A new blog

 Just to let you know that inspired by the example of a couple of old blogging friends on Facebook, I've taken the plunge into blogging again at:

https://staying-put.blogspot.com/

I hope to see some of you there.

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. 

On the cusp of autumn

I’m writing this in the warm, humid twilight at the end of what is forecast to be the last hot day of our summer here in Normandy. It’s over two months since we arrived and only just over a week before we return home to Wales. In all that time, for a variety of reasons which I won’t bore you with now, I’ve only managed to publish one post.

Oh, I’ve often thought about doing so, and have mentally sketched out several posts, but none have come to fruition. Today I realised that if this went on much longer I would imperceptibly become an ex-blogger and I’m really not ready for that to happen yet.  So what has been going on over the past couple of months in our French neck of the woods?

The answer is not a great deal. It’s been a very quiet summer, with no visitors staying this year. DH has been busier than usual at times, dealing with clients’ problems, while I’ve been occupying myself with the usual pleasant round of gardening and knitting and cooking, with the occasional garden club visit or village fete thrown in for good measure.

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent rather a lot of time with my feet up, nursing a sore leg, and not enough time practising my sadly-neglected clarinet. Because sitting at the computer with my leg up isn’t easy, reading has tended to be novels, rather than blogs and I’ve missed too many of your posts. Perhaps I should treat myself to that tablet after all!

Nevertheless it’s been another contented summer in our beloved small corner of Normandy. On the whole the weather has been much better than last year, often sunny and warm, particularly in July, and occasionally far too hot for us native Northerners. After the last busy year, with the house move and my broken wrist, we feel rested and ready for our return to Wales and our autumn activities. Who knows, I might even manage another post before we leave…

Morning mist

Midday haze

Evening clarity

Apple picking time

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. 

Notable by her absence

That phrase sums up rather well the relationship between me and blogging for the past couple of weeks or more, ever since I was finally able to get back to full activity. Everyday life has taken over and it’s been good for me to get away from the computer for a while. The last three months have been very sedentary and I can feel the impact this has had on my general fitness, so it’s great to be busy and active again.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t missed you all, but I’ve been making up for lost time, particularly with music practice, plus a multitude of jobs around the house. The advent of some real spring weather has been another distraction, though that seems to be on hold again, with frost and wintry showers being the order of the day over the past few days. 

Dawn on a frosty Sunday morning

A sign of spring pushing through the debris of a long wet winter

Now DH and I are busy getting ready to be on the move again. The very small campervan has just returned from the garage with a new speedometer cable and a spruced-up gearbox and is raring to go. DH has even given its exterior a reluctant wash and brush-up, a great concession from one who firmly believes that road dirt has a protective function where vehicle bodywork is concerned.

On Friday we will travel to Southport, where we will be celebrating my dear mother-in-law’s 90^th birthday this weekend. From there we will head north on our spring migration to the north coast of Scotland and the glories of the North-West Highlands. Having only managed a two-week visit there in the whole of last year, we can’t wait to arrive and settle in for a good long stay. We have no TV there and I’m looking forward to catching up with you all in the quiet evenings which are one of our great pleasures when we’re away. See you then….

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

Oops!

First an apology, in case any of you thought I was busy sending out spam. Yesterday  afternoon, as part of my efforts to forestall the scheduled disappearance of Google Reader, I registered my blog on Bloglovin’ in order to give me another way to follow blogs and to offer my readers the same way to follow my blog. As part of the process, I was asked to publish a post to ‘claim’ my blog, the content of which inadvertently appeared as the garbled and spam-like message some of you will have seen. Unfortunately, once launched into the ether by the Blogger dashboard, no post, however short or incomprehensible, can be retrieved by the hapless blogger, hence the apology.  

Secondly I’m starting to think spring may just be starting to appear over the horizon, despite the continuing fridge-like temperatures up in these hills. A couple of days ago I took a little stroll to check on the progress (or lack of it) of the thaw in shrinking the drifts in our lane.

The view north....

....and south, with the house just visible through the trees

The view east.....

...and west. At least there's some green around.

