The Butterfly Zoo

On my last weekend in Wales, Cathy comes back to visit. We've been friends since we were 11 when she saved me from an adolescence of loneliness and misery by inviting me back to her house in the next valley after school. I could help her pick caterpillars out of the garden, she'd said, to keep in the box under her bed that she was turning into a butterfly zoo.

Eighteen years later, Cathy drives too fast and doesn't always watch where she's going. Usually this makes me nervous but today I don't care. I'm feeling light-headed after lunch and I'm happy to ride shotgun through Ffestiniog as the sunlight hits the slate-heaps and turns them purple.

Listen to this, she says, turning up the music. I always think this song is about us.

The woman on the stereo sings about being sixteen; two girls drunk on a bathroom floor together.

Yes, it's about us, I agree, feeling emotional all of a sudden.

Who else could that song possibly have been written about except me and Cathy? I'm glad we're spending my last day here together, in Wales on the first day of March, driving too fast through Snowdonia where we have grown caterpillars and killed butterflies and swung from every lamppost and pissed on every tree.