A golden anniversary

Five years ago today I wrote a post to mark our forty-fifth wedding anniversary and Grandson#2’s eleventh birthday. In the years since then, we have sold our home of over forty years and moved down into the valley, where we are now very happily settled. Today Grandson#2 reaches the advanced age of sixteen, whilst DH and I pinch ourselves to be sure we aren’t dreaming that fifty years really have passed since that wet April Monday in Oxford when the two of us were married.

As soon as I sat down to try to to think of words to sum up those fifty years, I was swamped by so many memories, happy, sad, funny, serious, mundane or truly extraordinary, that I despaired of distilling them into anything shorter than a sizeable book. Instead I turned, as I do increasingly as the years pass, to images, to the photographs which have chronicled the fifty years of our life together, as our children were born, grew up and went out into the world and in their turn found partners and settled down to produce a new generation.

By and large these years have been good ones, for which we are both very grateful. There have been difficulties and sorrows, but they have been balanced by joys and the satisfaction of work and other interests and now by the contentment of our life together in our seventies. My hope is that these snapshots will give you a at least a flavour of what those fifty years have meant to us both.

Fifty years ago today

Young and usually scruffy...

..though we scrubbed up quite well

DS and his very young and inexperienced parents

At the chilly Northumbrian coast with DD and DS

Up in the Welsh hills and still scruffy...

All grown and spruced up 

DS's graduation

Grandmother and grandson

Mother and daughter

A very happy family occasion

Another special, happy day

Grandson#1, who is now at university!

Grandson#2 (16 today) with his great-grandmother

Grandson#3, who is now taller than us both.

Our three beloved grandsons

Ordination as deacon 30 years ago this year

Nearly 9 years later, ordination as priest

Three brothers

Five sisters

Fifty years on we're growing old disgracefully...

Five years on

It was a cold, grey day in February (no surprise there) and I was alone at home, high in the Welsh hills, DH being away on a visit to his mother. Being therefore without transport for two or three days, lots of lovely, empty time stretched out ahead of me and I wondered how best to use it. Spring-cleaning, while I had the house to myself, was a must, but no-one can spring-clean all the time.

Knitting, of course, and reading my pile of library books, and a bit of TV watching, but what else? One of my favourite ways of online interaction back then, a small private forum, was temporarily offline, but of course there were always blogs to read and read them I did. But somehow I felt I should be doing more.

I had been reading blogs with huge enjoyment for some time and one or two bloggers had been gently encouraging when I wondered out loud whether I might one day do more than just read and comment. The absence of my forum friends spurred me on to a snap decision and within an amazingly short time one Sunday afternoon I’d set up an account with Blogger, registered a blog name, created a basic template and by the evening had written and published my first exploratory post. 

The five years since then have flown by, as my life has become ever richer and fuller with the growth of wonderful links and friendships with bloggers all over the world. We share ideas and interests, experiences and insights, joys and sorrows. The rate of posting waxes and wanes, as other aspects of life take over at times, but after five years and close to 300 posts, the sheer pleasure of blogging is still there and continues to bring me back to this most satisfying of activities. It looks like you’re all stuck with me for some time to come…

Image via Google

P.S. This post will be published while I’m on my way back from my Big Birthday trip, so there will be no replies until I’m home again. 

A moving anniversary

Oops! I really did mean to squeeze in a post before the end of September, but somehow it just didn’t happen.  The three weeks since our return to Wales seem to have flown by, with days full first of unpacking and sorting out, then of gardening, appointments and meetings, sermon-writing and service planning. In the evenings I’ve been busy knitting a sweater for my new great-nephew to the accompaniment of some favourite TV programmes.  I really don’t miss TV at all when we’re away, but it is definitely fun to catch up once we’re back home in Wales.

Talking of home, it was a shock to realise at the beginning of the week that it is already a year since we moved down from the hills into the valley. This time last year we were gradually transferring our furniture and other possessions from the old house to the new and struggling at times to work out how to fit everything in. I find it reassuring to realise that the overwhelming  sense of newness and strangeness I was so conscious of last October has long since worn off.  Now when I talk or think of home, this is the house I mean.

It has been a year of discoveries – gradually getting to know our kind and friendly neighbours and enjoying the little treasures of a new (and flat!) garden and the pleasure of being within walking distance of the village. The county council is even in the process of constructing a proper footpath from our road junction to the edge of the village centre which will save me having to leap onto the grass verge out of the way of oncoming vehicles. I can’t wait for it to be finished! It has also been lovely to discover how hospitable a house this is, able to absorb visitors comfortably and enjoyably, with three different visits on the calendar for this month alone.

