Mandala and moon phases on a calf

The lamp in the chapel went out again on Tuesday, so Mr Pryce has taken to reading the banns by the light from the pit-head furnace, which makes the whole congregation look like they are standing in the bottom of a kettle. I tell you this so you will know I am still keeping my eyes open, even if my hands are not as steady as they were before the cough came back. Your mother sends her love and says the eggs are going off faster than the price of them.

You asked in your last whether the new moon still looks the same from the top of the tip as it did from our back step in Abersychan. It does, though there is less of it to look at. Every night I climb to the fan house and count the phases the way you taught me, first the thin paring, then the half, then the full one sitting over the wheel like a coin nobody will spend. Tom Bevan says a man who counts the moon is a man who is waiting for something, and I told him I was waiting for the dinner bell.

The lads have started drawing on each other's arms with ink from the colliery office, a flower in the middle and dots running down like a bead curtain. Little Davey had one done in the wash-house with a darning needle and a bit of soot, and his mother near fainted. It is ugly work and I would never let them do it to me, but I confess I looked at it a long time. It put me in mind of you, always spinning a bit of string into something finer than it had any right to be.

Write back soon, and tell me the moon over Cardiff is not so lonely as ours.