Liz Dawes is on holiday.  Remember last week’s Packing-Gate?  Standing in for her is Hatty, who is not just a literary figment of Liz’s imagination.  She really does exist….

Greetings, gentle readers.  It is without doubt a daunting task to try and fill the Shoes of Dawes – and jolly big shoes they are, though only metaphorically speaking.  Unlike her gloves.  These may as well be grain sacks with holes cut out for fingers, for she has, without doubt, Freakishly Large Man-Hands ™. Strange but true.

Dawes and I were on tour last week.  If you’re particularly on the ball, you may remember her post from last autumn – Toxic Twins.  We were back there, in the Strangest Town in Wales, full of men called Dai-something.  You get the hang of it eventually.  Every couple of months I disappear off, and this is the second time I’ve taken Dawes.  She was well remembered, as you can probably imagine (ahem) and the Hands were examined in great detail.  Much comparing and measuring ensued.

Sacred spaces are hard to come by.  You know the type; the only place you really feel at home apart from (perhaps) home.  Incidentally, as of 6 months ago, I once again live in Cambridge, which was my place from birth until 24. Suddenly, last year, I got homesick so cashed in my chips and went back.  It’s like never having been away.  I’m lucky enough that home actually feels like it, but I’m just as happy in Laugharne – and fortunately it seems to put up with me. It’s an alternate world, where everything is just as good, but different.  My phone doesn’t work.

Sacred, for me, means I wouldn’t take just anyone there.  It’s where the layers come off and I’m me – whether I’m walking, writing, sleeping or Toxing.  By bringing a friend, I’m baring my soul and sharing my dreams.  In February, I took my family, and my oldest friend.  Mother and stepfather, father and stepmother, sister and brother-in-law, and Catherine.  We hired a beautiful house for my birthday, and they too knew the spectacular movements of the tides; the dramatic silhouette of the ruined castle against a mackerel sky; the strange, uncompromising peace of sitting on the rocks at the end of Dylan’s Walk.  I wanted them to know.

Dawes comes with me because she ‘gets’ it.  Trudy has been (she’s an actress – she gets ‘people’ and loved it).  Fireman has been (if you’re a long-term reader and thinking ‘eh?’, it’s a different Fireman.  If not, don’t worry about it).  One or two others have also joined me on the Long Drive West.  I’m not entirely sure the list will get much longer, unless of course I just give in and move there.  It’s a possibility, but not for a little while yet.  Alas, I have a living to earn.

In the mean time I know it’s there whenever I need that extra lightness of being; know I can walk through the woods and look out across the three-river estuary to the sea beyond.  This year, the spring flowers were the best they’ve ever been.