Well here I am adding to my Blogs, when I started I wasn't sure I would do a Blog, now I'm glad that I did as I can look back on our journey so far and remember how much fun it has been.

Last Friday (11th April) I travelled to Wales to see Mark in his world for the first time, I've wanted to do this since we first met.

Mark had rented a house and picked up the keys on the day i arrived, it was a pleasure and an honour to share his first night in his new home with him. The journey was a little difficult as it was night time and there was a bad storm, the mountain roads were to say the least interesting to travel. You have to realise that in 3 years I have hardly driven anywhere further than work.

To see Mark is always a joy, it had been a couple of weeks since I had last seen him and I was so looking forward to it. I had a fantastic 3 day's where Mark introduced me to his world. It felt so natural to be there with him, some of the places he took me to were personal to him, places he liked to go to think and contemplate life/the world. I got to see more of the inner Mark in his own world than I had when he was staying with me. It made things more real for me to know him in his world, if it doesn't sound silly for me it closed the circle.

One way I can describe it is as if there is a rainbow that now has two ends, one with Mark in Wales and the other here with me in Birmingham. I can look at the rainbow now and know both ends of it, both ends are solid and good, it is full of wonder, joy and new shared experiences.

To watch Mark as he speaks his first language Welsh is to watch a light come on, Welsh is so a part of who he is. The country of Wales is also a part of Mark, it is a beautiful country, I hope to explore much of it with Mark at my side.

An interesting thing is that I have decided that I want to learn welsh, I'm not very good at english so I'm going to find learning welsh hard. It is important to me to learn welsh, I want to share and communicate with Mark on a level that is more communal/intimate than we can have in English. It has become quite important to me to do this, it will take a long time, but I intend to achieve this goal with Marks help.

I am going to stay with Mark in his new home again next weekend, it's starting to feel like we have two homes or hearths, one we share in Wales and one we share in Birmingham.

Everything points to the future, a journey we can travel together and share. 19-04-2008