welsh hills again

I have never been a great shopper.  I am always puzzled by the idea of retail "therapy" and am mildly astonished that many perfectly lovely and intelligent people seem to enjoy spending time in huge shopping centres like Bluewater, Westfield or, my personal bete noire, the Trafford Centre.  Too much choice makes me shut down and too much pressure to spend turns me into a one woman awkward squad and makes me hang onto to my purse. There is not a lot of shopping you can do up here anyway.  We are not totally in the middle of nowhere.  In twenty minutes or so you can be in any one of three nice small towns, Mold, Denbigh or Ruthin, where you can do a supermarket shop if you want to, find some good small shops and buy a decent cup of coffee.  There are some lovely independent retailers too like Homewood Bound and the Craft Centre just down the road at Afonwen but you have to travel forty five minutes or so to get to Chester to find a proper city.  In fact C...

Now I know this is my fault.  I don't have to read magazines and perhaps I shouldn't, especially not in the run up to Christmas.  I don't have to read weekend papers and watch television but, heck, I like all those things.  I am a real newspaper addict, love my particular magazines dearly (Country Living, Good Housekeeping, Woman and Home, Gardens Illustrated and The English Garden since you asked, with occasional diversions into Red) and while I don't watch a lot of television, what I do like are things that make me laugh like  "The Thick of It"  and cookery or gardening programmes, particularly ones like River Cottage which talk about growing and cooking the kind of food I like. So I don't really want to turn into Mrs Grumpy and give up my usual pleasures during the run up to Christmas but I am plodding through my usual reading feeling that the country is running mad.  Do people really give each other £900 headsets from Swavorski or is it a jo...

It is time for a blog about day to day things. I am sitting by the woodburner with a new load of logs in the basket and it is raining gently outside. Only a week ago we were hanging on to the last days of a golden autumn which almost converted me from my long held dislike of this time of year. The garden was looking better that it ever has in October, thanks to a combination of the endless flowering of masses of self seeded cosmos and a soft warm light which washed everything the pale straw colour of Fino sherry. I planted out a hundred tiny wild tulips, tulipa sylvestris, which will fling open their star shaped cream and yellow flowers in spring. I sowed Sarah Raven sweet peas and annuals, Orlaya Grandiflora, Ammi Majus, and white foxgloves by the box full. I considered once again cleaning out the aluminium greenhouse and once again found something else to do. That must be one of my least favourite jobs, on a par with cleaning the oven. I spent almost as much time outside as I do in s...

Well, I've done it. For the first time ever in my life I have done all my Christmas shopping with three weeks to go. At least that is the theory. Sadly when I spread everything out all over the bed with my list by my side I discover that what I have actually done is buy a lot of things for me and for people who are like me. Damn it. I always do something like this. I have a general cheery sense in the run up to Christmas that there are quite a number of people to buy for who have very similar likes and dislikes to mine: both older and younger daughter, my mother, my sister. Then, to a slightly lesser extent but still within the comfort zone, my daughter in law and my older niece. So out I go, or in I sit at the computer, and wander around shops or cyberspace thinking "That's an interesting book. Ooh, lovely little evening bag. Mmm, heritage seeds and here's a garden diary. Gorgeous embroidered cushion. Cath Kidston slippers. Provencal soaps. More books. G...