9.40 am: I headed for the bus station, and took the X15 to Abertillery. It poured:

I’ve not been in the town under such heavy weather since the early 1980s. So, what was, for locals, a dismal day was, for me, one of unusual and uplifting melancholy – dark and brooding, comforting and nostalgic, in equal measure. This is home in the most proud sense. Following the course of my previous revisits, I took sustenance at Marenghi’s Café in the Arcade on arrival. The name betrays its Italian ancestry:

I had an hour before my lunchtime appointment in which to find, and walk again in, my footprints through the town. I journeyed to the summit of Gladstone Street (from where I could view the terrace on which I’d lived with as a boy) and back to the boundary of the Abertillery’s centre (where the shops stopped). A low cloud ‘smoked’ the top of the Arael Mountain. There’s something eerily disquieting about this otherwise explicable, natural phenomenon. This mountain knows things – secrets:

Andrew (one of my band members in the late 1970s) and Dawn, his wife, treated me to lunch at the Abertillery branch of ‘Spoons. Afterwards, we attended the Opening of Ron McCormick’s photography exhibition, How Green Was My Valley, at the Kickplate Gallery:

I had to kick myself; I couldn’t ever have imagined that a contemporary art gallery would find a place in the town. Rarely did one have occasion to mention art and Abertillery in the same sentence. The intimate space was packed with enthusiastic visitors, some from far afield. It was lovely to see again John Selway (who has always reminded me of Keith Moon – the one-time drummer for The Who). He’s a tremendous painter, and taught me fine art during by BA at Newport. I recalled to him of the times when he painted in the studio and would commission one of us to go to the art school shop to buy him a tube of paint. ‘Get me a red, John!’, John would ask. ‘What colour of red, John?’ ‘Anyone will do’, he replied. Nobody other than John could get away with that. The gallery project is a brave and visionary endeavour, which is fast developing a sense of its own identity. I wish it well.

3.30 pm: I took the bus to Crumlin (across which once spanned an impressive viaduct) to spend a few hours with my cousin and her husband. South Walians talk and talk about anything: politics, the economy, local history, and experience. Nothing inconsequential, though. We had a gas. From the bus stop on Crumlin Square I could hear a heavy metal gig organised by The Patriots – a biker group — resounding from a pub.