Hay on Wye

Sorry Cath, I read your blog too late to tell you anything in advance, but I know Hay is the best place in Britain for second hand books. There are loads and loads of dark little shops where dirty looking men hide in corners reading original copies of The Railway Children or Virgil's Aenead.

I know Dad took us there once on one of our long trips out west to reach the end of the then known universe (St David's Head, I think) but it is also where I and a good friend from teacher training college launched a single ship...we set out from Hay on Wye to canoe down to Monmouth in a rubber cayak, canadian style over the rapids. We pushed off from the sandy beach just down from the lovely old stone bridge. Eeh, it were a reet good laff. (Cookie - Paul Cookson, a maths teacher and juggler of note who also visited us in Botswana - heralds from Oldham or thereabouts) We had great pub lunches, enjoyed wonderful weather and saw peregrine falcons over the cliffs at Bishops Castle. We considered taking a tin of pinapple chunks and a dog along but both of these might have punctured our inflatable.

In Ross we passed a family of three boys and a girl, each under ten, and their mum and dad, all cayaking upstream with their pots and pans, tents and so on, in the stern. Another brother of twelve canoed a separate cayak alongside. Ee-up, and I thought we had it rough putting up tents in the new forest in the rain. I reckon the strains of 'Are we nearly there yet Dad?' must have accompanied that family most everywhere they went!

Ah, heady days...