FENG SHUI, OR THE STRANGE TALE OF THE KITCHEN DRAWERS

The Phantom Opening Drawers



And the Feng Shui Solution


I HAVE GOOD reason to be thankful to what I saw referred to with admirable brevity on someone’s post the other day as ‘members of The Coo’. Very good at solving problems are members of the Coo. ‘How do I de-mist my double-glazed windows,’ I asked once, ‘without buying new ones, that is?’

‘Drill a tiny hole on the inside,’ came Countrymousie’s almost instantaneous response. I am sure this is just the thing to do but as, lazily, I haven’t yet got around to finding a drill to make tiny holes in thick glass, I can’t report the result, either to you, or to Mousie herself, who fearing perhaps that my window might shatter, seems to be hibernating deep in her country mouse hole. Or perhaps she is listening: if you are, Mousie, it is only a matter of time. The wheels in the Somerville household may grind slow, but they grind very small. I shall get around to it.

There was another matter on which I wanted Coo advice, but I didn’t quite know how to put the question. I wasn’t asking something personally embarrassing - like how I might rid myself of carbuncles, or how I should address a visiting bishop. No, it was the ultra simple question of how might I ensure that the drawers beside my kitchen sink stayed shut when I shut them and didn’t slowly open again of their own accord, as if they had become apprentice extras in a horror movie.

I have tried magnetic strips and repositioning the contents of the drawers without success; the only thing that worked seemed to be a piece of kitchen roll folded and wedged hard in the drawer top. Even this didn’t work always. After ten minutes the drawer would slowly open, as if pushed from inside by an unseen hand.

Nonetheless, unlikely as it may seem, the Coo, (our Jane in this case) have solved the problem. All that was involved was a little elementary Feng Shui.

Jane, as you doubtless know, is an expert in these dark arts. She has written an absolutely brilliant book on this and other things to do with transforming your untidy and cluttered lump of hollow brick and concrete into a home.

One of the things she says is that you should learn to talk to your house. If you do this correctly your house will talk back to you. Being a rational being, not on medication, with no tendency to imagine that I am Don Quixote, I was sceptical of this advice. It sounded like playing the ouija board, but without the mock solemnity and dim lighting.

Imagine my surprise therefore when the house began to talk back to me - and not in the sort of belligerent male voice that I had been expecting, ‘Why have you been neglecting me? What do you care?’ But in a rather pleasant, refined but humble, maid of all work sort of voice - a cross between Cinderella and Honeysuckle Weeks. Rather than complaining about my general household neglect, the house instead was eager to please and sorry that she didn’t look smarter. When I mentioned new paint she practically fainted in anticipation.

This may have been a mistake! For she jabbers at me now in the manner of a three-year old that has been promised an unspecified trip to the zoo. Nevertheless, she is not tiresome, and is friendly to animals. She realises that paint is rarely the first item in a rejuvenation process. There are de-cluttering operations and cleaning operations and repairing operations to be undertaken first, including getting the mist out of the windows.

Now Jane’s book also pointed out that you don’t get very far, Feng Shui wise, in a house with missing corners and it soon became obvious that the house was missing two corners - corresponding to the marriage and the knowledge areas of my life. Book in hand, this I have set out to rectify.

Jane suggests that a quick ‘cure’ for such a deficit is a plant in a big solid tub strategically placed where the corner should be. With the knowledge corner, this is proving hard. Quite an area of house is missing. The spot where the corner ought to be is occupied by the car.

Moving the car and placing an isolated pot in the middle of the tarmac drive just looks silly. In any case, judging from the quantity of books we have quite enough knowledge to stock a shop. So I have compromised and half-moved the car and half-filled in the corner. Whether this will make me half-witted remains to be seen.

But the missing marriage corner, on the inside of which coincidentally are to be found the annoying self-opening drawers, was easy to complete. I dragged a pot of yellow wallflowers into the spot - just to see how it would look. ‘Grand,’ said J.

