Read Online Island of Lightning by Robert Minhinnick - Free Book Online Page A

we all commute. The sea twice a day, the call centre Kayleighs, the DIY warehouse Garins, the planets in rare affiliation in the north west tonight, which is the direction we’re taking. Commuters are the pilgrims today and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that we are pilgrims or we are nothing. There’s white van man in the fast lane, that pilot fish of commerce, because if ever there was a pilgrim it is white van man, gunning it to destiny, 90, 95, the orgasmic ton.
    And there stalled on the hard shoulder, the saleswoman’s Focus. And you and I in the hayrattle meadow that is now the Grenada forecourt at Cardiff West. Ten minutes later we can be above The Cymdda where one day the cottongrass and peatwater black as espresso will be restored. Because this is it: our Great Barrier Reef. And there’s no better place to observe it than this bridge. I suppose I could have dashed across, there are gaps in the traffic. Yet only the bridge permits this panorama. And what a place to stand. This is our balcony in the eye of the storm as the M4 disappears in its ribbon of platinum dust and the cherry blossom streams into the drains.
    With me on the road through Gwaelod y Garth is Edward Lhuyd. We stopped at the pub, although the village hostelry considers itself an inn, and indisputably an inn it is, a stone tavern built from the stone that rises behind it and gives the village its name and purchase. But only for a couple, though already my legs are as heavy as my head is light, and now on the road through the fields our talk is of garlic.
    My attention at the bar had been drawn by a young woman with a bowl of soup. How she sipped, gracefully as an avocet, her upturned spoon its upturned beak, over the gleaming mere. But Lhuyd had been arrested by garlic twiglets. By garlic mayonnaise. By the garlic-flavoured crisps, the scree and swarf scented with garlic in their sealed purses, the iron filings flavoured with garlic in saucers upon the counter, the limestone chews impregnated with garlic, the granite shavings immersed in garlic, the beechwood toast and oaken baguettes overwhelmed by garlic.
    I had enjoyed our snack, but Lhuyd’s teeth are not what they were. I try to stop his complaint. After all, there are bullfinches in the hedge, their breasts so red you’d think them naked, there are buzzards catcalling over the wood, and yes, Lhuyd is right, there is a white road of garlic that follows our road, that bends when it bends, that climbs as we rise.
    There’s no time to stop so we taste as we go. Certainly Lhuyd is right. This is garlic as it should be, this is garlic with the rain on it, wild garlic under its white veil, a wedding trail of garlic in the grass behind us, and here’s the ghost of garlic on my fingers, a succulence that won’t let go.
    Common enough, I say, chewing another leaf.
    â€œ Allium ursinum, ” he says.
    â€œRamsons,” I say. “Or is it ransoms. Ransoms is better. As in the poem. Sort of a wild onion. Long may it hold me to ransom.”
    â€œOf the family Liliaceae. ”
    â€œWell answer me this,” I say. “Why did we never cook with it? Here it is, free food. A larder a mile long. And no recipes for wild garlic. Not poisonous, is it”?
    â€œPigs wouldn’t eat it”
    â€œThink,” I say. “We could have put in soups. In stews. Cooked our meats with it. All that tough mutton. All that bad cheese. It’s crying out for ransoms. All that bread that smells like library books”.
    â€œHorses wouldn’t look at it.”
    â€œWe could sell it,” I say. “We could bag it up and sell it in Ponty market for a quid a bunch. Make us rich.”
    Lhuyd goes quiet. The light, as we climb, devastates. The view grows with every step. But we see only as far as we allow ourselves. There are so many greens you’d need a National Gallery of Green to reproduce them.
    â€œWhat’s that?” I