I am very excited about this new 'skins' availibility. I can't resist an opportunity to prettify things. I picked this skin because it was elegant and minimal and not too distracting.

I'm currently having quite a dull day. I overslept considerably this morning as I had a rather insomniac night (worse than normal) and didn't get to sleep until 06:30 this morning (several hours after I had gone to bed. I intend to make my day less dull by embarking on some painting. I am going to do a watercolour preliminary for my 'Lady of Shallot' - a bit late considering I have already started on the oil painting. The oil painting has been put on hold until painting the clouds ceases to frustrate me.

Anyway, enough of the boring details of my life. This is a journal about how lucky I feel to live somewhere as beautiful as I do. I love the area I live in. I think it is set in beautiful countryside, and very inspiring. The other day I took a Californian woman about the same age as me for a guided tour of one of the local woodlands. She was really astounded by it, and I suddenly felt bad for taking it for granted. The memory of living in a city has, for me, been polished into something shiny by time. I miss Bristol, and in that have forgotten what it is like to live somewhere that is mainly buildings and concrete rather than trees. Luckily Bristol does have the Downs, but they are on the outskirts, up with lovely Clifton.

I am a person who left this area, went to the big city and returned. Once upon a time I lived in a space in a big building with lots of other people living in their own cramped spaces. At night it was noisy with people partying above me, or if they were quiet, the sounds of the city, that low-level background hum that you only notice when all other sounds die away, that murmur made of the accumulation of all the cars, air-conditioning and heating units, lorries, trains, loud people, barking dogs, loud music, distant factories, overhead planes and other city sounds merged into indistinction by the winds coming, in Bristol's case, over from the Bristol Channel and the seas beyond.

Now I live somewhere peaceful. At night I can sometimes hear the nearest town if the wind blows ill, or cars on the main road, but I can hear them as cars not as an all pervasive hum. During the day I can hear jets fly past because I'm just too close to Heathrow to avoid them, but it's still so much quieter. I can hear birds, lots of birds rather than just gulls, pigeons crows and jays. There are bluetits in my garden and hawks in the sky. I can watch pretty green woodpeckers or go to the pond and see various sorts of duck. I can see bees as well as wasps, and dragonflies and ladybirds. In summer there are butterflies everywhere.

I have found a muse in this village, in this little corner of England with its stained-glassed parish church, ornately covered wells, rolling hills, sheep and hedgerows full of life. Even in winter, skeletal trees scratching against the bleak grey sky drive me to poetry. But I wrote poety in the city. I looked out over myriad twinkling lights from high above the rainbow bridge and the allotments, thinking of how close together it all looked at night, and how far away it was by day, how rich each hundred meters was with possibility. I do miss Bristol. It had a human vibrancy I connected to, but I am a country person at heart.

I am a Romantic and a Realist. I know agriculture is an industry, and that the green rolling fields are acres of intensive food production, that the black and white cows are their for their milk rather than to make the countryside look pretty. The countryside smells of dung, mud and rotting leaves. There are biting insects and some of the populace are just as much yobs, soots and jerks as in the big city - it's just they're suitably far away from me that I can avoid them. This place is not some pastoral Elysium. It has been built on. I live in a 1960's terraced house. One facing a field and rather large chestnut tree, granted, but still a grotty, falling-appart terraced house. Queit country lanes are now busy thoroughfairs, and there are mobile phone masts and electricity pylons.

This is the modern world, with electricity, industry, cars and all. But this is still, in many ways, an old place. I think there was once a proud white horse carved into a local hill. A blurry white gigantic, vaguely horse-shaped chalky smudge remains, but I've seen earlier aerial photographs where it was clearer. It has since been ploughed through. The parish church is over 1,000 years old - it has stood since before the Norman conquest, bears scars from the English Civil War, has a Victorian bell-tower and a 1970s extension for a parish room/hall. Romans carved huge clay pits and Victorian engineers blasted away vast chalk quarries. People made pots near on 2,000 years ago, and bricks 200 years ago. There are saw pits in the woods from where trees were cut for making into chairs. There are barrows on the hill, silent, hunched watchers risen from the earth.