Tuesday 6th February

 Happiness is a thick warm hand-knitted jumper, knitted wrist warmers, home knitted woollen socks, and a knitted shawl around my shoulders and neck.

I'm feeling warm and toasty for the first time today, now that I have settled down on the settee for the evening. 

It's have been a fairly busy day so I'vebeen bustling around from one thing to another. A frienda friend came round after lunch a bunch of tulips - so kind! We had coffee in the garden, all wrapped up against the cold. It really wasn't the weather for sitting outside but we were both willing to give it a go.

I managed a walk too - no.t as far as earlier days because I'm now tackling a different, slightly steeper road. The slightest uphill gradient has a dramatic effect on my speed! Even so, I managed 550m, there and back,a total of about 800 steps, in quarter of an hour. I'm happy with that as a start. 

Daily drawing 

The picture was cut out of a magazine. It's a hill top town somewhere in Yemen. (Sorry about the glare in the photo) What struck me is how the similar the town was to others all round the Mediterranean Sea; Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, but here what I took for sky is actually an apparently unending series of steep sided mountains and ravines, making the towns especially isolated. 

When people are widely separated from each other, and access so nearly impossible for centuries, it's not surprising that many countries remained as tiny kingdoms and principalities struggling against each other until comparatively recently, and even in today's times.