Wales

I have actually visited Wales, though I recognise none of Lonely Planet's favourite features. My travels are far too people-oriented to take in days hiking or touring castle towns. Both my visits were limited to Cardiff. 

My first was in 1975 with my friend M, whose mother was born and raised in Cardiff. During or after World War 2 she met her French husband and they brought their two daughters to live in a Nissan hut at Fisherman's Bend, Melbourne, in about 1957. Of course they didn't stay longer than a few years in the hut; they bought land, built a house, lived happily ever after.

My friend M and I left Melbourne for Europe via Asia at the end of 1974. We took a train to Cardiff in an April that snowed, and passed through Birmingham, discovering how black and white a city could be. The image remains in my memory as one of those I'm-glad-I-don't-live-here-and-can-travel-on moments. M's relatives in Cardiff lived in the same street in which they'd grown up and plied us with several carbohydrate feasts. I left there slightly heavier and educated in the uses of three-tier silver cake trays and tea sets featuring pink spring flowers.

Ten years later I visited Cardiff to reconnect with a couple I'd met in Zambia in 1977. She was a Town Planner, he was something financial. They had two daughters too (there must be couples who produce sons in Wales, but I didn't meet any in my small sample of contacts). My son was a toddler; we took a walk through heathland that surrounded the new estate where they lived. That kind of estate now colonises the hilly ex-farming lands around my country town. Two storeyed eaveless homes copy the British way of housing a fast-growing population. The streets are off-road and winding.

Some time at the beginning of this century, I looked up R and F in Cardiff on the worldwide telephone directory. Only R was recorded as living at that address. As I didn't have an email address for them, I haven't found out why. My imagination makes up answers which I  attempt to repel. I suppose I could have snail-mailed. Why didn't I? Ditto about my answers as above. 

This blog has told me I need to take action. Facebook and snail mail, here I come. I hope I'm not too late. Wait for me, Wales!!