welsh hills again

Time is a strange elastic thing.  A day at home pottering through the domestic routine just whisks away,  and in no time at all we are sitting by the woodburner and then going upstairs to bed.  Two days away in London and time seems to have stretched.  Driving back from the station on Friday afternoon it felt as if we had been away all week.  If you want to get more time out of your life do something different.  I can sort of understand that one. Time and memory though, that's a strange fluid thing, not the elasticity of stretching out the moment but instead a fluidity, moving, changing, like rushing water.   And just like water,  memory is sometimes cloudy and dark, sometimes pellucidly clear.  We spent Thursday morning last week in the Courtauld Gallery.  This was absolutely my territory when I was at university, forty years ago now.  Somerset House and the Courtauld are right next door to King's College where I studied, and ...

I have been tagged by red haired runner and writer Preseli Mags for a meme on memory.  Memories are a blur and a swirl.  I try to pick something out, make something emerge from the mist. My brother's trainset, a Hornby train, the track secured to a big board.  Paul had two trains with their sets of carriages, painted in brown and cream.  We used to play a lot together, my brother and I.  We lived up on the edge of the moor and went to school across town so we didn't really know the few local children who lived further down the common.  We spent hours up on the moors and out on the common whenever the days were fine, but sometimes, it being the Pennines, rain streamed down the window and we hung around moaning that we didn't know what to do.  My mother wouldn't let us say we were bored but she was good at coming up with projects which would take us a while.  I only understood when I had children of my own that there was an element of self intere...