Spring fun

Discovered that my housemate has arranged for two Jack Russells to come and stay with us for the day while their mother the reborn Christian moves house.

Subverting Jack Russell puppies is not difficult.

‘Get in touch with your Inner Bitch,’ I tell them as they sit obediently in their knitted Argyll jackets. ‘Whose mummy believes in God as a nasty narrow old manmade construct? Who knows God is just Dog spelled backwards?’

Now they are jumping on sofas and tearing around the garden. After lunch they will learn to Dig for Fun and not come when called. They will discover Bad as a positive adjective and get a little pagan wickedness into their once-wolf souls.

How thrilled their mother will be! How she will enjoy having months of puppy schooling undone by her pagan friend and animal anarchist!

In between bouts of this cross-species subversion I am making a great salad with cos lettuce, ripe avocado, spring onions, sweet red tomatoes and diced cucumber. And roasting rosemary potatoes in the oven with olive oil and rosemary from the garden. If it doesn’t rain I shall char-grill red peppers and slices of aubergine.

Taking a walk on the wild side.

Anger management for mystics

Rainy but beautiful weather — friends took me out for a Cuban-African lunch to the Buena Vista Social Cafe in the Helderberg valley. Stuffed jalapenos, salsas, a ‘Virgin Daiquiri’ of freshly squeezed lime juice. The battered old barn on a farm, painted in shades of blue and ochre, wooden doors stripped down and fireplaces put in. Old framed portraits of Che Guervara and downtown Havana in the 1940s on the walls alongside mirrors and Spanish wrought-iron work. Heavy but comfortable dining room chairs and tables in dark polished wood. Vibey and crowded with students, tourists, adventurous eaters. We laughed and chatted and enjoyed the sultry Latin jazz in the background.

Too much to eat and I can feel the sleepiness and slight indigestion. Because I am so aware of body sensations right now I find myself wondering about why anger is such an uncomfortable feeling.

Anger. My heart races, there is a knot in my stomach, a flushed unhappiness, tensing, sweaty palms sometimes, or an icy chill all over, the cold contempt of anger.

When men express anger, it is seen very often as effective and powerful, an angry man speaking out and setting boundaries, protecting himself. Even physical aggression is not seen as a man losing control, although that is often the case. When women express anger, it is often read as hysteria or a woman getting out of control. And anger is an uncontained emotion, a blast of rage, force, vehemence and impulsive, dangerous, unpredictable.

But we all feel angry at certain times and anger is a valid human emotion. It is natural. Like the build-up to orgasm or an instinctive dash across the beach to rescue a puppy. It can be unthinking, primal, direct.

Or it can be a slow simmer or a lingering bitterness, a festering wound. Along with the pain and discomfort of enduring that disruptive angry energy, there are the proscriptions we as women have internalised against expressing anger.

If I am angry I will be thought unreasonable. I will look ugly and aggressive. Anger is not feminine. Anger is not spiritual. Anger is going to provoke more anger in those around me and may be an excuse for them to behave violently towards me.

Anger has some uncomfortable emotional companions. Anger and guilt. Anger and sexual arousal. Anger and tears. Anger and helplessness. Anger and sadism. Anger and masochism. Feelings of wanting to punish or be punished. Self-injury, lashing out, breaking objects, lying, stealing, verbal abuse, drinking too much, drugging the anger away. Plotting or taking vengeance on others that hurts us and others, and achieves nothing. Hurting ourselves because we cannot confront others. Swallowing anger like toxic poisons. Anger makes us feel unlovable and hardly human. We feel like monstrous women when we are screaming in fury. We are like wild hyenas, shrill, viragos, ballbreakers, manhaters, spinsters, evil, dreadful, to be pitied, to be chained up or locked away.

When we express anger we risk being seen as crazy, mad, out of our minds. Insane and irrational.

