Monday 7th September: Leeds, Cardiff, The Mumbles and Swansea.
Mein Hosts and I were up early, they to work, me to hit the road, kindly equipped with their sat-nav. We had conducted a test the previous day, which had not proved entirely successful.
For a start, I kept wanting to look at the screen and not the road – dangerous. We were driving Abi home on multi-lane, inner city ring roads which I’m not used to. The sat-nav told me to go one way, himself was telling me to ignore it and go his way, Abi piped in with her views on the best route to her home. while Emma wanted us to do whatever the sat-nav directed and incessantly asked how accurate was its timing of our expected arrival. Despite this being an admiralable trait, I could have done without the questions while trying to assimilate and process three conflicting opinions and avoid being crushed beneath the surfeit of artics which surrounded us, being mindful of the £500 car hire excess. We did arrive safely and the experience of using and ignoring the sat-nav was most helpful in the days ahead.
So I set out for Wales at 8 a.m. on a bright, rain free morning. There is nothing like heading off on an adventure. The theme of this holiday was to go to places I had never before been and to do things, where possible that I would not usually do. My journey was in effect a large circle through England and Wales, Cardiff, Swansea, Carmarthen, Mid-Wales, Manchester, then back home to Edinburgh.
I had booked one night in the Cardiff Novotel, with the intention of using Cardiff as a base but to explore Swansea, the Mumbles, the Gower peninsula and Laugharne. Literate readers will have already made the connection between those locations, they are the birthplace, home and final home of Dylan Thomas. I’ve always loved his poetry and voice and have meant to visit that part of Wales (the wettest, west-est, wildest, West Wales) for years.
For those of you interested in routes, this is how the sat-nav got me from Leeds to Swansea: M62, M42, M5, M50, A40, A449, M4. I was delighted to see such evocative names on the motorway signs as I crossed into Wales; Pontypridd, Llantrisant, Bridgend, Maesteg, Neath, Pontardawe, Kidwelly and of course Swansea. After travelling through several rain storms, I arrived in Swansea at lunchtime in blazing sun and with the temperature rising.
Entering the city centre, one of the first signs I saw was for The Dylan Thomas Centre – I turned in and found a car park. The centre is next to the mouth of the River Tawe and the marina, so I had a wander and found the local Sainsbury’s for a quick sandwich and drink. The marina area has clearly seen recent development and was most attractive. In the middle distance were the hills surrounding the city, round shouldered, unlike anything I’ve seen in Scotland. There were also some bird life to keep me interested while eating lunch in the September sun.
Swans in Swansea!
After visiting the Dylan Thomas centre (resisting the temptation to buy more Dylan books) and having a very quick look round Swansea town centre and the castle, I drove onto Mumbles, further round Swansea Bay.
Seemingly every town in Wales has at least one castle and many chapels, both I suspect to keep the English out. Thomas spent much time in the pubs in Mumbles and I can see why, it’s a delightful seaside town. I wandered round the town, and along the bay front and used some of the “Amlen talu i mewn” at the HSBC as it is after all “Y ffordd gyflym a syml o dalu i mewn a thalu biliau.” I liked the idea of having being asked to “Press 2 for English” on the machine. I heard the lovely Welsh accent here for the first time properly, as a regular followed me into the bank to be greeted by name, “Hello Mr. Edwards, how are you today? What’ll it be paying in again?” Wow!
The view across Swansea bay from Mumbles to the city.
The Mumbles pier at the end of the seaside promenade.
Some of the seaside houses and interesting weather vane.
In
I found this…
I had a quick drive to Langlands Bay near the lifeboat station and then decided to drive back to Cardiff to get to the hotel. Tomorrow would take me to Laugharne and through Wales to Manchester. My sat-nav found the hotel with surprising ease, given that after a shower and before supper it got me completely lost in a quick drive round Cardiff.
This was not entirely it’s fault, as every road seemed to be under repair, a one way street or the wrong direction. I did manage to make my way to Cardiff Bay area and saw the impressive Welsh Assembly and Wales Millennium Centre. Like Swansea there seems to have been a lot of recent renovation and development. There were however many places like this, and of all the places I visited on my trip – I’m sorry to say that Cardiff did it least for me.
Back at the hotel, I had a lovely couple of drinks and some chicken fajitas and a couple more drinks with some Dutch folk at the bar. Ironically they were heading to Edinburgh and so I was able to help them out with a suggestion or two.
The poem workings which you can see in the photograph from the Dylan Thomas Centre became this:
Poem on his Birthday
In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay’s grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.
Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.
In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
Herons walk in their shroud,
The livelong river’s robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
Slides good in the sleek mouth.
In a cavernous, swung
Wave’s silence, wept white angelus knells.
Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,
Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark
And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.
There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
Or the stars’ seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in young Heaven’s fold
Be at cloud quaking peace,
But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick starts,
Faithlessly unto Him
Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons’ vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:
Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,
That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith oem On His Birthday
That ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,
I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.
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