Bleary days

It's the bleary pre Christmas week, when the light is short and the mornings dark and the duvet is cosy.  An ideal time to plan a walking holiday I thought, having spent lots of the summer trawling the Ramblers holidays website.  I seem to have a growing fondness for ditch or wall walks - having done Hadrian's wall, I'm planning to walk Offa's dyke, all the way down the length of Wales

It's in three sections so that should keep my next few holiday plans nice and simple!  I think it will link together many of the individual walks I have done - walks in the black mountains, bits of the Wye valley trails.  I am hoping that June will be stable and warm-ish and not the monsoon season we seem to be having now. A friend asked me why I don't drive to holidays if I can help it, knowing how simply I have to pack travelling by train, but I quite like the excitement of trains even if the current reality is crowded, fraught and fairly frantic at times!  I can switch off and read even if my legs get cramped being clamped around my rucksack.

Flint sounds a tough station.  Flint headed, I think that's in Jeremiah, where the prophet has to set his face "like flint" or maybe it's gospel?  I don't know!  I imagine a grey, shiny polished little town.  Or maybe it's a town where one of our leadership team's husband hails from?  Who knows?  I find I need some plans on grey soggy days.

I made a discovery about sprouts this weekend at our works Christmas meal. Where have the hydrogen sulphide, volcanic hot springs tasting stinking bullets gone?  Genetic engineering is a good thing in the case of the sprout I think.  They were small, sweet, dinky little things.  Having spent a lifetime dutifully eating two or three at Christmas, under sufference, I had seconds.  Unheard of!

It was a lovely festive, relaxed meal, despite having to shout over the disco and large corporate party in the same room.  I feel so very privileged to be working with people I actually quite like to talk to!