I didn’t think much more about it until I realised that the kitchen drawers were no longer opening of their own accord. ‘Impossible!’ I thought, every fibre of my rational self protesting in my ear. But it was true. And they haven’t opened since - by themselves at any rate. Not only that but J and I haven’t had a cross-word since, which must be something of a record, nice people though we are. So that’s Feng Shui 1 - Rationality Nil.

And for those who read the blog I wrote some weeks ago about books tumbling out of a bookcase of their own volition I have to point out that the bookcase bears the same relation to the knowledge corner as the kitchen drawers did to the marriage corner. Whether my pot moving will stop further book falls we shall have to see.

FENG SHUI AMONG THE APRICOTS

Homework again! This time an easy response to Faith's call. This isn't the first blog I ever wrote, but it was at least one of the first pieces I entrusted to the blogosphere. And one or two people seemed to like it.

Like all such pieces it doesn't age too well. There is a reference in it to Mr Howard sacking someone. That tells you something. Mr Howard led the Conservative party at some point in the dim and distant past. Who he sacked and for what reason - clearly something to do with venturing an opinion at an inopportune moment - are lost in the mists of time. For all I know it might have been Boris Johnson though I think on reflection it may have been something to do with the man who said the Conservatives were going to cut taxes. Ha! The only other thing I know about Mr Howard is that he and his wife, having nothing better to do of an evening, watch re-runs of Brideshead Revisited, which is, in a manner of speaking, really all about terminating otherwise promising relationships in colourful settings.

By coincidence, this little piece is also about terminating a relationship in a colourful setting. In this case the relationship was with an apricot tree and the languid setting was Syon House, by the Thames in West London. Now apricots are one of my favourite fruits; I eat apricot jam every morning with my yoghurt. I fell in love with a pretty tree, but the relationship, as you will discover, was not meant to last.

My garden still lacks an apricot tree (though the faithful, but dull, blueberry continues to struggle for sun outside the kitchen window. As it happens I am reading Jane's lovely and fascinating book on Feng Shui at the moment and have just discovered that I lack a marriage corner, which, after 37 years, is a trifle disconcerting. A big plant, I suppose an apricot would do, strategically placed, might help to cover up. Perhaps, this exercise will persuade me to go and buy one.


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DON'T ASK AN APRICOT ABOUT AN AUTUMN FESTIVAL

In my experience Easter is either surpassingly mild or unreasonably cold. Sometimes it is both at once. Cold and clammy dampness suddenly gives way to merry sunshine in which birds sing and daffodils flounce thus confirming the sentiment of Robert Browning's line 'Oh to be in England now that April's there.' Or even, March, as this year the full moon determined it should be. Early or late, Easter always seems to creep out of the Spring calendar at a most inopportune and unexpected moment, but there we are.

It had so crept, I seem to remember, one Easter Sunday on the Ile de Noirmoutier where some friends had a holiday cottage. They had spent the journey - most of it passed I recall dodging in and out of thick sea fog - boasting of Noirmoutier's microclimate. Crossing the causeway to the island, they swore the sun would be there to welcome us. When it wasn't they insisted that it would be when we reached the restaurant on the other side. It still wasn't. Not only that but the restaurant was full. So, huddled in overcoats on the terrace, we ate moule-frites, stone cold, with the mist swirling about our heads, while glancing enviously at the earlier diners warm and snug inside.

This year there were neither moule-frites, nor swirling mist, but there was an Apricot Tree. We had eschewed the romanticism of La France Maritime for prosaic suburban London - the lovely Syon Park Garden Centre to be precise. And it was there that I dithered over whether to purchase an apricot tree that looked so pretty covered as it was by pyrotechnic bursts of white blossom. And as I was dithering I wondered whether we should not have a festival similar to Easter sometime in the autumn, this being another season that Britain tends to do rather well, as Mr Keats this time was wont to remind us.

Autumn festivals we have a plenty. Harvest Festival and All Saints battle it out with Bonfire Night and Halloween. And now - 200 years late - the idea of a Trafalgar Day is mooted. Could all be combined - I put it to the Apricot - into a new autumn Friday to Monday holiday called, for linguistic balance, 'Wester?' The Tree made no attempt to disagree.

