Barry in Europe

Wales was not the only place to make me feel somewhat unwelcome. On the last day of March, I struck a triple whammy. I'd arrived home late on the Monday night, and didn't really think twice when I noticed my landlord's desk was missing. In the morning, however, it was a bit more than that; there was a strange car in the driveway, strange voices in the house and various items that I really didn't think were my landlord's, such as a pair of turntables. At work, I found I had lost my office key, and the fellow at the key cutting shop had two goes at cutting a replacement without success. And, worst of all, at around 4:30 I found out that my computer access was about to be cut off because it was the end of my time at Birmingham - despite me telling everybody I was leaving at the end of April. So, all in all, I was feeling just a little lost.

Not that I could get too worried, because I had a date. My bookclub friend had agreed to come for a drink and a movie; it turned out we were both a bit late, so it was just the movie - Duplicity, with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. There were smart elements to it, but a very long and tedious set up of the commercial background to the plot slowed things enormously. Afterwards, we wandered back through town to catch our respective trains. There is something I'll be doing next week; when I revealed it to her, she had conniptions because she'd tried hard to do the same but had missed out.

Wednesday, all my problems got themselves sorted out: my landlord had swapped houses with his daughter without telling me; Birmingham gave me a month's extension on my stay, and I found someone to cut a proper copy of my key. Actually, I didn't so much find him as return to him, as this is not the first time I've lost the key to the office. He operates from a shop which seems to mix elements of Arkwright's shop in Open All Hours and Steptoe and Son - a hardware shop stuck down a side street stacked to the rafters with a weird and wonderful selection - you have to thread your way between piles of stock and the old Indian fellow sitting eating his lunch or sucking away at a cup of tea and then wait while the key is laboriously filed. So, to celebrate everything coming right, I went to a French bistro in town, Chez Jules, and had the kind of food I had found so elusive while in France - a wonderful braised beef dish.

Then the very roundabout start to my Easter break started. I had to see a fellow at Southampton University for my work, so decided to take the weekend in Cornwall. I had a bit of a cock up on the transportation front (does anyone remember Jimmy (played by Geoffrey Palmer) from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin these days?) Instead of organising the train to Southampton, I had bought a ticket to Portsmouth - an expensive mistake, as it cost the same again to go the last twenty miles to Southampton. There, I was finally reunited with Travelodges. I didn't really see very much of Southampton - I spent the morning at the University (MUCH better coffee and food than at Birmingham), saw my man and collected another rental car.

I only had a short distance to go (another cock up on the transportation front - as events transpired, I should have pushed on further West) so decided to dawdle, taking a detour in the New Forest (which is not that new, and only vaguely forest, but there are horses)

After a while, I found myself in a very cute village called Beaulieu

It is famous for its Abbey

There is also a motor museum; while I didn't actually see it, the local car dealer may as well have been a museum


That's an Aston Martin, by the way. Eighty-five thousand quid, if you're interested.
I couldn't quite see how much they wanted for the Rolls

Slightly more than what I customarily spend on cars, I suspect.

Town itself was just a single street

with an olde-worlde grocers and a very pleasant cafe (more teacakes!), and a cool looking school.

Continuing on my trek around the south coast, I came to Lymington, somewhere I would have liked to stay, it had a nice feel to it,


lots of decent looking cafes and B&B's but, since my trip was so short, I had everything booked in advance. I thought it a bit random to see this on the dock, with no-one in sight

As I headed towards Bournemouth, I came across the "ancient Borough of Christhurch" and really did plan to take a look (I missed out on the "ancient Borough of Wellington", which is near Telford) but didn't spot the right turn off and found myself in a path leading inexorably to Bournemouth, where I had a pleasant stay in a very traditional English beach resort hotel. Bournemouth has a pier (closed for a private function)

a deserted beach

and about a million bars, cafes and restaurants (but it has always been a watering place - that is how Galsworthy described it more than 100 years ago in The Forsyte Saga). It took a while for me to find a place that appealed, most were empty and silent with waiters who would look at me anxiously as I went past willing me to go in. I was about to resign myself to fish and chips when I came across a very cheerful Mexican place, called Coriander, one which went well beyond the normal tacos and burritoes - I had something described as a "Mexican casserole of Chicken, in a spicy tomato and vegetable sauce, with crispy potatoes & melted cheese" and very nice it was too.

Reading this week was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The things I was most fascinated with, he spent least time on, such as the drive to keep consuming in order to keep the wheels of capitalism running (although there was a lot of detail about the production of the various classes of people). The moral standards were inverted; girls who went with the same guy for more than a week were perverse; promiscuity was to be congratulated. One thing that has stuck in my mind is the one accolade given by the guys to the girls - they are said to be pneumatic (this had interesting resonances given the pneumatic pants described in Antic Hay and that the best sofas are those which are pneumatic).

Yesterday was all about coasts and castles and coldness. Today was about warmth and inland destinations, one of which I managed to fall in love with.


