I'm just going outside ...

When the snow begins to fall in this part of the world otherwise normal and well-balanced individuals trip their switches and begin to operate in unusual and outlandish ways. Ours is a landscape where, not so very long ago, many of the hills were topped with the black drifts of coal waste-tips and on washing days, when clean white sheets were hung out to dry, they would, if the wind blew from those tips, turn into weird, dark canvases. The more artistically inclined voters among the populace would stand, then, and stare at them because the sooty bed-linen would become uncomfortably reminiscent of the works of Dore or Goya. Eventually the starers would move off, pensive and talking quietly amongst themselves, to add a kind of morose rive gauche quality to the general gloom of the valley. Perhaps it is this racial memory of creeping blackness that triggers brains around here to regard white flakes falling from a low grey sky as some kind of heavenly sign that an apocalypse is near.

The first flurries of snow began to fall around midday. By 2 p.m. the world is turned upside down.

In the supermarket all of the tills have lines that stretch back well into the aisles and every trolley in those lines is stocked with bread, potatoes, milk and, among the more far-sighted, a certain amount of alcohol.

There is a worrying buzz in the store, too. It is like the sound that you hear when you've opened a long-neglected garden-shed to find that a colony of assertive wasps has moved in during your absence. For the shoppers are uneasy; outside the snow is falling, and inside stocks are running low.

The white sliced-bread is already gone and some elements, strangers to the vocabulary, are being driven to make hopeful, but ultimately uninformed, choices between pain rustique, coppia ferrarese and bauernbrot. Others, only previously familiar with smooth plastic-wrapped loaves,  stare helplessly at the knobbly, naked splendour of stacked sourdoughs, or pick in a distracted way at the organic bloomers' golden crusts. Among the vegetables, too, circumstance forces hands. With the potatoes running low, shoppers scrabble for the last tubers remaining.  A small and determined group of toothless, grey-haired women forms up into a phalanx and drives forward through a wall of surprised shoppers to snatch bags of Maris Piper and King Edwards; then, hot with victory, the wiry testudo heads off to hunt out the small remaining reserves of teabags and Hobnobs.

I decide that I am not equal to the ordeal of entering the lists for the single pack of cat-food that was to be my only purchase, for trolleys are stacked six-deep, and, tempers frayed, normal people threaten to become zombies. The buzz in the aisles is a guttural growl at the tills.  A young woman deftly slips her basket on a belt, just in front of a family already unpacking their load of shopping. "Don't mind, do you, love!" she brays loudly, in the direction of the mother.

Deciding that I am not suitably armed for this battle, I guiltily put the cat-food down amongst some aubergines in a display and slink out of the store.

There are big snowflakes falling on the car park. Two drivers  threaten one another over a single parking-space, and a crawling line of cars stretches towards the petrol station where, no doubt, the pumps will soon be empty. I start my own car quietly and, with great caution, ease it away from the store and out onto the dual carriageway.

The traffic is reduced to a single line in the white gloom as we feel our way down the valley, headlights and wipers working overtime ... except for a young lady in the sporty little Fiesta, who flies by in the outside lane at 70 mph, car-horn defiantly blaring  'La Cucaracha'. Perhaps she's a zombie already.

What's in a name?

A couple of weeks ago, to escape from the early darkness that descends upon our little village at this time of year, we went for a walk through the woodland behind our house, and up onto the track that leads to the broad, flat, sunny whaleback of the Garth.
As you climb the path, both a geography and a history lesson unfold before your eyes.

The valley floors are overcrowded; roads, railways, the old canals thread and interwine south to north and they are lapped by untidy waves of houses and trading estates. This is a legacy of the century before last, when coal and iron were mined and extracted from the valleys, and settlements grew up around the works and the collieries to house and supply the immigrant workers. For the populations in those valley towns were, and are, cosmopolitan; in the valley where I grew up, family names included Hartshorn, Courtney, Greening, Walbeoff, Szymanski, and Minoli, as well as Evans, Gronw and Morgan. Before the nineteenth century, the deep-cut, damp, valleys were hardly populated at all.

The dissected plateaux rolling high above are a different story. This is farmland and moorland, and here, settlements, though fewer and smaller than down below, have a pedigree. There are farms, typically they are old farms, whose byres were old even before the acts of union. Blood-lines are older up here; there are Vaughans and Lewises, Pritchards and Prices. Coughlins, Joneses and Contis, if they have found their way up to the sunlight at all, have done so only recently, and by way of the high-altitude council estates that were the successors to the earlier TB hospitals (situated alike,  to clear the diseased lungs of the poorer working folk) or the newer dormitory villages and terracotta-roofed houses that sprang up in the affluent years of the beginning of the present century.