That would open the way for the more commercial aspects of Christmas to become 'Norther;' which would prompt an equivalent summer festival called 'Souther,' clearly a name with just the right sort of resonance. As in "we're spending Souther at our villa in Antibes this year." We would all know where we where and the religious among us could then celebrate their own sacred festivals at the same or different times free of disfiguring commercialism. "What?" I asked the Apricot. But reply came there none. Evidently, the tree was too pre-occupied with its pyrotechnic bursts of pretty blossom - or maybe it just didn't want to risk being sacked by Mr Howard.

One day the Apricot might have provided fresh fruit at my Souther party, but surely, I mused, that pretty blossom would not survive a long car journey and the indignity of re-potting? So I chose a blueberry instead, and now I can't shut it up.

TOWN TWINNING

One of the few compensations of having a large printing order to discharge, as we had this week, is that you get to listen to Radio 4 a lot. And want a wonderfully eclectic mix of programmes you find there! If you are an intellectual butterfly like me, vaguely interested in pretty much anything, you can find yourself listening to it more or less continuously while the thermal printer chomps away in the background.

In the last few days I have learned about midwives, prostitutes, Stanley Baldwin, a Chinook helicopter called Bravo November and how intensively reared chicken is altogether a Good Thing if the limit of your perspective is global warming. I have listened to the Archers, learned about the Burmese tragedy and and bristled at Susan Sarandon berating Hillary Clinton.

Not that the radio has had things entirely its own way. For between these printing sessions and other, more regular work, I have been assisting, as the French would say, in the biennial visit of families from Clisson, our twin town near Nantes.

They arrived on Thursday bringing with them both sunshine and their own portable loudspeaker apparatus and set up camp in our newly renovated Physic Garden, where the Committee had laid on the South Walian equivalent of a vin d’honneur. All very agreeable, you might say, but at the same time curiously transportng. For what with the bunting, the convivialité, the amplified French voices it seemed I was no longer in Wales at all but back somewhere in La France Profonde

Nor does this transporting stop with the bunting and ‘le micro.’ For the arrival of the French precipitates a rush of Gallic behaviour, even among us locals. Acquaintances that you barely nod to in the street suddenly greet you with a kiss on both cheeks. Apart from the absence of brioche and the unlikely substitution - caused I suppose by the relative strengths of the dollar and euro - of Blossom Hill Californian, for the ubiquitous Muscadet, the little reception could have been French.

It was the same with the Hog Roast last night. Trestle tables had been set out in the rugby club in three long rows. Some species of unfortunate pig roasted outside on a supersize barbecue. Pencil thin girls wafted up and down, depositing even more of the Blossom Hill on the tables. This embarrassed me as I am not a fan of wine grown in any English speaking country but our French guests affected not to notice, or if they did notice they remained unusually reticent on the subject.

The pig however refused to succumb without a struggle. I don’t mean that it started the evening oinking around on the hallowed turf of the rugby field. The butcher had done his job, but evidently the beast had proved more well-padded than expected and a great deal of the Blossom Hill disappeared while we waiting for the porcine epiphany.

This provided excuse for yet another round of cheek kissing and general amity before a local choir arrived in best Welsh tradition. After the choir a harp made its appearance, played by a woman in stovepipe hat - these were billed, after all as cultural exchanges - and the gentle rippling sounds mesmerized the audience.

After we had eaten, with the Blossom Hill, still not exhausted the choir returned and sang Myfanwy. For those who do not know it, Myfanwy is the saddest and most poignant of all love songs and the music alone evokes the longings of a young heart so beautifully that listeners are often reduced to tears.

Poor Bernadette, one of our visitors, found herself caught up with the conductor during this performance for reasons that need not detain us now. Never mind that the song was in Welsh and the music not exactly in the French idyll, she returned to her seat tears streaming from her eyes.

And so it went on. Not to be outdone the French visitors huddled to the front and sang and we banged the tables during that old happy drinking song ‘Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.’ Finally to shouts of ‘more,’ the choir returned and we all belted out together the national anthems - ‘Mae Hen Gwlad fy Nadau’ and the Marseillaise.