Is there room for a little footpath?

My tiny flowerbed in June

And in September after 3 months away

As it happens there is another anniversary early this month, one which I am even more grateful to be able to mark every year. Ten years ago, on the 4^th of October 2005, I had a mastectomy after my second diagnosis of breast cancer. For a few frightening weeks after finding that second lump, I had to face the possibility that perhaps this time the prognosis wouldn’t be as good as it had been after my first diagnosis 8 years before. Thankfully my worst fears weren’t realised and I am fortunate enough to have ten full and happy years to look back on since that significant date.

Now I’d better post this and finish getting ready for an all-day meeting tomorrow and the service I’m taking on Sunday. I may be starting to wear out here and there (don’t mention the word ‘knee’ at the moment) but I’m not going to rust if I can help it.  Life is too precious to be wasted.

   

A worldwide web of friendship

It began in 1997, just after I’d been made redundant from the library and was officially early-retired. Enjoying my new-found leisure, I treated myself to a day trip to the annual Christian Resources Exhibition at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. There I came across a stand run by a new organisation, Christians On The Internet (always known as COIN) through which I was introduced to the concept of mailing lists and began to discover how people I’d never met could become friends.

The next step came three years later, when I first started to suggest to DH that we might look at buying a little cottage in France. As part of my research I joined a couple of French-interest online forums, where helpful strangers offered me a lot of useful advice and where in turn I could eventually share the fruits of my own experience. A recurrence of breast cancer in 2005 brought me on to a couple of support forums where I received a huge amount of help and kindness and it was here first that forum members really began to become friends. Later I had the same experience on other small and friendly forums.

It was on a French-interest forum that I stumbled across my first blog, French Leave (now sadly defunct) and I was hooked. I rapidly discovered more and more blogs, by no means all writing about France, and eventually began to be nagged by the thought that perhaps this was something I too could attempt.

Finally, four years ago today, I took the plunge and launched my first baby post into the ether, helped by an understanding blogger who had kindly offered to add my blog to her blog roll, if I ever summoned up the courage to start one. To my surprise a tiny trickle of comments came in, including one from the writer of the marvellous blog that had first whetted my appetite. She has encouraged me every step of the way since and pointed me in the direction of many other wonderful blogs. Thanks, Helen.

The four years since that first tentative post have been deeply enjoyable and satisfying and my web of online friends has become truly worldwide. Day by day I’m offered fascinating glimpses of life throughout Europe, north and central America, Australia and New Zealand and I never cease to marvel that my own blog has visitors from all over the world.

When I at last gave in and joined Facebook last year, I found many of my virtual (but nonetheless very real) friends from every medium already there to greet me – another strand in a beautiful and rewarding web of friendship that has enriched my life immeasurably. I’ve even managed to meet a few of them in person and would love to meet more. Just imagine the world tour I could make…

Image via Google

P.S. This post will be published while I’m away on a weekend family visit, so there will be no replies until I’m home again. 

Three years ago today

It was a cold, grey February day and DH was away visiting his mother for a few days. With no car to take me further afield, I was spending my time catching up with the spring-cleaning, in my experience a job best done when you have the house to yourself. In between bouts of cleaning, I was reading blogs, an absorbing pastime I’d discovered some time before and which fascinated me more and more.

That day, however was different. Almost on the spur of the moment, I decided to stop fantasising about starting a blog myself and just do it. It took surprisingly little time to register with Blogger, find a name and set up a very basic template and that evening I wrote my very first post and set it adrift on the world-wide web.

That first post must have looked very austere – no images, no links, no videos, just text. It only took me a few days to master posting images and a few weeks to work out how to post a link. Videos however had to wait for several months and of course there was always the spice of danger involved in learning to live with Blogger’s vagaries. J

I always knew I would enjoy writing posts and to my surprise I even enjoyed the technical challenges. What I could never have foreseen was the enormous, life-changing enjoyment and satisfaction I would gain from interaction with other bloggers and their blogs. Moving from passive reading to active blogging, commenting and replying was one of the best decisions I've ever made and three years on, blogging is still one of the great joys of my life.

So thank you all for reading and commenting and generally encouraging me, for giving me so many insights and so much pleasure though your own blogs, and for being as nice a bunch of people as one could ever hope to meet and count as friends.

