One of the luckiest things in my life is that I am able to come to Pembrokeshire and have a house to live in when I get here. Another is that I have a husband able and prepared to drive us here and a car to bring us on the journey. Without the car I’d have to be much more careful about what I brought with me, especially in regard to books and papers. Without the husband, it would feel so much less of an enjoyable venture.

But Pembrokeshire was where I was born and grew up. While my mother and father were both still alive, it’s the place I came back to huge numbers of times and not only to see them but because I love it so much. This continued after my mother had died and while my father was still alive. He too loved the place and had many, many stories about it. After he died, my visits did not stop.

So here I am again. I have noted that the little garden at the back of the house is in need of a great deal of weeding. But that can get done gradually while Paul and I are here. Meantime, there are friends to spend time with. And I think it’s only the best of friends who would always have left something delicious she’d cooked on our kitchen table for us to eat when we got here. This time it was a lovely quiche.

Paul and I arrived quite late last night. Today I feel utterly shattered. But that won’t put me off going to walk across Whitesands beach or visiting the little bay of Abercastle or, if I’m still just too tired to get out to see them, thinking about them while I have an afternoon sleep. Meantime, I am already appreciating being back in the county of my birth and my growing up and knowing how much I still love it. How lucky is that!

PS: The pictures today are of two of my favourite Pembrokeshire places. One is from our bedroom window in Mathri. The other is of the great expanse of Whitesands beach when the tide is out.

Marmalade and I get on very well. I love the edible kind: my mother would make great batches of it and it was a staple of breakfast time. But now there’s another Marmalade in our lives. It’s a cat, a very lithe and light little cat who comes across the back garden wall. I’ve no idea if she’ll continue to visit. If she doesn’t, I’ll miss her a bit. If she does, she’ll be very welcome. The other day, sitting at the kitchen table doing our current jigsaw (jigsaws is something that began with lockdown), suddenly, there she was on my lap. No warning. At least she didn’t climb onto the table and start pawing the jigsaw pieces onto the floor.

Of course Marmalade makes me think of all the other famous cats there have been in our lives. Biggles and Minky and Fanta and Cosimo and Whiskers and Hannah-Jane all much-loved, known to all friends and mourned by many when they passed on to cat-heaven.

So now that we don’t have a cat in our lives on a regular live-in basis,  I have begun wondering (again) why on earth not. Time for action. The possible impediments – running out of cat-food and having to make unplanned visits to the shops, plus mewing from the back seat of the car on our journeys to Wales and provision of litter tray on the floor of the car – have not proved impossible in the past.  Read the rest of this entry »

Lying in bed at eight o’clock this morning, the thought crashed into – or out of – my brain. Oh my goodness, it’s Saturday. I’ve got to do my blog.

It’s one of those inexplicable things that, suddenly, this thing I do each week seemed so suddenly so unlikeable, so onerous, so very much NOT what I wanted to do. Not now, not ever, not ever again.

Yet here I am, now sitting at my desk and feeling absolutely comfortable with the thought of actually getting this blog written. For of course, one of the odd things about life is that, as soon as you start to accept what you’ve got to do and start to think about it, ideas do start coming into your head.

Sometimes, of course, the ideas are too many. Thus, already in the few minutes since I remembered that it’s Saturday morning and sat down at my desk to write this blog, I’ve thought about the room in the hospital where I go for a blood at the start of any visit. But it’s not so much the room that buzzes into my mind as the woman who works there and the fact that, seconds after my arrival, we’ll be chatting away as if we’d known each other for ever. How does that happen? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always loved the work of Thomas Hardy, the novels as well as the poems. Recently, I’ve been returning to the poems, appreciating both the rhythms and the sense of them. Today, I make no apology for devoting this blog to perhaps my most-loved of Hardy’s poems, which was written during the First World War in December 1912. Maybe it’s the sense of loss that permeates it that most moves me, the sound of the breeze travelling across the wet mead and the wind oozing thin through the thorn.

