A Carmarthenshire holiday April 2010.

A Carmarthenshire Holiday, April, 2010.




We swept through Mid-Wales, Jane and I, sucked down through three-lane and four-lane carriageways with stern, sculpted roundabouts as pauses for breath. This side, then that of Oswestry, Welshpool, Newtown. Which Newtown was this? The saddened Newtown of the Valleys fame, all grey-faced and holed up, holding itself up. Or the Newtown of market Mid-Wales where once all drovers paths met, the cattle clusters of Herefords and Welsh Blacks shifted, wayward? This was the Newtown now corralling the industrial cattle on Fridays; cattle pumped up with ballooning udders, delivering eight gallons a shot, twice a day to be routinely siphoned off by Tesco. Down the Wye Valley, Red Kites turn across the top left of the windscreen. Jane is implacable as the temperature guage swoops and soars. She calms me. 'We'll get there ' she tells me, telepathically.

At 'The Old Granary', there is no 'welcome pack' as promised, no tea or coffee, biscuits, milk as the website had gayly advertised. The converted slate barn is shaded by the big house where the hosts live. LLangrannog is the village it belongs to, whose grim Welsh greystones are always just a bit further down the stifling drop to the coast. The coast, you feel is about to reveal itself around the next bend, or perhaps the next bend but one.

The hosts, Judy and Erhardt Jungmayer were hard-nosed, well-off, fussing but producing no warmth. Mr Jungmayer stumblingly asked us for a shopping list, dutifully motored out to the mini-market petrol station we had passed three miles ago, had decided to ignore as we pictured the hot meal that we would be regaled with. He returned an hour later with the list, presenting us with a bill to the letter.

Hostess Judy, meanwhile had picked up that it was someone's birthday, had left a cheerless card on the small, wooden dining table in the galley kitchen. The card was meant to be meaningful but the meaning is poor. It's our birthday not my birthday.

In a small earthenware jar there were a few floor-swept tea bags. The TV control malfunctioned. The shower, with its miserable curtain blew hot and cold (lukewarm mostly).



The Cardiganshire coast is grey-strangled with dramatic and oppressive drops where the river flow has been cut off by something akin to glacial action. There's not much action around here, only that of brighly coloured humans screaming, plashing, dog-doodling, idling, licking the ice-cream upwards, pushing out the mini-boards on dying wavelets. I see the crumpled sedimentary rocks, see the herring gull settle herself, breast-first and brave on a chimney cowl, settle to her eggs, her task. She calls, gulling and this simple call humbles me.