Nostalgia? Maybe...

I was taken, by a chance meeting with a very old friend this morning, back to the earliest years of our tenure here in Gogledd Cymru; some forty-plus years since. We were the foundation stones of the Gerlan Bohemia [blog posts passim], along with several other couples, all involved in the early days of the local food co-op, in which we shared bagging-up duties, banter, laughs and partying in equal measure: a little slice of true communal endeavour that belied the Thatcherite ethos starting to wreak its - unfortunately long-lasting - havoc in the wider world beyond our semi-rural idyll. We were, it has to be said, escapees - or so we supposed - from the increasingly fraught world of Mammon out-with our particular slice of paradise. Of course, we were youthfully optimistic and probably quite wrong that the world wouldn't catch up with us eventually, but there you go. It has to be said that we are still making a fight of it, forty-odd years later, nevertheless, despite the attrition and collateral damage of of age: it has to be done, folks...