Gweoedd Bywyd

I've always marked the various phases of my life as individual lives in themselves, one leading to another and sometimes intersecting back and forth through time via the conduits of experience and relationship. When we first moved to Wales in 1980, on my taking my place on the postgraduate course in Linguistics that I'd won that year, we lived in a number of rented cottages before we eventually bought a house here. Each of these moves netted us new friends and acquaintances, culminating in the social circle we dubbed the 'Gerlan Bohemia' of the early/mid eighties [blog posts passim] centred mainly around the arts, music and of course, food and drink.

One of the consequences of living a life fragmented thusly is people come and go, touching on yours briefly and then they're off into a different orbit altogether. People who were the young children of friends at the time grow up in yet different worlds to you, sometimes to re-impinge on your trajectory at a future time, having made significant lives for themselves in the interim. I can think of numerous examples of such over the last forty-odd years of living here in Gogledd Cymru. Lisa Jên from the Welsh language band 9Bach is one: back in the heyday of the Bohemia, amid the partying up in Gwernydd at Pete and Linda's place, Lisa was the carpet-crawling infant amidst the throng. I only met her again as an adult perhaps ten years or so ago, when I was the Openreach engineer sent out to try and repair her broadband; still living in the same place, but now a well-known musician in her own right, and whose music I now have on my 'devices'.

One other that comes to mind, and the prompt that spurred this chain of thought, is Will Perrin, who I was reminded of this afternoon reading through some old rock-climbing stuff online. Now, I never knew Will as a person beyond baby-sitting him for our then neighbours, Penny and Jim Perrin, who lived a couple of doors down from us in the row of tiny crog-lofft cottages in Caerberllan, Bethesda. Will was just walking, and although he had been put down for the night, part way through the evening, he managed to get out of bed and wander out onto the un-guarded platform of the crog-lofft above us in the room below. Without warning, he launched himself forward towards us off the edge, to be just caught under his arms by me: totally unflinching himself, but almost unhinging me, as one of the two responsible adults in loco parentis that evening back in 1981. Will died tragically at his own hand, in 2004; but not before living a full life as a well-respected climber and much more. I'll leave you with this this rather wonderful encomium to him, written ten years after his death by someone who knew him well, and which filled in the gaps that I never knew, our paths having never crossed again from that evening in 1981 until his death...