12 Awst 2026
I had only just begun to trust the map again.
Britain was back under familiar colours, the roads between Cardiff and the rest of the mainland looked marginally less like suggestions, and for perhaps half a cup of tea it seemed possible that things might remain quiet.
Then Belgium attacked the south-east of England. Again.
The report crawled across the inside cover of my notebook in green lettering while something mechanical clicked behind the spine. London, apparently, was once again somebody’s problem.
Cardiff carried on.
The castle still stood above the street, wearing every century it had survived at once: stone beneath iron, iron beneath cables, old fortifications quietly accommodating machinery nobody who built the original walls could have named. Greggs continued performing its constitutional duties. Nobody nearby seemed sufficiently alarmed to abandon breakfast.
I took this as evidence that civilisation remained intact.
There were other scraps coming through too. Flanders. Movements across the water. A peculiar whisper from Portugal involving cork.
I wrote "CORK?" in the margin, underlined it once, and decided that was probably enough intelligence work for the morning.
I had not come to Cardiff to command anybody. Nor, strictly speaking, had I come to watch a war. I came because the roads were opening again, because there were places beyond Wales I had never seen, and because every time the world settles down it seems to reveal another path worth walking.
The south-east could burn for a moment without me.
My tea was getting cold.