And all of this is part of what we live with and what we live through. Anger is who we are at times. It is a consuming and intense emotion that is fed to a blaze by resentments and fear and shame. Rarely does it feel liberating and positive.

If we are cool and calm and able to act clearly to correct injustice and address the source of what causes us to get angry, the chances are that we have worked through the anger and are not choked up with rage as we speak.

But that choking furious thwarted vengeful anger wants to be felt and acknowledged and that is the reality. We need to just be angry and suffer that bitter taste in the throat, the heat behind the eyes, the twisting hands and constricted throat chakras, the clenched fists and explosve roaring within — angry, we know ourselves as the wronged and frustrated and humiliated, and suffer the punitive sensations, the memories of not being heard, of being falsely accused or betrayed or abandoned, of being belittled or mocked, a lifetime’s worth of resentments and grievances. We rage for all those innocents we cannot protect, the wretched of the earth. The anger burns through us. Searing and raw and unbearable, but we bear it, feel the sensations and the emotional scourging.

And then we are with the Mother who has raged with us, we are the phoenix reborn and cleansed and purified. No more moralising or pathologising. Anger has a home in us and we allow the space for it to blaze or smoulder.

Of vipers and vipassana

My present computer is riddled with bugs, so bear with me –

A long vipassana retreat in the deserts and mountain ranges of the Karoo. There were fig trees just popping with new green fruit, aloes still in tawny-red flower, wild purple daisies and the low resiny grey bushes of the bushveld all around. A drifting snowline so that even in the hot sunshine, there was the snap of ice.

We sat for at least 10 hours each day in a draughty meditation hall, fighting sleepiness, enduring and observing backache, grumbling muscles, inner storms of grief and rage and plain old boredom.

When I woke up each morning on hearing the gong at 4am, the moon would be overhead, gleaming on the snow and the rivers running down the mountainsides. Once outside, I would take lungful after lungful of the freezing pure air and look across the valley, shadowy and moonlit and motionless. All the power of the lunar landscape, unhindered and streaming down over the African plains.

When it warmed up, the snakes came out. Grass snakes, quick and shy, cobras and a puffadder. We wore thick boots and walked across the veld very carefully. Very warily and mindfully. I was, in truth, far more afraid of scorpions, the little flat brown scuttling creatures with curved scimtars held up so fiercely.

All through the long hours, together with the other silent women cross-legged all around me, I sat and followed the bare breath softly leaving the nostrils, the sensation of faint breath on my upper lip. Hour on hour sitting and paying attention to the sensations, the aching muscles, the constrictions of my throat, the tensions gathering and dissolving, the struggle to release and let go, to accept life as it is. Noting the sensations that connote the subtlest indication of anger as it is suppressed; the pleasure of the skin boundaries becoming permeable, floating, golden and transparent; the renewed struggles, the taste of old bitterness, the knot in the soft belly; the cravings or pleasurable sensations, the loathing and dread of pain and damp and tiredness. Energies I have never looked at so long or so hard.

It is really not about what happens, it is all about observing what happens. Patiently and gently and hopefully.

The clutching at the past, at the doubtful pleasures of blaming, the hissing and spitting within, the hollow sensations of powerlessness. Sensations coming up through flesh and bone and the layers of the epidermis, gathering, intensifying, passing. New sensations, desires, furies, hopes, the breath catching or hardening, the jawline clenching, the itching and tickling and burning. Stiffnes, sitting motionless for hours, not scratching or coughing, just enduring. The locked bodies of the West. The emptiness within, the fullness of quick magical strams of golden pleasure, the jabbing needling pain of old scars. Shakespeare’s Malvolio: ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound.’

We are body-mind. We despise and ignore and punish our bodies. The same bodies that carry us through life, that suffer and carry on indomitably like brave little pack mules until the day we die.

And there were the tiny green figs swelling like bright peas on the bare branches, pelargoniums like scarlet flags, the women walking up and down the mountainside in shawls and coats and pashminas. Extending silent support to one another.

