8.30 am: After a traditional breakfast treat at ‘Spoons, situated across the road from the hotel, I packed and headed into the damp and drizzle. Newport has always woken up slowly in the morning. I recalled arriving by bus at this time of the morning, daily, to attend my Foundation Studies course in 1977. (This was undoubtedly the most important year in my art education.) Whatever else has changed, the mood of the town/city hasn’t.

There’s a danger in revisiting any place that, in time, the memory of the visits will overwrite the recollection of one’s original experience. So, I wanted to explore the further reaches of the city (It’ll always be a town in my head), to see again places that I was less familiar with. I walked down Upper Dock Street in the direction of the transporter bridge:

I and several fearless foundation colleagues once walked the narrow, upper-gantry of the bridge, hanging on to the railings on either side for dear life. A great many of the premises on the main streets of the town are now second-hand and charity shops, coffee bars, eateries, or else derelict. The new shopping precincts, such as Friars Walk, have usurped them. I alighted upon Bolt Street, where the art school’s sculpture annex was once situated:

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The old school building that housed it has long gone. As, too, the foundation annex at Emlyn Street. There’s only a plaque, affixed to the pine-end of one of terrace houses, which commemorates, not the art school annex but, rather, the old Catholic School that it had occupied:

At the end of Caroline Street there’s a corner shop that used to be ‘Maria’s’. I’d often go there to buy lunch with one of my fellow foundation student, Mario Lenza. (The resonance of his name was not lost on us.) He could talk to Maria in Italian, and get her to make some extraordinary sandwiches – like the ones he’d eaten in the ‘old country’:

11.30 am: I sought out refreshment and respite at a coffee shop on Friars Walk – a place that wasn’t in my youth. The material culture of the past is gradually erased. Memories (the immaterial culture of the past) are no more permanent. Like misplaced books, they get lost in the library of the mind. They become undone, rearranged, overlaid, and amplified by subsequent experience, realisation, and information. The past is always under construction.

1.36 pm: I caught the train back to Aberystwyth, working en route:

Arrived: