April/May 2007


Another Sarn Spring of indescribable beauty. The sun has shone every day for a month. On one day the temperature was 30 in the shade outside the studio. Though we have managed to burn £120 worth of wood in two months which tells us something about both the underlying temperature and the temperature at which we live!
The succession of hedgerow blossom is nearing its end. The blackthorn was so thick the hedges looked like under snow and now hawthorn and cow parsley. There were 20 Early Purple Orchids in the churchyard in spite of an early mowing. There is honeysuckle in full flower on a sheltered patch at Llangian.

Our peculiar gardening arrangements have delivered four decent patches and they are sown with Italian beans of various hues, Peas and Sugar Peas, Artichokes, Courgettes, Pumpkins and Aubergines plus the usual arrangement of herbs and salads. The first Artichokes have even been picked and eaten! We have, under glass, Melons, Pot Basil and some unhappy looking Thai Coriander.
I went to Crug farm and began what will be the long process of trying to stock the garden. No problem if we had tens of thousands!! I should think we need at least upwards of 300 plants..at £20.00 a pot!! We have the bank to plant with Rhododendrons and Oleanders and some Ericas..some..about 100 of them, the Bog Garden and The Wood Garden, let alone the Wood itself
The Snowball tree which normally flowers at the end of May is in full bloom. We have decided not to cut the grass except for pathways and this has resulted in a profusion of butterflies. Besides the usual ones there are large numbers of Orange Tips.
If the old adage of
The Ash before the Oak
there’s bound to be a soak
The Oak before the Ash
there’ll only be a splash
is to be believed we are in for a dry summer as the Oak trees are fully leaved while the Ashes are quite bare
There are young rooks everywhere in the tops of these bare ashes. Some are waddling on the ground, while the buzzards and even the sparrow hawk home in.
May 12 I saw a Crow attack a young rabbit and make off with it outside Abersoch and the same evening we saw a Stoat bowling a fully grown rabbit down the verge. Over Talsarn a Buzzard making away with the first of the Pheasant chicks. The ones in the garden yet to appear. The cock Pheasant is looking fairly aged and the hens have not been seen for days. For some reason the cock likes to relax in the studio, which I would not mind except for his propensity to shit. While watching the news a couple of days ago a Robin came and sat on the TV. And today both swallows and house martins are flying in and out of the kitchen and the studio

May has turned into a wet and cold miserableness but, of course, that just means everything grows.

E turned five and we had all the children from the school here. They had a treasure hunt in the garden and turned up a number of unintended ‘treasures’! She went, too, to her friend’s party and hugged a few lambs. Her friend’s Great-Granny produced a picture of 4 generations of children at the School. No wonder the Council want to close it.

R and A were here as was A’s mother and E has her doll’s house which is some kind of modern Swiss chalet, but a great improvement on the mock Victorian kitsch to be found in the outrageously priced Farnham doll’s house shop. She also has a new trampoline which seems relatively successful and can be seen from Abersoch as a new Rhiw landmark. She needs for nothing except her health…and we are off again at the end of the month for another eye saga at the Portland Hospital. She will be very grumpy.

K will be turning thirty and I suppose long before she turns sixty or Elodie thirty I will be ‘out of here’ on my astral journeys! If not I shall be well in need of an intergalactic zimmerframe.

Several pleasantly mad bits of news:
Hindu Monks in Llanpumpsaint have been protesting, as the Yanks say, the possible slaughter of a TB infected Cow
Also an ‘obsession with Buddhism and the practice of monks setting themselves on fire’ seems to have led a poor soul in Caernarfon to her death!
Laos, one of that distinguished group of countries without any coasts, is to join the International Whaling Commission…lots of them in the Mekhong


Elsewhere the house in Chiang Mai is rising from the ground. K’s sister went to see it and said:
“I thought it was a little bungalow..but it’s enormous!”..certainly isn’t costing a little bungalow!
For some reason I am not feeling particularly fluent about all this. I think it is mainly business, I mean busyness and the fact that much of what one wants to say about these places has been said! However once the house is there I can see there will probably be plenty to say! I gave up on the width of the circular staircase and the three doored bathroom! I will probably give up on the Gary Rhodes style cooking island! M sent me a most attractive picture of the septic tank-which at least the virtue of assuring us that it is there! I continue to watch the fluctuations in the currency markets with the zeal of a Forex Trader. Will the Baht follow the Yuan? Or the Yen?...still only the last tranche to convert now. If the papers were to be believed much of Thailand is in such a dire state that the currency should be worthless; Civil war in the south, massive floods and landslides in Nan and Uttaradit, Bangkok under water permanently in 20 years. Of course when there life seems resiliently vibrant and most people sufficiently monied.
Nowadays most information I get comes from Asia News Network, which is a syndicated anthology, Asia Times and Al Jazeera with some top dressing from Le Point and JDD. And of course The Caernarfon and Denbigh herald