I could feel the moonlight on my skin by the sixth evening, a cool touch. Small jet- and gold-shelled humped mountain tortoises clambering alongside us, the goshawks lazily climbing on thermals high over the valley.

We were cold and damp. Some of the vegetarian meals were delicious: sliced beans and mushrooms and tamari, delicately toasted cubes of tofu. Grains scented with cardamom, china bowls of broccoli and chopped cashew nuts. But there was cold gruel for breakfast and no food after noon, just a glass of lemon juice and hot water in the evening. The women with cancer and Aids coughed and struggled, shook with fevers. Their own choice to come here, battle through the harsh conditions, the tough schedule. Suffering or non-suffering less important than awareness, simple presence, staying in the moment.

And the bond between all of us unspoken but very much a strength. Women exploring the psyche, the watching consciousness, the mysticism of the East, the dying to ego in life, the sensations wordless and unstopping across the skin and swift or thickening throughout the body.

The body speaking and teaching the mind, the chatter stilled.

Louise Gluck: ‘Oh my body /have you the one song only to sing?’

The last day we sat in the sun and shared our journeys. Women from Puerta Rico, from Equador, from Scotland, from Denmark, from all over South Africa. Blooded into the tough purifying techniques of vipassana, insight meditation.

Somewhere along the way, at perhaps the sixth or ninth day, something arose, shifted and shimmered away, a lightness in me and the lifting of depression. A clarity about this past year and metta, compassion. Filled with light and tenderness. Then again moments of fury and pain, but the light breaking through, the deeper feelings steady and to be trusted.

Came home laughing and with armfuls of proteas, my silk scarves catching the early morning sunlight. A cup of coffee almost taking the top of my head off after days of only weak green tea. Energies streaming all around me, subtle but unmistakeable. How little we know of the auric body, the world of complex and fine sensations, those threads of sensation and light ribboning all about us!

And now for the work to begin in earnest, the writing and sitting and always, always to remain aware. The balance, the generosity, the perception.

A computer addled with viruses.

I’m off to the lonely Swartberg mountains for a vipassana retreat and a chance to watch the chanting goshawk perching on Chinese lantern bushes. It is bitterly cold.

Thanks to all my lovely witches — I shall be back in contact in about 12 days time. Take care of yourselves — having our hearts broken open may turn out to be one of the Great Mother’s blessings. Thanks for nothing, beloved Ma!

And the journey continues. more will be revealed…

xxxx

Peering through mist

It is very like scrying, peering through the fine wet mist that has descended on the fields and lower mountain slopes this morning. The roads and fields and bushes are wet and shimmering, but the views shift and open and close. I am never sure what I’m able to see, there is no certainty in the glimpses.

And this is true of so much in my life now. My computer is malfunctioning on and off. The much-loved and rather resented ex-lover emails me and I can tell he is lonely. I am determined not to feel sorry for him because us women spend too much of our time feeling sorry for men.

He doesn’t know how to make my killer salad vinaigrette, but that is his problem, damn it. He could have paid attention while I was there in the kitchen deftly whisking balsamic vinegar, extra-virgin olive oil and Dijon mustard together. But no, he was thinking about po-faced Richard Dawkins solving all the known mysteries of the planet and reducing everything to equations and common sense. While I was doing practical uncommon magic right under his nose.

He misses the flowers I placed in glass bowls around the house, roses and lilies and trailing ivy, the sweet-smelling oils with which I polished the furniture, the candles set near the foamy sea-green bath, the appetising smell of roast chicken or sauces for pasta when he came in through the front door, muddy and complaining. He even misses the piles of books and literary journals, the New Yorkers and London Review of Books, the music of Stravinsky, the recipes written down and left near the stove, spells for unforgettable meals. The mirrors I put up to catch and reflect green light from the garden, my pots of herbs and the spires of mauve petrovskia or red and yellow kniphofia that reminded me of Africa. He tells me, with that mean-spirited sorrow of the man who feels abandoned by his mistress, that he has killed off most of my plants. He doesn’t understand how he did it, he says slyly.

