A solid night’s sleep; the first in a week. My final day in South Wales. 9.00 am. Mercifully, the sky was overcast and kept the ambient temperature within tolerable limits. A Starbrukfast:

Afterwards, I visited Newport’s covered market:

In an age of globalized companies, the persistence of these small-scale, specialized, and family-run businesses is both remarkable and praise worthy. After a cheapo haircut, I visited the the Newport Museum & Art Gallery. There, I perused the industrial collection, and caught-up with the continuing efforts that are being made to conserve and restore the remains of a medieval boat, which had been buried and preserved under the mud-silt of the River Wye at Newport:

The gallery still exhibits works that I saw there when I was an undergraduate, including one of Jack Crabtree’s monumental portraits of coalminers, a lyrical landscape with figures by John Selway (one of only two other contemporary artists to have emerged from Abertillery), and works by the British surrealist Evan Charlton and Tom Rathmell (a former Head of my old art school). Paintings have a conditional immutability: the artist ages; they age not:

Tom Rathmell, The Dresser

Proof of presence:

11.30 am. I spent the remainder of the morning in the reference library, which is in the same building as the Museum and Gallery:

I’ve not read here since 1981-2, the years between my BA and MA degrees, when I studied everything in their collection on art in Wales. I used the time, today, to catch-up on my diary and review emails from family and work. 1.30 pm. I took a late lunch at a café in the market – a delicious slice of homemade corned beef pie:

2.15 pm. A further hour of diarism before returning to the hotel to retrieve my suitcase and a walk to the railway station. Armed with bottles of cold water, I took the 5.31 pm train to Shrewsbury. Homeward! An easy journey.