I had set my alarm for 8:30 am this morning to ensure I was up and ready for my next therapy session. That turned out to be at 3:30 pm. How I got that one so wrong, I’ll never know. After realising my mistake, I rolled back over and dozed a few more times until around mid-morning.
There was still one more of those thick-cut strips of bacon in the fridge. As it’s highly illegal to keep bacon for too long, I had no choice but to cook and devour it. Although it’s a lesser offence to allow sausages to go uneaten as well, I decided not to take any chances with those either, so the two remaining plump pork bangers kept the bacon company in the air fryer. Hey, I don’t make the rules.
The summer heat wave has moved on, and it’s considerably more comfortable here in Wales now. John tells me they had a good dousing of rain last night. That’s still nowhere near enough to alleviate the drought conditions, but it was enough to bring some relief to John’s butt. He has been complaining about his butt for a few weeks now, so I’m glad it’s no longer empty.
It was still just about okay to sit outside this morning. I was on the verge of grabbing a top to keep the occasional fresh breeze off my bare arms, but that would have meant getting up from the chair and walking several paces to the house.
After breakfast, and the obligatory lounging around for half an hour, we contemplated heading out for an impromptu day trip. I had asked John and Lisa whether there were more places within striking distance I’d not yet visited. One option we contemplated was the nearby Hafren Forest. However, Lisa was bemoaning the fact that it had received a lot of positive press in recent years from nature-loving TV shows. She felt it resulted in an influx of tourists, rendering an area of outstanding natural beauty a victim of its own success. Lisa hates crowds, and they also have the ailing dog still to consider. After a while, I decided a 40-minute drive wasn’t too much effort, so I popped into the car and set off there myself. It was another very last-minute decision.
Getting to Hafren Forest hiking trails wasn’t hard, but it did involve navigating some extremely narrow roads. I had to stop several times and even reverse more than once to let oncoming vehicles pass.
One of John and Lisa’s predictions was that the car park would likely be full, which it was. To be fair, it’s only a tiny car park big enough for maybe 20 vehicles. Besides a few portable lavatories and a couple of information boards, there’s really nothing else there other than the hiking trails. There were a short red trail and progressively longer blue and white trails available to hike through the forest. I stuck to the red accessible trail. In an earlier life, I might have taken on more of a challenge, but it doesn’t take much nowadays before I am out of breath. Even the red trail started out by dipping down several metres and out of sight around some asphalted hairpin bends, making me consider that what goes down must eventually come up again. The out-of-the-way beauty spot is essentially a series of walking trails alongside and around a stretch of the River Severn as it winds through the Hafren Forest. There is a several-hundred-meter slightly raised wooden walkway that meanders beside the river for a stretch. It’s really quite lovely. The tranquil sounds of flowing water emanate from several gentle waterfalls along the walking route. It’s one of those blissful ‘at one with nature’ beauty spots, although the natural environment was being slightly disturbed by the groups of people who had flocked here to wander the forest floor. A couple of times, I felt compelled to wait to allow a rowdy group to pass and move out of earshot.
It wasn’t crowded by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I would have enjoyed it a little more had there been just a tad fewer people. When I reached the far end of the red accessible trail, I parked myself on some rocks in the middle of a trickling waterfall to sit and contemplate life and the universe. Judging by the rock erosion patterns at that spot, I would have been nearly completely submerged beneath torrents of water if we weren’t experiencing drought conditions. The River Severn is all but a trickle at the moment.
Try as I might, I couldn’t reach a conclusion about how to save the planet and mankind, even after 5 minutes of blissful serenity on those rocks on the river in the middle of the forest. It didn’t help that I kept hearing people nearby trying to snap photos… with my back to them, in the middle of their frame.
After about half an hour of taking it all in, it was time to move on. Lisa was right. It is indeed a stunningly beautiful place, but too many people had also figured that out. Like several dozen other visitors, I had found a place to park just outside the full car park along a winding lane barely wide enough for a car to pass. I made my way back and edged my car out of the row. That was easier said than done. The asphalted road is on a hillside, so a wrong move could easily have sent my car tumbling down the embankment.
After carefully manoeuvring my car back and forth a few times to get it facing the way out, I drove off into the forest from whence I came. I was carefully weaving my way around the narrow passes behind two other equally-slow-moving cars when we were all suddenly confronted with a true logistical challenge.
Although the lanes are very narrow, there are usually some slightly wider areas every few hundred metres to allow cars to pass each other. This can be tricky and sometimes requires someone to reverse for a while before traffic can pass one another. When it’s just a few cars that meet each other head-on, it’s usually easy to see who should move and in what order to relieve the gridlock. It’s considerably more fun, however, when an enormous articulated log haulier lorry emerges through the overhanging trees, which is precisely what happened to us.
Lorries of that size don’t have the option of backing up, and the handful of cars I was behind also struggled to figure out how to play Tetris in such a way as to resolve the gridlock.
I reversed as far as I could into a layby, as did the car in front of me, but that left nowhere for the third car to escape to. Several drivers—including the lorry driver—were out of their seats and wandering around to see how best to resolve the bottleneck.
There was no animosity or shouting. It was all quite pleasant and cooperative. I initially thought the lorry driver was a foreigner with limited English language skills. He seemed to be directing me—still behind my wheel—using grunts and hand gestures. I responded in kind, but this was making communication challenging.
Since another driver was standing near my door and I had my windows all the way down, I spoke briefly to him. That immediately drew a reaction from the lorry driver, who overheard me talking. It turned out he was English after all. We laughed when he revealed he thought I was a foreigner because I was driving a left-hand-drive car with an overseas license plate. Once we resolved the communication bottleneck, we were able to work out a plan to rearrange the cars and clear a path for the lorry to finally move forward. We were soon all on our way again.