This is the view from my hostel bedroom at Borth. The road over the hill to Aberystwyth was a little less scary in the daylight, but still very narrow

I only really went back to Aberystwyth because I wanted to see if Galloway’s bookshop was open – after something like 130 years of being a family business, they have finally decided that life is too hard and are closing their doors for ever. Sad. Plus they were having a 25% off sale, but they don’t open Sundays. I wandered around a bit, was so impressed with this


I had to ask a passing gentleman what it was all about. Apparently it used to be a hotel, but when it went bust, was taken over to form the original campus of the University of Aberystwyth. Still in use and much nicer than the new campus up on the hill, and what a location, right on the waterfront.

Heading north, my first stop was Machynlleth, which was (briefly) the site of the Welsh Parliament at the beginning of the 15th century.


I wonder how many MP’s they could fit in there (and whether THEY had problems with MP’s double-dipping on their second home allowances).

After this, I was on the southside of Snowdonia

and then it happened: I came round a corner and over a wee bridge

and saw this

This is Dolgellau – reading my guidebook later, I saw that is one of the best preserved traditional Welsh granite towns there is.

I took so many photos my camera battery died. No worries, I took refuge in a cafe and charged up

I had a lot of fun in the visitor centre in Dolgellau, more fun than I thought possible. I was curious about coming back, so asked the charming lass how to get there by public transport; apparently you come through Machynlleth. Hearing this said with the proper Welsh pronunciation is a thing of joy - I contrived to have her repeat it. After about a dozen times, I thought I had better go, otherwise she might think I was a loon.

After this, I had to get a move on to get back to Telford before dark, with only the occasional stop for photos - I was impressed by this church (it hasn't come out as clearly as hoped - it is sheathed with corrugated iron, but it is the colour which got to me)

then it was goodbye to Snowdonia

This building is a restaurant and what seemed to be apartments - and what a location

There was a reason I had started in Telford - it is a few miles from a place called Ironbridge, which is where the Industrial Revolution is said to have started. It is here that Abraham Darby was the first to use a blast furnace to make iron in 1709, and a whole industry built up around him. There are ten museums devoted to this early phase of industrial history, and I've been wanting to go explore ever since I hear about this place. Unfortunately, my planning was a bit off - I didn't get down to into the Ironbridge Gorge until about 5:30!

It is a beautiful spot


and yes, there is an iron bridge, the first cast iron bridge in the world, built by Abraham Darby III in 1779

Thomas Telford, who built the Conwy suspension bridge that bears his name was strongly influenced by Darby's bridge but refined the design considerably. His Wikipedia entry reveals him to be a quite remarkable man who did a lot in the early 19th century to design transport links all around the UK.

The town of Telford, named in his honour, is a disaster. It is a near new city - basically a bunch of roads built around a mall, with none of the bars, cafes etc that you'd expect to find in a place housing 200,000 people. Only now are they investing to build up this essential element. The only place I could find to eat (apart from the Motorway service area) was a Beefeaters; they managed to stuff up every element of my dinner. The only element that was cooked nicely was something I hadn't ordered, so I don't expect they'll be seeing much more of me.

Llanberis has one of the Guardian's Top Ten Breakfasts in the UK, at Pete's Eats, but my hotel fed me handsomely on a big English breakfast and, oddly, watermelon so I decided to head west. Yes, my ultimate destination for the day was South East of Llanberis but I was taking the long way round - back to Betwys-y-coed and up to the North coast and around. The day was bitterly cold, so I didn't hang about anywhere in particular, but what a fantastic drive.

I did start to develop a bit of a complex, however. When I first travelled to the UK, I took it personally when I saw signs on pubs saying "No Travellers" (kids from New Zealand have no idea what a traveller might be, other than someone who travels). But the Welsh are just downright mean to me and my family. How else do explain these signs, which are all over the place?

I wasn't having any of that, so carried on my merry way.

I was only going 15 miles, but there seemed to be plenty of distractions - one of the many castles established in the 13th century to defend Wales (behind a wall so I never saw it), a woollen mill with interesting things to try on (and, you know, if one of the flat caps had actually fitted, I might have bought one), more narrow streets

and quaint stone churches

Finally, in Conwy, I got to see a castle

and a bridge (Thomas Telford's Suspension Bridge, lots of signs and postcards informed me. No, I don't know who he is either.)

It was far too cold to be hanging about looking at castles, so I went to Llandudno


Yes, its a beach. According to my guidebook, it is the finest Victorian resort in Wales. One thing I didn't really like about it was that on the front, all the buildings are either houses or hotels

- no cafes where (if it had been a warm day) a day tripper could sit and take a meal. They were all on the side and back streets, along with all of the brand names that make up your typical British High Street. I sat in the car transfixed by a remake of a Tony Hancock skit, and then headed off. I had castles to see.