I grit my teeth and go out into my wild garden here in Africa, four or five times the size of my little Welsh pocket handkerchief. There is the African cuckoo, the piet-my-vrou, singing his heart out in a thicket of wild tecomaria, our Cape honeysuckle. The polygalas, or September bushes, are flowering in purple. The lemon tree is smothered in ripe lemons. My olives blow silver in the mist.

My lost love, the destroyer of nature and spoiler of passion. I cannot see what will become of us and I don’t know how often love affairs can endure the alchemy of transmuting into true friendship.

But the words of Virginia Woolf come back to me again and again. That women too often serve as mirrors reflecting men at twice their size and men depend on us, need us, take up all our time. My deepest spiritual connections come from earth-based practicality, the work I do in my garden with a little spade and secateurs. My rough magic comes out in my cooking and gardening and homemaking and listening to birds crying in the mist, looking at art, writing and striving to live more fully, more richly, more selflessly. I did not create a garden in Wales so that a discontented and selfish child could destroy it. Let him make his own garden, let him undergo my shamanic initiations of pain and grief — then he can talk to me of friendship. Enough of this coddling, enough of pretence. I am so tired of men in flght from mystery. Any man who has watched the blood and filth and splitting and tearing and flooding wetness of a woman giving birth will understand more of mystery than Dawkins or his ilk of lab rats.

Growth into the earth-based wisdom is crucial for human connectivity, to love the earth and respect her produce and nuture what is there before it is too late — enough of this celluloid Hollywood imitation of love affairs. There is another place we need to meet as co-workers serving the Great Mother before we play those tedious ‘he says/she says’ games.

Remembering

As I was sitting in a bath of steaming hot water earlier, soothing myself with a soap that smelled like stargazer lilies, I remembered something and I sat weeping in the cloud of steam, hot tears dripping into hot water. Blessed memory.

I’m thinking back four months. The Hay festival was in full swing nd the market town was crowded with journalists and writers and critics, all looking the part. A stall just below the castle was selling barely passable Vietnamese food. Stirfried whatever. Roger was down from London and staying with us, very urbane and a littke condescending at moments. Another friend’s young daughter and her friends from York university were having lunch with us and we all sat precariously balanced on stools under a canopy and giggling infectiously, spooning up clumpy rice and dull strips of carrot.

Then S saw Richard, the man who turned this village into a booktown. Richard was all alone and fussing with callipers, all by himself at a table near the entrance to the grassy terrace. S asked him over, and as he staggered towards us, Roger muttered,’S is like a fucking saint, I can’t stand this. So embarrassing.’

Richard has been severely incapacitated by a stroke. He had ordered a meat burger and half masticated burger mince fell out of the side of his mouth, juices dribbled down his chin. Half his face was numb and he felt nothing there. He dribbled and his speech was hard to follow. A brain tumour had been removed and he had suffered a stroke. It was hard to follow what he was saying. The students from York stopped eating and seemed to be struggling with revulsion, looking away. I smiled at Richard but he wanted to flirt with one of the students and asked for her phone number. Talked about cowboy porn being the next big thing. Demanded K’s phone number again, saying indistinctly that he had plans for her.

‘Leave out a digit,’ said S to her in his firmest tone, and Richard grinned as S wiped his mouth and chin with napkins. S wasn’t bothered at all. Roger beside me was staring into space. The students all looked down, grimacing, and waited for the ordeal to end.

That moment I loved S more than I have ever loved any man because he is one of my own people. He has compassion and doesn’t even fucking know it. I will always remember that. The way he didn’t see disability and just made Richard welcome, just went on wiping Richard’s chin as if all of us everywhere should do the same. Talking to Richard as a man behaving naughtily with young women. As if death was not waiting, as if disability was not important, as if the impaired were always and forever whole. My kind of man.

