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I find it in a storm. The sky is grey as slate with only a crack of sun in it and rain lashes my face until I stop feeling it. It’s already the middle of March but spring seems to have skipped over us on its way north. I’m in Carmarthenshire in Wales on a spontaneous trip with my mum. Alongside a handful of other wet pilgrims, we wander in silence along the stretch of cliff which drops into the Tâf estuary. The water from a distance is like a strip of cool steel but on looking closer I see that it’s angry and agitated. I focus on keeping my feet and try not to imagine how it would feel to be the object of that kind of rage. A cry startles me. A spotted herring gull, calling for her mate, glides over my head, dips low and disappears into the shifting colours of the bay. As the cliff winds to the right, the party ahead of me stops. The wind is ferocious out in the open and I squint against the rain. ‘Here it is,’ someone says. White waves howl and beat against the sea wall and white paint of the boathouse. It’s a wild spot which must be beautiful in the summer but on a day like today is desolate. This is where Dylan Thomas lived and worked in his final years. How perfectly suited they must have been. Here he dreamed up words which would catch the breeze and drift through time to find me in my own most desolate places. Overshadowed by the cliff and crowned with evergreen branches, the house looks strong and vulnerable at once. The landscape could almost have given birth to it and it’s as much weather as bricks. It connects me to him in such a tangible way that I feel I can almost see him through the window, almost hear the whisky bottle clinking against the glass, the murmur of his voice in the hall, or the footsteps of his children. ‘Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.’ The gull and her mate rise above the chimney stack and arc back towards us. It makes a pretty picture and some people get their cameras out but I’m not tempted to reach for mine. I don’t feel the need to linger any longer. The feeling has passed the same way it came. The house is just a house, the water doing what water does. But as I head back along the path with the wind at my back, I carry with me the secret knowledge that for a moment they had spoken as one living thing. For a moment he was alive and we were alive together.