one each of red and white onions (recently harvested and currently drying in the polytunnel) and softened them in a pan with a glug of olive oil.

Meanwhile I sliced the chicken breasts and tossed them in Moroccan-style spicings - the end of a jar of Ras el hanout, a tablespoon of toasted and ground cumin seeds and a couple of grinds of black pepper. I added these to the pan with two chopped cloves of garlic (from the poytunnel ditto the onions) and then added three carrots - prepared carrot salad-style which is scrubbed and run through the chips cutter on my food processor (or you could cut them julienne style if you have the patience or are less lazy than I am).

When that lot was browned and softened I added a pint of chicken stock with a good pinch of saffron strands and a sliced lemon (both Delia's idea). Then I put on a lid and left it to simmer slowly until the chicken was cooked. Then I checked the seasoning and added about a tablespoon of honey to taste. It should be salty, sweet and sour.

I piled it into a dish on top of the couscous (prepared in the usual way) and sprinkled over a handful of salty peanuts (back to Nigella's salad idea again) and served the rocket on the side.

It was, for a dish created by a veritable committee of recipes, surprisingly delicious and got the thumbs up. I might in the future, when not catering for H9 who can spot a whiff of heat at a million paces, add a bit of sliced red chilli - I like the hot, sour, sweet, salty spicy combination. A final scattering of chopped fresh coriander wouldn't go amiss either.

The Big Bread Bakeathon #2: Malted Grain Bread

2011-08-25T15:46:00.001+01:00

Recipe number two in the River Cottage Bread book is Malted Grain bread. Daniel Stevens says it is 'like candlelight or a soft-focus lens, it is flattering - the Don Juan of home baking'. Don Juan or not, it did seem to be a well-tempered dough. I had time to rise it twice which improves the flavour. This time I divided the dough into two, one for my new 800g tin, the other to be baked on my trusty paving slab.

We scoffed it fresh from the oven with bowls of homemade spicy lentil soup. It got a resounding thmubs up again, especially for its really tasty crusty crust.

Next: White bread.

The Gallery: World Photography Day

2011-08-24T09:40:00.001+01:00

I haven't taken part in The Gallery for a while - not because I have taken any photographs (I've taken nearly 700 in August alone) but because they have all been specific to things other than the Gallery prompts. But this weekend included World Photography Day so I had to include an entry.

Saturday saw butterflies everywhere in my garden and on the farm. Lots of tortoiseshells, peacocks and red admirals. Butterflies are a frustrating subject to photograph. They're beautiful but elusive. I only have a compact camera with a small zoom so focussing on the ~~buggers~~ butterflies can be a frustrating business. I got this shot though (it took only about 15 attempts!)

Coincidentally on World Photography Day I also got to order my birthday present for next Sunday - a second hand Canon Eos DSLR*. Hopefully photographing the butterflies in my garden will be a less frustrating business from now on.

* There's a story behind this. I regularly used a Canon Eos 35mm camera when I was a reporter to take pictures when the paper's photographer wasn't available. The editor knew I was competent enough to get a good shot. It's quite a thrill to see one of your photographs blown up to fill a broadsheet page or on page one. (I photographed the Queen once and she bought a copy for the Buckingham palace collection). So when I finally saved up for a DSLR I went to the self-proclaimed Canon experts at the camera shop in Carmarthen for advice. The wide boy behind the counter treated me like an imbecile and told me - when I asked about DSLRs - that I could have 'a compact camera for sixty quid'. I felt my Canon Powershot - I always carry it in my handbag - shudder. Offended, I left, and bought my DSLR elsewhere (from a woman).

Carreg Cennen Castle

2011-08-21T09:58:00.001+01:00

We made a visit to 'Wales' most romantic ruin' on Friday - Carreg Cennen Castle, which is just south of Llandeilo. It's a fabulously imposing privately-owned castle perched atop a high rock which is reached by a short but strenuous walk through the owner's farmland. It has a tea shop on the way so we refuelled there first with tea and cream scones.

We had another motive for visiting the castle which was to have a look at these sheep. This is a Balwen Welsh Mountain sheep and is a breed we're considering converting our flock to. We've only got 20 ewes now and I've always felt that it would make more sense to have a pedigree flock. In the past we trialled Llanwenogs but they didn't really suit our terrain. I quite like the idea of having a dark-fleeced breed and Balwen, being originally from Carmarthenshire, are our nearest. I very much like the white-tipped tail, the socks and the blaze on the face. The next step is to find a local breeder and have a chat.

Carreg Cennen is also famous for its Longhorn cattle. When I was farming editor for the local paper I used to see Bernard Llewellyn and his cattle at shows (in fact he used to write a column for me many years ago in the farming paper I edited, Farm & Field).

This little chap has a way to go in the horn growing department.

The castle dates back to at least the 13th century but archaeological evidence has been found both of the Romans and prehistoric man. Despite being a ruin it is still an incredibly imposing structure.

The views from the top are spellbinding. The castle sits at the western end of the Beacons Way long distance path, a 95-mile walk through the Brecon Beacons National Park which ends at the Holy Mountain.

The castle has a natural cave which you can visit by clambering down a steep path. It gets darker and steeper towards the bottom. We chickened out when we ran out of light - you really do need a torch for the cave itself.

Pretty little harebells growing high up on the ruined castle walls tossed their heads in the breeze.

We loved Carreg Cennen Castle. It's been turned into a tourist attraction with the help of Cadw but is unspoilt. We loved the freedom to scramble around and find our way about with occasional help from the unobtrusive information signs. If we didn't know what things were there was a discreet sign ('kitchen above' and 'later musket loop' being two examples). The rest was left to our imagination, which is exactly as it should be.

*********

Back at home and a picture of Itsy to show just how gorgeous she looks in the summer. H9 has been brushing her coat and combing her mane and she's bursting with health at the moment. Here she's naughtily leaning over to steal hay from Bullseye (we wondered why he'd lost so much weight! Oops!). He's now putting weight on his injured leg, thank goodness, and seems to be making a speedy recovery.

The Big Bread Bakeathon

2011-08-19T09:54:00.000+01:00

I was reading the lovely Village Fate blog a few days ago where Kitty announced she was cooking her way through Pam Corbin's River Cottage Cake handbook in a sort of Julie/Julia project. Ah ha! I thought, I'd like to do that too. I don't have a copy of Cake (although I'd dearly love one) so I can't exactly join Kitty but then I do have River Cottage Handbook No. 3, Bread by Dan Stevens. Genius! I'll cook that.