And so after a final round of cheek kissing and benedictions of ‘Nos dda (Goodnight) or even more endearingly: ‘Nos dda, Cariad’ (Goodnight, little darling) we meandered home happy.

I see that the performance is to be repeated tonight, with no doubt will be another attempt to drink California dry. Dancing is to be substituted for singing this time, which will be fun as the Clissonais confess to a variety of interesting folk dances. But why in our reserved little Britain do we not do this sort of thing more often?

YEAR END

I love this time of year. Late April. The sun bursting through the clouds, the field grass growing crazily, lush shades of green everywhere you look. The dew heavy and soaking in the mornings. Elder Daughter was down and we walked together across the railway meadows in the growing dusk. Suddenly she gave a cry. ‘Slugs!’

Little bits of beige slime covered the thick grass. Everywhere. As we crossed the field there appeared to be no fewer, no less, wherever we went. I did a calculation - let’s say 30 to the square yard, 150,000 to the acre, so in this field of 10 acres, there must be 1.5 million. That’s an awful lot of slugs - all looking identical, like peas in a pod. I suppose they were recently hatched - perhaps something to do with last summer’s rain - and now were eating the damp grass. Nothing that I could see was eating them. A feast for the ducks, I thought, if there were to be any ducks.

Elder Daughter had come over as she had been offered a greenhouse if she could demolish it and take it away. That’s where I came in. Not only am I labour when it comes to demolishing greenhouses but I drive a car with a boot capacity of 2000 litres with the seats out. Enough for a couple of greenhouses.

That was last weekend. As I write this it is the end of our financial year: April 30. One of the best year ends you can have if you are self-employed for in effect you pay tax eleven months later than would be the case if your tax year ended a mere twenty-five days earlier. Nowadays I believe the Inland Revenue take a dim view of people who claim such advantageous year ends; but in my case it was genuine.

Twenty-four years ago - on 1 May 1984 - I found myself at the offices of what was then Allied Hambro for the purpose of being trained to sell life assurance, something that I came to regret almost instantly. But by then it was too late. Selling is not my forte. I would have difficulty in selling ice cream to Arabs, or sand to Esquimaux, so I found selling life assurance impossible and departed soon afterwards. Nevertheless my year end - or, to be strictly accurate, my year beginning - had been established.

Now, of course, labels are my principal work. In between came an eclectic variety of activities but always each financial year has ended on 30 April. It is the day one asks ‘how did we do?’ And I look for the headline total. Contrary to what might appear sensible from the point of tax, I always look for a successful final week and especially to a final productive day to round off the year nicely.

And what happened this year? Nothing! We did not take a single order all day. The telephone remained dead as though cut off. As though all our customers, who on other days ring demanding labels for yesterday, had departed on a slow boat to China. I was left twiddling my thumbs in frustration while gazing out of the window at the ivy and the rain.

In between these bouts of twiddling I did some unenthusiastic research for a European article I have to write. Sometimes, these articles are easy; the subject stands out, it is easy to find something to say. At other times the bricks are many and the straws few. The whole European Continent is walking on eggshells, or so it seems, until the Ireland goes to the polls on 12 June. Only in the Balkans, as ever, are there developments.

Despite the lack of orders I have two small deliveries to make. Donning an anorak I head into the pouring rain towards the post box, jiffy bags in hand. On the way I meet a distant neighbour. She has the bowed appearance of someone in their late seventies who has seen better times. Her hair is permed and steely grey. She dresses with respectable convention and looks vacant. She walks slowly with a stick. I don’t know her name, in fact before today I had not even spoken to her.

She had been caught in this downpour without coat or umbrella and, shopping bag in hand, was battling through it as best she could. I asked her if I could lend an umbrella, which was a bit silly as I did not have an umbrella on me. I could fetch one from the car I said. In a soft Highland accent that reminded me of Janet from Dr Finlay’s casebook she replied that she was much ‘obliged’ to me - what a comforting old-fashioned word that is - but she had no need of an umbrella; she lived only around the corner. And with that she proceeded on her way. I felt nevertheless that the day had not been entirely wasted.

