Knighton Landscapes

Hills fading into low cloud and mist this morning - small hillocks like green whales surging through a field - pine forests regimented, orchestrated, rigid; a strange magnificence to such anal order, perhaps because of the contrast with the wilder elements of landscape. My mother's cousin used to live in Knighton and I often wonder if there are Thomases here still, distant cousins. Remote family. (A distant project, walking old family routes, finding old family towns buried beneath the modern world.) A town of tall narrow houses on steep streets, strangely Irish, strangely flattened Alpine. Grey stone walls, slate roofs, high white-painted windows. An old man in a coffee shop window, doing the crossword. A well-dressed mad man on an endless muttering walk of three streets. The cheerful clear English 'Hello!' from a post lady; the warmer, fatter, richer Welsh voice of the storesman inside the delivery depot. A man asking me the name of a plant, which I thought was a fig; another rooted outsider. Another funeral. A lot of rain, the surrounding pine forest dripping and draped with left-over cloud like wool on a sharp-wire fence. Watching leaves in gutters being carried by the water. Rain rain rain on the car roof as we drove home, the vast panorama of hills invisible behind the water.