After I’d recovered from the shock of seeing that almost all the snow still left around us is concentrated in or next to our lane, I had a wander around the back field in search of daffodils. I knew I’d seen them poking their hopeful little spears out of the grass before the snow came and then they vanished. Now they have reappeared and are even starting to show some glimpses of yellow. Who knows? We might actually have some daffodils in bloom before the end of April, and if the bench up there at the top of the slope can extricate itself from its snowdrift, somewhere to sit to enjoy them at close quarters. Hope springs eternal…..

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. 

Bring me sunshine

Fans of the unforgettable Morecambe and Wise will, I hope, forgive me for borrowing their theme song for the title of this post. It sprang irresistibly to mind when I opened Google Reader yesterday to find that my friend Croixblanches of Nowhere-on-Thames had kindly passed on to me the Sunshine Award she had recently been given.

Longer-term readers of this blog probably know by now that I sometimes sit a bit lightly to the conditions attached to many blogging awards. Today, however, in gratitude both for the award and for the real sunshine which has so brightened up the past week, I will be a good girl and do as I am asked. After thanking the kind giver, I am to choose 10 bloggers, who, in my opinion, “positively and creatively inspire others in the blogosphere” and then answer a few simple questions about myself.

I recognize that not every blogger wishes to receive awards, in which case please feel free to decline. It’s even possible that some have already received it and are running out of space on their virtual mantelpiece. The main thing is that I’m given the chance to highlight some of the blogs I enjoy and offer them for further exploration, so, without further ado, here are my choices. They come from near and far, some are long-established, others newer and still small. Some post very regularly, others quite infrequently. The one thing they have in common is that I enjoy reading each and every one.

A Skinny Fair-trade Latte in theFood Court of Life

ABroad with a View

Astrid’s Soapbox      

Bonnie’s Thoughts and Jots

breathelighter  

coming home to myself

It Helps Fill the Day   

Kamo Lady    

Some Other Mountain   

Where Five Valleys Meet  

Now for the questions – 9 rather than 10 for some reason, but I'm not grumbling. J

Favourite colour:  Blue, ever since I could pronounce it, though I'm told I look good in coral pink.

Favourite animal:  Cats, by a mile. When we stop travelling we’ll have cats again.
Favourite number:  Whatever age I’ll be next birthday.

Favourite drink:  During the day tea, in the evening red wine. (OK, I cheated)

Facebook or Twitter:  Neither. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
Your passion:  DH and my blog - an offshoot of my primal passion for reading.
Giving or getting presents:  Let’s be honest here – both.
Favourite day:  I’m retired and getting on a bit, so every day I wake up feeling well is my favourite.

Favourite flowers:  I particularly love spring flowers such as snowdrops, primroses and bluebells, but if I had to choose just one flower, it would be the old-fashioned scented rose.

Now it’s over to you, both to explore and, for the recipients, to accept and pass it on if you want to. Enjoy...

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

On the move

Like the rest of us, the birds have been enjoying the gloriously sunny weather we’re having and DH has been having fun with his new video camera trying to capture some of them in motion. At the moment we only see our faithful year-round inhabitants, but soon now the summer visitors will begin to arrive and we will be able once again to marvel at their breathtaking aerobatics.

Yes, the migration season is upon us again and what applies to the birds is also true of the Transit household. Bags are being packed, the campervan given its spring-cleaning and in a couple of days we will be once more on the road north.

The difference this time is that en route we shall be spending a couple of days in Southport for a family get-together to celebrate DH’s mother’s birthday. This will be great fun and in addition gives me my very first chance to meet a blogger in the flesh. The Broad lives in Southport and has kindly invited us to call in for a cuppa and a chat while we’re there, a meeting we are both looking forward to with keen anticipation.

As if this weren’t enough excitement for two staid old-age pensioners on one trip, we have received a second invitation from a fellow-blogger. Sian has invited us to visit her on her small island while we’re in the far north of Scotland and we plan to do that before we finally head south again in early May.