From what I’ve read, Thomas Hardy was quite a one for the ladies. This poem has something so poignant about it. Its repetitions – ‘how you call to me, call to me’ – and also the repetitions of sound as in the faltering forward of the last verse, leaves falling and the wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward. Read the rest of this entry »

Golwg is a Welsh word with a number of related meanings among them sight, appearance and view. Golwg is also the name of a Welsh language magazine, which pops through my letterbox in London towards the end of each week.

An item in Golwg this week describes how a Muslim woman, Hanan Issa, who lives in Grangetown in Cardiff, recently shared a story about racism in Wales. According to her account, a woman wearing a niqab was chatting with her son on a bus when a stranger turned to her and said that, as she was in Britain, she ought to be speaking English. Upon hearing this, another woman immediately turned to the man and pointed out, ‘She’s in Wales and she’s speaking Welsh.’

This story reminded me of a horrible incident which I’ve never forgotten. Indeed, I’ve probably included it in some previous blog. I was sitting in a second-tier box in the Royal Albert Hall for a Proms concert devoted to BBC Radio Six Music   Cerys Matthews, the presenter and singer, who was one of the main performers on that occasion was introducing an old Welsh tune from Tudor times by its Welsh name. A man shouted down at her: ‘Your language is dead.’ I felt outraged then. And I feel outraged now in recollecting it. Read the rest of this entry »

Time was, I began last week’s blog, when I would have walked down to Whitesands on my own from St David’s. And time also was, I’ve been thinking, when, during years before that, I’d cycle away from our house when we lived in Fishguard, finding roads I hadn’t been on before and carrying on. I don’t know how this passion for discovery began. But I did love it. For instance, you’d come across lovely views that made you stop and admire. Or you’d happen across sights that would make you wonder about the people who might be involved.

Some of those memories have been prompted by seeing my brother Richard and sister Ann in Mathri this week and the long talks we had. One that continues to return to mind – and I’m sure I’ve written about it here before – was when I cycled down into that little valley on a road near Fishguard where I hadn’t been before. At the bottom of the road was a small white house – or was it a pair of houses? – with a stream running across the bottom of the garden.  Anyway, as I stopped for a bit of a rest, I saw the sight which imprinted itself on my mind and imagination and that no doubt will be there for the rest of my life. As I stood there, astride my bike but probably not in obvious view, a young man came out of the house. In his hand was a bunch of dead daffodils. And what did he do with these daffodils? Did he throw them into a dustbin or onto a heap for recycling? No. He continued to carry them as he got onto his bike, which was propped against one of the houses and, still carrying the daffodils, cycled out onto the road and rode away. Read the rest of this entry »

Time was when I would have walked or cycled down to Whitesands from our house on the edge of St David’s and, when I got there, I’d probably have found no-one at all on the beach. So I’d have had that glorious expanse of sand to myself (glorious expanse when the tide was out). Nowadays it’s hardly ever like that. All year round, on Christmas Day too, visitors come from all over the place in their camper vans and appropriate togs and what’s lovely is that they all appear to be having a marvellous time. Their dogs too (except in high summer when they’re banned from Pembrokeshire beaches). Bounding across the abundant sand (abundant when the tide is out), the dogs make momentary new friends with other dogs and then bound on. What’s less lovely is that, retaining the memories of having the place to myself, I often wish that time had not moved on. Read the rest of this entry »

It can be a dismaying feeling. The husband of a friend has died. You really don’t know what to say except for a lame ‘I’m so sorry’.

Another friend is in turmoil. She doesn’t know what to do. Shall she finally move to the country? She’s thought about it for years. Has she finally got the courage or the means to do it now? You really can’t say much that is helpful. Instead, you just listen.

You enter a Cathedral. The roof is high, the pillars that hold up the roof are mighty. The quiet inside the building is awesome. You don’t want to speak. Nor do you want anyone to speak to you. In every sense, the building brings you into its silence. Read the rest of this entry »

Portrait of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) by Francois D’Albert Durade, 1850

These days, I sometimes don’t get out of bed till coffee-time. This is because I have an increasingly strong sense that, unless there are appointments to attend or other particular things that have to be done at home, it doesn’t really matter what time I get up. Meantime, there’s lots of reading to do. How much time is available for this on any particular day fluctuates. But compared with my past life as a working storyteller when an early get-up was almost always a necessity, having time to sit in bed reading is a wonderful luxury. Or dare I admit it both to myself and to you reading this blog, it has become something of a necessity.

