WAR DIARY
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| March 18th - a beautiful arrangement of hellebores at a friend's dinner party - something we haven't been to for two years |
Starting this new phase of the diary. Previously called the ‘Corona Diary’. February 11th 2022 is the exact
two year anniversary of the designation of Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) as a pandemic
by WHO. Admissions to hospital are
increasing in the UK because of the complete relaxation of restrictions, and
because of the enhanced transmissibility of the Omicron variant. Lindsay tells me that there is a ‘Deltacron’
variant, but I await further data. An
interesting post by a nurse on Facebook calls attention to the bizarre paradox that
anti-vaxxers, on admission to hospital and ITU, are more than ready to be
filled full of cocktails of modern drugs to treat their Covid, but, strangely,
were not previously prepared to be vaccinated!
How Lewis Carroll is that?
‘Contrariwise’,
continued Tweedledee, ‘If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would
be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s
logic’.
So, I will leave Corona for the time being. The war in Ukraine is on all our minds
now. The outrageous disinformation from
Russia is truly mind-boggling. I have
noticed, and I feel the same too, that many friends cannot bear to switch on
the news. I confine myself to gathering
in the bare daily facts. It is hard to
watch suffering.
Sunday March 13th
It is the middle of the night. I play my guitar. Vivaldi, Hoagy Carmichael, Pachelbel. Strange bedfellows, though bedfellows is
perhaps not the right word. Easy
arrangements you understand. I’m no John
Williams. A friend visited on Friday. She said that deranged sleep patterns are a
feature of Covid. Truth to tell I’ve
sometimes had these episodes before. Maybe
it’s worse. I woke up from a strange
dream, with a headache. Now waiting for
the Solpadeine to work. In the dream, two
trees had come down. I didn’t recognise
the house; the neighbour was the same though.
Going through my mind was the following:
‘Time it was, and what
a time it was
It was…
A time of innocence
A time of confidences…
Long ago, it must be,
I have a photograph.
Preserve your
memories,
They’re all that’s
left you…’
Strange, isn’t it?
Sitting on the music stool I cast my eyes left and downwards. Standing by the record turntable, the Richard
Avedon photograph of Simon and Garfunkel.
Bookends. Strange… As I have observed before, Paul Simon is a
poet. Equally deserving of the Nobel as
Bob Dylan. Nobel – dynamite. It’s hard not to think about the War, or
‘Special Operation’, as Putin calls it for domestic consumption.
‘Vlad i mir
What are you doing
here?’
First two lines of a song or poem by the author. I can’t complete it just now…
In 1974, Mr Cool, I bought a pigskin jacket. It cost £54.
A website tells me that this is worth about £800 nowadays! I was in my second housejob
(internship). I worked so many hours I
couldn’t spend my salary. Then I left
the jacket on the back of my chair in a pub in Old Basing. I rushed back at lunchtime the next day. Of course somebody had taken it. Wonder whether somebody still wears it? I was distraught. The purpose of this story – this Tristram
Shandyish story – is that once I summoned up the courage and mental effort to
go out and buy an identical one, I felt better.
But the related purpose of this story is to tell of my collected poems
of T S Eliot (the S for Stearns is put in there so that nobody can spell his
name ‘Toilets’ backwards). I loaned it
to someone years ago. It never
returned. The other day, a line from the
‘Four Quartets’ coming into my head, I determined to buy another copy. Only just over three pounds, with free
postage! I felt better. Shades of the pigskin jacket. When it arrived it was in perfect condition,
and proudly bears the stamp ‘Cork City Library’. Why don’t they need their copy any more? It must have been there for years – obviously
not borrowed frequently.
Now, what was it that was running through my brain? It is the suffering in Ukraine.
‘…human kind cannot
bear very much reality’. (Burnt Norton)
This is why we switch off the
news.
I don’t pretend to understand all of Eliot. Ralph Fiennes, who has been giving stage
readings recently of the Four Quartets said something very similar when I saw
him interviewed about it. But mostly I
can see what Eliot’s getting at. When he
wrote this (1935) there was great interest in the concept of time.
