I am still signed off work with CFS and still focusing on graded exercise – and am relieved that I am finally seeing signs of improvement. In order to micromanage my recovery I have, with the odd exception, stuck to exactly the same walk every day, gradually increasing my step count after 5 – 7 days. Despite trying to look out for all the new signs of Spring, (the other day I was pleased to spot the first cuckoo flowers – they are also known as lady’s smock or milkmaids but I prefer the former name which may have been given because the flowers appear in April along with the arrival of the cuckoo!), this walk has become quite tedious. As a distraction, I have been listening to a 10 part adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit on BBC Sounds, and trying to take inspiration from Mark Tapley – I may definitely be floored for the present, but I am trying very hard, if not to be jolly, then to at least be more positive.

I have slowly managed to pick up my pace, and can cover a bit more ground now, although I still find that I need a sit down half way. It was a great day when, instead of just sitting on a bench by the river, I could muster enough energy to climb the steps to sit at the top of the old railway embankment which once formed part of the old Elham Valley line. It offers great views over the Hambrook marshes and River Stour across to the cathedral, and I like to contemplate the timelessness of the same view that was painted over 150 years ago by Thomas Sidney Cooper, Canterbury’s most famous artist.

He was nicknamed Cow Cooper because he is mostly associated with paintings of sheep and cows. The painting below is called Canterbury Meadows and was painted by him in 1863. As with my poor quality photo, you can see the cathedral in the background, although now there a lot more trees obscuring the view so you can only see the Bell Harry Tower, and there is also a railway bridge.

A similar vista was painted in the early 1900s by his great nephew, William Sidney Cooper. This one is called ‘Canterbury Cathedral from the Stour Meadows’

There are still cows grazing today, although their field is fenced off and a tarmac cycle path runs between that and the river so they can’t wade into the water, but looking at the paintings again got me wondering about the railway bridge. I had assumed that it must have been built after they had both been painted, but a little research revealed that the London, Chatham and Dover railway line, serving Canterbury East station, in fact opened on 9th July 1860, which means that both uncle and great nephew opted to leave it out. It obviously wasn’t picturesque enough!

As a bit of variety, I have had the odd coffee trip, including a spontaneous visit to Dover, where a slow walk down to the seafront was within my steps range, and I sat in the sunshine and read my book – Good Evening Mrs Craven, the Wartime Short Stories of Mollie Panter-Bownes. I had bought it in the Persephone bookshop in Bath when we were last there almost three years ago, and it had got lost within my TBR shelf. The stories were written for the New Yorker magazine (Panter-Bownes was their London correspondent), detailing domestic life in Britain during the Second World War, and are dated chronologically from 1939 through to 1945. I regretted having left it so long because it was such a brilliant read – in fact I haven’t yet read a Persephone book that I haven’t loved – and I found myself having to ration the stories so that I could savour them and not get through them too quickly.

Beyond that I have been trying to focus on the simple magic around me. An unusually long spell of beautiful Spring sunshine means that I have spent a lot of time sitting on our swing seat in the garden (often with my coat on!), but when I have been indoors I have enjoyed these beautiful tulips,

and for the first half of the month, I always made sure that I was looking out of the window just before sunset, when a murmuration of starlings swooping and swirling about in the sky in front of our house. It was nothing on the scale of those that take place in Brighton, but it was still fascinating to watch as more and more small groups gathered together to make one large group, flying in unison.

A lot of the highlights of the month have ended up revolving around food. 1st March was St David’s Day and I bought a cheap bunch of daffodils and made a vegetarian Welsh Cawl for dinner. I tend to live on soups and stews when I am on my own as I am a lazy cook – even more so at the moment when energy is thin on the ground – and it suits me to make one big pan of something and reheat it for the next few days, so this seemed like a great choice. (I had thought about making Glamorgan sausages but decided it was too much effort!) I used this recipe https://thehappyfoodie.co.uk/recipes/cawl/ and added 50g of ancient pearl barley that I found at the back of the cupboard to bulk it out. (I cooked it separately and added it in at the end just in case – and then used the opportunity to also have a bit of a cupboard declutter as there were a lot of things that were shockingly out of date even for me to risk using, and I speak as someone who hates food waste and regularly uses things that are well past their best before dates!)

I also knocked up a batch of Welsh cakes which are very quick and easy to make – and very tasty too.

It seemed appropriate to spend part of the day working on the Welsh line of my family tree (my Welsh great grandmother married my Spanish great grandfather where they had met while both living in Liverpool), although I quickly remembered why I had given up last time. There are an awful lot of Jones’ in Wales, and although I am certain that I had found the correct John Jones, a farmer of 120 acres in Llandausant, Carmarthenshire in the 1851 census, trying to then pin down his birth in Llanfairarynbryn in about 1791 is proving to be almost impossible, and so I have rather ground to a halt!