We went up and robbed Elsi’s grave of its stone and took it to Hefin to have him engrave it with Ac Yn Ei Ysbryd R.S.Thomas, which might lay some ghosts to rest.
Evelyn told me that she had had ‘complaints’ that there was ‘witchcraft’ being practised in Llanfaelrhys churchyard as Elsi’s grave had both joss sticks and Buddhist holy thread on it…..

Ran up a couple of nice dishes
Lined some cocottes with butter and fillets of Plaice. Filled the cocottes with Crab and a sauce of Egg yolks, Cream, Tarragon, Sorrel, and Spinach with a touch of Chili and Lemongrass. Baked in a Bain Marie for 20 minutes. A sort of French Hor Muk….

As a variation on Aubergine Fritters..Baked some slices of Aubergine with Olive Oil and a seasoned Passata, then added for a brief few further minutes a Crab and Horseradish garnish. Unusual!

Then at the end of the month we had another saga with E’s eyes. The older she gets the more she hates doctors, hospitals, operations. Can you blame her. We went to the Portland this time having found Moorfields shall we say, unsympathetic. Portland no better. In all places the facilities look pretty good but the Portland cramped and the nursing staff useless. GOSH the only place we have been in the UK that was up to speed and quality. Most other places make The BKK Children’s Hospital look pretty good. Anyway we were in at 5.00 and out at 9.00 which was not bad. E says she has ‘magic eyes’ ie. Double Vision! But seems to be disappearing slowly. I think it is a ‘brain thing’ as her brain readjusts its co-ordinates. AB rang to say he has had his cataracts lasered too. Hard on a professional book reader. I suspect I will end up wandering round Sarn by touch, like Elsi. My real problem is that I lose a pair of glasses every week so eventually I will get bored with that. Its just that to walk around I don’t need them-in fact cannot walk, so I shove them on my forehead, then they irritate me so I abandon them in the garden…


June 2007

Anyway on to June. Grass cutting. Fishing. Got all the tackle out-have not been fishing for 20 years! Not since the day of the Golden Wrasse; after which R ate no fish for 15 years!

At the end of the first week of June the garden is awash with fledglings, wrens, robins, chaffinches by the dozen, blackbirds and mistle thrushes, the cacophony of rooks having ceased-there are also blue, coal and great tits, pigeons and buzzards, gold, green and bull finches, chiff chaffs and blackcaps-all devouring every worm, grub and seed that can be had. Some are nopisy like the wrens and bkue tits others silent flitterers like the pipistrelles of which there seem plenty, too.But no sign this year of pheasant chicks in the garden…some down by Llanengan, and partridges, too…have not seen the three hens for days..and no nests as I at last cut the grass. Incompetent birds!!
The hedgerows have given way to foxgloves and honeysuckle-though the patch of lilies and Tanrallt is still there; the Purple Loosestrife yet to come. Elsi’s roses are having a good year-we have filled vases in every room with them and the new ones we bought are starting to flower; the rampant Bobbi James yet to show. We have pumpkins and courgettes, peas and sugar peas and a wild variety of odd Italian Beans-even Aubergines and melons-radishes, rocket. Black tomatoes and salad greens of all nations-well Italy and China mainly…and the reason is that It Is Hot-never mind the forecasts some days it reaches 30 again. Is Sarn to become Corsica? I shall start buying Oleanders and bring Bougainvillea from Chiang Mai!

Saturday we went to the Abersoch Jazz festival-pictures below-for the Umbrella Contest, of course..and then Sunday to the beach…..first prawns and we drew the Chiang Mai house out on the sand…looks good….not sure the kitchen is big enough and maybe the bathroom downstairs too big-but what a place!! Having drawn it we sat in it, lay in it and ate a puicnc in it. E much taken with her room and bathroom!
But her eye is still not properly opened and so all that continues a worry beyond all pleasure.

Bloodaxe appear to have failed miserably to increase sales on the back of Byron’s book-which is odd given that Orion did..What is that about? Anyway we are on to Uncollected Poems, Poems for Elsi and some other small books…Then we will have to address Complete poems seriously!! Else the B mss are still missing and BBC Wales seem unable to stop showing On Show! Everytime I go to Pwllheli someone leers at me as it has been on again!