‘Time present and time past are both perhaps contained in time
future…’
Alternative realities influenced J.B. Priestley (Time and
the Conways; Dangerous Corner; I have been here before), and they were still
influencing authors such as John Fowles, years later (The French Lieutenant’s
Woman). In the 1930s, Einstein must have
seemed like the scientific celebrity equivalent to Stephen Hawking in our time…
and after Einstein, nobody understood time.
But this is a long way from a War Diary. Prevarication.
Monday March 14th
It is ‘pi’ day. Only
the Americans think of it this way because they write it 3.14 (Ï€ to 2 decimal
places).
I cannot report anything new about the war. A photograph taken the other day showed an
injured heavily pregnant woman removed from a maternity hospital which had been
bombed. Reportedly, today, both she and
the baby are dead. I’ve been saddened
too, to watch the little children, with their garish rucksacks, presumably
containing clothing and everything that is precious to them, boarding buses to
take them away to neutral countries. Thinking
about our little children, or grandchildren, with their rucksacks, is somehow
even more upsetting than seeing the faces of these children.
Biden has publicly stated that any intervention by America
would mean ‘World War Three’. This plays
into the hands of Putin, who has threatened, in a roundabout way, nuclear
retaliation. This seems unlikely – Putin
would know that a nuclear attack, no matter where he was hiding, would be the
end of him and his regime. There is a
strong mood of bitterness and frustration at our inaction in letters to the
newspapers today:
‘We are standing on
the sidelines watching Russia target civilians in Ukraine as its method for
overrunning the country’.
‘Western leaders have
fallen over themselves retreating from red lines (invading a sovereign state,
attacking nuclear power plants, targeting civilians)… All our leaders are doing now is postponing
the inevitable – and while they dither Ukrainians die’.
Biden’s statement:
‘those words invite Mr Putin to invade other neighbours with no fear of
reprisals, except for sanctions that don’t deter him. It isn’t Mr Putin who is crackers. It is us’.
‘Can’t someone smear
something nasty on Mr Putin’s front-door knob’?
I mentioned Alexandra Hall Hall recently. Although a very clear thinker, and hugely
experienced as a diplomat, she is very clearly a European anti-Brexit
person. But she ignores the fact that,
even if we were still in the EU, we would be dithering about Russia in just the
same, or perhaps an even more disorganised way.
European federalism has completely failed to tackle the risk on our
borders. A huge and successful country
like Ukraine, which is mostly Westward looking, should have been invited into
the EU soon after the fall of the Soviet Republic. Failure to do this has invited Russia to
attempt to take it back. And European
Federalism is mostly about bureaucracy, red tape, and economic partnering – it
has no firm military organisation. What
is more, for nations like Germany particularly, as well as richer nations such
as ourselves, it has been about giving money to the poorer members, often for
the most ridiculous projects. Trump
certainly had a point in his carping about NATO member states not paying their
legitimate share of the defence budget.
I do wonder sometimes whether, if Reagan and Thatcher were still in
their respective posts, Putin would have attempted his ‘Special Operation’.
Tuesday March 15th
Eventually got around to reading an interview with David
Hare in the weekend review. I presume it
was done before the war (the New war).
For a left-leaning dramatist, I couldn’t resist a smile when I heard
that he laments that Margaret Thatcher was not in charge during the
pandemic. As both a scientist and a
politician she would have organised things better. As he reflects, ‘She had competence;
something noticeably lacking in the present incumbent.’
We have had our ‘Tiananmen Square’ moment. A presenter on Russian TV suddenly appeared
behind the newsreader with a ‘Stop the War’ message. This brave girl is called Marina
Ovsyannikova. Like the man standing in
front of the tanks in 1989, she is now missing.
(Note added 16th March; she is visible, and has been fined,
but may ‘face further charges’).
Say what you like about President Kennedy (and many have),
his speeches are remarkable in their quality, compared, let us say, to be even
handed, to Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Here is the text of his speech before the Canadian Parliament on May 17th,
1961, tragically and ironically, his first trip outside the U.S. as President.