Me and Bread are good friends and I have cooked quite a few recipes from it already but in the interests of this bakeathon I plan to cook all of them, in order, including the vetkoek and doughnuts which require (shudder) deep frying.

Bread is a good book to choose because you have to start it from the beginning. In fact Dan warns you, should you dare to enter the chapter entitled 'Beyond the basic loaf' that if you skipped the 'breadmaking step-by-step' chapter 'you need to go back and unskip it'. Ciabatta mustn't be attempted until you've had a certain amount of practice, he scolds.

So I began with the basic bread recipe that I make regularly, but one slips into sloppy habits so I went back and followed it through, step-by-step. Dan's very detailed about what each stage of the alchemy of breadmaking entails and I have found that if you follow each step exactly, the results are amazing.

The basic recipe gives you options, it's the technique that's all important here. So my options were: Flour - two thirds strong white, one third strong wholemeal; liquid - water; extras - sesame seeds; fat - walnut oil; coating - sesame seeds with a few cumin seeds tossed in for interest.

I baked it on my bakestone (a paving slab from Wickes) and these three loaves were the result.

I made a vegetable soup for dinner and we ate this loaf with it. Delicious.

The next chapter is variations on the basic bread recipe which begins with malted grain bread.

The best laid plans...

2011-08-17T22:30:00.001+01:00

Today we were supposed to go to Folly Farm. We've been planning this for a while, a family visit, with Daddy on his day off from work so we could all go on the Dodgems at the same time and on the flying swings and the carousel and see all the animals (especially the adorable armadillos).

I made sandwiches, packed a flask of coffee and some cartons of juice. Then we drove the few miles and encountered The Queue from Hell at Folly Farm. Ah. I think it was Peppa Pig Day or something. We could see a tsunami of mummies and buggies, angry dads queuing in hot cars with fractious kids in the back seat. The queue to pay to get in was a quarter of a mile long and who knows what it was like inside. We drove past, noting the tailback of traffic to the Begelly roundabout, accompanied by a disappointed silence.

We headed for Carew instead but on the way my homing instinct for Lawrenny kicked in and we found ourselves on the quay again - the second time in two weeks. Brian hadn't done The Walk yet so it seemed a good time to show him the route. We grabbed our sandwiches and dashed out of the car to sit scoffing them overlooking the boats moored at the marina. I pointed out all the boats that looked like Sea Dance and where she used to be moored and Brian, H9 and R7 humoured me (they've heard it all before, but I do like to reminisce).

We headed into the cool woods and on, down into Lawrenny.

The wall by the church is covered with blackberries. R7 and I tested them. The first we've had this year. Then we continued on the walk in unseemly haste...

...and found ourselves in the tearoom.

It was packed (but everyone was outside. We'd already been bothered by a wasp so we stayed indoors in the cool, almost on our own. It wasn't this empty for long.)

G9, R7 and I felt it our duty to tackle the strawberry and raspberry cheesecake. Doesn't it look pretty on its Cath Kidston plate?

Brian sampled the delights of the Lemon Thing (its official title) which is served on a white plate to avoid risk of a colour clash.

By this time it was a quite lovely afternoon. The tide was way out and we crunched about at the edge of the water on piles of mussel shells. We found teeny tiny crabs burying themselves in the soft mud and popped the bladder wrack with our feet. Three oystercatchers flew past followed by a cormorant and the usual gulls. We ambled round the edge of the estuary back up toward Garron Pill and found a quiet place to sit to watch mullet flipping their fins in the shallows. Little boats buzzed to and fro and a Chinook rumbled overhead.

This little shore bird was poking about in the shallows. I think he was quite annoyed at us disturbing his dabbling.

It really was a beautiful day and, according to R7, almost as good as going to Folly Farm.

Raspberry chocolate crumble

2011-08-15T21:53:00.002+01:00

I'm a huge fan of raspberries. I think they are my favourite fruit and we're fortunate here in having the conditions they love. A few years ago I planted some Glen Ample canes and now they romp around the garden like weeds. The back vegetable garden is divided up into raised beds with paths in between but this hasn't put off the raspberries which happily pop under the paths and reappear in neighbouring beds. In fact I've just noticed that they've popped up in the small polytunnel which is right over the othe side from where they were originally planted.

Sometimes we get a glut of the tart scarlet berries and I fill plastic boxes and hide them in the freezer. I found one on Sunday and immediately thought 'crumble!'

I first encountered raspberry crumble in the concourse at high school in the arms of my friend Jane who had just made it in home economics. I didn't get a taste of that one because she took it home on the bus to her lucky Mum and Dad but I've been making it ever since. On Sunday, though, I took inspiration from a tart I ate at another friend's house. Nicola's wasn't home made but it was delicious - a crisp chocolate case studded with raspberries (and if you want to take that short cut, you'll find it in the Tesco Finest frozen dessert section.)

Anyway I combined the two. I just made my basic crumble recipe (six tablespoons of flour, three of butter, three of caster sugar, all rubbed in together, adjust individual components until it's right) and added a generous tablespoon of cocoa powder (Tesco Value fat reduced is cheap and excellent.)

Sprinkle it over the raspberries (I don't bother to thaw the fruit first if it's frozen) and bake in a moderately hot oven (I was cooking a pasta bake at gas mark 5 at the time so this went in on the shelf below).

Bake until the top is just beginning to brown and the fruit is heated through and just beginning to collapse into a fragrant juicy muddle.

Serve with custard, cream, ice cream or all three. Eat the leftovers for breakfast the following morning with plain yoghurt. The chocolate crumble was a huge hit and I'm thinking that a pear version might be a lovely autumnal Sunday dinner treat.

New shoes!

2011-08-13T11:45:00.002+01:00

The BEST sort of new shoes

John the Farrier came on Friday and I had a sudden flash of inspiration while he was here. We'd been looking at ~~Fatsy~~ Isty in utter wonderment because her adipose tissue has resisted attempts to shift it, while Bulleye has nicely slimmed down.

So I asked John if he wouldn't mind popping shoes onto Itsy so we can burn off some fat by way of exercise. Last time I took her out on the road she winced every time she stepped on a stone which isn't fun either for her or her rider. Also as H9 is keen to get on board now a little more mileage is planned. Shoes seemed the obvious way to go.

She won't be in heavy work so only front shoes are needed, but it means I can have a little clip clop around the lanes with her and H9 can too.

Let me out!

