Sugar and spice, flour and rice

There's not room for another crumb in my larder cupboard

My 17-year-old daughter was invited to stay at a college friend's house overnight on Friday. She had a really good time, however she couldn't help noticing one big difference in the way our two households operate.

The friend's mother does the household shopping once a week, on a Friday. She buys sufficient food to last a week. By Thursday, meal options are vastly reduced. On Friday, in my daughter's words, 'When she says they have empty cupboards, they have empty cupboards'. 

She laughed. 'It's insane, mum.'

I think she was talking about my approach, because having empty cupboards at the end of the week is not insane. Using restraint in the supermarket is a perfectly sensible and admirable way to live. It means food doesn't go out of date, that you can actually find what you're looking for in the fridge, freezer or cupboards and that you don't have to crawl under the bed to check what you're hoarding underneath every fortnight or so.

I really wish I could adopt the 'go shopping when the cupboards are empty' approach.

Only four boxes of food remain under the bed

Yesterday, I spent (wasted) half an hour reducing the number of cardboard boxes under my bed from eight to four. Cardboard boxes full of non-perishable foodstuffs: BOGOFs, special offers, discount shopping, bargains that'll be anything but if they never get eaten.

I transferred lots of items to my over-flowing larder cupboard (I can still remember my excitement when the kitchen fitter constructed it back in January 2011 - yes really!). It was a bit of a squash but somehow I managed to ram in more rice, flour, packet sauce mixes and tinned biscuits.. oh, and some (actually lots) of long-life naan bread. And crisps. 

As I stood on a high stool rummaging around at the back of the top shelf, I spotted four bags of flour I'd forgotten all about. Hang on, weren't there another four bags of flour stashed under the bed, sandwiched neatly between six packets of creamed coconut, various cake mixes and numerous packets dried onions? At the last count, there were nearly thirty curry sauces in this house. 

F

Four packets of mixed seed wholemeal stuffing?

You're probably getting the idea by now. Where food is concerned I've always adopted a hamster mentality. A website for hamster owners explains how they 'are natural hoarders and are notorious for stockpiling their food'. It adds, 'their... precious food supply has been painstakingly stored for future use... removing the hamsters' food hoard completely may cause the animal to become anxious'. The analogy stops there, I should add, because hamsters are prone to urinating on their food store to show who it belongs to!

I blame my genes; I come from a family of food hoarders. My late mother kept a shopping list on the kitchen noticeboard. When any foodstuff was used - a tin of tomatoes, a curry sauce, a bag of frozen chips - it was automatically added to the list so it could be replaced on the next shopping trip. I don't recall us ever running out of anything. My father, now nearly 80, lives alone but could probably feed a small regiment for several weeks.

Me? I could invite the whole British Army to a Come Dine With Me evening!

My intentions are always honorable. I pop to the supermarket carrying the shortest of lists  - fresh fruit and vegetables, some croissants, a French stick and half a dozen eggs - and invariably emerge an hour later clutching several large holdalls.

Wales' introduction of the carrier bag charge in October 2011 has just made things worse. Forget those flimsy, useless carrier bags that disintegrated halfway down the garden path. Now we all have wonderfully sturdy, cavernous shopping bags in the car boot, it's much less hassle to transport large amounts of shopping from car to house.

Summer 2012 wasn't great for camping

Last summer, we had lots of camping planned so I went a little bit mad on the instant packet mixes. Pasta meals and savoury rice... perfect for quick meals, grab ten of each. Curry sauces... adding a touch of spiciness to the campfire feast. Dried onions, tins of chili, spicy sauces... dare I admit it, there's even a very large box of noodles under the desk in our study.

The summer of 2012 is best forgotten. The BBC's Science/Environment section claims April and June were the wettest since monthly records began and the period April-to-June 2012 was the wettest spring ever. 

As you can imagine, we didn't get an awful lot of camping done despite completing Harri's Day Walks in the Brecon Beacons for Vertebrate Publishing. No campfire, no burning desire to eat salty, dried, convenience food. Most of it remains uneaten and under the bed.

So I've decided it's got to stop. It's time to rebrand. The Walker's Wife is a cuddly hamster no more. It's time to transform into a sleek and majestic jaguar, planning no further ahead than the next mouth-watering meal. 