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/may-17-1961-address-canadian-parliament
I came across this because I was searching for the origin of
the famous sentence:
‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good men to do nothing’, erroneously it seems attributed to Edmund Burke. Kennedy used it in this speech.
Wednesday, March 16th
A southerly wind bringing yellow or brown Saharan dust has
covered the ski slopes of the Alps, and there are pictures of what they call
‘Saharstaub’ from Lenzerheide. It seems
to have reached here today, giving a very gloomy cast to the sky before heavy
rain adds to the murk and puts an end to plans for golf today.
No change in Ukraine.
Bizarrely, Ukraine and Russia have been holding talks. Zelensky (Ukrainian President) has put a
promise not to join NATO on the table. I
can’t see any satisfactory resolution to this, and I suspect Putin is just
doing this as a sham negotiation.
There is much discussion about making the West less
dependent on Russian oil. Perhaps this
will kickstart alternative approaches to energy generation? A recent edition of CAM (Cambridge Alumni
Magazine) focussed on climate change and green issues. There were two topics I found
interesting. One was a word I had never
heard before – dunkelflaute – a German word meaning ‘dark doldrums’, i.e. how
to produce energy when it’s dark (no solar); or when there is no wind for wind
turbines. The second is that current
solar panels are more efficient and cheaper to make than previously, but still
only capture about a third of the wavelength energies contained in the sun’s
light emissions. Work proceeds on how to
make them more efficient. But, forgive
the pun, the push to carbon zero may have to go on the back burner until war is
over in Ukraine. Some years ago, much
was made about the harnessing of tidal energy with tidal turbines, but that
doesn’t seem to have come to fruition.
As a letter in the paper stated the other day, the tide will come in and
go out again for as long as the moon continues to go round the earth. Why are we not making use of it?
Thursday March 17th, St Patrick’s Day
Another strong Irish presence at the Cheltenham Festival
(horse racing). Shamrocks in the top
pocket for Sir A P McCoy. Lovely weather
today in contrast to yesterday.
Boris Johnson seems to have returned from Saudi with his
tail between his legs, having failed to persuade the Gulf States to turn on the
tap to provide more oil. The Americans
were apparently in secret negotiations with them recently but no word on their
progress. The 6 year custodial hostage,
Nazanin Naghari-Radcliffe, held by Iran on trumped up spying charges, has
returned to the UK, seemingly as a result of the UK repaying a £400 million
debt owed to them since the Islamic takeover.
Yesterday evening was a very emotional one. Kirill Karabits, the Ukrainian chief
conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, returned for the first time
since the war began. Many of us wore
blue and yellow, or waved sunflowers.
Kirill received a standing ovation and then addressed us. ‘Since I last saw you’, he began, ‘the world
has changed; and not for the better’. He
went on to say how moved he had been by the many messages of support. Suggestions had been made that the orchestra
play some Ukrainian music. But as an
audience, he reminded us, we have probably heard more Ukrainian music over the
last 13 years (his period of tenure) than anybody else outside Ukraine! Besides, he stated that Sibelius’ 2nd
Symphony, the main work, was written at a time of threat and trouble for
Finland in their relationship with Russia, and he believed that its profound
nature typified the need for struggle for one’s country.
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| A reflective Kirill Karabits on the podium at Poole Lighthouse |
The other main work on the programme was Bax’s Tintagel – a
work which was given its premiere by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra (as it
was then) under Sir Dan Godfrey in 1921. Another piece echoing with the threat
or actuality of war (written 1917-19). Looking at the yellowing pages on the music
stands of the first violins it was easy to believe that these were still the
original manuscripts.
The Poole audience (for bizarrely, the BSO is a Poole based
orchestra) is not known for demonstrativeness.
A second standing ovation, which the Sibelius received, is unknown.
Tuesday March 29th, 2022
It is easy to get depressed.
‘Our lot crawls
between dry ribs, to keep our metaphysics warm.’
The war rumbles on, though success against Putin by the
Ukrainians has forced a retrenchment and a focus on the southeast of the
country, particularly the Black Sea coast.
