Balanced

"Never meet your heroes", they say but, as so often, 'they' are wrong. We were generously entertained in every sense by legendary blippers Ceridwen and Ppatrick. If you want to get on my good side, offer me crumpets, home-gathered whinberry jam and a very generous slice of your own, unbelievably rich, hazlenut birthday cake. We learned a great deal about idiosyncratic corners of SW Wales that they rightly devined would appeal to us, and got a little glimpse of the patch of paradise that the have created around themselves. What a privilege was ours (No pictures - we are all much too shy for that!) 

I'm sorry for yet more big sky and shades of blue, but our time here is coming to an end soon, and the peace that I find in this picture (or I suppose I mean the memory of the real thing) is part of the reason why we spend these weeks away. This is the Nefern estuary once more, at high tide, in sub-zero temperature and still air - the very start of the 10km circuit up and down the river that worked up an apetite for teatime treats. As we walked upstream, the falling leaves (should there still be falling leaves on 1 December?), frozen solid and falling on to a frozen carpet, sounded like cornflakes falling into a bowl. When we got back, the tide was out and the birds of many kinds made this estuary view busy and interesting, but this is the moment of calm that I will treasure