God bless Wales and Nye Bevan

I’ve just driven back from seeing my sister in South Wales. After about seventy-three cancer operations and more drugs than Amy Winehouse, she is looking fantastic (she isn’t yet 40). She lives in an old pit village in the valley of Nye Bevan and Neil Kinnock. The valleys seem remarkably idyllic; “but what do people do?” my wife asked. Well, a lot of them are retired; many are teachers – they have managed to keep most of the village schools open – and there are quite a few people working in Cardiff or Newport. And no doubt there are many working in social services and suchlike. My sister, being severely disabled and deserted by her husband, does call to a certain extent on social services, but far more on centuries-old community solidarity; she is clearly known and loved. Nye, you may have lost the mines; but your spirit lives and walks in the Sirhowy valley.

Despite the insistence of my satnav that I’d be better off sticking to the motorways, I decided to drive all the way up the Welsh border. First up the valley to Tredegar, to pay my respects to Nye, and to sing “The Bells of Rhymney” to myself through many of the places it mentions. Then through the Brecon Beacons – utterly deserving of their National Park status, up to Presteigne, where we had an extended stop because my wife had spotted an antique shop, which, like all antique shops (or so I am told) contained a genuine Ming Dynasty plate.

Then past the field of Mortimer’s Cross, a turning point in the Wars of the Roses, and Oswestry, where King Oswald of Mercia was killed in 642 in a doomed pagan attempt to halt the Christianisation of England. My wife had lost all faith in my navigation by now, largely because I pointed out each time we passed from England into Wales and vice versa (it got into double figures) and because Marcher villages with their stone churches look remarkably similar: “Look, this is the third time we’ve been through here!” “No it isn’t, darling”. But in my book it beat the M5 and M6, with which I am thoroughly bored.

At one point in A. E. Housman country she asked me (she is Chinese, and we are both well-travelled) what my favourite countryside in the world was. A silly time to ask, and of course I was accused of chauvinistic nationalism. You can’t win, can you?