There are many Russian speakers in the area – shades of the Sudetenland
again – and Putin’s chosen tactic is to destroy the cities such as Mariupol,
and even to deport many local inhabitants to camps in Russia. Lyse Doucet reminded us yesterday evening
that Putin has stated in the past ‘Ukraine should not exist’, a chilling
statement of how he views the true extent of the Russian Empire. In the meantime, Biden has come under fire
again for a rather stupid remark calling for ‘regime change’ in Russia. Superficially this doesn’t seem unreasonable,
but as his critics point out, that is a matter for the Russian people. There is significant dissent about the war in
Russia, but it is hard to gauge how widespread this is. An open letter signed by many academics has
surfaced. The current ban on
demonstrations has led to an underground symbol – a knot of green ribbon –
which has started appearing in public places, surreptitiously placed on
important Soviet era statues and the like.
An unusual incident in Ukraine brings back memories of ‘fragging’, the
deliberate killing of senior officers by disaffected men under their
command. Upset by losses incurred in
their engagements with the Ukrainians, a group of Russian conscripts
deliberately ran over their commander, a Colonel Medvedev, with a tank. He later died of the wounds inflicted. (Although this type of military action
existed before, the term fragging came from the use of fragmentation grenades
by Vietnam war soldiers in this context).
I went to a college reunion in Cambridge this last
weekend. It was a lot better than I
anticipated, and the college must have decided that at our age we might be
thinking about a legacy, so the boat was well pushed out with an excellent meal
and good wines. I met fellow
undergraduates whom I have not seen for over 50 years. A beautiful day in Cambridge, the streets
seemingly filled everywhere with Chinese people, students, visitors, and
tourists. I even saw a young man walking
through Downing College with a sweatshirt which proclaimed his name and title (Tom
Chen) ‘Chinese Student Welfare Support Team’, or some such. Some of the David Hockney exhibition was in
the Fitzwilliam, and some in a Chinese funded gallery in Downing, the ‘Heong’
gallery. The room I was allocated in
College is usually inhabited in term time by somebody called Qi Qi. It’s almost certainly a racist remark to say
that it sounds like a giant panda, but this is what came to mind…
Early the next morning, Cambridge was enshrouded in mist,
and I walked around freely, the streets almost empty.
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| Misty early morning looking downriver at Queens' |
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| Hockney at the Fitzwilliam |
On my way home, stopping in a motorway service station, I
walked back outside to meet a family dragging themselves towards the fast
food. Dragging being the operative
word. The dad, had scarce been able to
exit the car before lighting up. The
scrawny son – perhaps 16 to 18, rapidly rolling himself a cigarette. Mother followed with her daughter. How sad.
Just hours before I had been walking past the Cavendish laboratory; the
Downing site; inhabited by the greatest scientists and Nobel Prize
winners. Why all the scientific advance
if this is the result? To give
cigarette-addicted dad a mobile phone to make it easier to waste even more
money with instant betting on Paddy Power?
Today was the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh,
and it was brief and moving. The Queen
attended. The senior lady royals wore a
dark green; was this Lovat? In deference
to the Scottish connection? I don’t
know. Interesting to see the Queen escorted
in through a short route rather than the west door – by Prince Andrew.
Meanwhile, the free world (for which read the USA) is
reeling following a violent episode at the Oscars. Comedian and (black) actor Will Smith took
exception to a tasteless joke about his wife’s alopecia by a black comedian I
have never heard of called Chris Rock, and slapped him. Cue many hours of news anchor time discussing
this. Given the level of violence in
many American made films this seems a somewhat hypocritical reaction. And given what is going on in Ukraine, it
seems risible that so much time, and so many column inches are wasted on this
little spat in La-La Land. Unfortunate
too in that it probably gives the reactionary white zealots ammunition against
black people – you can imagine the story line.
There is some irony in labelling America the Land of the Free. A radio feature ‘From Our Own Correspondent’
came from Texas, where the Governor recently signed into law a statute that
prohibits abortion from about six weeks of gestation – after a beating heart is
detected. In practice this means no
abortions, since many women are not aware of pregnancy until later than
this. No exceptions, even in cases of
rape. The USA, in its own fundamentalist
way, is also one of the most illiberal countries in the world.
