I realised I had no photograph of the new stone laid on Elsi’s grave with the inscriptions for RS. So I went up the hill in the gloaming to take one. When I was young I used to walk in that late summer evening light from Sarn to Aberdaron through the newly cut fields of hay.
I had been sitting in the garden of Sarn when a pair of bullfinches came and sat on the big stone by the back door. Both resplendent in fit plumage. The male solicitous that the hen had food. Then a Grey Wagtail flies onto the roof. I have always wondered why there are no Pied Wagtails here..but here is an even more unusual visitor.
The swallows are still flying in the door of the Studio and out the window, but they have never nested here. And though there are Martins, there are no Swifts as there were at Egwys fach and Aberdaron..’winnowing the air’. The Wagtails nested in the porch at Manafon.
The old pheasant has lost his tail feathers, but he has, this evening, still pulled a young hen who gobbles up the seed. Surely they cannot be going to produce a brood this late? I think he is no longer capable which is why there are no hens, no nests, and no chicks in the garden!
Anyway I drove up to Llanfaelrhys. The Sparrow Hawk sitting on the wires, the Choughs overhead and the Gannets diving in Port Ysgo.
In the churchyard two hares and a partridge. It made me think of the picture MEE did of Melangell sheltering the hare. It was designed as stamps-some 32 of them-and we collected one every week to make the picture. Now where is that?
I took the photo and also one of the grave of the Keating sisters; for without who we would not be here. It is difficult to show the ‘ambience’ of the church but these two pictures may help!:
So here is letting go! We are off to Chiang Mai for some years, I think! We will no doubt make or find another magic place for such is our life.
I spoke to E on the phone( she is already there):
“I have got a letter from Father Christmas!”
Da:” How do you know who it is from?”
“The writing on the envelope is the same as on my Christmas Presents!”
“ Is there a letter?!”
“Yes and it says Love from Daddy. Miss you! So now I know who is Father Christmas!”
“Oh dear!”
6 year old graphologist
The more I live, the more I think we have been an extraordinarily privileged generation-well in ‘the west’.
Untouched in any real sense by war, disease or famine, we have constructed lives of sensational security by comparison with other times. I was reading Norman Lewis: Naples 1944. All that really remains of that book, for me, is another history of rape.
We have some knowledge of what went on in Rwanda, more perhaps of the Chinese in Tibet; but perhaps the history of man is just one of war and rape. There are those who say that, in spite of his brain and his opposable thumbs man is just an animaI; I wondered whether any other species behaves in this way: war and rape. I suspect not. I sympathise with that film maker whose name now escapes me who said: The human race is insane. I fear for my wife and children as we move, maybe, into dark times.
All is now stored. Last of all: This!!
