Graveyards

The cat has got fleas. My wife resolves to take action immediately. She means business. A trip to the vet follows. The cat is treated appropriately and, for the time being, is banished to the garden. An expensive and powerful spray is acquired. Wearing a facemask, I give the lounge carpet a good seeing to. It has since become a graveyard for house flies attracted to their doom through open doors and windows. They are piling up in there. What’s in that spray? On the can it says it’s “dangerous to the environment.” Doesn’t that include us? I think I would prefer to take my chance with the fleas and keep the front room battle-ground as a chemical-free zone.

My first visit to the locomotive graveyard that was Barry docks was taken on the 24/4/65. This picture was my first ever railway colour slide. A grey day and a mediocre camera were insufficient excuses for my failure to hold the thing steady. The picture just about shows Merchant Navy Class No. 35025 Brocklebank Line amongst the rows of condemned engines. She eventually became the 169^th locomotive to be rescued. She is owned by the 35025 Brocklebank Association and is being restored at their base at Sellindge in Kent.

I sat in the garden and reminisced about my four visits to Barry. On the first three, the yards were stuffed with those rusting hulks. It was a sad sight but how grateful we all are now to the former proprietor, Dai Woodham. I visited Barry again in recent times, only discovering fifty years later that the whole set-up was just a stone’s throw from the beach and the other attractions of a typical holiday resort. Until then they had seemed to be a world - as well as half a lifetime - apart.

I looked up into a blue sky to see the latest crop of fledgling house martins. They nest annually in the gable end of an adjacent property. They are tiny little arrows with wafer thin wings, wheeling high overhead in their search for flies as they stock up for their long migration, a first trip to Africa at only a few weeks old. What a hazardous first journey, but what an extraordinary, mind-boggling and wonderful thing. I hope they are not struggling to find enough food to eat up there. Most of the flies around here are dead - prostrate on our lounge floor. That reminds me, where’s the dustpan and brush?