A small wooden church on Cardiff Bay testifies to the most significant influx of Norwegians to Britain since the Viking invasions a thousand years earlier. These nineteenth-century Norwegians were more peaceable than their Viking ancestors, interested in trade rather than pillage. And unlike those earlier visitors they worshipped Christ, not Odin.
Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea. (Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas) My work here is done. Peter and Andrew were fisherman. We lying by seasand, watching yellowAnd the grave sea, mock who derideWho follow the red rivers, hollowAlcove of words out of cicada shade,For in this yellow grave of sand and seaA calling for colour calls with the windThat’s grave and gay as grave and seaSleeping on either hand.The lunar silences, the silent tideLapping the still canals, the dry tide-masterRibbed between desert and water storm,Should cure our ills of the waterWith a one-coloured calm;The heavenly music over the sandSounds with the grains as they hurryHiding the golden mountains and mansionsOf the grave, gay, seaside land.Bound …