Have just accepted an invitation today to read at Cheltenham Poetry Festival next spring.

Also Les Murray has taken two more poems for Quadrant -

Learned in South Wales this weekend that it's a mistake to return to places which sparked my imagination as a child. Kenfig pool is not the actual location of the 'drowned town'. It is really located up beside the M4 and was covered with sand pretty quickly (Time Team did a recent quick excavation and then re-covered it).

I should love those facts too, but it was really an Anglo-Norman town, not Welsh, and I spent a lot of time on windy days listening out for the church bells under the pool!

Also, a very right wing historian who lives mostly in the US has bought Sker House and done it up. It's now in good nick but very private and can't be visited. So we can no longer sit in the old hotel bar, watch waves splash the rocks above Wrecker's Bay and shiver, imagining the old ones putting out lanterns on stormy nights to beckon unwary boats onto the rocks. It feels like a violation. There's possibly a poem about that, in a while....

Still, saw a Welsh wedding - didn't know before that Welsh men wore kilts!! Dark ones, mind and no sporran! Very smart though in wonderful Physick Garden in Cowbridge in bright sunshine, among all the colourful flowering herbs. Wish I had a life-time's knowledge of herbs - that would be worth knowing!! I bet we once rivalled the Chinese for herbal knowledge! All lost in urbanisation!