Woke up to a lovely warm and sunny morning. After breakfast I made a call to the bereaved daughter of the woman whose funeral I'm doing in ten days time, to introduce myself and arrange to meet her and her sibling when we get back on Friday. Then an unhurried start for St German's, so it didn't matter that I had red traffic lights at every junction. The church was filled with bright sunlight and the Eucharist was filled with pregnant pauses to savour every moment. Heavenly indeed, and during the sermon I sang the opening verse of Irving Berlin's 'Dancing cheek to cheek, as it speaks of heavenly intimacy, something the St German's congregation knows about.
I had to dash home afterwards for as punctual a lunch as is possible, as the car needed packing. I was also anxious to complete next Thursday's Morning Prayer upload, as I'd only got half way through recording and editing it a few days ago, and not found time to complete it. While Clare had a siesta, I completed the recording and editing in twenty minutes and then did the video slideshow, but ran out of time to upload it to YouTube, so I had to leave it and cross my fingers that the broadband in our holiday house will be up to scratch. In the end we left just after three, half an hour later than planned, but the journey time, including a traffic queue due to roadworks outside Burry Port was only an hour and a half, so no need for a stop on the way there.
Our holiday home hosts are Brian and Jill. Brian met us and gave us a full briefing about the house, which is set in a quiet cul-de-sac near the police station a few hundred yards from the main street and Burry Port railway station. It's a three bedroom mid twentieth century terraced house recently restored in immaculate condition and very well equipped indeed. I needn't have worried about connectivity. There's EE superfast broadband downloading at over 100mbs and uploading at 20mbs. First task, to attach all four of our digital devices to the router's wifi - always a fiddly process, which I rarely get right first time round with a ten digit passcode jumble of numbers and letters to type in properly.
Then a fifteen minute walk down to the harbour to look around and take in the landscape. Gentle rolling wooded hills and valleys behind the coastal plain, the Llwchwr Estuary to the north and east of us, and to the south, the west flank of the Gower peninsula with Cefn Bryn rising and falling away gently down towards Rhossili beach, which its hidden behind the headland from here, but what you can see beyond it on the horizon is Worm's Head and reached by a tidal causeway from it Ynys Weryn, aka Devil's Bridge.
The local RNLI HQ out by the harbour was hosting a barbecue, and people were out on neighbouring beaches enjoying the sun while they could. The tide was turning and starting to come in. There comes a critical moment after which people can get stranded offshore or the sea covers all the sand right up to the sea defences. Then a warning klaxon sounds. Teenagers on bikes, scooters or skateboards were larking about on the jetty, playing music from their phones on portable bluetooth speakers, all enjoying a lovely warm afternoon.
Just outside the harbour there's a commemorative plaque to aviator Amelia Earhart's plane landing in the Llwchwr Estuary near Burry Port on 18th June 1928, a first transatlantic flight direct from Newfoundland, by a woman, even if she was one of three pilots on board. Their destination was a public reception at Southampton but the pilots lost their way due to cloud cover and landed their float plane on water to find out where they were. A fisherman rowed out in a coracle to greet them, but when they asked their way they couldn't understand his Carmarthenshire English accent!
By the time we got back to the main street, the chippie were closed, likewise the restaurants and we didn't fancy trying the pubs, so when we got back I cooked some veggies to go with smoked mackerel warmed up in a pan with hot water. All this an a complementary mini bottle of Chilean Merlot went down a treat. As the sun was setting I went for a walk to check out where other shops were located and found a pharmacy, a Chinese, an Indian and Balti takeway, all three open. As I walked back to the house a saw several couples walking back tipsy from one of the busy pubs, but no rowdy youth. Maybe it's different in high season, but quiet streets were reminiscent of village life on Sundays long gone.
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