PEMBROKESHIRE 2

Sunday Monday – each day a walk long the beach at White Sands just below the house. Few people about and I take a dip in the sea thinking that it will be sometime before I can next be in seawater swimming. We take a cliff top walk, five miles, a wonderful coastal path and look down the cliffs to the sea below rushing against rocks 750 million years old, the Cambrian age. Eventually we reach the lifeboat station at Porthstinian and here we are scooped up by Kate in the Land Rover and bounced back to the house for lunch.

I take afternoon nap, on a towel outside the house in the sun and the down onto the beach for a swim and an ice cream, chocolate with chocolate cornet.

Sunday evening: Church Beer and Fish and Chips. We attend Evensong at St David’s Cathedral. Warm grey stone sits on this town’s hillside basking in the last of the evening sun. The collects give us hope: Then, Lord, in your mercy grant us safe lodging, a holy rest and peace at the last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN

Then bump bump in the Land Rover to Porth Gain and the Sloop Inn for a goodly and godly pint! The place was packed and live music was the draw http://www.sloop.co.uk

With warm welsh bitter which we sat and supped taking in the sights and people watching. Mike and I tarried longer over out pints contemplating more at The Shed http://www.theshedporthgain.co.uk/ the fish and chip bistro in the village where I tucked into haddock and chips with a little more pale welsh beer. All in all a wonderful evening and on the five-mile ride back to Whitesands I was nicely insulated through food and drink to the bump bump of Mike Land Rover.

One of my artistic hero’s is John Knapp-Fisher. I have salivated over his work through re-reading his wonderful book Pembrokeshire. Mike drove me over to his gallery in Croesgoch only a few miles down the road. John was in and we engaged in conversation and I was able to show him with immoderate praise and as importantly to actually see his work close-up! This experience included seeing his wonderful sketchbooks and colour palettes and all the paraphernalia of his work – everything was on display to touch and feel! These three short days in Pembroke, talking to John about his work, the location and hospitality afforded by Mike and Kate has ensured that I am bonded to this part of the world and willed to return. This is a particular landscape, unpacked before me in short order: tiny fields, hedge row-walls punctuated with slate roofed farms and often a blue blue sea.

For more on Mr. Knapp-Fisher

http://www.johnknapp-fisher.com/John_Knapp-Fisher/Home.html