Kindness is beauty, kindness sets the world alight. Compassion is the reason we walk the shared path. S was not always kind to me but he has that beauty in him. The beauty of the male at his most human.

Sleepwalking through spring

And I wish I felt more connected. When I go out into the hot brilliant streets and se the oaks greening and smell sweel mauve alyssum, that intense honied fragrance, I want to come back to life.

But it is adjustment and can’t be rushed.

Sine I have been away, there have been changes in the small village in the mountains. A new pub has opened, calling itslf The Green Dragon and I think of the Welsh national flag and the hotel named The Green Dragon in Hereford. The latter a terrible place to stay with lumpy beds, mildewed sheets and shabby furnishings, from all accounts.

Then there is the new establishment to be called The Fat Lady, on the site of the Old Mill. Trepidation about the food because the previous owners served excellent pizzas.

And then there is Dagbreek, meaning ‘daybreak’ in Afrikaans. A television actress has bought the old Cape Dutch gabled house and is planning a club with theatre suppers and a cosy intimate atmosphere. She is anorectic and nobody holds out much hope for the food, although some look forward to months of sultry Piaf by candlelight.

But the main street has not changed, it still smells of hot tar and eucalyptus, the mountains swim in a noon haze and everything is very quiet and I walk down Kerkstraat trying to connect. I have left part of myself elsewhere, I am at a loss, I feel as if my energies have ebbed.

This will pass and I breathe in deeply as I walk past gardens filled with the honey-sweet fragrance of mauve alyssum. The sky is lead-white and boiling with sun. Here I am adrift in memory, in the rubble of my past again, and I take another breath, just to stay in the present moment.

Things have been much worse than this. And I have survived the unimaginable so many times. I look hard at the pink and deep red of the flowering raphiolepsis in my neighbour’s garden. I think about my own garden wrecked and neglected during myabsence and that old despair comes over me again.

I have loved untrustworthy people, I am myself untrustworthy. Just notice the moods, I say to myself, and let them pass. I don’t want to cry hot tears while walking down a village street at noon. Words like ‘bereft’ come to me and I shrug them off. It is not that bad. Other women have lived through this loss of love and come through.

There is the feeling of a deadend, a cul-de-sac, but it is only a feeling. Another neighbour, an elderly man in a felt hat, frowning, drives past in his battered pick-up truck and I wave to him. After the stroke he should not be driving.

Walking country roads. I have lived in South Africa, here in the Cape, for almost 30 years, longer than I lived in Kenya or Zimbabwe or Scotland. I am at home here and I understand the landscape and its people from within. For so long I thought of this place as home, worked hard at belonging, at deciphering the subtext of the continent.

Now I am no longer at home here, I am adrift. It is rather like finding myself tossed out to sea by the insouciant hand of a goddess, so that I might be carried elsewhere. Not an easy time and the waves aimless and eddying around me like a riptide.

But I need to trust the process. Something has shifted within me. I am a sojourner without a map or destination, a traveller crossing borders and frontiers and exploring the veiled places of the psyche. Neither here nor there. A time of walking between dream and reality, crossing back and forth. More will be revealed, I tell myself, and until then I am just treading water.

Wonder as I wander

Last night I put myself to bed early with dark chocolate and a copy of a novel by Jean Stubbs called The Witching Hour. Fresh-faced English witches in a country village, gathering at full moon to dance naked around a crcle of ancient whsipering stones. All very positive stuff and I enjoyed the read but it was, well, written from the outside. Charming but unimpressive. Plenty of elderly midwives beside bright fires in cosy kitchens with scrubbed deal tables, Welsh dressers, strings of drying herbs and sleepy black cats. Pretty red-headed witches making dashing quilts and baking cakes and falling in love with strong sympathetic men on big motorbikes. Admirable daring lesbians with walk-on roles, a fatherly wizard. I’ll spare you the rest.

