…of my favourite things. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens you can keep, thank you. Give me a pint of HPA, a laptop showing a Wrexham win and a four poster bed in a lovely hotel in Presteigne, Mid Wales.
These are a few
Where are we?
posted in: Countryside, Travel, Wales
Got a bit lost in the foggy Radnor hills today. Luckily we came across this way marker to tell us where we were.
Ravilious-esque landscape
posted in: Countryside, Telegraph Poles, Travel, Wales
If ever a photograph looked like Eric Ravilious had painted it, it is this one. It was intended for next year’s TPAS calendar, but I think I already used a similar scene for 2024. It is on the Abergwesyn mountain road out of Tregaron in Ceredigion. Take this road and hope you don’t meet a timber lorry coming the other way because you’ll have to reverse for miles. But do go, the scenery is stunning. As are the telegraph poles that line the first 10 miles or so (as far as the famous remote chapel of Soar y Mynydd.
Merlin App
posted in: Countryside, Nature, Travel
I’ll see your Chaffinch and hooded crow and raise you a Corncrake and one Sand Martin. (Just down from Farrens’ Bar, Malin Head, Donegal)
Eigg Nog
posted in: Countryside, Nature, Telegraph Poles, Travel
We recently undertook an expedition to the wee small isles in the inner Hebrides. Starting on the Isle of Eigg but also taking in neighbouring isles of Rum and Muck. These have been on my must visit list since I was about 8 years old.
I didn’t expect to but there was some amazing vintage telegraph poles to discover. And to save me the energy of re-typing it all and to save the internet space for having the text twice, why not read the full story by clicking over to my sister site The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society.
Here are a few photos from the trip anyway. Click to enlarge.
Rum from Eigg
Today’s picnic site. Laig bay, Eigg with Rum just across the sound
Another holiday, another castle
posted in: Countryside, Poetry, Travel
Not staying if it’s not a castle! Kinnity Castle, Co. Offaly. Foloowed by a sleet-dodging blast up the Slieve Blooms to Wolftrap mountain. From the antenna sprouted latter there came forth a poem. A film poem actually. Currently in its gestation period.
Other pics: street scene in Birr, Co. Offaly, a vintage petrol pump in the street there and the Laois/Offaly border
Sigmund Freud’s gaff
Two poems about dementia safely delivered (one by Gareth Writer-Davies and one by me) to a book launch at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Maida Vale last night. Here I am next to a photo of that great man Sigmund Freud. I used to love him on Radio 4’s Just a Minute and his ads for dog food with his mutt Henry were just hilarious.
The book was called Clinical Psychoanalytic Case Studies with Complex Patients: Watching Experience at Work in case you wondered. Great friend Rachael Davenhill has a chapter in it.
The Yetis
Was over in Co. Donegal recently. My son’s band had a gig in a local pub so captured what I could for posterity. Tom is the saxophonist.
Introducing Ruby.
posted in: Other stuff, Renovation, Travel, Wales
I’m not often given to anthropomorphism but then it’s not every house that comes with a free Austin 7. This one, a 1937 Austin Seven RUBY, has been under a tarpaulin at Fedw Fawr this last twenty odd years and the previous owner felt it, nay, she, belonged with the house. Today we bit the bullet and moved Ruby to a purpose-built shed. This gorgeous little car should now slowly come back to life along with the rest of this neglected old house.