Please tell me it's normal to keep noodles in the study

She will repeat the mantra, 'One should to eat to live, not live to eat' and frequently remind herself that it is immoral to hoard food while there are people starving in the world.

My daughter reckons we've got enough food in this house to last for three months... well,, not for much longer!

Publication day looms

The author in the Brecon Beacons

 ‘I would like to thank my partner for… providing cheer and company on the walks themselves, and for not complaining – too much – when the weather took a turn for the worse.’ 

Harri Roberts, author, Day Walks in the Brecon Beacons

Can there be anything more exciting than seeing your partner's words in print as his first walking guidebook hits the shelves (figuratively speaking)? To see your own contribution acknowledged in black and white?

April 1 marks the official publication day for Day Walks in the Brecon Beacons (although the book has been available to pre-order from publisher Vertebrate and other online book stores for several weeks now). Underneath the thumbnail of the cover and book description on Vertebrate's site, there’s a little bio about Harri, which I’m going to repeat here:

Harri Roberts is a freelance writer, editor and translator based in Newport, Gwent. He has authored a number of Welsh walking guides, including a forthcoming official guidebook to the Wales Coast Path (Amroth to Swansea section). 

His love of the Brecon Beacons developed during research for an ambitious guide to the Cambrian Way, a high-level, Welsh ‘end-to-end’ across some of the most scenic and mountainous terrain in the country.

The trail levels out above Talybont reservoir 

So it’s finally looking as if all the hours of driving, freezing nights huddled in our tiny tent, aching legs and sore feet (plus the long hours confined to the study writing it) have been worth it. 

And just in case you're in any doubt, writing hiking books for a living is a long, mostly uphill struggle. 

I say this with feeling because I’ve been there alongside Harri from the outset and I'd like to believe my small contribution (photography and sandwiches) has gone some way towards helping him fulfill his lifelong ambition. 

To this end, I’ve trekked miles up, down, across and around Wales in sun, wind, rain and drizzle. I’ve been frazzled, frozen, soggy and sunburnt, hungry, thirsty, blistered and just bloody fed up. I've laughed and cried, paddled through icy waters and assisted in freeing countless sheep from barbed wire fences. I’ve ‘lost’ the camera more times than I care to remember, and spent more on bus fares in six years than in my entire previous lifetime.

Occasionally, for practical reasons (like needing to be dropped off/picked up miles from civilisation or a bus route or hiking in particularly difficult terrain like the Rhinogs), Harri has opted to walk alone but those occasions were relatively rare and as publication day of this first book approaches, I wear my hiking writer’s partner badge with pride. 

I've walked the miles, captured the images, earned my title. I've worked hard so that on April 1, I can announce with complete authenticity, 'Today, readers, I'm going to be The Walker's Wife'.

Looking down from Allt yr Esgair

Not that hiking in the glorious Brecon Beacons, with its spectacular peaks and escarpments, gorges, open moorland and peaceful valleys, can really be considered 'work'; rather we've simply been indulging our passion with the promise of a pay cheque sometime in the distance future .

Fortunately, the majority of our Brecon Beacons hiking was done last spring before the jet stream got stuck down south and the mountains were transformed into bleak, verdant bogs. Later, we were glad we'd seized the moment and spent the fine weather exploring trails, footpaths and quiet, metalled lanes.

We hiked some of the most popular spots in the National Park and some of the most remote. We joined a convoy of hikers approaching Pen y Fan from the north ridge (amazingly, we’d managed to forget it was a Bank Holiday weekend) and enjoyed the company of sheep on the isolated slopes of the (confusingly named) Black Mountain.

In early March, just two days after completing the Llanelli Half Marathon (my first ever race of this kind) and sporting rather spectacular blood blisters on the soles of both feet, I was back in the ‘saddle’, scaling a Black Mountains escarpment (Route 6: Castell Dinas and  Rhos Dirion) .

In May, and with the Black Mountains walks done and dusted, we battled against cold winds to complete a ten-miler around Mynyydd Llangatwg and Craig y Cilau (Route 9). 

Llangors Lake: a beautiful setting for bird-watchers

The landscape was always interesting and varied, even for a seasoned Brecon Beacons visitor like me.