There’s a way of making the Craft so domesticated and idealised that we forget how strange and numinous it can become, how much a journey of life and death, going into our own darkness.

It is a lonely and misunderstood calling. We work and practice alongside friends, colleague and lovers who have no idea what we are doing much of the time. There are hours of study, learning and trying out old recipes, memorising the zodiac readings and cycles of stars and tides, growing plants and finding out more advanced botany, disciplining the wayward childish mind, educating ourselves in politics, ecology, women’s history and developmental or depth psychology, unlearning racism, beginning again as we enter new phases on the movement through maiden-mother-crone, acquiring the habits of reverence and gratitude and cultivating a healthy and sophisticated hermeneutic of suspicion.

Paying attention to the body. To the mind. To the seasons. To relating and the failure to relate.

Falling into the serendipity of magic and discovering how to play.

Enduring heartbreak, grieving, mourning, healing. Alone and with others. Probing our own wounds more deeply. Letting go.

And only then do we begin to understand how we are called to serve, to do reverence, to bear witness, to glimpse something of the terrifying and exalted Otherness of mystery at work in us, in nature, in those we love. Only then are we ready for paradox, the bright shining darkness of knowledge.

Our lives, that long loving apprenticeship.

So I put the novel aside and turned off the light and heard the barn owls calling as I drifted into a dream of wandering lost through a misty landscape, hearing an ocean I could not glimpse, walking towards a hidden place, the mist veiling the path ahead.

It seemed to me that I had been walking for hours, perhaps in a circle. As I walked I could hear the surf breaking on rocks and smell the briny green sea. But I was wrapped in mist and unknowing. It was too late to turn back so I kept on walking and the mist was thicker around me, like a white glistening cloak. Then I stood on a promontory and I did not recognise anything, did not know why I had come to this place. The sea beating in below the cliff. And all I could do was to wait.

No revelations, no glib supernatural, no guides. Just my own curious and trusting nature bringing me to the edge of an undiscovered ocean, a new world.

Jolted

How little we know ourselves.

A friend called me from Kent. We chatted about mutual interests for a while and then she asked about the relationship ending and my return to South Africa.

I talked to her about feeling very distressed in some ways, humiliated, uncertain how to go on. Saying that when I can afford it I shall get some therapy.

She was warm and sympathetic, a little quizzy but meaning well. It was a bad connection, our voices kept breaking up. I was relieved to be able to put the phone down.

The shock hit me harder than I had thought it would. Shock of disclosure in part. I haven’t spoken to anyone as yet who knew us as a couple.

He had written to her and that made me feel small and humiliated and suspicious. I trust J, she is gentle and wise and tactful. But it hurt, all the same.

He told her he felt that he had been very clumsy and that everything he said made matters worse. That made me flinch inside. A hackneyed hetero scenario. The simple baffled man not understanding the complicated hurt woman. Is there really no more enlightened and subtle way for men and women to relate?

And I feel a fool because I went in with eyes wide open. He is no better and no worse than most men of his age and generation. It makes me shrink inside to think of the misunderstandings and inevitability of the whole thing.

Smarting amour propre, I tell myself. Vanity piqued. Hurt pride.

But there is a horrible exposure and indecency and lie involved in the whole thing that makes me feel sick to my stomach. What we do when we think we are in love, what we do in unintentional cruelty and to justify ourselves. What happens when we don’t care enough. What happens when we don’t tell the truth.

Walked up to the library feeling almost queasy with shock. Feel the damn feelings, I kept telling myself. Feelings won’t kill you. Chose books as if sleepwalking. On the counters at the front there were vases of late winter proteas, dark red and spiked with silver. The mountain beauties of the Cape coastal ranges, proteas.

Protean shape-shifters, mutable and endlessly varied. How I fear rigidity and stuckness, the death of the spirit that leads to reification, a frozen posture, defensive and deluded.

Came back and there was Hamish the computer salesman wanting to talk with me about laptops. I don’t know what will work best at this point and I couldn’t think clearly. A poor kind of exchange.

