A day off during half term and we were determined to get fresh air and to stretch our legs. A couple of years ago we had celebrated a birthday in Oswestry and spent a Friday afternoon driving out to the waterfall at Pistyll Rhaeadr for a scrabble over the rocks around the the waterfall.I had not really paid much attention. At the time I hadn’t paid much attention to where we were and how we got there. But two years later with kids in need of a run out it seemed like a good idea to go back.

A quick trawl through Google gave us all the information we needed. Rather to my surprise we all managed to get of bed on time this morning and we were off just after 9.00am. We almost bagged ourselves some lunch on the way down. We were halfway down the A483 when a cock pheasant in full plumage tried to cross the road two or three hundred yards ahead of us. There was a car between us and the pheasant and there was a bit of dithering from both the car and the pheasant as to where they should go. Sadly for the pheasant the car driver was not going to sacrifice herself and even more sadly the pheasant having turned back hesitated and turned again and was clipped by the car and was bowled over in a burst of feathers.

It looked in reasonable nick as we bowled past but there was a howl of protest when I suggested I should stop to dispatch it and bring it home for supper. So we continued the drive.

As we turned off the mail road beyond Oswestry and head into the low lying mountains a mist descended. It was more like low cloud. Not rain as such but laying a cold layer of damp over everything. It got denser as we drove up the narrow track through the valley that eventually lead to Pistyll Rhaeadr. By the time we got there the air was thick with it. We could hardly see the top of the waterfall. Just a gush of grey movement through the air and the noise of it coming down. As we walked closer and onto the metal bridge at the bottom we got a better idea of the size of it, 240 feet from top to bottom, taller than Niagara Falls and the tallest waterfall in England and Wales. Looking up we could see the white water spuming over the lip and a small arch that had been created in the black rock.

We did the scramble up to the top of the falls with a vague intention of eating our picnic up there. It was steep and wet and the youngest child started to complain but we we made it to the top. Once we got to the top of the falls we wandered around the rocks. The ground was deceptively marshy a pile of leaves or area of grass would sink down six or seven inches covering our walking boots. Some of the mud went deeper and Cora managed to lose her balance and went down face first arms in the air into a large puddle of mud. Great gloops of it had to be emptied out of her boots. We abandoned having the picnic outside and picked our way back to the car park to eat within the shelter of the car.

We drove back via Bala. The mist was thicker in the mountains and cleared down by the lake. the rest of the family fell asleep and i drove on. A lot of driving without a pub lunch.

I can remember the first pesto sauce I made the proper way, crushing the garlic with salt, then the basil leaves and then the pine nuts. It was in the small dark kitchen of Katie and Simon’s flat in Trevignano on the shores of Lake Bracciano outside Rome. The kitchen was compact and I  Katie sat me down with a pestle and mortar and a great pile basil leaves and told me to get on with it. There seemed to be too much basil but after ten minutes or so it had ground down into a pungent sauce.

No picture can ever to justice to small bowl of pesto. It might be able to capture something of the vivid green. But colour is not really the point. It is the raw abrasiveness of the garlic soften by the creamed pine nuts, olive oil and parmesan cheese and over all that the scent and taste of basil, slightly astringent with aniseed.

We had it this evening with a large bowl of spaghetti mixed with pieces of roasted potato 1cm square and just cooked thinly sliced cabbage. The kids fought over the small pieces of potato and asked for more pesto to go over the pasta.

We should have been eating it outside in sun and heat and the shop bought basil will not have been as good as the stuff we ate in Trevignano but it all got eaten.

Later that evening in the dark kitchen in Trevignano we argued about the rise of New Labour and who we would be voting for in the election that was due to come in 1997.

I will be keeping it short this evening as the weekend is starting to catch up and there is a headache lurking somewhere waiting to come out. Thanks in large part to the photos of the party yesterday was the blogs busiest day yet with almost 300 views.

The stats page also tells from which country the people looking at the blog come from. I was intrigued today to see that I had visitors from Indonesia and the Philippines. I then looked to see what seach terms people were using to get to the blog and quickly found the answer.

Now I can understand the cooking of sheep and it is nice to think that around the world anyone trying to find a recipe for cooking a sheep’s head runs the risk of inadvertently coming across this site and will have to grapple with these tired musings and the talk of a man with a black beard supping at his pint in Arundel’s.

God knows what the ‘love delicacy’ was about but I hope that whoever it was enjoyed the picture of the snowman.

Last year Dad gave me 50 snowdrop bulbs to plant in the garden. I planted them under the three apple trees that run along the wall on the right hand side looking out. I had expected that they might have been showing themselves a few weeks ago and when there was nothing there I thought that maybe they were a bad lot. But they were out today, five clear white bells.

Out in the garden it felt as if the weather had shrugged its shoulders and decided to give the beginning of Spring a go. It was dry and light. I have written elsewhere about the comfort to be taken as the days draw in for winter, the clocks go back and there is a warmth found rather than the dead beat of the sun. But now it is late afternoon and still light and the trees are still in the back of the garden.

Maybe it was the eighteenth birthday party last night but there is a sense of time moving on. The seasons turnover, another Winter done and Spring still to come.

The chicken is about done now and it is starting to go dark. Time to eat.