Summer (From Western Telegraph)

Summer

3:56pm Tuesday 18th August 2009

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Newport can be a difficult place to have a full-time job in summer, when it is full of people enjoying their holidays and you are working.

Clearly, I love where I live, otherwise I would have stayed in Cardiff (or even moved on to pastures new) when I finished my degree, like so many of my peers did, rather than coming home. But just because you love something doesn't mean that it doesn't annoy you sometimes (just ask The Boy).

We generally get a pretty good type of visitor in Newport; they are, evidently, discerning at the very least. It's the volume of visitors that I find most irritating. I only get half an hour for my lunch break. When I'm being organised and I've managed to drag myself to the supermarket, this is fine because I work from home, but unfortunately it's rare that I'm organised. So, if I want to eat (which I always do) I have to venture out of the house and face the shops which I know will be full of people.

I'm not a misanthrope, I promise. I am in fact usually quite friendly (I hope). But holiday makers seem to forget that not everyone is on holiday and not everyone has ample time to hang around behind them in Spar while they put through a trolley-full of stuff which they keep adding to. I stand in the queue at these moments watching my lunch break trickle away and I cannot help but resent the people who are invading my town.

It's petty, I'm very aware of this, but I'm feeling petty because I would love to be meandering slowly up the road in the sunshine rather than working inside all day with a quick break to manoeuvre around the people who are doing just that as I try to get in and out of shops in the quickest possible time.

Lately, however, I've been feeling less irritable. I went for a couple of walks before work and, despite being a bit knackered from getting up 45 minutes earlier than usual, it gave me a sunnier outlook. This is partly due to only going for pre-work walks when the sun was shining, but was also more metaphorical than that.

I didn't have to travel to be here. I left my house and five minutes later I was walking by the estuary on a shaded path mottled with sunlight. No driving in a hot car or squeezing into a packed train to be in such a beautiful place; I'm already here.

Annoying though holiday makers can be, once I stopped taking Newport for granted I started to empathise with them, because, really, who would not want to be here?