Up on the Garth, then, it should have been no surprise to see the local hunt, the Pentyrch, gathered on the sky-line with its horses and hounds. Behind them, beyond the farms of the Vale of Glamorgan, and across the Severn Channel, was Exmoor, and in front, to the North, the high moorland of the Brecon Beacons. Atop their impressive horses, and dressed in jackets of black or brown velvet, the riders and followers are probably a more substantial link to the long-view of the history of this landscape than the damp, patchwork citizenry in the stone streets below. Even they are not immune from infiltration, though, because, as we passed, their whipper-in, after sounding the horn, and shouting: "Get down Dancer!" at one over-eager dog, called to us, "Oi, you 'aven' seen three dogs down by there 'ave you? We carn' find 'em."

Don't step on my blue serge suit!

Gwyn Thomas was a writer, raconteur, wit and schoolmaster and, while he once had a cult-following in the United States, his work has never become popular in Britain, outside Wales. Perhaps it is because, while drawing on universal themes, his context is a parochial one; he confines his plots almost entirely to the South Welsh industrial valleys in the early and middle years of the last century. Even within Wales his audience did not extend to the Welsh-speaking heartland, or to most of the more rarified pundits of Welsh literature. This was because he was an example of that strangest of all birds, a Welsh author writing in English about the condition of living in Wales. Today, undeservedly, his work is almost forgotten, whether in Wales or the world.

It was a pleasant shock, then, when in Cardiff recently, to discover a flyer for a new drama, based on  a collection of Gwyn Thomas' short stories "The Dark Philosophers", to be staged in a theatre in Newport. I bought tickets and on Friday last we  set off for that city to see a performance.

View from Cymmer Hill

Newport is an interesting phenomenon. It juggles the awkward facts that it is, geographically, closer to Chepstow than to Cymmer, historically, nearer to Monmouth than Glamorgan and, realistically, it is a bit of a cat in a kipper-box. An interesting place to choose, then, to stage a performance of a play based upon the work of a writer who said himself , "as soon as I get to Chepstow I feel very frightened."

The Riverfront (Glan yr afon)  Arts Centre houses the theatre, and we arrived early enough to buy some supper for ourselves. The menu was international; chicken fajitas and spaghetti bolognese clamoured for our attention beside brie-filled baguettes and "mouth-watering" panini.  Adding to this heady cosmopolitan ambience were the many spruced-up and well turned-out socialites, bon-viveurs and theatre-crowd types who, like so many gazelles or show-birds, disposed themselves around the foyer in elegant knots or careless agglomerations of chatter and self-assuredness.

We decided upon spicy (is there another kind?) chick-pea curry and yellow rice and moved to a bistro-style table in the foyer to await its delivery. Gwyn Thomas described his writing as "Chekhov with chips", and so perhaps this multi-cultural start to the evening was some sort of a portent.

Hardly had we begun to eat when a young woman, a little flustered and distracted, and talking urgently into her mobile phone, asked if she might join us at our little table. There were two empty seats, and so, of course, we agreed. As happens on these social occasions, we fell to talking and we discovered that she was the partner of the playwright and was, at this very moment, talking him in from the railway station to the theatre. Our little group of three was soon joined by a fourth (still not the playwright), a theatre director. He exhibited a healthy, and self-confessed, "south-west glow" and had travelled over from Bristol to see the play, for he and the playwright were colleagues.

Soon, we were all, severally of course, tucking into a serving of spicy chick-pea curry, and listening carefully for updates on the playwright's progress through Newport. The man himself arrived at length. He was a sunny-looking young fellow, quite ruddy, with a satchel and a green combat jacket, and he was clearly anxious for the play to get started. He thanked us for welcoming his partner to our table and was interested that I knew Gwyn Thomas' own play, "The Keep". He asked if I'd ever met Gwyn Thomas. I said that I hadn't, and he looked disappointed, but his partner smiled and ventured that she was sure I'd enjoy the play immensely. With a cheery, "Break a leg" we left his little party to find our seats in the auditorium.

The set was very effective. A dark space, the stage was occupied by a towering hill of old-fashioned wooden wardrobes, desks and chests of drawers. These became, at different times in the play, terraces of valleys-houses, hillsides, coffins and portals, and, too, they symbolised quite beautifully the domestic setting of Gwyn Thomas' work and the skeletons in closets that he often hangs out to air.

The play began ....

... and we left our seats furtively at the end, trying very hard to avoid meeting again with the playwright and his party, for it would probably have been embarrassing had we done so.

