Wales is my home nation. I was born and lived in Cardiff, its capital city, until leaving for Swansea, deeper into Wales, for university. My first job was teaching in the English Midlands and I’ve never lived in Wales since. Apart from a few years in Seychelles, England has been home – two of my three sons are English, the other was born in Seychelles.
While I love where my wife and I live now, on the South Coast of England near the South Downs, going to Wales always evokes a sense of going home. After the border, usually crossed on the M4 motorway, the road signs are in both Welsh and English. The countryside is like nowhere else in the United Kingdom, hills, woods, rivers, greenery, the air.
Today our holiday near Brecon ends. We leave Powys’s gentle hills for the Downs. It’s been good to be here, to climb the local peaks and yesterday to walk old paths across bracken-covered plateaux used for centuries by sheep drovers taking their flocks to market.
Yes, Wales feels like home.
11 September, 2015