Category

Wonderful

Travel, Wales, Wonderful

Otherwise wonderful

Roath is a great part of Cardiff , Wales- bar the odd winter lockdown downpour.


 

Except for the Roath recreation park – beyond easy walking distance from our house – the suburb where we are locked down bears no resemblance to a forbidden beauty spot.  Bound, rather than dappled by the Roath river that skirts warily around this flattened post-code, a blocked catchment for winter downpours.  There are no gleeful jaunts across these sunken gutters, and the flood barriers stuffed into the surrounding streets are sodden.  They barely appease the lumping houses nearby.   The streets are grim, the sidewalks treeless, and though a few bay windows relieve the monotonous squash of tenement houses butted up against the relentless asphalt, they are half a suburb away.  Ringed by street after street of cramped reception rooms with sagging curtains, the postcode is a crushed collection of front entries so narrow they can bar all but the most stringent flat-pack.  Roath was never well-heeled, or beautiful, but only a year ago the main thoroughfares vibrated with the voices of people from all over the world.  The flavours and ideas they exchanged were like ingredients for a feast, perished now, beyond arms-length.  In the few essential shops that still remain open there is nowhere to sit and scarcely any idle chatter.  Even the glass windows are riddled with damp, the latest collection point for a rampant mould outbreak.  So diminished, so drowned of all colour that if the flood banks do crumble the mould might well regurgitate everything back into mush.  Houses are submerged, people are trapped and left marooned, while the borders of this perilous compound remain fixed, impervious to rising vaccination rates, or shrinking transmissions, like some lowly, but enduring holding bay.

 

……….

As for the otherwise wonderful days?  The truth is that my yellow brick house lies in a street of painted patchwork, a town of pets, and flower pots, baby-whisperers saying hi at the gate, corner shops selling halva, artists constructing mayhem, thinkers deconstructing tin gods,  loud Welsh folk clattering down the street, and fry ups that smell wilder than midsummer.  We’ve been through a lot, my yellow brick house and I.  We’re still standing.

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Australia, Wonderful

A walk in Summerhill

It’s winter.  The blossoms are early in Sydney’s west.

With their respective, four-pawed charges in tow, the two house-sitters wind their way through the inner-city western Sydney suburb of Summer-hill. Their paths might never have crossed, if not for chance conversations with enough of the same people to discover their mutual, fleeting residence.  With dog leads in hand, they meet to beat the pavements together, circling trees, picket fences and Federation era family homes.

“Did you really spend most of your first night in Summerhill coaxing Lilly out from behind the back shed?”

“She trembled for hours.”  He sighs.

“Ouch!” She nods as they both frown.

The male housesitter walks Lilly, a compact rescue dog.  Lilly looks like a mixed Lapsang Souchong cross, the sort of pretty dog you might expect to see wearing a bow if not for her female owner’s dislike of gender conditioning.   Lilly is getting counselling for whatever has happened to make her tremble, but it’s a slow process.

They walk past trees buttoned with blossoms.  The greyish brown branches of the trees that dot the parks and the sidewalks are covered in buds.  Winter is still about, but the sun is crisp and a few of the branches are already sparkling with petals.

 

“I had no idea Summer Hill was so pretty.” She shrugs, almost disoriented.  “I’d only ever driven through it,” she admits. “I’ve lived central and beachside, but never west.  These big sprawling houses and picket fences are like relics from another world.”

 

“What do you think?” He asks, patting Lilly.

 

“I like it”.  She smiles.  “It’s fluffy.”

 

She nods towards the blossom trees.

 

The tree lined streets are criss-crossed by cafes and the odd local grocer.  The female house sitter is staying in an archeologist’s house full of artefacts. The male house sitter is looking after a friend’s house whilst they’re away on holiday.  His friend works as a physiotherapist and lives with a musician, so the house is full of instruments and optimal posture references.

 

Out on the street, she gasps, guzzling the smell of the new buds.

 

He smiles and breathes in the same heady smell of open horizons.

 

They reach a street corner almost entirely dressed in pink and stand beneath the fringed branches counting tiny clouds of pastel down.  It takes a good twenty minutes, since there are hundreds of dark pink buds bubbling into lighter petals.

 

The female house-sitter walks SammySam, a droopy eared ginger Spaniel obsessed with a neighbour’s tabby cat.  Each time SammySam nears the picket fence that surrounds the tabby cat’s front yard he tugs fiercely and drags his walker excitedly towards the gate.  In no time, SammySam shoves his nose through the gap.  His entire body, from his trembling jaw to his propeller tale jumps at the spaces between the picket fence and the wooden gate. If ever the cat shows SammySam the least sign of curiosity he barks and leaps into the air.  More often, the cat is suspicious of his affections.  Sometimes it hisses.  When that happens SammySam looks up at the house-sitter, before returning his attention to the gap.  Neither house-sitter has ever seen such a cat loving dog before.

The female house-sitter wraps the lead around her wrist and flicks her head. With SammySam threatening to dig the fence up she walks north beyond the Federation houses towards the local dog park.

“They’re the perfect motivation to get out more.” She says, smiling.

“…and savour street corners.” he adds.   They both laugh.

The pair laugh even louder when they discover an outdoor cafe in the dog park serves ‘puppacinos’, a mix of goats milk and beefy treats frothed together in a tin bowl.  Owners can sit and sip cappuccinos alongside their puppacino slurping other half.  SammySam likes puppacinos almost as much as he likes the tabby cat. His tail wags so fast that his whole spine wriggles like jelly.   Dogs can run off lead in the park, so for the next hour after his puppacino stop he runs about the park chaotically, chasing the ball any which way the female housesitter can throw it.  Lilly will only chase balls when repeatedly coaxed.  Whilst SammySam relentlessly pursues his cheery cycle of bark, chase, gulp and return, Lilly nudges the ball warily, checking for boobytraps.  When she eventually bites and trots back with the ball in her mouth, she’s so light on her feet that she looks like a blossom herself, let loose in the wind.

On their way home, the two house-sitters circle the picket fences and federation houses and blossom trees.  The dogs instinctively weave their way between fences and leads.    The winter sun is breezy.   The blossoms are fresh.  The tabby cat runs to greet them as they walk past.  SammySam barks half-heartedly, but even he’s ready for home now.

 

“Would you live here?” He asks.

 

She shrugs as her eyes open wide.

 

“Too much fairy floss in the trees?” he asks.

 

She grins,  “Good people though.”

 

He grins back.

 

“…and awesome dogs.” she says, when they reach the house where she’s staying.  “See you tomorrow then?”

“Yes, see you then,” he smiles and motions for Lilly to follow him down the street.

 

The sky is blue.

 

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Video, Wales, Wonderful

Bounding up to a Bute blossom

To be in a city where people say bore da and their voice sounds like a song on a swing.

After living up north for a few years the warmth in the Cardiff sun feels world changing…there’s nothing like those first heady days of spring after long, dark, drenched winters.  In particular, after this last winter when most days were forcibly limited to our own four walls, the Cardiff spring time felt like a sunny reckoning.  This video is about May Day, when I went out and communed with an apple blossom tree in Bute Park.  It’s followed by a much loved poem by one of Wales’ most famous poets.

Fern Hill

Dylan Thomas – 1914-1953

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

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