As I write this I’m watching the picture load extremely slowly at the top of the page. It may not sound particularly glamorous to take a two week holiday in the midst of a bog/marsh/mire (all of them feature) but the advantage is that there’s a completely different flora here; one that I’m not very familiar with, so every walk is revelatory in some way. Yesterday, as is the manner of Wales, it rained and blew a hoolie all day and I spent many happy hours in the campervan, cataloguing and identifying all the plants I’d photographed. However the downside of a bit of remoteness is that the internet ran unbelievably slowly, and I don’t mean just less than the 100 megabits we’re used to – I mean 50 kilobits max. This is turning into that famous good news/bad news Chinese proverb because yesterday was also UK election day and so we spent the whole day sans telly, sans politics and sans anything that makes me bang my head on the wall. On balance it was better that way. Our friends in Bristol had an election party going on – attended by some high profile politicos. We’d bowed out because we were here in the campervan, but the party, they said this morning, failed to ignite because at the very moment Rees Mogg was ejected (cheers) Farage was elected (boos). And so for fear of being misinterpreted by the citizens of Clifton and Hotwells the massive explosion was not ignited. Then there were the supporters of Thangam Debbonaire who lost their MP and a few greens who gained one. Ah life ….. always complicated. We went to bed after the exit polls were announced but I still woke at 6.00am pretending to myself (unsuccessfully) that it didn’t matter.
Of course it mattered. And after a day processing the news it’s obviously better that a Labour government have taken over, and obviously better that the Lib Dems (left of Labour) did so well, and still obviously better that Ed Miliband has replaced Therese Coffey at Environment, and even more obviously better that a number of independents had shown the door to their labour predecessors over Gaza. It’s taken 24 hours for me to relax a bit and feel safer for the first time since Thatcher was elected in 1979. I don’t count the Blair government because Tony Blair was just Thatcher Lite, although Gordon Brown -aside from the hugely expensive PFI contracts – was in the right place. It’s so good to feel that at last the global environmental crisis might come up on the UK agenda, and that UK citizens have voted so decisively for ordinary decency over windbag oratory. Of course the knuckle draggers deserve their place in the sun and then we can all laugh at them and ring a rejuvenated NHS to warn them that they’ve come off their medication – but if anyone ever needed a full brain transplant it would be good to get hold of an unused model – a top of the range Farage for instance.
Here in the van,though, I discovered the cause of the internet breakdown (flat mobile router battery) and fixed it (turned it on); only to discover that it was the signal that was feeble. And so I write this with no expectation that it will escape the marshes of St Davids. But – message in a bottle style -I hope it finds you well. We sent postcards to our grandchildren and the Post Office staff in St David’s seemed almost absurdly grateful today. We also once found a Spanish lottery ticket in a bottle washed up in the bay across from here. I never did anything about it and it’s still tucked inside my first Welsh Dictionary. Hardly anyone speaks Welsh here.
This is the kind of place where I go after plants like a dog might go after smells. The new OLympus TG-7 camera is excellent with just a couple of quibbles. The GPS takes a while to log on to the satellites but if you leave it on the whole time it runs the battery down. But the picture quality is much better than my Pixel 6a. As ever I need to work out a suitable workflow. Today we rested in the warm sunshine. It was good!