Between Hafren Forest and Llanwnog is the quaint, sleepy town of Llanidloes. I spotted some characterful buildings in the centre of town as I passed through and made another on-the-spot decision to park the car and just explore the little gem.
What primarily caught my eye was a curious building sitting smack in the middle of the intersection of the town’s main roads—almost like the building itself was serving as a roundabout. It looked ancient and was raised off the ground. Indeed, I walked under it and sat on a bench there to rest. On the upper level, there were some black timbers set into whitewashed walls, similar to other centuries-old buildings I’ve come across in various other Welsh towns. Such places always have interesting stories to tell.
This particular curiosity turned out to be the Old Market Hall, colloquially known as Booth Hall. It has a rich and colourful history, dating back to the early 17th century, originally built between 1612 and 1622. The space beneath the structure is where market stalls were set up, while the upper portion has served numerous purposes over the centuries. It was once a wool and flannel market, a law court, a flannel store, a preachers’ hall, and a working men’s institute. It was once even the home of a museum.
Although not as extensive as Shrewsbury or even Cardigan, Llanidloes had a charm of its own, so I wandered some of the streets to take in the atmosphere. I strayed into a nearby tiny bakery, lured by the scent of fresh bread. A poppy-seeded round loaf called to me from the shelf, so I tapped my phone on the pleasant and chatty woman’s payment terminal and was relieved of a few pounds. I left with my loaf tucked neatly into a brown paper bag and continued my sojourn.
Just around the corner, a few steps into one of the narrow side-streets tacking off from the main drag, was a small church or chapel. A sign outside advertised a small handicrafts market. It was much like the typical handicrafts markets I’d seen elsewhere—not much to tempt me to part with any money, but an interesting aside all the same. In the corner was a lovely old pipe organ, which only added to the village charm of the place. I made one circuit around the hodgepodge of craft stalls before emerging back into the side street. I ventured into one or two other small places, and snapped a few more photos, before taking my loaf and driving the rest of the way back to John and Lisa’s in Llanwnog.
I wasn’t home long before slicing into the loaf to carve off a couple of delicious slices. With some real butter and a sprinkle of some of the poppy seeds from inside the bag, they went down a treat.
It was time for my next therapy session, so I parked myself at the window in the crafts room once again. I had another very good session with one of the two therapists I see each week. We first had a fun chat about my blogs. It turns out the therapists have been reading at least some of them and finding them not only useful from a therapeutic point of view, but also interesting in their own right.
Today’s session wasn’t nearly as emotionally intense as some others have been up to now. I didn’t have any sudden epiphanies or major emotional breakdowns. We continued to explore aspects of my behaviours and the triggers or drivers behind them. I don’t expect any ‘quick fixes’ from these sessions. I suspect I need to let some of the discussions sink in for a while first. Much of it is food for deep thought. I won’t see this particular therapist for a few weeks, as he is going on holiday for a fortnight. As such, there was no new homework for me to complete.
I found John and Lisa downstairs in full-on cards-and-board-games mode, so we all spent the remainder of the afternoon enjoying some truly side-splittingly hilarious fun and games. That was only interrupted briefly by dinner, which for me was one of the two-inch-thick slabs of pork chops I picked up the other day. I brought John nearly to tears of laughter once again when I cut the plastic bag off the chops, immediately washed my hands, only to have to pick the chops up again to season and place them in the air fryer. I made a mental note of John’s recipe for seasoned potato wedges, as they were delicious once again. Technically, I cooked them myself today, but that’s only a loose claim to make, given that John was directing my every move to ensure I was doing it all correctly.
We had yet more fun and games after dinner. The house was alive with laughter. I was especially pleased with my performance in the geography version of Trivial Pursuit we played. I had 5 of my 6 cheese sections filled when John and Lisa still had only one each, so I was streaks ahead of them both. That’s unusual. John and Lisa are avid trivia buffs, and I typically trail them. The final cheese I needed was in the Africa category. Each time I landed on a non-cheese-winning square in that category, I got the answers right, but I must have had 15 consecutive incorrect attempts to win that bloody last cheese piece, much to John and Lisa’s escalating levels of amusement. Eventually, I was overtaken altogether by them both, and John won in the end—all my hard work, and finally a genuine opportunity to beat them, only to be scuppered at the end. Sheesh!
I’m pretty sure that laughter is one of nature’s best methods of healing. If that’s the case, being here with John and Lisa must surely have given me an enormous boost in the arm. For all our individual faults, we have had a thoroughly enjoyable time together over the past few weeks.
I had a brief call with Sandy after the fun and games. She sounded well, which further puts me at ease. For the rest of the night, I tucked myself away to polish off this blog, which is always a calming, relaxing activity for me—perfect for putting me in a sleepy frame of mind and getting my brain ready for bed. I was two-thirds in when all hell broke loose downstairs. Lisa suddenly started screaming for John. He was by now snoring already, so I leapt into action and hurled myself down the stairs to rush to her aid. I found her clutching at her face, screaming in the direction of the TV. “Aaagghhhhh! There’s a massive spider—over there, by the TV!”
Now, I’ve lived in Australia, where we regularly see Huntsman spiders in the home. They can be as big as a dinner plate, although more often about the size of your hand. By comparison, this house spider was teeny tiny—barely big enough to fit in my palm. Still, I rose to the challenge, found a glass and a piece of paper, and did the necessary. Once the spider was safely outside the home, Lisa’s disposition began to return to normal, and she was able to leave the couch.
For another day of essentially having very little to do, there has yet again been plenty to write about. I wonder if tomorrow will be as full as today.