Contrasts There are some feelings, no matter how basic, that I cannot capture on paper. Not even in a poem.

For me, one such experience would be walking with Liz along the front at Porthcawl on a sunny spring morning, with a fresh breeze gusting off the Atlantic. On such a day you find yourself looking over the Bristol Channel to the Devon hills, or along the Welsh coast to the where the Celtic Sea embraces the Mumbles; whilst, in the other direction, the white village of Southerndown straddles the road to Nash Point. There are fine south-facing bays of golden sand here too, at Treco and Sandy Bay. And, over there, just round the corner on the Gower, is Rhossili, the third best beach in Europe and ninth in the world. Maybe the words Im looking for are freedom, nature and love. But I cant string them together. Talking of freedom reminds me of an article I read in the Huffington Post, based on a BBC report of conditions in the Amazon warehouse, where I shop for bargains. Apparently, the employees there are working under sweatshop conditions. At the start of a shift they plug their scanner into the system and, for the next 10 hours, they become little more than robots, following one instruction after the other with no time to think or rest. Like machines, they traipse up and down the warehouse floor, covering as many as 11 miles in a shift. I suppose that earning a living is the antitheses of freedom. Though work isnt always the flip-side of the happiness coin. That brings me to another point. Accompanying Liz around the vast blue characterless shed of IKEA in Cardiff, an escalator spits me out on the road to nowhere. I find myself drifting along in a procession of the living-dead, on a trek that goes on forever through an endless forest of chunky square lumps of wood. After an age, the forest gives way to the suburbs of some vast abandoned city, as mile after mile of uninhabited living rooms merge into abandoned bedrooms and lifeless bathrooms. From time to time, my zombie companions drift to a standstill, peer haplessly this way and that, as if looking for a way of escape, then meander resignedly on. Is this an away-day for the Amazonian androids? I wonder. The IKEAN inmates render the experience evermore disturbing. Poor pasty-faced creatures, men and women alike,

clad in sinister yellow shirts with blue vertical stripes which conjure up nightmares of those pictures that appeared in the papers at the end of the war gaunt figures in striped uniforms peering through the bars of concentration camps. Look! A Scotsman in a kilt, Liz breaks the eerie silence, gesticulating at a solitary man-mountain who stands, dominating an otherwise empty bedroom. Thats not a kilt, I tell her, weighing-up his sand-coloured skirt, Its a skilt Does that mean hes an Australian clansman? she wonders. Dunno, I say. He looks like the last of the desert rats. I thought they were all dead. They probably are. Keep moving. At that moment, a yellowshirt appears at the door of an otherwise empty bathroom and stares at us blankly. I get a flashback from that film, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Whatever became of Anne Frank? I wonder. Keep your head down, I tell Liz. Then, at last, we are outside in the car-park with Liz clutching a cut-price lavatory-brush our only purchase as we argue about where we left the car. Where do we go now? Liz wonders, when we accidently stumble on the vehicle. Dunno, I say. Its our 51st Wedding Anniversary, she reminds me. We could go for a curry, I say. Curry?! Where? That Indian on the cliffs, overlooking the sea in Fontygary. Remember? Where we stayed with the kids in a caravan, 39 years ago, she says. Yeah. It was great. It was that long hot summer. I used to come home from work in the evening and jump in the pool for a swim. And you took us to Swansea and went round a roundabout seven times, arguing about which was the road home. Fifty-one years, eh, I say, adjusting the rear-view mirror, and never a cross word.