Five years...

...ago today we signed the completion contract, l'acte de vente, for our house. Three months earlier we'd moved permanently from Wales to the village and to the small house that had been our holiday home for the previous five years. Within weeks we realised it wasn't big enough for working and living in all year round and we had to find somewhere bigger. We were lucky to find this house - it's ideal for us, less than a minute's walk to the village shops and market but off the main streets in a quiet place. Coming home to it after a week away has reinforced our feelings of attachment to the village and the house....I can't imagine ever living anywhere else.

This is a very grainy photo of the stairway* from the front door with one of my mother's indigo panels, made for a solo exhibition in Pembroke Dock in 1988, on the turn of the stairs, a couple of her drawings on the left and, on the right, Lo Jardinièr's piece made up of terracotta heads of jazz singers (I'll have to blip that one day, if he'll let me!). In the way that all these village houses are designed, although the kitchen is on the ground floor (in what was once the cave), we live mostly on the first floor, up these stairs.

* The rosy look to it is an effect of the light - the walls are painted white.