As a small token of gratitude, here is one of my favourite songs by those masters of words and music, Flanders and Swann. Enjoy….

P.S. DH is off to visit his mother tomorrow, so I'll be catching up with you all very soon.

Image via Google

A silver anniversary

After a lovely weekend with family, we finally arrived just after midnight and fell into bed. Today we evicted the spiders that always take up residence in our absence and have just finished unpacking. Giving thanks for the fact that the weather is dry, if rather cool, I've even made a start on trying to turn the hayfield that greeted us back into something vaguely resembling a lawn. Now we are both tired and ready for bed, but before I go, I can’t let this day end without mentioning that it has a very particular significance for me.

Twenty-five years ago, on Saturday June 25^th 1988, I was ordained deacon, together with five others, by the then Bishop of Bangor. For me it was the culmination of a long process of discernment and part-time training, alongside my full-time work as a public librarian, and it was an extraordinarily happy and enjoyable day. It wasn't a historic occasion like my later ordination to the priesthood. Instead it was a family occasion, as our families, friends and church congregations came together to celebrate this new stage in all our lives. 

I have no photos of the ordination service itself, nor any formal posed portraits. What I have is a series of snapshots which I think give a good flavour of the happiness that permeated the crowd outside the cathedral west door after the service.  Twenty-five years on, I’m still profoundly grateful for that day and for the joys and satisfaction of the work it made possible for me. It has been sheer privilege. 

With our two children, who put up with a lot during my training

With my next-to-youngest sister, then and always a great support.

And with my dear Baby Sis. Why do big sisters always have to hold forth?

With DH, without whom I'd never have done any of it.

You've heard of Flying Bishops. Meet the flying deacon....

All the images have been scanned from the hard copy originals of those long-ago pre-digital days.

There are some days you can’t forget…

 …and April 29^th is one of those for me. Incredible as it may seem, it was 45 years ago today that my 22 year-old self and my stripling of a fiancé (a mere 21 year-old) tied the knot in the smallest wedding ceremony it is legally possible to have. Four and a half decades, two children, and three grandsons later, despite being considerably older, fatter and greyer, we are happier and more in love than ever and I still think I must be the luckiest woman alive.

As I type this, DH is sitting downstairs after one of his favourite meals, happily engrossed in his beloved snooker (the World Championship has just entered its second week). Meanwhile I’m comfortably ensconced at my desk with a glass of rather nice French rosé, thinking back over the years and realising that, with all its ups and downs, I wouldn't have had our life together any other way.

But today isn't simply our wedding anniversary. Eleven years ago today I had just reached the end of the first year of my second career as a parish priest. DH and I had temporarily exchanged our Welsh farmhouse for an Edwardian vicarage and I was busier than I think I have ever been in my life, before or since. Not only was my diary (which I have open in front of me as a reminder) crammed with pastoral visits, parish meetings and other appointments, but we had our eldest grandson staying with us while his mother prepared for the birth of her second child.

On the evening of the 29^th I had two successive meetings at the vicarage and DH was left to put Grandson#1 to bed, while I tried to concentrate on parish affairs, knowing all the while that DD was in labour. Finally, at 9.30, the last member of the parochial church council said goodnight and I was free to discover whether I had become a grandmother again. You can imagine my jubilation on discovering that, while I was busy discussing the minutiae of parish finances, Grandson#2 had indeed made his entrance into the world and Grandson#1 had become an older brother. 

Eleven years on, Grandson#2 is in his last term at primary school and looking forward eagerly to the adventure of starting secondary school after the summer holidays. Those years have flown, as did the thirty-four which preceded them, yet I can still remember every detail of that quiet, happy and rain-sodden April day when DH and I said ‘I do’.

Now you see it….

….now you don’t.....

Yesterday......

Today........

With both the sun and the spring proving to be very fickle, there’s nothing for it but brighten up the day with a touch of sardonic humour from Tom Lehrer, a song which I remember our two singing with enormous relish when they were still at primary school. J

But before you all start enjoying yourselves, I’ve just remembered that today is the second birthday of my blog. I can’t believe it’s two years since I tentatively sent that first little post out into the big wide cyberworld, with no idea what a life-changing and life-enhancing experience it would prove to be. Thank you all so much for putting up with me over the past two years. Blogging is hugely rewarding and such fun and I look forward with keen anticipation to what the next blogging year will bring. 

