under another sun

A good night's sleep at Danny and Heidi's house. Up in a leisurely fashion, and a lovely porridge seedy nutty fruity breakfast, plus toast smeared with Heidi's home made blackcurrant jam, from her own fruit. Yum. Heidi even gave us a jar to take away which was very kind of her. We had really enjoyed hanging out with them again. Then we set off for the big drive. We set off around 11:30 and with a longish break, arrived home around 7:30.  A lovely journey, for me lazing in the passenger seat. For the first few hours we drove down twisty Welsh roads, running by rivers, and big hills, and scraps of forest and woodlands and villages. Lots of red kites in the sky. Then we crossed the Prince of Wales bridge over the Severn. Stopped somewhere north west of Salisbury at a service station, and sat outside on a bench and ate things like rocket and tomatoes and broccoli quiche, and then after a five minute meditation, we continued following Ways app on a route via Southampton along th...

A splendid night's sleep in the Llandindrod Wells Metropole. Up in time to have breakfast. The hotel has an air of faded grandeur and there were only a few people in the big dining room. We scooped up lots of breakfast, and drank some of their curiously tasteless coffee. Then packing and taking everything to the car and checking out. Noticed near reception a nice naive painting of the green hotel. We were given a large postcard sized copy of it for free. Then a mooch about Llandindrod Wells. It must have been a lovely place once, when the spa was really going strong. Beautiful buildings, but like the hotel all a bit run down, and like everywhere, shops that were closed. A nice little park. Then a lakeside interlude with dragons. A large lake dragon sculpture in the lake, and the paths up to the building at the side of it, where there was a cafe, toilets and red or green dragon pedaloes and so on were crowded with Canada geese, swans with cygnets, and ducks and moorhens and so on, w...

 So a holiday. Thank God.  I needed a complete break, so did not take my computer and did not blog.  Instead I took a new mould green notebook, a kindle, a volumes of poetry by Cavafy and Elyitis and my camera. I wrote was a couple of Greek inflected poems rewriting the drafts in my new notebook just as I did in the out of date diaries Gwen and Dave used to give me as a teenager that served as poetry notebooks. The journey to Meganisi fine. A morning flight, Lorraine drove us to Gatwick. Everything looking sunbaked even in the morning. Passing an inferno of a car which had crashed into a tree and was gouting flames and a vertical line of smoke, and a fire in a field visible as we took off.   The plane delayed an hour and a half on the runway, but the flight fairly comfortable, and after a judicious gin and tonic felt reasonably relaxed. A small boy sitting at the window seat and me in the middle. Lorraine made friends with him of course and he showed us a water drink...