Tuesday 5th April
Following a beautifully sunny weekend, though with biting
northeasterly winds, we have a milder period.
I played golf at Rye, one of the great places of the world for
golf. A very traditional club. Jacket and tie required. The town of Rye stands on a promontory, which
700 years ago was on the sea’s edge. Now
the accumulation of shingle has made it a two mile journey to the sea. The tidal River Rother winds its way muddily
past the town. On the dunes – skylarks.
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| A typical scene at Rye |
The war is as unspeakable as ever. Murder, rape, and torture of civilians is
commonplace. Again, the West is
reluctant to get involved, though it continues to provide military equipment
and weapons – a ‘nice’ point. The
consequences for us are minor in comparison – increased prices of energy, fuel,
commodities, and absence of foodstuffs which come from Ukraine – sunflower oil
(the sunflower is the Ukrainian national flower), and grain prices are
higher. You would not think that these
are minor to read the papers or hear the dialogue on TV news programmes.
Surreally, life continues.
Much anxiety for example, about the ‘draw’ in the World Cup (football)
which will take place in Qatar (yes, Qatar) later this year. England emerge with a favourable draw in a
group with Iran, USA, and a playoff team.
Sun headline – ‘It’s Iranian Men’.
Please ask if you don’t understand this.
Plenty of hypocrisy here too – Qatari human rights are appalling; many
migrant workers died because of unsafe construction practices during the
building of stadia; and homosexuality is illegal.
There is much debate about reliance on Russian oil imports
(only about 4% in the UK but much higher in many countries), and debate about
self-sufficiency as regards energy supplies…
Publicity about the construction at Hinkley Point C – a new
nuclear power station. Belatedly we
realise that our previous energy policies may be flawed. A nice cartoon by Blower in the Telegraph
illustrates how our countryside may change (with apologies to John Constable):
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| Blower - copyright The Telegraph |
Sunday April 10th
Another atrocity – a missile targeting a railway station in
the east of Ukraine, where civilians were trying to board trains to
evacuate. There is really nothing good
to report about this war. Surprise visit
of PM Boris Johnson to Kyiv, and he is filmed walking around with President
Zelensky. Detractors say publicity
stunt, of course. UK to provide more
hardware including anti-ship missiles, aimed at preventing the invasion and
occupation of Odessa from the Black Sea.
I should mention the awful gathering of Russians in a stadium
in central Moscow some weeks ago.
Compulsory attendance and lots of flag waving (we are told that
employees of local businesses were given the day off provided they attended). Putin stalking onto the stage clad in a
£3,500 Loro Piana coat. Loro Piana is
apparently the luxury wear of choice for oligarchs and dictators. The event reminded one forcibly of Hitler,
the Nuremberg rallies and the Leni Riefenstahl film ‘Triumph of the Will’.
One feels guilty talking of other things. The skylarks over Rye golf course bring to
mind the escape that WWI soldiers felt in observing ordinary natural things
during that war. Isaac Rosenberg wrote
in his poem ‘Returning, we hear the larks’:
But hark!
Joy-joy-strange joy, Lo! Heights
of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering on our upturned list’ning faces’.
John McCrae (In Flanders Fields): ‘The larks, still bravely
singing, fly, scarce heard amid the guns below’.
Is it any wonder that the skylarks on the dunes evoke these
thoughts? And in Rye and on the Romney
Marsh, of all places, where, with the wind in a southerly direction, ordinary
villagers were able to hear the guns on the Somme in 1916.
And a lovely walk in West Dorset yesterday, with some wild
garlic gathering, turned into soup today.
Vaccinating the elderly (over 75s) today. It’s a terrible generalisation I know, but
older people seem much nicer than younger people. They don’t take this vaccination service for
granted. Watching yesterday’s Grand
National from Aintree, and now the Masters golf from Augusta, with the
rhododendrons, dogwoods, and azaleas in perfect bloom. Some normality.
