The rain fell sideways in St David’s, needling the cobbled streets and rattling umbrellas like a band of loose tin drums. The tourists, anoraks pulled tight and sandals soaked through, shuffled and jostled in the narrow street, as though the small city were a theatre foyer too crowded for its own performance. Children whined like gulls. A dog shook itself on the cathedral green and baptised three strangers in its spray.
Inside the bakery on Nun Street, steamed windows blurred the view of the wet world. The air was heavy with pasties, golden and sweating, as though they too had just come in from the rain. A queue twisted and tightened, full of dripping shoulders and impatient bellies. The girl behind the counter worked like a sainted machine, flinging brown bags of pastry salvation at the faithful.
Down the hill, the cathedral crouched in its hollow, stone darkened to a bruised purple by the weather. The bells tolled slow and thick, as if calling the pilgrims from their pasties, from their cars, from their waterproof cocoons, to stand a moment in the damp shadow of something older than all of them.
And still the rain came on, steady as an evangelical sermon. St David’s heaved and bustled, steaming with umbrellas and hungry mouths, every doorway an ark, every shop a confessional of wet coins and chatter. And above it all, somewhere unseen, the saints of Wales must have been laughing, letting fall another bucket from the sky, as though they too queued for pastry, and found it all, in spite of everything, beautiful.