One hundred not out

To celebrate our reconnection to the outside world, it seems appropriate to inflict upon that same world my 100th post. J The BT engineer turned up soon after breakfast and worked doggedly all morning to track down the fault we knew was there, even though it had taken the faults service so long to diagnose. The problem section of wire was  almost a quarter of a mile from the house, by the phone box at the top of the lane down to the village. Once the cherry-picker had been summoned and the wire replaced, everything worked perfectly and DH and I are happy bunnies once more.

One hundred posts. Even just writing the words amazes me. I could never have imagined as I published my first post that I would persevere to write my hundredth. That was 15 months ago and since then I have discovered so many superb blogs, and met (both online and in person) so many kind, thoughtful and interesting people, that my life has changed quite remarkably.

Every day I am entertained, challenged and moved by what I read. My knowledge of geography has come on by leaps and bounds as I locate where my followers and my favourite bloggers live. I continue to be amazed and humbled by the number of visitors to my blog and the total of page-views they have made.

Unexpectedly, but very satisfyingly, I have discovered new skills and talents in myself at an age at which, in the past, I might have been expected to slow down and stop learning. I have even learned to understand, if not love, Blogger and have tentatively put a toe into the pond called WordPress.

Above all it has been fun, so much fun. I enjoy it all: the reading, the writing, the commenting and interaction, the sense of being part of something worldwide and so worthwhile. Reaching my century is simply an invitation to continue. You can’t get rid of me as easily as that…

  

Image via Google

Wedding anniversary blues

…..blue skies, that is. J Just to prove that sometimes – OK, very occasionally – the weather in the far north of Scotland can be so much better than the weather further south, here are a couple of photos taken on my way back from church this morning. Apologies to all those awash with excess rain in a time of drought, but sometimes even the best of us can’t help gloating a little.

DH and I have been busy celebrating our 44th wedding anniversary today, but tomorrow I’ll be back with the first part of my wonderful trip to the Orkneys. Watch this space....

Snow-capped Ben More peeping over Castle Varich hill

Glorious Ben Loyal towering over the little village of Tongue

A giggle of bloggers - or doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

As I mentioned in my last post, DH has been away visiting his mother this weekend, just as he was this time last year. As well as the spring-cleaning I wrote about, his absence last year was marked by a very different activity on my part – my very first blog post. Yes, dear reader, as of today I have been inflicting my thoughts, or what passes for them, on an unsuspecting world for a whole year and it has been such fun! J 

Only two months later, I had to acknowledge that I was hopelessly hooked on this extraordinarily enjoyable and fulfilling activity called blogging, and nothing has happened since then to change my opinion. Oh, there have been times of deep frustration at Blogger’s inadequacies and my own lack of technical know-how, but these pale into insignificance when set next to the ways in which my life has been enriched. Blogging  has brought me so much pleasure and satisfaction since that first tentative post last February and I don't grudge a minute of the time I spend on it.

First and foremost I love the glimpses of other lives, countries and cultures that I get from reading blogs written by people living all over the world, and I find the interaction with everyone who comments on my blog, or on whose blogs I comment, deeply enjoyable and satisfying. Blogging is a community activity, a reciprocal sharing of insights and experience, which is immensely rich and fulfilling.

I love the knowledge that by writing my blog I’m capturing memories of my own life which will still be there for others to read long after I’m gone. Some people write memoirs. I write my blog and I’m trying hard to make it a legacy worth leaving behind me one day.

I also love the fact that blogging is creative and forces me to think hard and use my intellect and language skills to say what I want to say as well as possible, as well as using my aesthetic sense to choose the best images to illustrate it. I even enjoy the technical challenge of learning to use the blogging software properly, the only computer thing I've mastered without help from anyone, even my very tech-savvy DH.

Blogging in this sense is a very active thing to do, compared to the passivity of watching TV or listening to the radio. In fact I can barely sit still in front of the TV nowadays unless I have some knitting to do - which is why I've already started yet another pair of socks for DH. 

I know that I will blog less when the weather is good, as happened last summer in France, or when other activities are on offer, as happens in Scotland. But on a cold winter's day on top of a remote Welsh hillside, there are few more enjoyable things to do than blogging.

So my heartfelt thanks to you all for reading and commenting on my blog over the past year and for sharing your thoughts and lives so generously with me in your own blogs. Here’s to the next year of this very worthwhile journey.

Footnote: a giggle of bloggers – the collective noun for a group of quirky bloggers