Moonlight and a Drude in a Welsh Park

Two swallows were mating on the porch as I arrived at the main house at Dinefwr, which I took to be a good omen. So it turned out. This new festival, in a park in the rolling Camarthenshire countryside, was small enough to let the boundaries between events and conversations blur over beer or fine, wood-fired pizza. I met some interesting people, including the writers Tashani Doshi and Lucy Caldwell, and watched Julian Cope explain between songs that St David was really Saint Dewi — at which a figure lurched up and said, now listen, there’s only one Dewi in this tent and that’s me — and that Dewi’s mother was Non, the name of an ancient pagan goddess. So there. And then he sang Las Vegas Basement, with its great chorus ‘I was chucked out of the crib into the snow… I was born to entertain, so here I go’. Walking back that night by moonlight through the park, the ruined castle on the hill an impressively gothic silhouette,  I was surrounded by voices speaking in Welsh, interspersed with occasional intelligible (to my ignorant ear) phrases, such as ‘Oh my God, so I was like, are you going out with her?’ Honoured to have participated in the first of what we hope are many Dinefwr Literary Festivals to come.

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