THOUGHTS FROM A WET MILL

It is pouring with rain: bathroom-shower like rain that falls vertically in thick grey sheets. The lowest of the clouds are actually below the tops of the hills; the wispy vapour giving the absurd impression that the valley is smouldering. For the last couple of hours I have been getting steadily wetter and wetter, slashing at yet another hidden garden, this time beside the millpond.


Completely impenetrable it is with fifteen years of brambles, alder, and budleia strangling the remains of the fruit trees, apple, pear, peach, struggling to blossom in this pig of a spring. At one time this garden might have been a mini-orchard. In the middle of it, I discovered a perfectly serviceable clothes line, dating I suppose from the times when numerous people lived here; it must have been over fifteen yards long. The wooden line-prop lay on the ground. When I tried to pick it up it fell to pieces in my hands.


Still, most of the garden is clear now, at least clear enough to see your way around and ponder what trees should be removed and to sow grass in the sandy soil. It could be pleasant to sit in there, I suppose, under the trees, the dappled summer light reflecting on the water of the millpond; to drink tea or to take an early evening ‘Ricard.’ Just the setting to see a kingfisher patrolling the leat that carries water from the weir to the Millpond.

I have christened this place the Waterside garden. It joins the extravagantly named (by me) Sleeping Beauty garden, one bay of which I planted yesterday with potatoes. Of course, I may never be here again to see the potatoes for the Mill is still up for sale, the price reduced in fact. We (or rather for I must curb my irritating tendency to become proprietorial) have potential buyers arriving tomorrow, so I wasn’t going to invest in expensive seed potatoes. Equally, I have a horror of bare (well-ish) earth, particularly in the deluges such as occur here.

The local Spar supermarket however had a convenient 10 kilo bag of old potatoes that looked as though they might be persuaded to sprout and these I dug into the shallow earth. If they do grow a great many will be green as there isn’t much chance of earthing them up, but it will be the first time that the garden has produced anything edible for several decades. If it does that is.

And even green potatoes would be a miracle: for wild boar live in the woods and hunt constantly for underground comestibles. And even if the boar don’t break in, there are field mice hiding in every nook and cranny.

I still have another half of the Sleeping Beauty garden to plant. What I want is a Homebase or a B and Q where you can acquire Petunias and Marigolds in industrial quantities at knock down prices. Here they are expensive. In the market in Maurs this morning 10 petunias would have set me back by 5 euros, or £4, in our enfeebled currency. As I would need about 100 plants for my efforts even to be noticeable I shall have to find some other way of leaving a trail of colour behind me.*

Now I am in the warm kitchen, thawing out. It isn't cold, but the dampness penetrates, through the skin it seems. I am busy bashing away here without any means of communicating these thoughts to the outside world.

Those of us who complain about British Telecom might ponder whether France Telecom could just be worse. For we arrived to find the telephone had been cut-off and no reason given. An engineer eventually remedied the situation leaving a note to say the company would be levying a call-out charge. But surprise! It wasn’t the old line he reconnected, but a new line altogether. Now the broadband contract, of course, was on the old line and the new line isn't broadband enabled.

So we sit here out of touch with the outside world, my computer talking wirelessly to the new Livebox on the desk, (the old Livebox having suffered an ‘impact de foudre’ - a lightning strike - last autumn and given up the ghost). No doubt all will be sorted out eventually but by then we shall be home and I shall have missed the Party!

Without broadband to divert us we have fallen back to discussions on etymology, to wit how the Mill got its name. It is called ‘Moulin du Clout.’ Mill of the...what? The word ‘clout’ doesn’t seem to exist in French, though it does, of course, in English - as in ‘a clout round the ear.’ A clout nail also exists, or so I understand. It is a nail with a large head and perhaps it is from this that we derive the idea of ‘clout’ meaning ‘hit.’ The word nail itself is beginning to acquire a similar meaning. One rugby player 'nails' another these days.