In other news, Bullseye, the pony who thinks he's a mountain goat, has whacked another leg. So far he has scars on his near foreleg and off hind to demonstrate the error of his ways. Now he has no additional scars but spent Friday dangling his other back leg. John had a look and agreed that it was tendon or possible fracture (gulp). So Bullseye is indoors on a thick bed of shavings and letting the world know, in shrill whinnies, that he's not happy with the situation. Today he's putting weight on the leg, so I'm holding out hope that it is a pulled digital flexor tendon (which is bad enough).

Riding at Marros Farm

2011-08-11T10:22:00.000+01:00

I have to admit I've resisted the clamour for riding lessons from my two little girls before now. Mostly it's because of the cost and also with three ponies of our own I felt it was a matter of waiting until the girls fitted the ponies rather than forking out for them to ride other people's equines.

But then Pony magazine carried vouchers for £5 off for new or lapsed riders to have a lesson at their local ABRS riding school and suddenly it seemed a good idea for the summer holidays.

(Left to right) G9 and Beau, H9 and Tally, R7 and Dylan.

I took the three girls (and my mum who had seen me through all my pony riding days) to Marros Riding Stables in south Pembrokeshire. The lesson was efficiently arranged by email. I told them the size and ability of the girls and helpful staff recommended a combination session - half an hour of lesson in the indoor school followed by a half hour trek. The price (£22 each) included hire of boots and hats. If you take your own hat they check that it is kite marked. Safety, here, is taken seriously.

Then the girls and the two other riders were taken into the school to meet their ponies. The latter were standing in a line, parked side by side down the centre of the school. Not tied up, just ready and waiting, ears pricked, for the lesson. That was impressive. Any pony quiet enough to be 'parked' like that is quiet enough for your precious child to ride.

G9 was riding Beau, a pretty chestnut mare, Hannah was on Tally, a little bay, and Rosie rode Dylan, the spitting image of our own Bullseye, who proved to have the one speed, slow, which was as it should be for a complete beginner.

Parents watched through the windows of the cafe which overlooks the indoor school, as the instructor explained the rudiments of riding, including stopping and steering (in and out of traffic cones) and then everyone had a go at trotting.

The hack part was a loop along a track around the riding stables. It was the perfect confidence-giving session and none of them wanted to get off their ponies when the hour was up.

They want to go back again, of course they do, and ride the same ponies, which may or may not be possible. The staff at Marros Riding Stables are friendly and fun. They take safety seriously and they know novice riders are going to feel nervous. They were experts in taking the absolute beginner and giving them confidence. I'm pretty sure we'll be heading back for another ride before the end of this summer holidays.

Patriotic in Pembrokeshire

2011-08-10T19:38:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, living here on the side of a hill in the far west of Wales, it can seem as if we are on another planet. Watching the news this week has intensified that feeling. First the looting by people with not much to hope for, living in a society which promotes a level of consumerism they can never hope to afford. Then the armies of broom-wielding community-spirited folk suddenly proving that a city is really just a series of joined-up villages after all. I'm not sure what to make of it all. It seems such a long way away.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I looked up from my favourite seat at the front of our home and saw that the vapour trails from the planes that fly over us from the London airports had drawn a Union flag in the sky.

As I photographed I was struck how quiet, peaceful, sunny and lovely it all was. Then the trails wafted away into the blue sky and the moment passed.

Something big this way comes...

2011-08-07T16:42:00.001+01:00

Something large, noisy, yellow and mechanical arrives...

...now it is busy digging on The Moor.

'The Boy' (Brian, 49) looks on. Occasionally there's a 'toot toot' from John JCB in the digger for 'The Boy' to move a flagstone or assist in some other way. The first of two 'scrapes' has been dug. They must be five metres across; shallow scrapes as new watery habitat for our newts and frogs.

John JCB likes 'The Boy' and has telephoned to check he'll be around this weekend and not working. 'The Boy' lops tree branches off so they don't scratch the digger and gets a Murray Mint as a reward.

John JCB sculpts the second of the two scrapes. This one is fed by a sparkling spring. We stop thinking 'frogs' and start thinking 'ducks'. John JCB realises he has an audience of two women and two little girls and chases 'The Boy' with the bucket. He looks over at his audience with a cheeky grin as 'The Boy' dives for cover.

There's tremendous skill to wielding such a machine. John JCB uses the bucket like it's an extension of his arm. Yesterday he cleared the lambing shed with his other digger and piled the manure in the garden (it looks like Everest at the moment, but it will rot).

The stream is trickling clean, clear water into the 'scrape'. We note how deep it is, stop thinking 'ducks' and start thinking 'wild swimming'.

Just a final bit of patting and sculpting. Edges cannot be left untidy, John JCB is a craftsman. He's also a character - I once had a whole conversation with him where his gaze never left the comfort of my cleavage while he regaled me with tales of 'f***ing this' and 'f***ing that' with my two little girls listening in with wide eyes and big ears. I'd love to think of him meeting the Queen, I'm sure he'd say something (in his broad Pembrokeshire accent) about the 'f***ing weather, Ma'am, while gazing happily at the Royal bosom.

The side effect of digging - useful flagstone sized bits of slate.

The liberated stones piled into the garden. They've been slumbering underground for who knows how many years. Now they face a new life over ground as part of our garden.

More from Dorset...

2011-08-05T12:24:00.001+01:00

More pictures from our day out in Dorset, starting at Maiden Castle with a quick lesson from Andrew on butterfly spotting. It's chalky land here so there were blue ones - adonis blues, small blues - lots of marbled whites (which we don't see in Pembrokeshire) and meadow browns (which we do).

Poundbury.

I wonder what Iron Age man (here in about 600BC) and the Romans (whose army took over Maiden Castle in AD43) would have made of ~~Trumpton~~ Poundbury? I'd like to think the Romans would have approved.

Fabulous view from up here.

Maiden Castle is a magical place, steeped in history and butterflies. It must have been a phenomenal undertaking to build it. One can only imagine the brutality of the battle that took place when the Romans decided they wanted it. I can see why they did though but I feel sorry for the inhabitants who were turfed off and moved to Durnovaria (Dorchester).

Heading for the coast. Sadly we couldn't all fit into one car so two of us had to travel in Nicola's BMW Z3. Here we're doing about 150mph and as you can see I haven't a hair out of place...

On Chesil Beach we found a partially buried man. I think he'd been there since Neolithic times.

When in Dorset it is obligatory to eat fish and chips in West Bay. The best are from the blue and white kiosk with the biggest queue. Sometimes they have pollack which is our favourite but they'd run out so instead we made do with haddock, chips and mushy peas, washed down with proper English tea.

