MORNING SERIAL
SHE gave me that from downunder look that told me she knew this instinctively, of course. I nodded her on.
Which was why, she confided, they needed not support nor comfort nor flattery but the kind of civic and cultural leadership that could ensure social and structural change.
Ceri had given up on the petty squabbling of the remnants of his own political past to embrace the wider vision that a new coalition of interests offered and for which he, and some others with both roots and networks, could serve as a conduit.
These channels had to be dug and lubricated by people with the same local knowledge and soaring ambition. But these people – a modest, implicit acknowledgement of herself, Gwilym and Maldwyn this time – were not somehow cheating or conniving to exclude ordinary people.
No, they had an extraordinary desire to help people who, in these serially neglected and benighted valleys, could no longer help themselves.
As a group, she said. As individuals, she said. It had to change, didn’t it?
Bran then led me by the hand through the plans they had devised together to provide an exemplar which would be the envy of regeneration projects across Europe, and wider still.
It met all the current needs of its surrounding dependents – economic and social – and, what was wonderfully more, it would bring the sharpest brains and the deepest wallets into a cultural symbiosis. She liked that word.
She liked it so much she used it twice. I could see the symbiotic connection she was eager to make. Money and minds, together. Wow. What a sweet combo.
When she saw the lightbulb was on she gently explained how such deals were always complex, fraught with bureaucracy, bedevilled by rivalry, hamstrung by low expectation and clouded vision.
There had to be leaders, big and bold enough to translate their individual ambition into the passion for progressive action that had always inspired them. It still did.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com