The Scots, who derived many of their dialect words from French have that useful expression about ‘nae casting a clout till May be out.’ Here, ‘clout’ seems to mean coat - but maybe a clout nail is no more than a nail with a coat or cover.

Now the Mill is unusual in being (when it was working) a water mill driven by wheels that are horizontal rather then vertical. Each wheel is a sort of turbine - not unlike one of those desktop fans that have multiple blades, though a lot bigger, of course, and set on its side. The water then shoots out of a hole in the mill chamber and strikes the mill wheel from an angle of about forty-five degrees, sending it spinning around. Could this be called ‘clouting?’ I don’t know. Neither it seems does anyone else. Answers on a postcard please.


*In fact baulked of petunias I left a taste of Wales and sowed a packet of leeks, whose likelihood of becoming vegetables is probably even less than the potatoes.

ON DREAMS, POLTERGEISTS AND WILTSHIRE

My Great Aunt was the sort of person who saw portents. “I heard the Banshee again last night,” she would intone with a chilling voice, just as the conversation began to flag. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone doesn’t fall ill very soon. It could be terminal.”

She was, of course, very old. Born in Ireland’s western hinterland in the 1880s. She died over forty years ago, convinced that an admirer from her distant past had somehow tracked her down and come back to claim her. She had bumped into someone, or someone had served her in a shop, and he had looked at her in a kindly, funny, inquisitive way. As that person bore some resemblance to the memory she held of her admirer - she had no photograph - so, it must have been him, however improbable.

This brought her some comfort in the weeks before her (to us) unexpected decease. The memory of my telling her not to be so silly haunts me to this day. St Peter, it seems, had come in person to escort her home. No wonder she grew angry at my rationality.

This recall of Great Aunt’s foibles was prompted by a great crash this morning outside my bedroom door. The noise sounded as if a wild animal, of generous proportions, had attempted to break in. It might, I reasoned, even now be slavering in ravenous anticipation on the other side of the door which I opened gingerly and in some alarm. Fortunately, I encountered no more than a pile of books which had somehow contrived to throw themselves off the top shelf of my bookcase, scattering themselves loudly against the wooden panels of my bedroom door. Is this an omen, I thought, picking up the books and replacing them on the shelf, or am I still dreaming?

For I had just awoken from a particularly vivid dream of being escorted around a country house by the late Alan Clark - he of diary notoriety. Now, I have to confess to being a bit of a fan of the Clark diaries and I keep all three volumes on my shelves. While he was a bounder of the first order, full of loutish and prejudiced opinions and despite much of his behaviour being both juvenile and boorish, he nevertheless wrote with memorable elegance and humour about a very wide range of subjects. He himself may not have been a great charmer but his diaries remind me just how interesting life can be.

Now I doubt if any woman would feel entirely safe alone with Alan Clark, but in this dream I was a member of a group, and though he spent some time talking to me - indeed I felt quite flattered - I managed to hold my own without being overborne.

It was a house that we were looking around, not his castle in Kent. I wondered if it was Seend Manor in Wiltshire, where he lived at one time. I have never so much as been to the village of Seend, though I used to pass the turning for it many times when my father lived in Dorset. Wiltshire villages may have been on my mind as I had read Little Brown Dog’s picturesque description of the one she lives in just a day or two before.

The tour over, we were in the garden through which a stream flowed. I asked AC what it was called. He prevaricated and then said something that sounded like ‘Bulg.’ I have never heard of a stream called ‘Bulg’ - and trying to place it woke me up.

In that half-asleep, half-awake time that followed I tried to remember the names of the houses in the diaries. Try as I might I could not remember the name of the castle in Kent, though the name must occur two hundred times in the books: Sandling? Sandwich? Sandford?

No good, it wouldn’t come. I had to look it up. I went to the bookcase. ‘Saltwood.’ Ah, of course, that was it. I returned to bed.

It was at this point that the crash of books against door occurred. Now the volume I had looked at was on one of the middle shelves of the bookcase, which is in any case screwed to the wall. I didn’t touch anything on the top shelf. Why then should a pile of books dislodge themselves and crash to the floor?

