‘Laugharne’ is Dylan Thomas’ last radio broadcast: Recorded on October 5th 1953 for Aneirin Talfan Davies for the BBC’s Welsh Home Service and broadcast on November 5th 1953 (the day Thomas became gravely ill in New York).

“Off and on, up and down, high and dry, man and boy, I’ve
been living now for fifteen years, or centuries, in this
timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings) town, in this far,
forgetful, important place of herons, cormorants (known
here as billyduckers), castle, churchyard, gulls, ghosts,
geese, feuds, scares, scandals, cherry-trees, mysteries,
jackdaws in the chimneys, bats in the belfry, skeletons in
the cupboards, pubs, mud, cockles, flatfish, curlews, rain.
and human, often all too human, beings; and, though still
very much a foreigner, I am hardly ever stoned in the
streets any more, and can claim to be able to call several
of the inhabitants, and a few of the herons, by their
Christian names.

Now, some people live in Laugharne because they were
born in Laugharne and saw no good reason to move; others
migrated here, for a number of curious reasons, from
places as distant and improbable as Tonypandy or even
England, and have now been absorbed by the natives;
some entered the town in the dark and immediately
disappeared, and can sometimes be heard, on hushed
black nights, making noises in ruined houses, or perhaps it
is the white owls breathing close together, like ghosts in
bed; others have almost cer-tainly come here to escape
the international police, or their wives; and there are those,
too, who still do not know, and will never know, why they
are here at all; you can see them, any day of the week,
slowly, dopily, wandering up and down the streets like
Welsh opium-eaters, half asleep in a heavy bewildered
daze. And some, like myself, just came, one day, for the day,
and never left; got off the bus, and forgot to get on again.
Whatever the reason, if any, for our being here, in this
timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town with its seven
public-houses, one chapel in action, one church, one factory,
two billiard tables, one St. Bernard (without brandy), one
policeman, three rivers, a visiting sea, one Rolls-Royce
selling fish and chips, one cannon (castiron), one chancellor
(flesh and blood), one port-reeve, one Danny Raye, and a
multitude of mixed birds, here we just are, and there is
nowhere like it anywhere at all.

But when you say, in a nearby village or town, that you
come from this unique, this waylaying, old, lost Laugharne,
where some people start to retire before they start to work
and where longish journeys, of a few hundred yards, are
often undertaken only on bicycles, then, oh! the wary
edging away, the whispers and whimpers, and nudges, the
swift removal of portable objects!

‘Let’s get away while the going is good.’ you hear.
‘Laugharne’s where they quarrel with boathooks.’
“All the women there’s got web feet.’
‘Mind out for the Evil Eye!’
‘Never go there at the full moon!’

They are only envious. They envy Laugharne its minding of
its own, strange, business; its sane disregard for haste: its
generous acceptance of the follies of others, having so
many, ripe and piping, of its own; its insular, featherbed air;
its philosophy of ‘It will all be the same in a hundred years’
time.’ They deplore its right to be, in their eyes, so wrong,
and to enjoy it so much as well. And, through envy and
indignation, they label and libel it a legendary lazy little
black-magical bedlam by the sea. And is it? Of course not,
I hope.”