At the age of 84, Bob Dylan is appearing at the Swansea Arena for three nights starting this Sunday. It’ll be the first time he has played in Swansea, the home of his namesake Dylan Thomas, since his inaugural gig in Cardiff in 1966. Since then he has played in Wales’s capital city 12 times, but has never before ventured down the road to Swansea.
Your scribe has tickets for one of the shows and in preparation has been reading the book Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas – The Two Dylans by K G Miles and Jeff Towns, with a foreword by Cerys Matthews.
Imagine his surprise when he came across, in the closing pages of the penultimate chapter, an illustrated reference, including a namecheck, to Jonah’s Dylan Thomas memorial plaque in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Jonah, who once wrote that “the skill of hand is an amazing factor in happiness”, would have been content with being described as “a great Welsh stonemason” – although the term he preferred to use was “letter-cutter”.
The Dylan Thomas plaque is an exhibit in the Oriel Jonah Jones.