St Patrick’s Day was on 17th March. I decided against another stew, and although in the past I have made Guiness cake and Guiness bread (fine like this but I don’t actually like it as a drink), after lots of browsing through assorted Irish recipes, I settled on barmbrack – a fruited tea loaf, using a recipe from the Irish Times. Apparently it’s usually made for Halloween, but it did for me and was absolutely delicious. I think it will become a staple in the household and will be great sliced in the freezer to take out for a snack when I am ready to do some longer walks.

It was also my daughter’s saints day this month. We’re not catholic but as all three of my children happened to have a named saint with a feast day, we started celebrating these when they were little because I have always been keen on an excuse to have a small celebration, and it provided an extra opportunity, in addition to a birthday, to make them feel special. (I think I might have read it as a suggestion in a newspaper). It was always more low key than a birthday and back then, I used to give them a card and small present and they would get to choose what they wanted for dinner. Nowadays, if I remember they might get a card, although more often it’s a message on WhatsApp! This year, because my daughter had had a lot on at work and had been quite stressed, I decided that she deserved a treat and sent an afternoon tea in a box from Piglets Pantry. She was surprised and delighted, which is what I wanted, although I hope that she won’t now have high expectations for the future as it was a one off!

In between all of these saints days, we have also had Shrove Tuesday, aka pancake day! I’m not a massive pancake fan and this is usually the only day in the year when I ever eat them. I almost didn’t bother at all this year, and then reminded myself that I am supposed to be marking as many dates as possible. However, as it didn’t seem worth making a batch of batter for me to just eat a couple with honey and lemon in the evening, for the first time ever I made some savoury ones, filling them with avocado, mushrooms and spinach, and eating them for my lunch. They were not very photogenic, but they tasted great, and although I will still probably only eat them once a year, I think this might be the way to go in future!

The month then ended with Mother’s Day. My eldest son is currently backpacking around South East Asia so is excused, although he did message me which was surprising – and it also reminds me that it was his birthday this month, yet another March event, which I celebrated on his behalf with some Nigella emergency brownies – but my younger son surprised me even more by buying me a replacement apple tree for the one which was decimated during some garden clearance that I had done in the autumn. I’d planted this original tree the year we’d moved into our current house, and although the apples were delicious, it was out of control and needed pruning. When I returned from work to find out what it had been reduced to, I did actually cry because I don’t think that there’s going to be any coming back from what is now basically just a tree trunk! I’m hoping that his gift might also include coming to plant it for me as I don’t think I’m up to digging big holes in solid ground just yet!! He also bought me a tayberry plant to replace the blackberry bushes which were also cleared (sad but not quite so traumatic), and I’m excited to try the produce when it fruits. I love blackberries and raspberries so I think we might be on to a winner with this.

My daughter took me out for a delicious veggie breakfast at a cafe in Tankerton, and then we had a rather windswept walk along the seafront.

She also bought me this book, which we have been pouring over and which has had us both excitedly dreaming of future adventures. Every suggested route sounds fantastic – it’s just a case of finding the time and money to do them all – but Estonia, Romania and Slovenia are all countries that we would never have thought of but which are now pretty high on the list!

Not for this year though as we have already booked a summer holiday! We returned to the same cafe where we had put together our Belgium/Luxembourg trip last year – we hadn’t actually set out to do holiday planning then and it just kind of evolved out of our general chat, but it was such a fabulous holiday that we decided that it was clearly the place to come up with the best travel plans! And when you are given a smiley face on your hot chocolate it seems to confirm the fact that it is the right place to come to have/plan a fun time!

As with our mini trip in May, it does maybe seem a little impulsive to book a holiday when my health is still in a fairly parlous condition, but it has given me an even greater motivation to focus on recovery and get well again. We are going on the Italian trip that I was hoping for in my Looking forward post, but have scaled back on what we had previously been discussing. My daughter has found an Airbnb in a small town on Lake Como where there is little to do but sit in cafes, take short walks along the lake and have a boat ride, plus the apartment has a little garden that we can sit out in. There will also be a lot of sitting on trains – we are travelling through Switzerland on the way out, stopping over in Basel and Zurich and we have splashed out on seats on the Bernina Express, which is actually featured in the slow travel book and which should be very exciting – although I have moments when I remember that I am scared of heights and start to worry about the vertiginous drops and how I am going to cope with them! We will then have a couple of nights in Milan before heading home. I am not a beach holiday/all inclusive resort sort of girl, so for me, used to tearing about around historic sites, galleries and museums on city breaks, or long hikes in the countryside, this is about as restful as it gets and I am very excited – but I just need to be better than I am now to properly enjoy it!