Quite how an ensemble can so thoroughly misinterpret and, therefore, misrepresent the genius of a writer is breathtaking. On this stage, Simeon is no longer a complex, brooding, enigma but a straightforward incestuous ram; Oscar is still vile, but the dark corners in the lives of those he squashes have been swept clean, and their own sinister cobwebs quietly disposed of. The result is that the pathos and wry humour of life's "big, sad, beautiful joke", bitter and sweet as the darkest chocolate, are overcome by sweet and sticky bathos and slapstick, and life is no longer funny.

A Commedia dell'Arte character, masked,  stalks the set throughout. As the action progresses, he walks among the characters, sometimes listening, sometimes teasing, sometimes telling them what they must say. That this Arleccino is intended to be the writer himself is undeniable, for he wears the unmistakable signature trilby hat and suit, but his purpose, other than to provide the glue that sticks the pastiche together, is unclear. He provides the suitably monstrous puppet-Oscar with its voice and takes part in an unnecessarily supercilious re-enactment of one of Gwyn Thomas' frequent television appearances. Maybe a theatrical metaphor is being dangled here. If so, we are, alas, either too short-sighted to see it, or too dull to understand it; perhaps both.

And, finally, what of  Walter, Ben and Arthur, the Dark Philosophers themselves? Perhaps they were too busy on this cold night, arguing over strong tea in the back room of Idomeneo's cafe, to make the complicated journey from Porth to Newport. Oh, but wasn't there a fourth among them? Ah yes, I remember, so there was ... and perhaps he was at Idomeneo's too, for though we searched, we could not find him at the Riverfront.

The sun also rises.

There are very many places whose names describe the beautiful or fortunate aspects of their location. Honeycombe Leaze, Otter Ferry and Combe Florey make you want to throw everything in and set off to share the sheer joy that their inhabitants must feel in saying, quite simply, "Oh yes, I live in Honeycombe Leaze," or, "Visiting Combe Florey? No, I live here." Other places hint of drama or dismay; Battle, Bleak Hey Nook and Lower Slaughter would be worth a drink bought for a local in any of their, undoubtedly atmospheric, hostelries in return for a story or two.

We live in a place whose name is just as descriptive and evocative of its location, but whose first fathers must have been of a much more modest and practical frame of mind than the worthy founders of Chew Magna or Rickinghall Superior. Gwaelod y Garth is what its name describes, the Bottom of the Hill, and being at the bottom, and facing east, we are accustomed to the dusky shadow that creeps down upon our little houses once the sun has passed over the top of the mountain.
In the summer, this personal sun-screen can be very welcome. We're often to be seen sitting outside our doors drinking cocoa in the cool shade while the unfortunate elements on the other side of the valley are still sweating and toiling in evening sunlight. We save pounds and pounds through this, not being forced to buy parasols, for example, or any of the more exotic garden furniture such as gazebos. Barbecues, too, are an unnecessary expense that we are fortunate to be spared. In winter time, however, if truth be told, the sun's early disappearance is something of a trial. For, what with the naturally damp disposition of the climate hereabouts, and the lush and over-exuberant ambitions of some of the lower flora, we are forced to wage a continual war against creeping green. By November - January at the latest - some of the older and more sedentary inhabitants of the village begin to take on a distinctly mossy appearance, and those of us who are of a comptemplative nature and who stop often, therefore, to peruse or to cogitate as we go about our daily business, are careful to rub our heads and to pat our shoulders often, lest the invisible yet ubiquitous fern-spores that fill the darkling air should gain a foot-hold.
We are all very used to this, of course, and newer elements in the village, like ourselves, soon pick up the necessary habits to keep the cryptogams at bay, and we quickly learn to move about regularly and, from time to time, to seek out those places roundabout where the sunlight lingers a little longer and where, as a result, the visitor will find small, sociable groups of us villagers, gathered together like those sea-lions one sees sometimes on the better kind of natural history programmes.
Very occasionally, I have been told, a villager will succumb to the advancing green-ness and, seeing the attraction of becoming fully vegetised, will seek out a dark and shady spot and sit down there as autumn approaches to mossify. By all accounts it is a gentle and painless process and, apart from the irritations of woodlice and millipedes, uncomplicated. Some voters, in days gone by, so one of the local wags tells me, took it into their heads to visit the National Botanic of Wales in this state, and are now, even to this day, feted in the temperate green-house there and make a tidy income for themselves through occasional walk-on parts, as exotic alien lfe-forms, in programmes such as Doctor Who and Pobol y Cwm.