It will be such fun to put faces to the names and vice-versa and to be able to talk about the things we have previously only written and read about. I can’t wait! For now though, it’s back to the preparation and the packing, so if you don’t see me about in the blogosphere for a little while, that’s the reason.

Image courtesy of the RSPB 

Feeling creative

Early yesterday morning, after a very bad night, I pootled sleepily across to read Debra’s latest post on her lovely blog  breathelighter, as I drank my morning tea. I always enjoy Debra’s take on life in the very different setting of Southern California, and was happily reading about her granddaughter’s sayings, when I almost dropped my mug as I found that she had nominated me for a blogging award I hadn’t heard of – the Kreativ Blogger.

Feeling very pleased and much more wide-awake after reading this, but also nosy curious, I turned to Google to find out where this award had originated. I soon discovered that the design has mutated in its travels through cyberspace from the original

the creation of which is documented on a visually stunning Norwegian blog (which really makes me wish I could read Norwegian) to the one most commonly circulating at the moment. 

I also discovered that the updated version of this award asks that we pass it on to seven other bloggers, after posting seven interesting facts about ourselves.  Hulda, however, was more modest in her original concept and only chose four. She also laid down no conditions for her recipients, simply explaining why she felt the blogs she had chosen qualified for the description ‘creative’.

This is where I start to get creative and post the one interesting thing about myself I think is relevant, which is that I feel a little uncomfortable about the way Hulda’s unconditional mark of recognition now comes with conditions. To me an award should be something given because of who the recipient is and what they have already achieved, with no strings attached.

So I’ve decided to revert to Hulda’s original intention and add her lovely design to my sidebar, as it seems a pity for it to fade into obscurity. In the same spirit of freedom I’m not going to place any conditions on my own recipients, leaving them to choose which version of the award they want to download, if any, and whether and how to pass it on in their turn.

Creativity matters deeply to me and I love the idea of acknowledging it in other bloggers. I am touched that Debra sees it in my blog and in my turn I find it in abundance in the blogs I so enjoy reading. My choices are very varied, because creativity comes in so many guises, and are:

Baking in Franglais – a blog I practically have to give up for Lent. Jean is as passionate and creative about her craft of baking as she is about blogging and her baking blog is a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. Her enthusiasm for good food is contagious and I can’t wait for Easter to try some of her wonderful recipes.

Moving on  Annie was an obvious choice, as she is always being creative with words, photos, yarn and chocolate, not necessarily all at the same time. J Annie and I go back a long way in my blogging life, as we found each other’s blogs only a few weeks after I pressed the publish button on my first post. It’s always fun when blogging friends share a hobby and knitting matters a lot to both of us, though living in the heat of southern Spain does make it more difficult for Annie to show off her creations.

Janice in Caunes   Janice is a newer blogging friend, who, like me, enjoys life in more than one country. She is busy learning the craft of blogging and is rapidly discovering how fascinating and addictive it is. I have enjoyed watching her posts become more and more creative over the few months since I found her blog and shall equally enjoy watching her be creative with her beloved house in France, when she migrates south for the summer.

 

Last, but by no means least, Ayak’s Turkish Delight.  I was recommended by a commenter on my very first post to visit Ayak’s blog and I’ve haunted it happily ever since. I go there to savour Ayak’s inimitable view of life in a very different country and the creative ways she copes with its vagaries and difficulties. I also go there never sure how it will look today, as she always enjoys being creative with template and photos. J

So there you have it: a few examples of creativity plucked from the maelstrom of creativity that is the blogosphere. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

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

Stop Press!

You don’t have to be a regular reader of my blog to realise that it doesn’t normally do current affairs or news, other than trying occasionally to grapple with the vagaries of Blogger. However today is an exception. 

I spent much of this morning writing a new post, which involved more research than usual, including looking for suitable images, for which Wikipedia is often a very useful resource.  Thus it was that I came across the news that tomorrow (January 18) the English Wikipedia site will be blacked out for 24 hours as part of a worldwide protest at what are seen as attacks on the freedom of the internet. There is a full explanation HERE, and not wanting my readers to be faced with inactive links, my post has been filed until the protest is over.