What I’m reading at present is Adam Bede, one of the big novels by 19^th century writer, George Eliot. What a mixture of satisfactions and tragedies the characters’ lives prove to be. And how well-drawn those characters are. The book is full of incident as it traces the ups-and-downs of their lives and as I read, I am both admiring and pitying their travails. I started upon Adam Bede at the suggestion of my good friend, the translator Margaret Costa, the person I call my Book-Pair. It was a suggestion I welcomed for I’d previously read other George Eliot books with great pleasure and admiration. I don’t know why this one had got missed out.

Like so many 19^th century novels, Adam Bede is both long and demanding. It moves between scenes of rural contentment to others of imminent tragedy. And imminent tragedy is where I am right now as one of the events in prospect is the hanging of the main female character. Oh my goodness, will this actually happen? Or will she be saved in some way or another? With such cliff-hangers as part of this long novel, perhaps it’s not surprising that I’ve spent a good part of recent mornings gripping my copy in apprehension at what might transpire.

As crime novels regularly do, Adam Bede (which is no crime novel) keeps you on your toes as to what’s going to happen to its main characters. Also in my case, in between times of reading, it keeps me wondering about my own reading. I studied English Literature at University. How come I didn’t get round to Adam Bede? The answer, I suppose, is that, not even including the recently-published novels I get to read as a member of my Book Group, there’s been so much else to turn to.

At least I can honestly say that I’m glad I’m a reader. Poetry, essays, biography, novels … toss them in my direction and I’ll at least pick them up and give them a go. And then, of course, quite apart from reading,  there’s no lack of other things to do. On Monday this week, for instance, there was the evening at the London Welsh Centre in Gray’s Inn Road to celebrate St David’s Day. It was a most enjoyable time. Wonderful Cawl a chan- traditional lamb soup and plenty of singing.Paul and I wore daffodils from our garden and its quite marvellous to be able to report that both are still blooming today as if they’d freshly opened. No shriveling or wilting or brown bits despite a whole evening at the London Welsh Centre in  and the several days that have passed since then. Amazing!

PS: The sunflower from our garden is here today as a tribute to the people of Ukraine whose national flower it is.

Pleasure and pain co-exist. One of this week’s great pleasures for me was the bright sunny mornings on several of the days, including this one as I write. Another was getting on with reading George Eliot’s Adam Bede, a book which, despite having been an English student at University, I’ve never read before and which I’m greatly enjoying. But perhaps the greatest highlight of the week was getting to spend a whole long afternoon with a very much-loved friend whom I hadn’t actually seen for a long time.

Sal Tonge lives up in Shropshire. She was visiting London this week in order to attend a kind of audition which, if successful, could provide financial backing for her new show. For Sal is now as much of a performer as a storyteller and she is very much involved in the creation of new shows. But it was in the early days of what became known as the Storytelling Revival that Sal and I first met. I don’t actually remember the particular occasion. Very likely it was connected with me going to perform at the Festival at the Edge which was, of course, a storytelling festival and not far from where Sal lived. What I am sure of, because it’s been a feature of knowing Sal ever since, is the early recognition of how we share so many pleasures, including the delights of the things people say, of being out and about in the world of nature, of making and eating a good supper, of music and children and laughter and, very much, of friendship itself.

Valuing laughter and the pleasures of family and friends is not to deny the pain that life can bring. What is currently happening in Ukraine is so gut-wrenchingly awful that, before it became the huge crisis it now is, I would have found it unimaginable as something that could happen in this modern world. It’s far from being the only war that is going on in the world right now. But, being so much in our newspapers and on our television screens, it has made me very aware – as no other war in my time has done – of what life must have felt like to our parents and their generation as what became the Second World War loomed and grew and became the environment in which they lived.

What’s to be done? It seems that there are persons in this world – persons such as Putin? – who value power over lands and populations more than peace and what peace gives. But despite the Putins, or perhaps because of what we learn in consequence of people like him, it has to be true  that the rest of us must never forget what friendship is and how much it means.

PS: Of course there had to be photographs during Sal’s visit. So the picture today is one Paul took then.