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| Springtime wood anemones in Dorset woodland |
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| Winterborne Houghton church - solidarity with Ukraine |
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| Cottage - Winterborne Stickland |
Scottie Scheffler won the Masters golf tournament. Another headline I wish I had had the wit to
make up ‘Master-Scheff’.
Saturday 30th April
Entries to this diary now infrequent. What is there to say about a war that is new
or original? The West is at war with
Russia in all but name, supplying much hardware though not personnel.
The different facets of war are unusually expressed in a
remarkable book called Children’s War Diaries, collated by Laurel Holliday
which I picked up at the second hand book display underneath Waterloo Bridge,
just next to the National Theatre some years ago. In one diary, for example, written by a 13
year old Jewish child in Budapest, Eva Heyman, there is fear and dread and
ultimately – silence. For she was
murdered at Auschwitz in October 1944.
The diary only survives because it was saved by her devout Christian
maid. In another, Joan Wyndham, a
teenager from a partly aristocratic, partly Bohemian family in London wrote:
‘The bombs are lovely, I think it’s all thrilling. Nevertheless, as the opposite of death is
life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow’. Like many, it was only when friends were killed
that she realised what war really meant, and enlisted in the Women’s Armed
Services.
So it is with us. ‘We
that have free souls, it touches us not’.
Our life goes on.
We have recently had our first holiday in over two years –
three days in Wales. There are some
cynics who would guffaw at this suggestion, that any visit to Wales can be a
holiday. A partisan Scottish colleague
(despite the fact he lives near Southampton) had hoped to get to the end of his
life without ever visiting Wales, a principle he adhered to until a friend
invited him to play golf at Royal Porthcawl.
To return to the Dylan Thomas theme, we journeyed to
Laugharne, where Dylan lived from 1949 until his death in 1953. Stopping in Llansteffan on the adjacent
estuary – the Towy – we found again the ruins of one of those frontier castles
which the Normans built as they tried to extend (or defend) their empire into
Wales. At school in Fishguard, the
history of Wales was dinned into us at every opportunity, including the fact
that the Normans found the unruly Welsh in the north of Pembrokeshire and
Carmarthenshire so ‘difficult’ that they had to fortify in a more or less
straight line along from West to East.
The line which demarcates English from Welsh speaking inhabitants is
sharper than the line of castles and is called the Landsker Line, an
Anglo-Saxon term meaning a separation of land.
The Landsker Line runs in a more northwest to southeast direction. But what we were taught is also an
oversimplification. There are more than
50 castles in Southwest Wales, built by both invaders and defenders – ranging
across Cardiganshire, Pembrokeshire, and Carmarthenshire.
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| Llansteffan Castle looking northeast |
After a walk over the castle ruins we drove to the centre of
Dylan Thomas culture in Laugharne. There
are several walks here, including the Dylan Thomas trail which takes in The
Boathouse where he lived, his writing shed, and his grave in the village
churchyard. Caitlin Thomas is also
buried here. Four years after Dylan’s
death she published a book, ‘Leftover Life to Kill’, though perhaps this was a
little premature. She lived on until
1994, over 40 years from Dylan’s death.
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| Laugharne Castle |
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| The Boathouse - looking south towards Sir John's Hill |
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| Peering into Dylan's Writing Shed |
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| Dylan Thomas's Grave |
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| Spring flowering near the Boathouse |
Dylan’s Birthday Walk includes Sir John’s Hill, the title of
one of his late poems, and the hill and woodland which is thought to relate to Poem
in October, celebrating his 30th birthday. Poem in October however was written in 1944
in Llangain, a small village near the Towy estuary, where his mother’s family
owned a cottage. No matter; he may have
intended Sir John’s Hill to be the ‘high hill’ of the poem. Laugharne town council certainly make the
most of the Dylan story.
Continuing the Welsh coast walking, I started from Amroth,
where we ended the Pembrokeshire coast path trail, and headed east over
spectacular and unspoilt headlands, down tiny paths through stunted trees and
alleyways of bluebells, up to gorse clad hills where a kestrel, or perhaps a
peregrine, whizzed over the edge of the cliff.