Then it was a quick stroll down the pier, past all the fishermen with their buckets of crabs, before we headed for home.

Waving

2011-08-04T09:55:00.000+01:00

We went on one of our regular trips to see lovely friends in Devon last week. Saturday was spent in Dorset at Sherbourne and Maiden Castle near Dorchester and included a visit to Chesil Beach.

I adore Chesil Beach and every one of its 180 billion pebbles. I'm mesmerised by the crunch of the pebbles under my feet and the crashing of the waves on the shore.

I can lose hours there just playing with the pebbles and watching the waves. I love the wonder of the beach - it seems astonishing that nature can make something so beautiful and architectural. I'm endlessly fascinated by the power of the waves too. The sea is so deep so close to the shore - perfect for sea fishing - and there's something a little perilous about sitting so close to the edge.

Grrrr

2011-08-03T20:33:00.000+01:00

The telephone rang today while I was ~~wandering around aimlessly wondering what to do next~~ doing the housework. As usual it was a voice from India. I think he said his name was Marvin and he worked for Mutter Mutter but the line was so rubbish he could have been anyone.

He asked to speak to "Mr or Mrs Margaret".

"Speaking," said I, irritated.

"Mrs Margaret we have been informed that you or Mr Margaret has had a road traffic accident in the last seven days."

"NO YOU HAVE NOT," I told him none too gently. "I HAVE NEVER HAD A ROAD ACCIDENT. EVER."

CRASH. (The phone, not the car.)

It immediately rang again.

"Perhaps," he continued, as if we'd never been interrupted by me slamming the phone down (although it being a new-fangled digital jobbie all I did was angrily press the 'end call button') "another member of your family has had a road traffic accident."

"NO THEY HAVEN'T," I replied, "AND IF THEY HAD MY HUSBAND WORKS FOR THE POLICE AND HE'D BE THE FIRST TO KNOW NOT YOU."

CRASH. (Well, beep.)

It didn't ring again.

How very dare they though. Absolute parasites. They barely speak English. They have no idea if a 'Margaret'* is a male or a female, yet they have my telephone number. It's very unsettling and it makes me distrust the telephone. It only rings now with bad news, wrong numbers or parasites from foreign call centres ringing to see if I'm a soft target. Everyone else Facebooks or texts or emails or calls me on my mobile.

And the new digital thing is most unsatisfactory. What happened to all those wonderful old fashioned heavy telephones with the lovely rattly dials and a proper bell? Now those you could really SLAM.

I must get one of those**.

---------

* A 'Margaret' is a female and this one is of the Mags or Maggie variety and hates being called 'Margaret'. You can call me Margo, should you wish (see earlier blog).

**Good old Amazon. That lovely red thing pictured above has got a proper bell and a dial. I'm going to put it on the house's Christmas list.

Abundance

2011-07-23T10:32:00.001+01:00

July seems to be the month of abundance in the garden. I have an abundance of good things - garlic, onions, potatoes, herbs, broad beans - but also an abundance of unwanted things - slugs, couch grass, brambles. Ah well, presumably you can't have one without the other and at least the brambles bear fruit!

One of the biggest successes this year has been the sweet peas. The plants have now formed themselves into a massive hedge underneath which are hidden the five wigwams I built when I put the plants in back in the spring. The plants are smothered with blooms and it's rather fabulous.

My sweet pea hedge

The varieties are: Anniversary, Mrs Collier, Matucana, Black Knight and Midnight (all seeds from Sarah Raven). I wish this was a 'scratch and sniff' blog because the fragrance from this many sweet peas at once quite knocks your socks off.

Matucana

Anniversary

Meanwhile in the polytunnel another plant has rather taken over and I can't bear to weed it out because it is so beautiful.

Dill

This is Dill Mammoth, again from Sarah Raven, who says it's a good acid green filler for flower arrangements and that it 'freely self sows'. It certainly does that. I love the huge green umbellifers in big bunches in a vase and have it in mind they might make a nice motif for future sewing projects. My plan is to distribute the seedheads in the garden in the hope of more 'freely self-sowing' but this time not just in the polytunnel (where it a bit of a thug, beautiful but thug nevertheless).

Making things

2011-07-22T18:16:00.000+01:00

I've had the sewing machine out lately, making a few things - some of which are for presents and so are secret - but they included this cushion:

Dad and Pat's cushion.

I made it as a house warming present for Dad and Pat - they've just moved from Milford Haven to Mull - and it's now sitting on their sofa in their brand new house in Craignure. Pat said it 'gave her goosebumps' when she opened it, which I think was a good thing.

Vive la difference!

2011-07-20T17:12:00.003+01:00

There's a great article on the BBC website today about the Americanisms we love to hate. Now I don't mind Americanisms from Americans but I do object to them in good old Blighty.

It just isn't British to say '24/7' (although I mind that particular one the least), but 'gotten' gets my goat as does 'wait up' used by my children to mean 'wait for me'. Even worse I've heard 'wait up already' which makes me shudder. Don't get me started on 'normalcy' - I don't even know what it means - or 'orient' instead of orientate. It's worthy of note that the auto-spell check thingy on here (which doesn't like thingy by the way) is perfectly happy with all those Americanisms (which proves it isn't clever enough to know I'm an English woman writing in Wales).

Does it matter? Perhaps. In France there was a drive to rid the language of Englishisms like 'le weekend' but that appears to have failed with the advent of social networking and its necessity for brevity. Apparently the French now use 'now' in texts and tweets instead of 'maintenant' because it's shorter. Presumably it was adopted the same way we took on 'hi' instead of 'good morning' or 'hello'.

Welsh isn't immune either using 'computer' instead of 'cyfridiadur' for example. Native Welsh speakers generally use a brilliant and wonderful version of 'Wenglish' and I'm not sure they know they're doing it. I was in Boots in Carmarthen once and the woman in front of me asked if a particular mascara was waterproof. The sales assistant replied in Welsh except for the phrase 'you could swim the English channel in it' which was in English. Now that's a clever bit of linguistic gymnastics and it's what makes Welsh so hard to learn. Perhaps it's a lesson for those of us who have attempted to learn Welsh - if you don't know the Welsh, say it in English.

Mind you there are other things creeping into daily usage which are probably entirely English. 'Should of' is one, instead of 'should have'. It's complete nonsense! As is 'off of' as in 'can't take my eyes off of you'. No! Another is the use of 'that'. As a sub editor I was constantly removing the 'thats' from reporters' copy (and I'm well aware subs editing my copy used to remove a few too, but perhaps not the nine I once removed from a single paragraph written by one reporter.)

