Imagination

There are other areas, other towns, that would have better fitted the bill if it were a purely logical choice. I could have bought something cheaper in the north of England or found somewhere nearer my family further south.

Forty something years ago I first came to this place. I was twelve, maybe thirteen, very shy, but oddly attracted to horse-riding. I wasn't a good rider - too nervous - but my nights and days were often soaked in dreams of galloping bareback across the prairies, long black hair streaming behind me. I was probably more Thelwell than Pocahontas but imagination is a wonderful thing.

In pursuit of my dream I persuaded my parents to let me go on a pony trekking holiday in the Welsh border country. My father deposited me at the collection point and us girls, all strangers, piled into a mini-van to be driven south towards a series of long, bare mountain ridges that straddle the border. I was by now having serious misgivings.

And then, I remember that the sun came out and the van started to climb. We rounded a bend and I stared across a narrow valley at rounded slopes, green dappled with russet bracken, tinged with gold in the late afternoon light. Apprehension and reserve were momentarily knocked out of me by wonder. I couldn't believe how beautiful and other this land was. I was a child of the flatlands with little experience of geography above 300 feet, and this was fairytale country. All that week - it was a wet one - astride Cocoa the mountain pony, I silently absorbed the mountains and the deep, misty valleys.

These mountains have haunted me ever since.

****

And now I live a dozen miles away, in a market town on the river plain. When I walk in the nearby fields I can see the ancient granite ridges, blue silhouettes in the west against the setting sun. That's Wales, people tell you as a visitor. A different place.

Today the terrible border battles are long gone. On the local high street you hear sing-song Welsh accents mixed with the rounded English vowels (and the occasional conversation in Polish). My local supermarket sells bottles labelled Llaeth Cymraeg. These days in (because of?) the consumer society, for all the rise in regional nationalism, we blend and merge.

I've always been fascinated by borderlands, duality. I love Montreal, and to a lesser extent, Brussels, for the same reason. I wanted to live somewhere where there was flux, where two realities merge to form a third.

Now I'm here it's dawning on me that I have no idea of what the future holds. Really, none at all. It feels a little like being high though not necessarily ecstatic. Success. Failure. Who will judge?

I breathe. I do the next thing to be done. I feel. I wait. And as Dale puts it - beautifully - I listen.