Read Online Island of Lightning by Robert Minhinnick - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Minhinnick
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building sites with sycamores seeded in the foundations. Roads that double-back so youâre surprised you donât meet yourself coming the other way. Roads under hedges black with bryony where a green cockscomb grows up the middle. Roads so narrow you must walk sideways. Roads to places that are no longer places. Roads to places only he would know.
Yes, he would say that, wouldnât he, the thin man, who is already leading me out of the suburbs, or the villages that became suburbs, good places, expensive places, all gnocchi and nokias now of course, but in their time part of a vision, a creed that honoured life. I know another way , he says. But we canât start here.
Yet start we must. Under the Llandaff Cathedral yews. Iâm glad theyâre still here, alive and poisonous. Fifteen years ago I stood under these yews with a television journalist and local MP and talked about what acid rain was doing to the vitals of Wales. Frankly, I predicted doom. And was right. In a way.
Yet doom proves itself a cell by cell process. There was no apocalypse. So itâs good to talk to the yews again, to acknowledge their reasonable health. Because the yew is a powerful tree. It comes out of the neolithic to us in an immemorial dynasty. Over its red dust we make our way, across to the Taff. Weâll look at the river a while, then follow it north. The Taffâs our compass needle. But the thin man needs no compass, he says. And weâre travelling without the assistance of the Director General of the Ordnance Survey. What does he know and where has he been? So, not for the last time, letâs stray a little.
The Taff in its time was a quilt of iron dust. It was a coal vein broken open to the light. The Taff was once so thick with coal, people claimed its waters looked like funeral crepe. But now the final indignity. They have taken away its tides.
Because the Taff drowns itself in the teaspoon of the Cardiff Barrage. Back there at Llandaff and now at Taffâs Well it flows beside me, coming out of the carboniferous. It pushes through the circlet of limestone that rings the coalfield of south Wales on the geological map. That coalfield is coloured grey as a tumour, though as a Cardiff poet has told us, tumours might ripen into mauve.
So here it runs. Silver, suicidal. It has otters and trolleys and toilet paper, kingfishers and colliers on its conscience. And of children like poor Wiffin, thereâs no counting.
At the same time as in Taffâs Well it is behind us at Llandaff. There in the cathedral, Epsteinâs Christ is squeezing himself out of an enormous toothpaste tube. Simultaneously the river is flowing through Bute Park and into the cityâs aboretum, and surely of the cities I know itâs only Rio has a richer rainforest in its midst. On to our glass parliament it runs, and the Millennium Centre. So letâs hear it for the Taff. Letâs drown its own aria with an oratorio of our own, then allow the First Minister to offer a valediction as the river slumps into the dock beside him, Guilty, your Honour, Guilty as Sin , and its name is dissolved in the Bayâs acid bath.
Iâm walking north. But in less than a mile the way is blocked. Hereâs the motorway â a Serengeti for the age of speed. I stand on the M4 bridge below Radyr watching its metronome of life. And such life, a teeming ecology, the prey and the predatory mixed in together.
Usually, where thereâs no going over, I go under. Under at Kenfig to the sand-scoured castle. Under at Llewellyn Street where you might lean from the terrace windows and touch the concrete piles. Under at The Cymdda where the new Wales has been constructed overnight in the ultra violet of the Odeon and the sacristy of McArthur Glen. And when you stand under the motorway and read the writing on its pillars, when you hear the unrelenting wheels above your head, you know the motorway for what it is: a path of pilgrimage.
Because
Yes, he would say that, wouldnât he, the thin man, who is already leading me out of the suburbs, or the villages that became suburbs, good places, expensive places, all gnocchi and nokias now of course, but in their time part of a vision, a creed that honoured life. I know another way , he says. But we canât start here.
Yet start we must. Under the Llandaff Cathedral yews. Iâm glad theyâre still here, alive and poisonous. Fifteen years ago I stood under these yews with a television journalist and local MP and talked about what acid rain was doing to the vitals of Wales. Frankly, I predicted doom. And was right. In a way.
Yet doom proves itself a cell by cell process. There was no apocalypse. So itâs good to talk to the yews again, to acknowledge their reasonable health. Because the yew is a powerful tree. It comes out of the neolithic to us in an immemorial dynasty. Over its red dust we make our way, across to the Taff. Weâll look at the river a while, then follow it north. The Taffâs our compass needle. But the thin man needs no compass, he says. And weâre travelling without the assistance of the Director General of the Ordnance Survey. What does he know and where has he been? So, not for the last time, letâs stray a little.
The Taff in its time was a quilt of iron dust. It was a coal vein broken open to the light. The Taff was once so thick with coal, people claimed its waters looked like funeral crepe. But now the final indignity. They have taken away its tides.
Because the Taff drowns itself in the teaspoon of the Cardiff Barrage. Back there at Llandaff and now at Taffâs Well it flows beside me, coming out of the carboniferous. It pushes through the circlet of limestone that rings the coalfield of south Wales on the geological map. That coalfield is coloured grey as a tumour, though as a Cardiff poet has told us, tumours might ripen into mauve.
So here it runs. Silver, suicidal. It has otters and trolleys and toilet paper, kingfishers and colliers on its conscience. And of children like poor Wiffin, thereâs no counting.
At the same time as in Taffâs Well it is behind us at Llandaff. There in the cathedral, Epsteinâs Christ is squeezing himself out of an enormous toothpaste tube. Simultaneously the river is flowing through Bute Park and into the cityâs aboretum, and surely of the cities I know itâs only Rio has a richer rainforest in its midst. On to our glass parliament it runs, and the Millennium Centre. So letâs hear it for the Taff. Letâs drown its own aria with an oratorio of our own, then allow the First Minister to offer a valediction as the river slumps into the dock beside him, Guilty, your Honour, Guilty as Sin , and its name is dissolved in the Bayâs acid bath.
Iâm walking north. But in less than a mile the way is blocked. Hereâs the motorway â a Serengeti for the age of speed. I stand on the M4 bridge below Radyr watching its metronome of life. And such life, a teeming ecology, the prey and the predatory mixed in together.
Usually, where thereâs no going over, I go under. Under at Kenfig to the sand-scoured castle. Under at Llewellyn Street where you might lean from the terrace windows and touch the concrete piles. Under at The Cymdda where the new Wales has been constructed overnight in the ultra violet of the Odeon and the sacristy of McArthur Glen. And when you stand under the motorway and read the writing on its pillars, when you hear the unrelenting wheels above your head, you know the motorway for what it is: a path of pilgrimage.
Because
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