I read something recently which said millions of pounds of business is lost each year by websites with bad grammar and miss-spellings. Apparently things like 'your welcome' instead of 'you're welcome' make consumers mistrust the validity of the website (even sub-consciously).

Language is lovely. It is what helps us to be properly understood and I shall continue to pedantically (but gently) nag my children about their usage of it. I shall also 'stomp' (great word - I think I'll keep that one) all over any creeping Americanisms.

New shoes

2011-07-12T12:17:00.000+01:00

My knees always let me know when it is time for a new pair of running shoes. I also track how many miles I do in each pair and I know that as they approach the 500 mile mark, they are nearing the end of their days.

Old shoes; new shoes

The poor old things at the back have done 464.8 miles now and carried me to a PB at Cardiff Half Marathon last year. They're supremely comfortable - admittedly a bit smelly now and tread bare - and they've taken my feet through mud, snow, ice, rain and flood.

Together we have seen the seasons change four times, we've chased a baby bunny, watched somersaulting red kites, soaring buzzards and sly foxes. We've seen the sun rise and set. We've seen rainbows. We've avoided stepping on toads and slugs, we've seen little voles scuttle out of the way and we've heard the first cuckoo together.

We've dodged cars and lorries, jumped puddles, skidded on gravel and accidentally squelched into a smelly ditch. We've trodden in cow and horse poo, tripped over rocks and stepped carefully over cattle grids. We've jogged slowly, run flat out and charged along, high on endorphins feeling like a train.

All that at a cost of 13p per mile.

Now it's time to let them go. A new pair of ASICS Cumulus have arrived, this time in a sprightly turquoise. I've already been out for a four mile run in them and boy, these guys are fast.

More adventures await.

All nice things...

2011-07-11T14:37:00.000+01:00

I had a bit of a strop on Saturday. It concerned the fact that I was trying to watch the interviews on the BBC's coverage of the qualifying for the British Grand Prix. My children were, to put it mildly, MAKING A RACKET.

I remonstrated, I pleaded, I quoted Pink Floyd (the "lips move, but I can't hear what they're saying...") But to no avail. So I switched off of the TV and went to have a shower (I'd been for a run and was lunching and watching the top ten shoot-out for pole position first).

When I came out of the shower there was a folded bit of paper from R7 on the bed with a heart and the words "sorry Mum". Aw, sweet. All forgiven, of course. What I didn't know was that while I had been showering Brian had been fetched by the aforementioned offspring who had then confessed to extreme noisiness and Daddy had laid down the law a little (something about how I do a lot for them and the least they could do was not spoil my enjoyment of F1 which was my little treat, a reward for a week's hard work of mothering.)

I had a contrite verbal apology from H9 (really, I wasn't that cross, it wasn't like it was the actual race or anything) then in the kitchen I found this note from R7 (who is a sensitive soul):

I Miss you Mum

all nice things mummy has Done for me in my Life

She cooks the best food in the world for me

She helps me when i am in trouble

She Looks after me when daddy is working

She buy's amazing stuff for me

She play's with me.

She waches Harry potter with me.

Please Don't Leve me Mum

from Rosie

Gulp. Swallow. "Leve"? I was only in the shower! Slightly miffed perhaps, but the interviews were almost over and really were only a bunch of men droning on about downforce, off-throttle blowing of the diffuser and other stuff about exhaust gases in F1 which, really, they bored on about for most of Saturday and then agreed to do nothing much about.

Children are funny. Still, at least it shows what use I am to this family even if they can be a bit noisy (but perhaps I'll go and sing over Blue Peter or Shaun the Sheep as revenge...) You'll note the rather Welsh use of the apostrophe in R7's note - she hasn't started to learn English at school yet.

I won't, of course, ever leave (that's for them to do to me). Where would I go? Why would I want to? How would I afford the petrol?

Things that go boing in the night

2011-07-10T09:57:00.001+01:00

I resisted the purchase of a trampoline for ages. It seemed to be one of those things that Everybody Has Except Us - like a Wii, Ninentodo DS, wide screen TV, iPod, smartphone, iPad or Kindle.

None of those things is essential to life but they do make aspects of life that much nicer and we've given in to one or two (or four) of them. But not the trampoline. Surely those are dangerous? Surely you or your offspring will end up in casualty with broken bits?

But then everyone has them, so one's offspring visits other people's homes and bounces on trampolines. Better, perhaps, the devil you know. So yes, we now have a trampoline, a 10 foot Jumpking, a nice sturdy thing with a surrounding net to catch falling offspring. (Surrounding nets are vital). I have laid down the Rules of the Trampoline and we all love it. It's a bit huge and ugly in the garden but childhood is short and bouncing is fun. I've discovered different and quiet lovely views of the garden from the highest bounces on the trampoline. (Looking out from it is better than looking at it though. Perhaps I can train climbers up the supports...?)

Somehow my children (and a friend) contrived to be bouncing on it at 10.30pm (clutching glowsticks). Somehow they broke the 'one at a time' rule (there were three on at once). Somehow they were on in two and a half hours after bedtime.

Things that go boing in the night.

Childhood is short and it should be fun. (But I must apologise to the neighbour in the granny annexe about all the shrieking and laughing after she went to bed...)

A meadow full of ringlets

2011-07-08T09:29:00.002+01:00

In between torrential downpours the ringlets have been on the wing. These pretty brown butterflies flit and flutter around me when I walk the dogs and don't alight for long. I finally bagged a shot of one after a determined bout of butterfly chasing.

Ringlet

All of these plants and butterflies are on the field we call the Moor which is an acidic boggy field with streams and tussocky grasses, reeds, grassy areas and a fenced off vegetable patch. It's full of snipe and during this walk/butterfly chase I also saw a hen harrier, a buzzard and a red kite.

My favourite grass - I haven't identified it yet.

There's a lot of the parasitic flower Yellow Rattle too, which we're encouraging as it suppresses the grass in favour of the flowers and is regarded, in environmental circles, as a Good Thing.

Ragged Robin

The Moor has narrow paths that we have worn down over the years but for the most part it cannot be walked on (or rather in - the grasses are waist high) and if you stray from the path you can end up welly-deep in boggy ground. When we moved here neighbouring farmers recommended we drained 'the boggy patch' or we'd 'lose the cattle' in it in the winter. We ignored such advice and this precious bit of habitat is now protected by our environmental farming scheme.