It is salutary to realise that, until faced with its absence for just one day, I, like most people, had come to take the availability of Wikipedia, whenever I need it, entirely for granted. With all its faults and limitations it is a extraordinary compilation of information and images and we bloggers would find life more difficult without it. Thank you, Wikipedia, and long may you flourish unimpeded.


Image, as so often, via Wikipedia

The pleasure of sharing

One of the many lovely things about this blogging world of ours is being introduced to blogs we might not otherwise  come across and finding ourselves very much at home. To aid this process of discovery bloggers have become good at handing out awards which involve the recipient in handing them on to other bloggers in their turn.

I have to thank the wonderful Ayak at Ayak's Turkish Delight for thinking of me when she was given the Liebster Blog award recently. Unlike some awards the Liebster Blog doesn’t involve any self-revelation (thank goodness), but simply asks the recipient to add its image to their sidebar and, if they wish, to do a post passing it on to five other blogs, specifically blogs with fewer than 200 followers. As we don’t all follow each other’s blogs, it’s probably best to let the new recipients know directly, as well as in the special post, and of course link back to the awarding blog as a gesture of thanks.

There are so many wonderful blogs out there, full of good writing, beautiful images and interesting thoughts that it’s difficult to choose just five. However, I’ve taken the plunge and would like to introduce you to five very different and enjoyable blogs I’m glad I found.

Blethers is a thoughtful and beautifully-written blog by a retired English teacher and active poet, living on the west coast of Scotland. 

Lifeonthecutoffs Blog is a recent discovery of mine which I am enjoying enormously. It reflects life in a quiet, rural corner of the American Mid-West, on the very edge of Chicago. Its sharing of favourite books has already tempted me to more book-buying than is probably good for me.

Lurking is a delightful mixture of blog and day-book written by someone who lives on the very edge of London and who shares many of my interests, such as books and knitting and church life.

a very grand pressigny is one of two blogs I've chosen with a French flavour. It’s about life with a much-loved second home in the Loire Valley and is spiced with lots of wonderful photos and also some tempting links to recipes on the author’s other blog.

Writing Home is a blog about life in rural south-west France – a gentle, beautifully-illustrated portrait of a quiet life of house restoration, gardening and animals, with the occasional recipe thrown in for good measure.

I do hope you enjoy exploring my five chosen blogs as much as I've enjoyed choosing them.

The Versatile Blogger

Last Friday, as we were in the final throes of packing to come north, I took a quick coffee break to catch up with that morning’s blog posts in Google Reader before my computer was switched off for the trip. As I sipped my coffee and nibbled a biscuit, I was delighted to read on the always excellent Ayak’s Turkish Delight that she had just been given the Versatile Blogger Award by another blogger based, like her, in Turkey.

As Ayak explained, there are conditions to receiving this award. The winner has to tell you five quirky things about him or herself and then pass the award on to five more bloggers. You’ll have to read Ayak’s five lovely quirky things for yourselves, but I can tell you that I was extremely, if pleasantly, surprised to find that I was one of her five nominees. As I commented to Ayak, I’m not sure how versatile I am, especially at that time of the morning, and I’m certainly not sure how quirky I can be considered, but in all fairness I have to try to live up to the honour. J  So here goes…..

1.       I hate Marmite! I know the world is divided into Marmite lovers and Marmite haters and the former seem to predominate, but I can’t stand the nasty, salty stuff.

2.       I’m a sock knitter to the bottom of my soul. I like all kinds of knitting, but as I've mentioned before, socks are my perfect project for all sorts of reasons, being small, light, and cheap to make, but also nicely challenging to do well. One can never have too many socks.

3.       I have never watched Strictly Come Dancing or the X-Factor or even The Apprentice or Dragon’s Den. I realise that in some circles that makes me not just quirky but barely a member of the human race, but I can’t help it.  I don’t like reality TV or game shows, as I just can’t bear to watch people being publicly criticised, belittled or made a fool of, even if they’ve volunteered for the privilege.