The beautifully constructed wooden bird hide on the western shore of Llangors Lake was a wonderful surprise, as was the wooded ridge of Allt yr Esgair (Route 8). In the book, Harri describes the latter as ‘a pure delight, with panoramic views complemented in May and June by a wild profusion of colourful flowers’ . I can sum it up in two words, ‘absolutely stunning’.

The serene Olchon Valley (Route 5), just outside the National Park, is off the well-trodden tourist track but is equally appealing (the valley is now known as the setting for the film Resistance, based on the novel by Owen Sheers) and well worth walking.

Another Black Mountains gem is the 11th century Partrishow Church, with its intricately carved 16th century rood screen and the chilling, faded wall painting of a skeleton holding a scythe, hourglass and spade. 

A rival for Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa?

A couple of miles away, subsidence in the hillside has caused the tower of St Martin's Church, Cwmyoy to lean precariously like a Welsh Leaning Tower of Pisa. 

One morning, we stumbled upon a field of daffodils, out of place against the wild heather-covered escarpment looming above but uplifting nonetheless.

We wandered among sheep, cattle and horses, along the Roman road of Sarn Helen, sections of Offa's Dyke and behind waterfalls.

Finally, in August and after the wettest summer in 100 years, we finished walking the Brecon Beacons and, for me at least, the hard work was over.

Inevitably, some memories fade as the months pass. But it doesn't really matter because we'll always want spend time hiking across the varied landscape of the Brecon Beacons, book or no book.

An unexpected field of daffodils 

A higher level of living

The distinct 'fingers' of the Black Mountains

In this current hot spell all I want to do is lose myself in our beautiful countryside (and with my map reading skills I’d probably do just that if Harri wasn’t around to issue me with frequent directions). Seriously though, there is nothing more uplifting for the human spirit than to trundle for miles along centuries-old tracks, footpaths and mountain trails, pausing only occasionally for a bite to eat or a dip in a cool stream.

On Wednesday we completed the ninth walk for Harri’s forthcoming book Day Walks in the Brecon Beacons (commissioned by Vertebrate Publishing) – at 16 miles, the loop from Llanbedr, crossing from one Black Mountain ‘finger’ to another, is the longest.

Harri studying boundary stones

It was a scorcher of a day, but the vast landscape – and the fact that Harri is currently reading Raymond Williams' People of the Black Mountains – got us thinking and talking about the last Ice Age. Although the line of rocks marking the upper edge of the glacier is clearly visible in many places, it’s difficult to picture the landscape as it would have looked then and almost impossible to imagine the day-to-day lives of our nomadic cave-dwelling ancestors further south.

When you are trekking across the peaks of Pen Cerrig Calch, Pen Allt Mawr and Pen y Gadair Fawr discussing massive historical geological events, our own insane, materialistic, overly-competitive and overly-complicated society feels not just thousands, but millions of years away.

Yesterday, Radio Four’s Ramblings programme featured Stuart Jessop who, with his dog Poppy, is walking around much of the coast of England as part of a campaign to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness.

Stuart has depression and he spoke eloquently and movingly about it. He describes walking as ‘a form of therapy’ and writes on his website ‘when I’m feeling low, a day spent out walking can lift my mood significantly’.

I didn’t catch the whole programme, but Stuart’s determination to manage his depression in such a positive way really impressed me and reminded me of an urban myth I once heard about a GP in Crickhowell who allegedly refused to prescribe his patients with medication for stress and anxiety but instead ‘prescribed’ a list of walks in the surrounding area. Only if the walks failed to lift the person's spirits, he told them, would he be prepared to consider medication. 

Feeling small on the top of Waun Fach

I’m not trying to downplay mental illness and the terrible impact it has on many people’s lives, but I do think Erich Fromm was onto something in the fifties when he wrote (in The Sane Society) that man’s removal of himself from nature has had a detrimental effect on his emotional health. Written half a decade later, there are definitely echoes of Fromm’s theory in Oliver James’ excellent Affluenza, which postulates that the dogged pursuit of status and material possessions, i.e. selfish capitalism, does not result in happiness, rather the opposite.

While I can't compete with Fromm and James, I do have a few crumbs of advice for anyone who is weary of the ideology that drives our growth-obsessed culture, or is sinking under the arbitrary bureaucracy of the typical working day – find a mountain and climb it!