Common spotted-orchid

Every year we check on the orchids. It feels like such a privilege that they grow here. They're small, beautiful but incredibly tough. This one was photographed after it was bounced on by my glamorous assistants (see later picture).

Bog Asphodel

My wild flowers book doesn't mention that Bog Asphodel packs one heck of a punch in the perfume department. It's such a tiny lily but it has the fragrance of a much bigger plant. The fragrance hangs in the air nearby though, so you can often overlook the tiny flower beneath.

Glamorous assistant and tiny flower

Mido demonstrating just how small the Bog Asphodel is. If I hadn't encountered the perfume I never would have gone looking for it. We only found it a couple of years ago. I think we'd spent a few years stepping on it on the way to the orchids.

We're jammin'

2011-07-07T09:02:00.002+01:00

There's something very satisfying about growing and picking your own fruit (and I picked nearly one and a half kilos of blackcurrants off the one bush in its first year of production.)

I picked out all the leaves and stalks and mixed the lovely fat, dark berries with water and sugar.

Simmered them in my lovely new jam making pan...

...and now we have ten jars of lovely blackcurrant jam. I'm still astonished every time the jam 'works'. I worry about it not setting, or setting too much or burning and sticking to the bottom of the pan, but all is fine and I'm told the jam is the best I have made so far (my children always say that!)

The alchemy of jam-making will always be something of a miracle to me, like planting a seed which then becomes a sweet pea or sunflower, or burying a potato and then digging up a bountiful crop later.

Walking in Pembrokeshire: Lawrenny

2011-07-06T10:25:00.000+01:00

My Lawrenny: (clockwise from top left): Me at the helm of our boat; sailing;
our Pembrokeshire corgi Skipper; the caravan at Mountain Park Farm.

I spent a lot of time in Lawrenny when I was a kid. We had a 22-foot Ballerina sailing boat moored there and went down to sail Sea Dance almost every weekend until I was about eight or nine.

Mum and Sukey rowing out to the boat; Dad at the helm; our first Land Rover;
rowing out to the boat; Dad helming on a sunnier day; Skipper.

The marina is still very much there as is the cafe but it if anything it's even more lovely now than it was when I was a child. The play park where my sister and I played has gone, as has the slide from the quay to the beach, but the cafe is greasy spoon no more. These days it's an award-winning tea room serving delicious lunches - but more of that later.

We had an end of term treat yesterday, Jo and I. Her idea. She said she would treat me to lunch in return for the lovely cakes I had made for our walks over the past school year (our walking timetable is very much influenced by the school calendar). So I drove and we headed for Lawrenny as it has a perfect three mile circular walk which starts, conveniently, by the tea rooms.

Park at the Quay and then head on, dragging yourself past the tea rooms and the tempting allure of its specials blackboard, and turn left on through the boat yard, following the signs into Lawrenny woods.

The path meanders through the woods with some short but steep rocky scrambles and then brings you down into Garron Pill. You know you've got there by the smell of the seaweed and the sound of curlews calling.

Jo identifies the curlews.

The path takes you alongside the roots of the gnarled old oaks on the foreshore and round into Garron Pill.

We were hoping to see egrets but we only spotted curlews and a mullet which was in the shallows.

These deep inlets provide the perfect feeding habitat for shorebirds.

Then follow the path up the hill towards pretty Lawrenny village. On the way we picked up a canine guide at the entrance to one of the farms. There are two routes back to the quay, one through the village, the other past the church and across the fields.

The correct route, we are shown, is this one past the church.

We did have to negotiate a herd of cattle which was sleeping across the path in front of the gate, but they moved when the dog approached.

A fine view of the estuary. No osprey today.

We arrived back at the quay at 1pm - perfect timing. Lunch was crab sandwiches and salad for Jo with smoked mackerel pate and toast for me. We shared a pitcher of elderflower spritzer.

The tea rooms were definitely popular - not quite full but nearly - but the service was so smooth and efficient it made us laugh (in a very good way). The granary toast with my pate was hot which is always a good sign. Then it rained and the staff rescued those who had risked it to lunch outside and we decided to have cake. Again the service was so efficient that, as we sat down again from the difficult decisions at the cake counter, our desserts arrived like magic. We giggled at this, as did the waitress. All the staff were lovely and happily directed lost walkers to the start of the path (and lent them maps of the route for a £1 deposit).

There's a children's menu too (tuna and mayo sandwiches, for example) and a healthy wine list with other drinks in jugs: Pimms, Sangria.

Cakes are served on Cath Kidston plates which just adds to the prettiness of the occasion.

Jo's blueberry cheesecake.

It is our duty to return to test the rest of the cakes.

My chocolate torte.

Afterwards we sat on the quay looking out across the stretch of water I sailed so many times and shared a coffee. The perfect end of term treat - thanks Jo!

Time for a hug

2011-07-04T16:23:00.002+01:00

Time for a hug

Nivea’s professional shot.

Me and R7 recreate the image at Folly Farm (with my camera phone)

I don’t come from a very ‘kissy cuddly’ family so when I had my own children I’ve rather made up for it. I hug them and they spontaneously hug me back (even in their sleep). It’s lovely and I’m never going to stop.

They hug their dad too (he IS from a kissy cuddly family) and I think that closeness with their parents helps them feel safe, secure and loved.

Some people are definitely more kissy than most – I have friends that I hug, friends that I kiss and friends that do neither. Sometimes it seems to be related to distance and how recently I have seen that person. The further away they are and the longer it is since we last saw each other, the more likely it is that they get a hug or a kiss (or both).

I hug my dogs, my ponies, our pet sheep Chops and one of the hens (Amelia) who is a cuddly sort of hen and likes to sit on my lap when I’m weeding the garden. Occasionally I still hug my teddy bear too.

All this talk about hugging is because Nivea, which is celebrating its 100^th birthday this year, is marking the occasion by celebrating closeness in 21^st century Britain with its Million Moments of Closeness Campaign.

Over on Nivea’s Facebook page they are discussing closeness and asking: “Do you hug your best friend when you see her, or are you more likely to give her a peck on the cheek? Do you remember being cuddled a lot as a child, and how do you feel this has impacted on you as an adult? What do you think about elderly couples who still kiss and hold hands?”

Nivea is inviting everyone to help celebrate 21st century closeness by uploading photos of themselves sharing a cosy moment with a friend, colleague, sibling, partner, parent or child at facebook.com/niveauk. Also you can catch up with the campaign at road shows throughout the UK where you can jump into a photo booth and have your picture instantly uploaded. Either way all photographs will be entered into a competition to win one of 100 prizes worth £100. Every day, a picture of the day will be selected by psychologist Professor Geoff Beattie, who’s studied closeness for NIVEA.

