The light does such magical things on this hillside that, as I walk the steep narrow lanes between fields, I can’t take my eyes off a distant, golden-topped mountain range.
At night the sky is so clear I wander into the garden and stare at the northern star, bright and low. I saw in the local paper that we got the northern lights the other evening: streaks of blue and green over the harbour. Everything seems such a riot of colour and flavour here.
I look around me and despite the views, I also see the funeral cars going up and down the lanes
The food tastes precisely of itself, to steal a phrase from Nancy Mitford. I’m peeling potatoes so dirty my hands are covered in mud by the time they reach the pan of tap water that comes from a ‘holy well’.
People walk past my gate with bottles and fill them from puddles beside the road coming from the spring that feeds our borehole.
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