The sun has come out, hot and making the snow on the mountaintops gleam brighter than ever. Why do mountains always look so much higher if there is snow on them? There are two spindly almond trees in flower further down the street. Yellow oxslips on the sports field.

Let me get over this and heal properly. Failed love has robbed me of a sense of self and I need to retrieve and glue together the pieces that got broken and fell somewhere out of sight.

The first day of spring, the beginning of September, my Libra birthday month. Breathing in deeply, sending oxygen and caring energies all the way down to the tired and aching heart chakras.

It will get easier, one of these days.

Gossamer past lives

Although I keep talking about staying in the present and just living one day at a time and being all those good things to be, there is a singular part of me that is secretly and greedily writing about the Welsh Marches because that is my way of not having to come home.

It is possible to love place the way you can love a person. My first lost love was the forest reserve of Stapleford, an isolated and undeveloped forest and mountain savannah plain somewhere high on the mountainous eastern borders of what is now Zimbabwe, falling away into Mozambique. There, in the Eastern Highlands of Nyanga, I knew and named and passionately loved every knotty pine and red blade of grass and tall wind-shaken reed and mountain silhouette as if I was a child charting her mother’s body. I could eagerly watch the swarming of flying ants just before rain, knew how to catch grasshoppers, imitate the shrieking whistle of eagles on the escarpment, and the noise of the river at night lulled me to sleep. The brown Pungwe in flood was the first riverine love of my life, sluggish and threatening on the plains and then becoming transparent, crystal clear over the rapids. I could search out flame lilies and wild epiphytic violets, the various ferns tumbling down the sides of gorges and ravines, the gourd creepers of the undergrowth, the brown velvet pods that caused such terrible itching. I spied on otters and iguanas and a small wily mongoose near the mealie field, knew how to sidestep the lazy coiled puff adder at the top of the verandah steps. I loved the quick black and red dawns and the long summer nights when the skies would be white with starlight. Galaxies opening up like the endless pages of a favourite book, the constellations of the Southern Cross.

If there is any kind of natural heaven for us to play in after death, that would be mine. Leaving that forest sanctuary was among the deepest griefs of my young life.

And the desire to explore the Welsh Borders was like finding a whole new paradise. I do wish I had taken the initiative and travelled around more, taken more bus rides into north Wales and the Gower, spent more days walking the sidestreets of Brecon or Talgaarth or another of those quiet and surprising little grey villages in the hills. I loved rambling along footpaths, fording streams and clambering up slopes of thistle and gorse, followed quite cluelessly by a crowd of blackfaced sheep. Lying amidst bluebells in a spring woodland. The views from the Black Mountain were always misty and beguiling, I was never sure if my directions and landmarks were what I took them to be. There were the endangered red kites soaring overhead on thermals, their wing spans like a code for freedom; and in early spring all of Wales seemed crowned with white hawthorn.

The memories I have are all gossamer and blossom and ravishing. Fairy land, a thin liminal place of crossing over, the history alive in the present, magical in an unsentimental way. The swans under grey willows on a small island in the Wye losing their cygnets in the spring floods; the gipsy woman with her roughly rolled cigarettes of newsprint and shredding tobacco, narrow black eyes like those of a wild bird, her stories of roasting hedgehog and plucked swallows over a fire in the woodland sixty years ago. Finding the traces of a vanished railway track down by the river and following a long-overgrown hedge of dogroses and crab-apple trees to a ruined castle keep…

The young woman with hair gone grey too soon, talking about prostitution and the strange lost men who would knock on the door of her almshouse rooms just before dawn, wanting to come in out of the cold and be comforted, sleepless men like animals hunting in the woods all night, washing blood from their hands in her basin, reeking of drink but obedient as children.

By writing about that timeless borderland and its people, I am making it real to myself and inhabiting it all over again. Able to postpone my departure just a little longer.