So I began to wonder - am still wondering - whether this unlikely and unexplained event was in any way connected with my dream. I don’t believe in ‘signs’ or ‘portents.’ I will accept poltergeists, and have an idea anyway that this house, may be infected by a feeble and non-malicious species of poltergeist that occasional tricks us into thinking someone is at the front door, or upstairs, when they aren’t.

But books crashing randomly out of bookcases, could become aggravating. Clearly, I shall have to stop reading charming accounts of Wiltshire villages and eat better cheese.

Where I Live

For the past 31 years I have lived in the Vale of Glamorgan, and for the past 17 here in this house on the southern fringes of Cowbridge, which is a pleasant little town of about 5,000 folk. What used to be called a ‘market’ town except that markets are, these days, a thing of the past. With it’s curving High Street and eclectic architecture - a mix from medieval to modern - Cowbridge is one of only a handful of Welsh towns that can be called ‘pretty.’ Quite why visual beauty in the built environment should be shunned in a country with such wonderful landscapes has always escaped me, but there we are, others may disagree. The prettiness is one of the reasons I like living here.

It is also well placed geographically - close enough to Cardiff, and for that matter London; just a few miles from the most romantic coastline that you could want, sufficient hills to make any panorama interesting but without the oppression of mountains, brooding smokily beyond your back window. We have castle and a river, a fortified church, in fact an abundance of churches, a little theatre, some renowned clothes shops, a Food Festival in the autumn, a Physic Garden, a small park, a medieval town wall and gate and a Charter granted by Richard III.

The Vale is the bit that bulges out from the bottom of Wales (stop giggling in the back) and is like an amphitheatre, the land rising from the sea, with each set of hills higher than the last. Climb up to Cae’r Mynydd (Mountain Fort), near Bridgend and you can see the entire Vale spread out before you like a map. In fact from here on a really clear day you can even see Glastonbury Tor - 45 miles away.

I was lucky enough to grow up in the country, surrounded by trees and fields and animals. I still need plenty of open space around me. From the house the open countryside is less than five minutes away. Every Sunday morning I tour my ‘domain’ - a stiff walk up Primrose Hill to the top of ‘The Tump’ from where I can see the Bristol Channel and the hills of Exmoor beyond. Then down into St Hilary Woods - carpeted successively by wood anemones, wild garlic, bluebells - and around and across fields full, at this time of year, with young lambs and their patient mothers. Finally, I cross the old railway line that used to connect Aberthaw on the coast with Llantrisant (where the coins come from) and so back home.

Our house is built on the same railway line, or rather it is built on the cutting that carried the line into Cowbridge. We bought it in 1991 semi-finished from the builder. But it was warm and dry - the principle criteria for any house - and we have been here since. The children have moved on, Mother-in Law came and we converted the garage for her and she lived with us for five or six years, gradually declining with senile incapacity. Now the converted garage is our label stockroom and houses several million labels.

Like many houses it was built speculatively on a plot of land that used to be the bottom of someone’s garden. But in trying to maximise his return the developer produced a large house with very little space outside. Still we have a patio on one side, a garden shed on the other and in front a little lawn that is quite large enough for us to entertain on. French people think nothing of sitting and eating al fresco outside their houses in the sunshine, but here this custom hasn’t quite caught on and the neighbours’ faces wear expressions variously of hilarity (the young) studied disregard (the middle-aged) and disapproval (the elderly).

On this lawn is a greengage tree, which this year shows some sign of blossom, and a fig tree on which small unripe figs have hung bleakly all winter. At the back we have a pear tree which always produces an abundance of fruit (but no partridges - though many years ago we did actually raise partridges in a short-lived experiment. But then we didn’t have a pear tree).

I write these pieces in my little office - the single bedroom as was - looking south out of the first floor window past the ivy at a great sycamore on the edge of the fields a hundred yards away. I now use a MacBook for my writing and emails while we use my old Sony PC for the labels. I have attached some pictures, including one to show that we do actually get snow here on very rare occasions.