There’s scientific evidence for why touch is so important. It plays an important role in baby brain development, childhood stress management, bonding in a relationship and in recovery from sickness too.

Hugging produces higher levels of oxytocin, a feel good hormone associated with feelings of intimacy. Even a light touch on the hand can reduce heart rate and blood pressure – something cats are well aware of!

So do we touch each other enough and why do we sometimes shy aware from it? What’s your take on hugging?

NIVEA
closer than ever
Feel Closer
million moments of closeness

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Juggling children, sheep and bicycles

2011-07-03T20:17:00.001+01:00

How annoying to be left so far behind by one's little sister.

Friday's school run brought with it a bit of a juggle with children - we were like the Tesco advert where the mum and dad rush about swapping children between various activities. I collected three from school, sent H9 and her friend G9 to the play park while I took R7 (dressed as Belle from Beauty and the Beast) to a party. Then it was home with the two eldest (having eventually tempted them off the swings) where I handed them over to Brian to take them to Brownies (once we had persuaded them to come down from the trees they were climbing) while I dashed back to the village to collect R7.

On Saturday morning we rounded up the sheep, separated the lambs and treated them against flystrike before sending them (noisily) back out to the field. The yard then had to be swept ready for the sheep shearer's arrival at 1.30pm which nicely coincided with H9 going off to a party.

The ewes were then sheared (they hate the process but love the result). Mum and I collected and rolled the fleeces and squeezed them into a wool sack. R7 bounced on the wool sack which, she claims, is a Very Important Job. We then had to scrub the yard clean and wash out the stables in which the ewes had been waiting for their coiffure appointment (they had little else to occupying their little woolly brains so they did a lot of poo). We then had to get showered and cleaned up ourselves because we were covered in wool and smelled awfully much of ovine excretions. Thankfully Brian got back from work in time to collect H9 from the party. We managed to fit bicycling practice sessions in both the morning and afternoon.

Sunday was sunny again so I got up at 6.30am to do my run in the cooler part of the day. Five miles in which I encountered only one other person and a single car. Bliss.

G9 came over to play with H9 and R7 and somehow I managed to pick the raspberries, blackcurrants and red currants, make a batch of lemon curd swirl ice cream (with our own eggs in both the ice cream and mum's home made lemon curd) and cook us a roast chicken lunch (with new potatoes freshly dug from the garden). The ice cream and raspberries made a divine dessert.

Then it was off to Rosebush for the Adran sponsored cycle ride which was two miles along the track towards the forestry and back around on the old railway line. R7 (who wasn't officially there as she is not a member of Adran until September) pedalled off happily while H9 struggled with the pot-holes and got very grumpy that R7 was so much faster. There was then a barbecue which the children tucked into happily while us grown-ups (and the dog) headed off in search of something cold and refreshing in a handy local tafarn.

All off this was conducted under the bluest of blue skies with scorching sun for which the only suitable antidote on Sunday evening was lashings of homemade elderflower champagne.

The Gallery: My weekend

2011-06-29T10:43:00.000+01:00

The washing is on the line and there's a stuffed chicken roasting in the oven.

The prompt for this week's The Gallery is 'My Weekend'. On Saturday it rained, I ran, I washed everything and I watched Andy Murray win his match at Wimbledon. On Sunday the sun shone, we swam, ate ice cream for lunch on the beach and everything I had washed flew on the line until it was dry.

Blog silence...

2011-06-28T19:56:00.000+01:00

Swallow chicks in the stable.

Blog silence because:

It's been sunny so I've been outside doing glamorous things*
It's been raining so I've been inside losing my usual battle with the housework, sewing (presents so I can't tell you what), cooking (bread, meals, more bread, pizza)
On Thursday I nipped out to the local fabric emporium (which is on a farm) and bought supplies for the aforementioned sewing (so I can't tell you what because it's a secret, although I did buy some lovely fabric for a skirt for me).
The Urdd** sports scheduled for last Wednesday (when it wasn't raining but had been so the field was too wet) were held on Friday (when it was raining but the field was dry). R7 won the egg and spoon for the second year running.
It was a real phew-what-a-scorcher on Sunday and by Monday two of the ewes had flystrike*** so we had to round them up and deal with it.
In between times there's been Wimbledon and a Grand Prix (the only times I watch the TV during the day and even then I feel so guilty I dust, clean windows, sew or iron while watching)
Today the school sports were held and Brian was on an early shift so I had to muck the yard out, fetch the ponies in, water the polytunnel, feed and walk the dogs, make the girls' packed lunches, shower and drink a pint of strong coffee all before 7.30am (after which I had to wake two girls, find red coloured sports kit, round up trainers, tease tangles from hair, eat breakfast, stuff dog-toys with treats to amuse dogs while I'm out and find my deckchair and leave for school at 8.45am).
Then I had to watch my offspring compete in running, egg and spoon (H9 second, R7 third) and tug of war (and feign deafness, invisibility and rigor mortis when the call came for the mums' race) all of which, as any parent knows, is exhausting.
I did manage to fit in picking three huge bunches of sweet peas (or they'll set seed and stop flowering), dead head the roses and water the polytunnel again.
Now? Now it most very definitely is wine o'clock.

* I jest. Glamorous? Ha!
** Youth sports - all the schools in this area competing against each other. Usually six schools, but we lost two on Friday to their own sports days.
*** Don't ask. Fishermen use them as bait. 'Nuff said.

The three word Gallery

2011-06-22T20:22:00.001+01:00

Tara's inspiration for The Gallery this week was the 'your day in three words' feature from Simon Mayo's radio two show (which I listen to most evenings while I'm cooking dinner).

So my The Gallery three word Wednesdays are:

Polytunnel skeleton completed

"All" we have to do now is make the doors, dig a one foot deep and wide trench all the way round and put on the polythene cover.

Gorgeous sweet peas

R7 and I planted five different varieties last September and they've been flowering their little socks off for about a fortnight now. Here we have (little vase): Anniversary, Mrs Collier, (big vase) Matucana, Black Knight and Midnight (all seeds from Sarah Raven.)

School report

2011-06-21T22:17:00.000+01:00

I've just been to the school for an informal parents evening which turned out to be a very sociable, happy occasion with a great deal of praise and good news for my offspring. It made me both proud and envious of the education my children are having.

