Cones in the Car Park

The car park is being re-surfaced this week, quite a difficult job when it's still being used, so orange cones are everywhere. This means, of course, that it is also being re-lined, so we will no longer see the ghost of the old lining system underlying the new and trying to break through, like the wallpaper pattern in that creepy short story The Yellow Wallpaper.

As I went past the Blue Boar on my way home, I peered into one of the little shops that run along the Oxford Road side of the building. There are three, and at present one is an ice cream shop, one sells dolls' house miniatures, and the third and biggest is empty. Empty as a shop, anyway, since The Old Curiosity Shoppe moved up to bigger premises at the Castle. Today there were two artists working in there at easels.

On Castle Street (which could use some re-surfacing, too) I met Athene English. She has the shop that sells leather goods and Welsh blankets, and similar things. She told me she's off to Patagonia next week - that enclave of Welshness in South America.

Meanwhile, it was writing class day, and this time there were only eight of us meeting in the afternoon, a much more manageable number. Our exercise today was on Memory - what our classrooms were like when we were seven. The world has changed completely; we all remembered days of free school milk and heavy wooden desks, and even dipping pens into ink wells. Homework this week is to go out to a public place "and basically hang around and wait for something interesting to happen". Observation without embroidering the facts is what's required of us. It seems to me that the Timbuktu meeting might be a suitable venue to try this out - I can always mooch around Brecon next week if nothing interesting turns up to write about there.