Abergavenny Food Festival

P and I spent yesterday at "The Glastonbury of Food Festivals" - Abergavenny, in South Wales - with a couple of friends. I took this picture in April, from the castle walls, when my mother and I spent a girlie night in a hotel there for a treat, and ever since I've wanted to take P there, not specifically for food and drink but to show him the beauty of the hills and landscape. I love high country. I love moors and bracken and wind-swept moutainsides. I miss Colorado so much, I feel it like an ache in my soul, and this area of Wales feels to me like a balm, and I should go there more often.

So the occasion of the Abergavenny Food Festival was not to be missed. It only takes an hour or so to get there from here, up through Bath, a blessedly brief trip along the hideous M4, and across the Severn Bridge with its fantastic views over the Avon estuary. It was the clearest day imaginable, a perfect blue, cloudless. And then Wales, with its forests and valleys, deep and green and mysterious. Abergavenny is a sweet town, and yesterday it became one large farmers' market, with stalls selling local produce, to be taken away or eaten on the spot, all over the place. We wandered from stand to stand - a half of cider for P here, a half of perry for him there, a nibble of goat's cheese for me here, a spoonful of something delicious for him there. Yes, I ate vicariously through P and he ate well - a plateful of steaming paella, cooked in the largest pan I have ever seen in my life (fully a metre across); fresh sardines with salad. I ate a mixed salad with garbanzos and beans and as many green veggies as I could get piled in (admittedly not many) and as we were eating (cross-legged on the pavement), we were asked by an official festival photographer if he could take our pictures - I guess we really looked as though we were enjoying ourselves!

We bought lots of deliciousness between the pair of us and our friends, and ate much of it en famille when we got home. Probably not a(nother) CR day.

Today I was restless. Restless, restless, restless with the kind of ache in my legs that is usually only relieved by running. Rye bread and tayberry jam for breakfast probably didn't help. :-) After a pub lunch, we walked by the Caen Locks for an hour or so. Stunning engineering; P tried to explain the mechanics of it to me but my head just whirled with it - driving a boat up water? Just goes to prove, what seems impossible can often be achieved.

I just hope this proves possible with my CR. I am still trying to work out where my self-discipline has gone and why. I really don't want to be constantly at odds with myself. It's really starting to annoy me, this lack of balance, this nagging irritation, this (for want of a better word) hunger which seems not to be hunger at all, but an all too familiar physical expression of some kind of dissatisfaction... I don't know, maybe I am looking in the wrong place, and CR is neither the reason for nor the answer to how I am feeling right now.

But! It's been a good weekend. And tomorrow is the start of another new week. And I still have three more days at home to CRON. And a fridge full of leaves and veggies. And dino kale! The Abergavenny spoils have been sent back to London in P's rucksack.