R7's teacher is an absolute delight. Almost as tiny as her pupils, bright and smart, she has taught R7 on and off since the nursery class and the adoration between them is mutual. There are no SATs here so R7 has been assessed discretely and found to be above the standard required in everything.

Meanwhile in year four H9 is taught by the new headteacher. H had done well with her previous teachers but Mrs C seems to 'get' H9 and H9 respects that and is inspired by it. The children learn not be subject but by child-led exploration (with guidance) so they don't know they are doing geography or science or whatever, it's all mingled into an education that is exciting and engaging. H9 again is above the expected standard in all subjects, even in maths which she tries to pretend she's not good at (but is).

It's all a far cry from my own schooling which was the primary school to age nine, middle school aged nine to 12 and high school for the rest. I loved my tiny rural primary school, which for me was about writing stories, being unbeaten in every school race, singing, dancing and hanging upside down on the climbing bars comparing the frills on my knickers with my friend Louise.

Then something went wrong in middle school. I encountered a bottle blonde harpy called Mrs Richards who took a dislike to the eight-year-old me (my birthday's at the end of August so I did everything a year younger) and made aspects of my time at that school quite uncomfortable.

Of course I don't remember it all clearly now but incidents included me being sent to join the remedial children for extra schooling in English (the remedial - awful word - teacher sent me right back into my class insisting there had been a mistake), falling behind in maths, failing to live up to her sporting expectations (I remember her standing over me with a clipboard, screaming at me because I couldn't jump far enough in the long jump).

I remember maths exam after maths exam when I got almost perfect marks and she wouldn't put me up to the higher set. Eventually when I just completely stopped getting any question wrong she said: "I suppose I'll HAVE to put you up to set one," and sent me there - in fury and bad temper - on the last day of that school year.

She prevented me becoming a prefect and stamped all over any enthusiasm I had for school sports. She had her favourites. I wasn't one of them. After four years of that treatment I thought I was a fairly average pupil academically, hopeless at sport and quite a rubbish person to boot.

Then we moved up to the high school and took tests to be selected for streaming. On day one at the high school I still remember looking at the code 3D1A and thinking there must have been some mistake. I was in the top sets for everything. Mrs Richards dislike of me - and to this day I still wonder why - pervaded the my school life. She knocked my confidence and I never put myself forward for any of the sporting teams (despite wanting to - I loved hockey and netball) and I wanted to do cross country running too (the last time I ran at school I beat the entire school team).

Of course I then went on to college and university, won a couple of best student awards and got my degree and made it happily into journalism and writing which is all I originally wanted to do anyway. The Mrs Richards effect wasn't terminal but she is the teacher I remember most and for all the wrong reasons!

Teachers have a great deal of influence over the pupils in their charge. It's a happy accident and a privilege that H9 and R7 are in the school they are in and I'm glad they are there (even if that fact they are entirely taught in Welsh has had its moments of difficulty - but only for me, not them). The early years of education are vital and if there's ever any whiff of a Mrs Richards in my children's education I'll be right there, ready for a fight.

They grow so fast!

2011-06-20T22:43:00.000+01:00

The chicks have only been hatched since the beginning of the month and look how much they've grown in such a short space of time. This week, having realised they are proper little birds with wings and feathers they are doing their best to fly (see video at the bottom of this post).

Learning how to find food.

Look we've got feathers and everything.

Some are blue.

Just as Tardis gets them all nicely lined up one wanders off.

Cofiwch Dryweryn!

2011-06-18T20:16:00.009+01:00

You know how it is, some weeks pass in a blur. This one was mostly taken up with anticipation of and practice for the national round of the Welsh Book Quiz.

H9 was part of the school team and had already been through two, I think, rounds to get to the finals as representatives of the county. This included reading and talking about various books and performing a play about their main book, Ta-ta Tryweryn by Gwenno Hughes. H9 had a shouting and speaking part, waving a placard while wearing a floor length fur coat. She loved taking part and I think she learned a lot from the other children in the team, many of whom are far more used to performing having taken part in the Urdd Eisteddfod.

The villagers protest.

The play was about the village of Capel Celyn and the Tryweryn valley north of Bala which was flooded in 1965 to provide for water for Liverpool. It portrayed the anger and despair of the Welsh-speaking residents as they fought - in vain - for their homes, chapel, school and farmland. It was so controversial because Liverpool City Council brought a private bill before parliament in 1956 which meant the Welsh local planning authorities had no say in the matter. The bill was opposed by 35 of the 36 Welsh MPs (one didn't vote) but was passed in 1957 and one of the last Welsh-only communities was lost to provide water for an English city.

Liverpool officially apologised for the incident in 2005.

Water engulfs Capel Celyn.

The play was extraordinarily moving. As the 'water' engulfed Capel Celyn the performers hummed 'Hen wlad fy nhadau' - a powerful moment.

After the morning quiz and performance the team made it through to the final four and were back on stage again to perform their play a final time for the judges. The standard was incredibly high - brilliant acting and singing in all of the performances. I'd have hated to have had to choose (except, being maternally biased, I'd still say Maenclochog's performance was the best!) They came second - a fantastic result for such a tiny school.

The finals took place at Aberystwyth Arts Centre which is on the university campus. It was lovely to be back there again. I used to occasionally have lunch at the Arts Centre when my grant allowed and saw many plays and films there. I really felt that nothing had changed since I last was in there in June 1990 wearing a mortar board and gown to collect my BSc. Perhaps the trees were taller and the Arts Centre has had some new additions - studios, dance school, a new cinema. I was itching to trot next door into the library, almost expecting to see some of my fellow students studying for their finals or maybe into the Students Union for a quick pint.

On the journey to and from Aber we passed the famous wall with its graffito 'Cofiwch Dryweryn' (remember Tryweryn) which is on the side of the A487 near Llanrhystud. Apparently it used to say 'Cofiwch Tryweryn' until a local teacher complained to her pupils that it was grammatically incorrect. The following day the T had been replaced by a D and someone had also added 'sorry miss'. The monument is kept freshly painted by the community.

On the way up the wall was pointed out to the children as they were doing the final run through of the play. On the way home, victorious, as the bus passed the wall again the children stood up in their seats and yelled 'Cofiwch Dryweryn!'

PS (added Monday, June 20th 2011 in response to Mountainear's comment): If you think 'incidents' like Tryweryn have been consigned to history go and read Mountainear's blog. This time it is pylons across a stunningly beautiful part of Wales to take windfarm-generated electricity from mid-Wales to England. Please also visit the No Pylons in Rea Valley website.