4.       I love Christmas. I know it’s fashionable to bemoan the secularisation and commercialism of the festival, but to me it has a meaning and a magic which is irresistible. I even enjoy singing carols (all the verses, mind you) and writing Christmas cards, as well as receiving them. A hopeless case…..

5.       The nearest I ever came to meeting a real celebrity was back in the mid-60s, when I was a student. (I’ve led a very sheltered life since then. J) Coming out of a coffee bar in a little side-street near the centre of Oxford, I almost collided with Paul McCartney and Jane Asher, as they walked past the door. She was appearing at the Playhouse and I'd barely heard of her at that time, but was a huge Beatles fan. Imagine my horror if I’d actually knocked him over.....

Now for my nominees, all of whom I think write great and versatile blogs.  They are:

Daydreamer

Life on a Small Island

Moving On

The Other Half

A Skinny Fairtrade Latte in the Food Court of Life

The Seven Links Project

I was quietly browsing Google Reader with my coffee this morning, when I almost fell off my chair to find that Karen at Being Koy had nominated me for the Seven Links Project, which was started recently by Katie at Trip Base.

The aim (in Katie’s words) “is to unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavour to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again”.

It gives the nominated bloggers a reason to look back over their output and, without too much agonising, to choose certain posts which they feel are worth highlighting. Once I recovered from the shock, I enjoyed reflecting over my as-yet limited list of posts and making my choice.

The rules are simple:

1. The Blogger is nominated to take part by another blogger
2. He/she publishes their 7 links on their own blog. One link for each category.
3. He/she nominates up to five more bloggers to take part.

The categories are very varied:

My most beautiful post   The day I fell in love

This post took me back to a turning-point in my youth and I enormously enjoyed writing it. Though I always try to write as well as I can, I found the words flowed particularly easily and did what I wanted them to, in terms of evoking that long-ago experience and its life-changing significance for me.

My most popular post   It really depends what you mean by popular. J 

In terms of page-views, as measured by the not-always-reliable Blogger Stats, it is without doubt Where did the years go?  which was written on our daughter’s fortieth birthday and was also a contender for Most Beautiful Post for very much the same reasons I give above.

In terms of comments it has to be A sentimental old fool which started as a bit of fun, but really seemed to strike a chord with my readers.

My most controversial post   As my family could tell you, I don’t do controversy any more, at least not deliberately and in public, but Lessons for life (see below) deals with difficult subjects, as does A milestone birthday.

My most helpful post   A tree for all seasons 

(at least for people googling for photos of a tree (ash or not) year-round J As I don’t write an advice or information blog, this wasn’t easy, but the number of times a Google search has led people to this post leads me to hope that a few of them found it helpful, or at least mildly interesting.

A post whose success surprises me   I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills

This is one of my earliest posts and the first to which I managed to add photos. It is simply a reflection on how my life has always been lived among hills and I hadn’t anticipated how much this would appeal to others or how many page-views it would get.

A post I feel didn’t get the attention it deserved  Images

I didn't find this category very easy either, as I’m reluctant, not to say unable, to judge how much attention anything I write really deserves. However, in the spirit of the project, I mention this post.  It was written at the time when coverage of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was filling the news media daily, so my small reflection on the human cost of this catastrophe went almost unnoticed.

The post I am most proud of   Lessons for life

This is another post reflecting on a significant time in my youth, in this case when, as a student of German, I worked for a few months as a ward orderly in a care home in Hamburg in the mid-1960s. I spent a long time on this post, trying to sum up what this experience had meant to me by remembering three women I had cared for and something of their stories, and feel I succeeded better than I could ever have hoped.

I realise I've snuck in an extra link, but trust I won't be excommunicated for one small sin....

5 bloggers

Among so many great bloggers it’s hard to pick just 5 to share something of their blog and their thoughts on blogging, but here is my list of nominees:

Wylye Girl @  The River Cottage Diaries  who gave me my very first blog-roll spot when I was just starting out – thanks, Wylye Girl. J

The Broad @  ABroad with a View

Rosie @  A Year down the Line

DB @  Dancing Beastie 

David @  The Vernacular Curate  (from whose blog I garnered a lot of useful advice about blogging)


Image via Wylio