Ready?

Hi you all,

With a lot of help, and I mean a LOT of help, from Blogless, I’ve got this blog thing going.

I swore I wouldn’t do this until I’d finished the editing of my novel. Looks like that plan worked out really well.

BT said I wouldn’t make it past mid-May until I started blogging. Maybe he hexed me with that little nugget. Maybe I just wanted to anyway, and that comment of his was my good excuse. Anyway, here we go. Hope you guys have fun with it.

Most of this sat on my blog-that-wasn’t-a-blog for a while. (I used to change my avatar almost every week and change my “About Me” as a way to sort of blog. Then, sometimes, I’d copy and paste into my quasi-blog.) I added a little at the end…

Saturday, November 24, 2007

My husband, who isn't remotely a pilgrimage kind of person, (unless there's a pub within shouting distance), opted for marital harmony and drove me on my pilgrimage to see Dylan Thomas's writing shed in Laugharne, Wales.

This was a major feat for him. He’d tried desperately the year before to rush past a little marker of a sign along a back road in England and keep me talking so I wouldn't see that the sign said "origin of the Thames”. WHAT? I'd shouted. You don't wanna see the f----in' origin of the f----in' Thames? He'd pulled the car over with a sigh, leaned against the side of the car with his nose upturned in a way I've only ever seen a British man accomplish, and said, "It's a bloody stream, Rob. A bloody stream. A trickle." Well, that was just the point, I thought - and I wanted to find the 'bubbling up from the ground point', and I could have - if only there'd been a pub close enough for my husband to hang out in while I went on my history/geography trek. But no. No pubs. And it was less than a mile away.

But there was a nice dark pub close by in Laugharne, so I was able to wander down this road and see the shed I'd come to see. I stood for a while, drinking it in. That seemed appropriate.




Then it started drizzling and I walked back up the road and into the pub and met up with my husband and a friend of ours who’d driven over to spend the day with us, a big-boned lanky redheaded guy with a long, long handlebar moustache.

The three of us sat drinking at a small round table close to the fireplace. It wasn’t the season for a fire to be burning, and that was a good thing, because a man was sleeping at the table just in front of the fireplace. And he’d either gotten very drunk or very comfortable or maybe very both, because he was lying with the back of his head on the hearth, his long black hair splayed out around him. He looked damn peaceful.

What can I say? It was a sodden day all around.

I love walking into places like this. Whether they’re seaside towns with writer’s sheds and musty, dark bars, or somewhere else, I crave places that seem, when you’re in them, as though the rest of the world is a separated place, and you’re separate too, because you’re in them.

Anybody else?