June has continued as May-long days and nights of rain. So much so that it was running through the house in rivulets. The NT and Gwynedd seem not much interested. Looks like it will all have to be dug out to below the foundations-what a mess that will be. And anyway then what will have to be done? As the grass remains uncuttable it has grown 3 feet high and droops elegantly covered in feathery raindrops.
K has gone to Chiang Mai to pull the builders into line. Even she says she wanted a little house but it seems to have ‘just growed’. Anyway the roof will be on this month and all maybe done by the end of August. Whether we will actually go and live in it the we are not sure. We may try and get in at least one more term or even two in Abersoch. E keen to have snow-so R may have to take her skiing!
E told her ‘not to come back too soon Mummy so Daddy and I can do what we want’. Then told the school that she had gone for three months!

Went up to see AD and N also D and new wife-very cool and pretty and freckly. Said to A I wondered whether she was freckled ’all over’! N in Cambridge had much darker freckles and she was!

Up to C to see R and A. Much giggling, grinning and blushing. They have decided to get married! When and where-who knows-all their house purchase plans seem to fail-I guess they want something too large and/or too unusual. I would!
Spoke to S who was in the gloaming in Ithaca. R said she cried when he told her-it was quite a wobbly thing! Though I don’t think either Caerynwch or Sarn are the kinds of places from which one would ever want to ‘flee the nest’!


Last time I was there we found a copy of this:

1. Oriental Field Sports; being a complete, detailed, and accurate description of the wild sports of the East.
WILLIAMSON, Captain Thomas HOWETT, Samuel Bookseller: Price: US$ ***00.00 !!
Book Description: London William Bulmer and Co. for Edward Orme 1807, 1807. The Most Beautiful Book on Indian Sport in Existence Forty Hand-Colored Aquatint Plates WILLIAMSON, Captain Thomas, [Author, Illustrator], [HOWETT, Samuel, Illustrator]. Oriental Field Sports;.being a complete, detailed, and accurate description of the Wild Sports of the East; and exhibiting in a novel and interesting manner, the Natural History of the elephant, the rhinoceros.the whole interspersed with a variety of Original, Authentic, and Curious Anecdotes, which render the work replete with information and amusement. London: William Bulmer and Co. for Edward Orme, 1807. Oblong folio (18 1/8 x 22 7/8 inches; 460 x 582 mm.). [2], [i]-ii, [2], 150 pp. Complete with hand-colored additional title and forty hand-colored aquatint engraved plates with pages of descriptive text interspersed. Text in two columns, captions in French and English. Text watermarked 1804. Contemporary half brown morocco over brown morocco-grain cloth, decoratively tooled in gilt and blind. Expertly rebacked preserving the original spine. Spine decoratively tooled, ruled and lettered in gilt. Gilt cover lettering. Morocco turn-ins decoratively tooled in blind. Marbled endpapers, joints expertly repaired.Covers and extremeties a little rubbed. Occasional light browning. Repaired tear to engraved additional title. An excellent copy with bright plates. "To the same year belongs the Oriental Field Sports. The text is by Captain Thomas Williamson, and the forty plates, which, as a bookseller’s catalogue insidiously remarks, would make a fascinating series in frames to adorn a smoking-room, are from Williamson’s designs, re-drawn by Howett. The preface, in the florid language of the period, claims that in this book ‘the British Nimrod may view with no small satisfaction a new and arduous species of the Chase. The Artist may reap a rich harvest of information;. The Philospher and the Historian may either confirm or correct their conceptions of former details.’ The book is not only a mine of information as to the manners. customs, scenery, and costume of India, but contains one of the finest series of sporting plates ever published. All are coloured aquatints engraved by H. Merke, with the exception of two by J. Hamble and a soft-ground etching by Vivares" (Martin-Hardie, pp. 135-136) Abbey, Travel, 427; Nissen ZBI, 4416; Tooley, 508; Schwerdt II, p. 297-298. HBS 56086. Bookseller Inventory # 5608

This copy is in the original binding and has plates dated 1805 and 1806 which I presume tells us something of the time it took to produce the illustrations for the text!
It was under the billiard table and probably had been for several decades as no-one knew it was there except A and she had never opened it! There are probably some more. This time we found four of the Bentley 1833 edition of Jane Austen-the first with illustrations-, of which Michael Sadleir in "XIX Fiction" notes that ‘these Austen titles are some of the rarest in the Bentley Standard Novel library’. Unfortunately they are not in the plum cloth and I have not checked the ‘issue’ points

Sarn has finally caught up with the ricefields and produced wireless! Still slower! But we will be writing!!

