Bombing around the valleys

Sunday was a long day. We’d been sat up the night before, looking at potential routes around Wales.  After several hours we came up with a route that’d score some good grave and we went to bed feeling pretty chuffed, having got postcodes for every location.

Our first grave was Henry Vaughan’s. We entered the postcode, drove to it, but it led us to a totally different church in the valleys. Not ideal. It took us half an hour of running round the graveyard to realize our mistake, before tacking across the country roads, waving phones in the air, desperately trying to get some signal so we could work out where we’d gone wrong.

It turns out that we were 40 minutes away from the churchyard we were looking for. As we bombed our way over and bundled out of the car, we saw a vicar walking out of the graveyard. We asked whether Henry Vaughan was buried there and got a very dry

‘Yes. He hasn’t moved yet.’

It might be the ridiculous nature of this trip and the lack of sleep, but we were really, really deliriously happy to have found him. It was like we’d really kept the faith and soldiered through. It felt (weirdly) like we’d achieved something.

After that we had to get a move on to get to Shropshire. We were visiting the grave of A E Housman. We listened to a load of comedy routines and passed round some haribo. During the drive we also discussed which kind of grave we’d like the most. None of us are overly keen on dying, but we had some ideas.

1. A death mask of your face, massively increased in size, where people could walk through the mouth.

2. A stone tablet/table, that would ensure virility for anyone copulating on top of it. Basically, if you create a legend around your gravestone, you know that it stays relevant.

3. I kind of like the family vault/mausoleum idea. A huge block of stone – one size for all the family.

As with most of these conversations, we ended with the same conclusion: we really, really don’t want to die. Then we put some music back on.

After getting to A E Housman’s grave in Shropshire – or at least getting to the scaffolding that surrounded it, we had some lunch and headed on. We were off back into Wales to go and visit the grave of Gelert – a dog from Welsh legend. It was probably the most beautiful location we’ve visited so far – and his grave was huge. Supposedly, two stones were buried into the ground – one at Gelert’s head and one at his tail, to show how huge it was. I’m pretty sure he was bigger than Mixy, to be honest.

That evening we performed in Tremeirchion in North Wales, to a wicked bunch of people – they were really warm and kind and tolerant of wild-eyed, slightly manic poets. We each wrote a piece for the audience during the break, based upon their suggestions. I was given the following words

Yoga

Badger

Yoghurt

Salubrious

Bendigedig (a welsh word meaning ‘fantastic’)

Feel free to have a go yourself – I’ll put my attempt up later tonight/early tomorrow.

After a long day on the road, we were given apple pie, whiskey and beds to sleep in by several very kind audience members. I can’t say this enough -  we are SO SO lucky to be meeting so many kind people on this tour.  Only a few days left, but it’s already made me think a lot about my own life. The examples of kindness I’ve seen have been more moving than the gravestones.

Anyway, better get moving. Thanks for reading.