Wales Coast Path, day 37: Dale to Dale
We’re in Dale for another week on the Pembrokeshire path, almost exactly two years after our first coastal campaign further north. Our cottage overlooks the Gann inlet, with a distant view of the Rhoscrowther oil refinery on the other side of Milford Haven. Its semiglobes, pipes and towers shine like the Emerald City at night; […]
Wales Coast Path, day 25: St Clears to Laugharne
A cloudless, still mid-April morning in a miraculous week of constant sun. We’re in St Clears, four of us, for a short and gentle stroll down afon Tâf to the sea at Laugharne, castle to castle. The castle at the southern end of St Clears is a toy one just off the road – a […]
A west African honeymoon, 1913
Our honeymoon (1980) was spent on two bicycles in north Norfolk. Laughable by today’s standards, but also, maybe, by those of a hundred years ago. My brother recently gave me a copy of a family document I’d never seen before. It’s a four page leaflet, printed in 1938 ‘on the occasion of her Silver Wedding’, […]
Wales Coast Path, day 23: Carmarthen to Llansteffan
Carmarthen town: a sunny morning at the end of a spell of hot spring weather. The three of us walk from the car park, along King Street and down Quay Street, with its blue plaques commemorating the eccentric historian George Eyre Evans and the young Egyptologist Ernest Harold Jones. Two hundred years ago Quay Street […]
Beth yw diben angladd?
Dros y gaeaf buodd Dr Angau ar grwydr trwy’r wlad yn ei glogyn du, ac yn anarferol o brysur. O fewn y pythefnos diwethaf bues i mewn tri angladd, yn Lloegr ac yng Nghymru. Byddai’r cyfanswm wedi bod yn bedwar angladd mewn tair gwlad oni bai am y ffaith bod dau’n digwydd ar yr un […]
Wales Coast Path, day 22: Ferryside to Carmarthen
We join J. at Swansea station, on the two-carriage train to Carmarthen. A British Transport Police officer paces our carriage. Maybe coastal walkers, with their clumpy boots and aggressive waterproofs, rank only just below Cardiff City fans on the BTP Travelling Troublemakers Index. But we reach Ferryside, a request stop, without challenge. It’s a cool, […]
A cold field in Croesyceiliog
i.m. Roger Cecil (1942–2015) ‘When birds come to suffer by severe frost, I find that the first that fail and die are the redwing-fieldfares, and then the song-thrushes’ (Gilbert White, 12 April 1770) In a cold field in Croesyceiliog no one saw me lie down to sleep or frost weave its lacework on […]
Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett
Buster Keaton, the twentieth century’s greatest comic, and Samuel Beckett, its most naked and unillusioned writer, once collaborated on a short silent film, based on Beckett’s only film script. I hadn’t realised this till yesterday. Or maybe I did know at one time, but forgot long ago – a common enough Beckettian condition. It was […]
Atalanta
For International Women’s Day, here’s a Greek woman of formidable talent and power. Since 1935 she’s lived in Swansea, in the collection of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. She’s hidden away from public view at the moment while the Gallery’s home is being modernised. She was absent from the big Christopher Williams exhibition curated by […]
Mr Gulliver’s voyage to the island of Lilliput
On Wednesday 25 February the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee invited two bankers from HSBC, Douglas Flint, Group Chairman, and Stuart Gulliver, Group Chief Executive, to give evidence about alleged wrongdoings by their bank. You can read everything they said in response to questions from the MPs on the Parliament website. It won’t take […]