Would any one like to try and explain these photographs??
Just took a picture on Makha Buccha day
Where have these spirits come from??



















there are lots more!

Pictures:
This journal used to look like a badly clipped hedge in IE. Now you can ONLY see the pictures in IE-nothing in Mozilla-even Firefox 2. Explanation?..quite...!
Anyway we went to Lao


and did the 4 sides of Wat Sisaket and several thousand wais at the run!

and lay and ate Lao food on the banks of the Mekong!
Fially we went to the inestmably charming Chaing Khan, north of Loei. A sort of Les Andelys Sur Mekong...and ate even more, even better fish!

I am a little depressd I don't presently have the energy to go wandering. It is difficult to leave E. I went to BKK for the night and came home early. E in paroxysms of delight..hugged all night and endlessly asking 'Why did you come back so quickly? Bought a Kumon book of Mazes which has silenced her for thr morning!
And I wonder why I want to go traipsing about Burma and Yunnan on my own. And the visa problems are endless. Rules changed for Schengen Visas, so now cannot get one for K here. Explanation: We don't have a database....bet the so-called militants happy about that!Also what is this idiotic PC photo stuff? A hair out of place, or a millimetre too small or big and their excuse is: We can't scan it! Well if you go to get a Thai Passport they scan it themselves and stick it in the passport, which might be a good idea for the embassies of all these rich countries, would it not!?
Burmese a bit idle...how many days??!

There should be PICTURES in all of this but Google cannot work out how to show them.
Pictures before April 2006 are there,but none after...cannot put new ones either. Google pretends this is not happening.
I don't know why so many people are surprised at the UNICEF report. I think the UK, and particularly its cities and towns, is a hugely unpleasant place to grow up. We are inordinately lucky to be able to live in Wales where we, for the most part, can avoid all that is 'British'. Some people seem surprised, too, that France is not such a wonderful place to be a child...We thought living in Burgundy was dire! The comments in The Guardian are very interesting:

UNICEF

Mind you the following is reported entirely without any sense of Irony!:

From The Welsh Assembly’s Website:

Assembly's Play Strategy begins (no, no not for the civil servants and AMs more’s the pity)

Launching the proposals at the Museum of Welsh Life, Ms Davidson said: "Wales was the first country in the UK to recognise that play is vital to children's development and that we should take every opportunity to support it."…..Ho Hum. And what form did the ‘recognition’ take? Tell them to DO it! That in a country which is almost in its entireity a museum and singularly lacking in homo ludens.

A teacher said to me that what it really meant was that they were going to have to lock away all the books!

So what with all the clustering, federalising and other financially motivated shiftiness and interfering that is going on, poor little infant schools, one of the few zones of happiness in nthe UK, I should think are having a hard time of it.

Elodie tells me :
“Tomorrow is Saturday. I just going to ‘hang about’, ‘hang around’.” Where does she hear this in Thailand?!

That is not to say that growing up in Bangkok would be much fun, nor in rural Thailand without a decent family income.

We had as it happens been discussing the optimal size of communities. I am sure much has been written on this and so we are just speculative amateurs. In a while I shall do some research-but before that….I grew up in small villages and even smaller schools. I should think the population of the villages, including their outlying farms, was no more than 1-2,000 at the most. Even towns such as Welshpool and Newtown can hardly have topped 5,000.

The population of Pen Llyn or Dwyfor, the resident population that is, appears to be about 20,000 which is almost the same as the extended population of Sawankhalok. That suggests that a population, of at the most 10,000 more is sufficient to trigger an even more reasonable level of services and communality.
As Dwyfor has struggled to about that number it has generated a Somerfield and an Asda, so has Sawankhalok attracted a Tesco Lotus. Both have,too, quite vibrant societies with fairly extensive familiarity of people with each other.
English Towns with a similar population ?? Well Amersham, Broadstairs, Huntingdon
Elsewhere Ronda has a population of 35,000, Tralee 20,000 and Piazza Armerina in Sicily the same. In France Anonnay, Aubenas, Beaune. You see I have not tried hard to go down the ABC. Interestingly most German Administrative Region Towns have populations of around 20000 or less
Are the above towns places one would have no problem in living in? Maybe the problm with Beaune is that we neither came from there nor really licved there long enough.
Looks to me that is the optimum. Less-in the sticks-more-increasing population pressure and space is surely critical. Populations of France, UK, Thailand almost identical-size of country? Well, of course, large tracts of the UK are uninhabited.
And then there are house prices.....what kind of a society creates an income eating monster like UK mortgages?...and to live in those little boxes, too!