Wales, Wales!

Leaving Bath, I drove a very picturesque route to visit friends in Wiltshire – David worked for Anchor Foods in Swindon and did a stint at the Dairy Board in Wellington. The road went through some quintessential pretty English villages. Had a lovely morning sitting in their garden, drinking coffee and reminiscing. Probably the last time I was warm in UK – it was freezing! Leaving David and Barbara, I blatted down the M4 to Carmarthen in West Wales (got the warm fuzzies when Brooke Fraser came on radio 2!) to be welcomed to the bosom of my family. It was a full-on 4 days – I was running on a tight schedule to fit in all the friends and family I wanted to catch up with but it was great – wonderful to see everyone again. That said, when I was with my aunts and uncles, I could understand only about 70% of what they said – they start off in English, then lapse into Welsh, remember I’m there, apologise and go back to English, lapse into Welsh etc etc. It’s hilarious.

It’s a very beautiful part of Wales but interesting how it’s changing. One of my uncles said that Llangynog, the village where my father grew up, has changed more in the last 12 months than in the last 50 years. Many of the small farms are being bought up and joined into one huge business, milking extraordinary numbers of cows. One farm now milking many more than all the smaller farms put together. He’s the only one of my father’s family who still lives there but the Thomases would have known everyone, and everyone would have known the Thomases. He says now he passes people when he’s out walking and has no idea who they are – and he’s not going to find out because they don’t acknowledge his greeting. Many of the people who live there now commute to Swansea (45 minutes away) and the local school has closed down and is now for sale. I’ll be looking out for it on Grand Designs! Sad the way things are changing.

Then came the drama of the Icelandic volcano spewing ash over Scotland and Northern England and closing airports up there on Tuesday. I was due to fly out of Bristol on Wednesday to meet Andrew in Paris and my cousin’s husband took great delight in gloomily predicting the ash was heading south and I’d be stuck there for months. “One of my friends was in Tenerife last year when it happened and couldn’t get back for 8 weeks!” “I don’t know why you think it’s so funny,” I said. “If it turns out that I can’t leave, guess where I’ll be coming back to to sit out the months of waiting?” That wiped the smile off his face! That said, the tv and radio were both predicting wide-spread air travel chaos as well.

Oh God, just the thought of what would happen if I couldn’t get to Paris made me feel queasy – what on earth would we do? I decided I wouldn’t think about it then, I’d think about it tomorrow if there was a problem – Scarlet O’Hara would have been proud!

Left Wales to drive back to Bristol. As my flight was at 6.45am, I wanted to return the rental car to the airport the previous night. What a pig of a place that is to find! You drive for miles and miles and they don’t put signposts sufficiently regularly to reassure you you’re on the right road. Spent my last night in England staying in a beautiful thatched farmhouse in the country, complete with two Labradors (one golden, one black) and a cat – very peaceful.