self centred softy

The Bride's father and the ring

Apologies to David Gray the builder. I had an overwhelming urge to ring him on Saturday to tell him the dimensions of the range cooker I had ordered.  Unfortunately, I rang him while he was enjoying his starter at his daughter Bonny's wedding reception!   He still speaking to me and here is a photo of him outside Cefnmeurig today.

A glimpse of the future

Photo of Cefnmeurig taken today, in our field above the house. The colour, although not seen in Carmarthenshire for a generation, is traditional to the county. Adrian the Plasterer said that it will be the second most visible landmark seen in space, after the Great Wall of China.

The past is imperfect.

Adrian the Plasterer is a professional and takes great pride in his work. He likes straight lines and 90 degree angles and at Cefnmeurig there are very few of these. He is not a happy man and thinks that the bulges and curves on the outside walls will make his plaster work look terrible. I take the opposite view and think that he should not try to correct the imperfections.

Who wins? (Clue - Who's paying?)

Me with imperfections.

Chip off the old slate block

Dilwyn the carpenter says he has grown to love Cefnmeurig – he has been working on the house almost seven days a week for 8 months and for some of that time he only had Chip his dog for company. Chip seems to pick up the mood of the men; when things are going well he comes out of the house to greet me but if there is bad news to be told he pretends to be asleep and swints at me with one eye half open when I arrive. He played dead today when one of the huge slate slabs, that was originally in the llaethdy, split in two when it was being moved back into place. It was a disappointment but it was lucky that it didn’t fall on someone’s foot as it was extremely heavy.

Chip playing dead on the relaid terracota floor in the dining room.

Bristol to St Clears via St Tropez

"You Welsh people live in some strange places" said the delivery driver’s mate with a Bristol burr, as I guided him via mobile phone from St Clears to Cefnmeurig. He needed constant reassurance that they were on the right road and became very alarmed when the houses disappeared. " We’re in a kind of… desert area now" he said, "We call them fields around here" I replied. All was going well until they reached the top of the track and he declared that they couldn’t go any further. " It’s too narrow, love" he said. " It’ll be fine" I said, " Jump out and have a look, if you are worried, and you’ll see that those long green stringy things bend when you touch them. Your lorry wont be damaged!" " I can’t do that!" he replied "I’ve got shorts on" (It was a sub-zero winter’s day). So I gave up on the coaxing and played dirty by attempting to dent his male ego "Well, everyone else has managed it" I said sternly. I never heard from them again, they were off down the lane and delivered the goods to the men on site. However, they must have been so tramatised by the experience, they unloaded someone else's bathroom by mistake and had to come back again the next week to collect it.

Cold Comfortable Farm

Denzil is a one in three, his surname is Davies. (see earlier post)

Work is coming along at Cefnmeurig. The interior plastering is nearly finished and the layout of the rooms is looking very good. The roof should be finished this week, weather permitting.

I'm a bit concerned that the working conditions are too cold for the men. They have got a fire going in one room, where they go for a warm up and tea break but I can't stick the cold for more than about half an hour. Chip the dog has given up chasing rabbits and spends most of his time by the fire at the moment. Despite the cold, Dil the chippy said today that he loved the house and will be sorry to leave when the job is finished.

Lunchtime at Cefnmeurig

Just Denzil

I have an appointment to see Denzil at the NFU offices in St Clears tomorrow. It's a good job that there is only one Denzil in the office as I don't know his surname. He always refers to himself on the phone as Denzil and his signature is illegible.

If was forced to guess his surname I would plumb for either Phillips, Lewis, Howells or David as West Carmarthenshire (the old administration hundred district of Derllys) has the highest concentration of these surnames in the world. There is a one in five probability it will be one the those four names. If you add the surnames Williams, Thomas and Davies to the list, the probability increases to one in three.

However should by any chance Denzil's great grandfather have stopped off at Milford Haven, from a whaling ship, travelling from the Shetland Islands to the South Atlantic and somehow missed the boat, the probability theory is harpooned in the water.

Up and under - whelmed

Following on from the "I had a dream" post where I dreamt that the date stone, Gary Owen (grandson of the last tenant) had told me about, had a date of either 1893 or  1895, which I assumed would be the date the kitchen extension was built and the roof raised. And should I be correct with the date I wondered whether this proved I had psychic powers:

David the builder said that Gary was very excited on the last day he was working at Cefnmeurig because he had found the date stone. Hearing this news made me very excited as well but I became a little puzzled when David started to walk away from the house towards a concrete gate post. "Here it is" he said "it's very faint though".

On top of the concrete post was scratched  "Gary Owen 1985" I'm sure that this will be of great interest to Gary's descendants in a 100 years time but it does not take me any further forward with my research into the history of the house!

1895? 1985? Perhaps I'm a psychic that just makes the occasional transposition error. 

Valley of the God-Almightly Phillipses

Reading the very well written book "The Valley of the God-Almightly Joneses" by Maginel Wright Barney, the sister of Frank Lloyd Wright. The book concentrates on the maternal side of the family, the Lloyd-Jones. The grandparents, Richard Jones and Mary Lloyd came from Llandysul before they emigrated to Wisconsin. There is some circumstantial evidence that we may be related to the Joneses on my father's side of the family.

Their Welsh Unitarian family were a very strong influence on Maginel and her brother Frank although this does not come out in the numerous biographies of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an amazing character and lead a life too colourful for Hollywood. From a very early age he had been groomed for great things by his mother Anna Lloyd-Jones and he knew that he was a genius. He is quoted as saying:

"Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility, I chose the former and have seen no reason to change"

If he was alive today he would be a tabloid reporters dream; totally indiscreet in his private life and always armed with a headline quote. But unlike todays so-called celebs he was a man of real talent, who changed the world of architecture.

In my article, to be published in the Western Mail tomorrow I talk about FLlW and his philosophy of Organic Architecture. I think that he would have demolished Cefnmeurig and started again on the same site. I just wonder whether he would have retained the same strongly defined reception rooms. His preference was for open plan rooms that flowed into each other. This matched the vast and open landscapes of the American Mid-West but if he had stayed in West Wales he may have designed interiors that mirrored the small enclosed fields that surrounded him. Who knows.

Plumber's mate eventually

Julian the plumber and I didn't get off to a very good start. A misunderstanding relating to bathroom dimensions resulted in a slight rise in blood pressure. But his extensive knowledge of water pressure and other plumbing matters reassured me that he was more than competent to do the job.