Among the abandoned mausoleums along the edges of the boating lake I see the figures of friends I’ve not seen in the flesh, Zoom excepted, for months now. A sepulchral light lies over the concrete shelters. Others know that it will rise again.īy evening youths begin to cluster under trees, holding their skateboards as if they were ceremonial weapons, smoking quietly as the dusk strengthens. We are waiting for the world to end, some of us. The synagogue in the distance is as worshiper-free as the churches down the hill. The childless play park is ribboned off with wind-trailing warning tape. Next to the wrecked observatory the abandoned water tower with its silver statue points up at the starless sky. Directly below me jut the spires of the newly discovered tomb-bed invisible against the background of the ridge. Only the sweating runners fail to bother.įace down in a shallow hollow at the edge of the ridge where Ty Gwyn beaches itself onto Cyncoed Road I watch the white-hulled sand-car of the time wardens shunt through the darkness along the old parish boundary. Up on those streets high on the hill where money used to reside before it moved out further to Lisvane people now shout greetings from right across roadways, move smiling to let you pass with your wide berth as big as their wide berth. I gave up.īut somehow this Covid seems to have fixed all that. You can get from City Hall walking all the way out to the Culver House in the west without having a single word addressed to you directly. Unless they are out to hassle you for something no one ever catches your eye. Back home in the capital no one says a thing. Cafes where they asked after your health and wanted to know why you were here and if there was anything they could do to help. In Rhymney, where I was trailing the streets most recently, a place that is referred to as Mordor by those living back down the valley in the big cities of Bargoed and Hengoed and Caerphilly, I was called but three times in my first twenty minutes after disembarking the train. The Drowned World by J G Ballard (image credit: Dent and Sons) You can’t acknowledge them all so you acknowledge none. The new world where no one speaks to you because there are just too many of us to do that. I should be out there, where the fire started, exploring the Valley trails in places I don’t know that well, mapping what remains of our industrial past before it gets forever mashed by the constantly arriving future. The shrinking world spilling off into a flat and endless two dimensional space where the dragons are. Eventually it’ll touch these streets and then fizzle at the edge of the Cardiff sea, that which remains. Rhigos fire has burned now as far as Caerphilly and is threatening to lick its way on south. Everything else is that vacant translucent blue.Īhead in the distance billows of white smoke mushroom over the roofs, followed by tips of eager flame, almost colourless in the hot sunlight. But today there’s only a single helicopter over Anglesey and that is vanishing towards Ireland.
In the past this would show Wales a mass of tail fins and flight route labels. In the large rear garden white plastic stacking chairs are in disarray and the empty swimming pool lies abandoned.
Above the sky remains a bland limpid blue, devoid of all cloud. Cardboard cartons are stacked in the hall and unwanted suitcases lie across the armchairs. Through the door I can see into the living room and the kitchen. Hidden by the shade I glance up and down the empty street. Pushing back the gate I walk up the path to the porch.
#Peter finch full
I’ve climbed Penylan Hill, running up along Bronwydd where the gardens are still full of trees, and other than the birds there isn’t a sound.Ī short way ahead I pass an open front door. They were like the pavilions of an abandoned necropolis built out across the barrage and along the edges of the coastal plain. It was as if they were lit less by solar light than by some interior lantern. By contrast, the straggle of warehouses, high rise apartments and shining hotels that constituted the capital city gleamed across the dark swells with a spectral brightness. Here, Peter Finch walks an eerie Ballard world of lockdown and sees hope in a renewal of the way society interacts.Īt intervals, when the sky was overcast, the water out in the distant bay was almost black, like putrescent dye. Political, personal, sociological, ecological, cultural – this is an evolving tableau of ideas.
#Peter finch series
This new series brings together a wide variety of perspectives and ideas in a vibrant array of styles and forms, expressing hopes for a new way of doing things when the Covid-19 coronavirus is finally overcome. Wales Arts Review asked some of Wales’s top writers to pen some thoughts on the future.
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