Well, put it this way, instead of having to rush around trying to put cards in envelopes and stick on stamps this morning (which I gave up on doing last night when my eyes were drooping), we are Confined To Barracks and no school for D. It was rain on top of frost again this morning and when I saw Trixie fall over on the path when I let her out before it was light, I roused my dearly beloved from bed to come and Do The Driving. However, like one day last week it was SO slippery underfoot - sheets of ice, not just black ice in patches - that we are going nowhere until it thaws a bit. So now I have the time to write the cards, add to the Christmas letter, pack the parcels and generally Get Sorted.
I am going to get my sewing machine down from the sewing room too , as that's up in the attic, and perishing cold - certainly not conducive to sitting down and sewing for more than 2 minutes at a stretch. I've looked out a length of heavy brocade material in a lovely deep aubergine colour with gold in it, that is destined to be a curtain for the front door, to keep the draughts out. OH has to do his bit and put up a curtain pole.
I woke at 5 a.m. again - having fallen into bed just gone 9 p.m. last night. It was too cold to get up so I laid there for an hour, my mind busy. All sorts of random thoughts going through my head, about books I had read years and years - half a lifetime ago. Does anyone remember the books by Derek Tangye? They told the story of how he gave up his life as a newspaper columnist and his wife abandoned her PR job at the Savoy in London to live in a tiny cottage on the cliffs at Minack in Cornwall. How they earned a living by picking their early narcissi and daffodils for the London markets, and packing them to go up on the milk train. They had cats and donkeys and an enviable lifestyle. I recall when his wife Jeannie had to go to Hospital to have a possible cancer checked out, wearing a bright red coat, and walking back down the lane in her bright red coat, knowing that her life was nearing its closure as she refused treatment for her cancer. I don't know why that should suddenly come to me, but it did. Along with John Seymour's Self Sufficiency, The Good Life on tv, Elizabeth West's 'Hovel in the Hills' and subsequent books Garden in the Hills and Kitchen in the Hills, and compounded by the wonderful books of Jeannine McMullen, who wrote of her smallholding here in Wales (not a million miles from me as I think she was close to Black Mountain and probably still is) these things gave me a leg-up onto the path in life I chose to take - moving here to our smallholding in deepest rural Wales.
