It's been a little while since I posted - no big news, just being busy and loving, loving, loving this glorious spring sunshine. Up until last night, we've had nearly three weeks of gorgeous weather, dry, sunny days and clear nights, light winds and starry skies. This has done wonders for the garden and we've now got a satisfactory amount of sprouting and growing going on. It's still too early for the summer bedding - those clear skies have been pretty chilly at night. But another ten days or so should do it. The huge amount of frogspawn has changed into tadpoles in the pond, and Andrew discovered one of our resident newts while repotting some of the water lilies.

I can't remember seeing such a compressed spring with wild flowers and plants. Last weekend, we did a new walk among a bit of Forestry Commission land near the Maenllwyd Inn. We strolled among sunshine lancing down through mixed forests, stands of beeches, larches just gone green, and all carpeted by one of the most magnificent displays I have ever seen of wood anemones. Everywhere was a thick carpet of white - it almost looked like snow. However, as you walked closer and looked carefully, there were often stands of bluebells just appearing, and big clumps of primroses and celandines on the edges. It was stunningly pretty and unusual, in that I would normally expect to see bluebells after celandines and wood anemones had finished the majority of their flowering. This year, the late and cold spring has squashed everything into a glorious burst of flowers. Wood anemones are one of those entrancing flowers that you just look at and feel better immediately - there's something very delicate and pure about the individual flowers yet in a carpet they also look stunning in a woodland setting, flowering before the tree canopy has blotted out the light. My favourite spring flower (well, one of my all time favourites really) is the humble celandine - I love the way it gleams in the late winter and early spring, often on banks and under hedges, glossy and bright when not much else is about, and such a cheerful colour. The heart shaped leaves are also very attractive. In our Plymouth garden, we had a cultivated variety with bronze leaves which was stunning and I was very sorry to leave it behind.

As well as our walk in the forest, we also strolled along the Barrage (Cardiff Bay) and took a couple of pics - attached. So nice to be able to walk along and enjoy the sunshine without being swaddled in layers of fleece, and the dogs to be out without their coats. The first few times, they looked strangely naked. This week has been fairly quiet - I walked Paula's dogs when she re-started her chemotherapy. Andrew has been in London for a couple of days and Birmingham for one day. I used our faithful slow cooker to do a beef brisket casserole - it was brilliant, after about six hours, the meat was so tender we could eat it with just a fork, and beautifully flavoured.

Other than that, I've been making another big pile of cards for the greyhound shop. Margaret, the main instigator, is coming up later in the week. She's spending the night with us, before we travel by coach to go to the V & A Museum in London to see the new Quilts exhibition. We met at a charity stall last year in Swansea - and quickly discovered that as well as our shared interest in greyhounds, we both like quilting and are both cancer survivors. She is very much looking forward to seeing our complete pack on home turf so to speak, and both of us are really looking forward to visiting what promises to be a wonderful exhibition. See link to website here http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/Quilts/index.html

This afternoon I listened to the last episode of Smiley's People on Radio 4 - a real joy, so well adapted from the book. Tonight, we watched a short documentary about Johnny Cash's "new" CD - American Recordings 6 that has just been released. I spent most of it in floods - the album deals quite explicitly with his imminent demise, yet does so with faith and grace and good humour, and of course mind bendingly good music. After my own health experiences, and seeing good friends currently going through terminal illness, this just resonated on so many levels. One of the terrible legacies of cancer, even when you survive and also I think of some other serious illnesses, is that you become aware, constantly, of the nearness of death. Now, on some levels, this is a good thing - much Christian thought for instance is focused on preparing spiritually for the life to come - in the historical church this was much more accepted, and a normal state of affairs, probably due to the fact that illness did take people much more quickly in the days before antibiotics. But it is also a burden at times, and sometimes I do want to go back to the pre-cancer days when although I accepted death as a theoretical state, I had no inkling of its nearness, not really, not down in the gut. Most humans, quite simply, row their boats along the river, with their back turned to the waterfall ahead - it's probably right and sensible to do so, as you go, if not completely potty, then at least a bit, when you look over your shoulder. All I can do in the moment is live as fully as possible and continue my resolution not to waste time with people who are negative, or who waste the wonderful time and talents we have all been blessed with.