A jackdaw flapped up in front, a vole in its beak. Skylarks sang above; stonechats and warblers
hopped from bush to bush or dived into the sedge in the low-lying marshy
areas. A buzzard soared. The sun shone, and a cold east wind
blew. Always the Gower peninsula visible
to the south, and Tenby and Caldey Island to the west. I stopped for lunch in Pendine at the start
of the famous sands, scene of multiple land speed records in the 1920s. Sadly the MoD requisitioned the beach during
WW2 and access is restricted.
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| Tunnel like paths - ringed with bluebells |
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| Looking west back to Amroth |
A tedious
low-lying stretch of the coast path is redeemed as one enters the area at the mouth
of the Taf estuary, the salt marshes, and finally the woodland of Sir John’s
Hill. Benches placed to enjoy the views
carry quotes from Poem in October. A new
one (‘Summery on the Hill’s Shoulder’) also carries a plaque – ‘Bench by Bob;
View by God’.
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| Bench |
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| View |
For Dylan Thomas, in ‘Over Sir John’s Hill’, the heron
acquired a near mythical, and possibly quasi-religious meaning. ‘…and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron/
In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.’
‘Where the elegiac fisherbird stabs and paddles/ In the
pebbly dab-filled / Shallow and sedge…’
Walking down through the woods, the strange burbling and
growling sounds led me, not to a heronry, as Dylan would have seen, but a
colony of little egrets. Thus time and
nature passes…
We ate at Brown’s Hotel, a popular drinking spot for Dylan
(but one could rhetorically say, of course, where wasn’t?), and enjoyed
wonderful steaks from local long aged beef.
Of necessity, we ate there again on the following night, all other
places being closed on a Monday.
Finally, to round off the holiday, I walked from Kidwelly to
Burry Port, much of which goes through Pembrey Country Park, fringed by eight
miles of Cefn Sidan beach, which though lesser known, is finer than
Pendine. The beach is littered with the
hulks of ships driven ashore by Southwesterly storms. Another modern interloper, a red kite,
cruises above me. All day, something
about Kidwelly, which I had not visited before, nagged at me. Eventually it came: the S.S. Kidwelly was the ship commanded by
Captain Cat in Under Milk Wood. As he
dreams: ‘…never such seas as any that swamped the decks of the S.S. Kidwelly
bellying over the bedclothes and jellyfish slippery sucking him down salt deep
into the Davy dark where the fish come biting out and nibble him down to his
wishbone, and the long drowned nuzzle up to him.’
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| One of the 'long-drowned' hulks on Cefn Sidan beach |
Kidwelly has one of the finest of the frontier castles,
mostly complete in its twelfth and thirteenth century conception and building.
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| Kidwelly Castle |
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| Cattle graze on the salt marshes to the southwest of Kidwelly |
Eventually it was time to leave, and to make our way to
Swansea to watch the Swans play AFC Bournemouth (The Cherries). Facing a long drive home, I persuade Lindsay
to leave after 75 minutes when Bournemouth are running around like headless
chickens and have conceded three goals.
I am not forgiven when Bournemouth score three goals in the final
quarter of an hour to tie the match.
Back in Poole, the sunny cold dry weather with a forceful
easterly continues.
There is much I could write about, but it is so petty, it is
scarcely worth your while to read it.
Allegations in the Daily Mail that a female labour MP (Angela Rayner)
crosses and uncrosses her legs while wearing a miniskirt to put Boris Johnson
off his speeches – a Basic Instinct moment as it is dubbed. Another article reveals that a Tory MP has
watched porn on his phone in the House (he has resigned). A headline, ‘Boris Jailed’ excites interest
until one realises that sadly, it is Boris Becker who concealed £2.5M from
bankruptcy investigators a couple of years ago, who is off to spend time at Her
Majesty’s Pleasure.
The war? Yes, of
course it continues. Putin is now
concentrating his efforts in the southeast of Ukraine. Suggestions that Moldova is likely to be the
next target.
I think it is time to end this section…
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