That's Caernarfon Castle - it is all of 7.5 miles from where I slept last night! Down the road


to Porthmadog, a place the guidebook says is far better to travel to than arrive at and then had some tosh about how it was designed and built to be some sort of perfect town. Couldn't see it myself, but did find some nice chips to tide me over. I snuck over the "toll road" without paying my 40 p toll to Harlech,



scene of yet another castle

The coast north of Barmouth was just lovely

and attracted some castles of a very modern sort

Barmouth seemed a nice enough town, and has a huge beach, at least a couple of miles long

I have a funny feeling there was yet another castle I saw, but if so, there's no photo. Heading down south of Barmouth, it was starting to get dark so I had to stop farting about and head for my destination, a wee town called Borth. It is a few miles up the coast from Aberystwyth, another town I have had in my imagination for a long time - it is in fact the first place in which I applied for an academic position. After checking into my hostel in Borth and finding that it offers little for the hungry motorist, I headed over the hill into Aberystwyth. The cold soon stopped my sight-seeing: I resolved to turn in the next door providing food, and thus it happened my dinner was Greek. Quite nice, actually, a very slow cooked beef casserole, just what you want on a cold Welsh night.

My flight from Grenoble saw me back in Birmingham in time for lunch, which turned out to be a humungous roast chicken dinner in the pub under New Street railway station. Of course, by evening I was hungry again, and I had a plan: I'd picked up a train magazine (like an airline one, but produced by a train company) which rated some restaurants in Mosely (a suburb of Birmingham) very highly. I picked the Thai place, and the food was very good. I don't know if it was the fact that I rode up several hills to get there, or the fact I was on French time (making it a long day), or the travelling had tired me out but I had an unusual encounter with the woman running the restaurant. She'd told me that something put on my food was good for "energy", and then when it came time to leave, there was a curious degree of intimacy: she was saying that I'd looked so tired when I came in, wanted to make sure I was taking care of myself - generally the sort of conversation you might have with a close, caring friend.

Another food highlight was my visit to the Asian greasy spoon near the station, where I'd previously had a good curry. They'd run out this week, so I went for the roast duck and pork on rice: amazing and under six quid! The duck was totally succulent (and probably just that little bit bad for me, as it was quite fatty). Over a week later as I write this, I can still taste the crunchy, slightly charred skin of the pork (helped a little by the fact I've been back for more since).

Wednesday was a bit of a mixed day: I had a seminar to give on Thursday, so spent the day preparing, finishing with a neat outline of what I wanted to say. When Word asked if I wanted to save, I thought "yes, better save, ah but I should print it out so I can take it home and think about it, so no I don't want to save". Now, when you say don't save, Word takes you at your word: I had a near blank document rather than the six page outline I'd spent the entire day working up. I really couldn't face a rewrite at that stage, and besides I had an appointment - I went out to Lichfield and had a bit of a pub crawl with one of my colleagues. Unusually, he lives there but expected me to be the guide - we did have a good time. After several pints and in a state of not quite complete sobriety, I rewrote my seminar notes and then, when giving it, had to give an acknowledgement: "if my paper is any good, it is thanks to Marston's Pedigree ale".

Friday, I had a rental car waiting for me at the Avis depot in Telford (northwest of Birmingham, near Shrewsbury). Or at least I thought so: somehow it took them half an hour to get it ready, a half hour I spent wishing I'd booked with Hertz ("if you wait more than ten minutes, your rental is free"). But Carly, the Avis lass, was a real charmer, so we hung out while her off-sider did wheelies in my car in the car park and it was about 4:40 before I could finally leave

.

The drive out through to Wales was pretty standard, a main road with lots of roundabouts, but once I hit the Wales border, things just got more and more special. The road narrowed, and took on stone borders


with lots of quaint villages

One of particular interest is Betws-y-coed



A couple of the many hotels made me wonder how good the place I had booked into was going to be, as these places looked cool, and I'd hate to find myself somewhere skodie when I could have been here

No worries, my hotel was pretty good, certainly worth what I paid, although in a different style (and quite pink inside)

Llanberis (the ll in Wales is a bit like the hard ch in English, but seems to have a bit of sqelch added - so you have a fairly soft k with a hint of the h sound, but also quite a soft sh) is the "capital" of Snowdonia, a fairly rugged area centred on Mt Snowden. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't good enough to permit me to take the train to the summit, and I wasn't going to walk so I never saw the mountain. Still, it seemed like a nice area, very reminiscent of New Zealand, with subtle differences. This is Dolbadarn Castle, from the 13th century, which was directly behind my hotel:

Lake Padarn, which is surrounded by the town of Llanberis (both are small)

A couple of random scenes from the road

Timing was pretty good: it became dark just as I arrived in Llanberis, so I had a pub dinner, wandered the mean streets (very little to see, even on a Friday night) and retired to the bar of my hotel.

Reading

Somehow I was still reading the Sunday paper on Tuesday, so little progress on reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Why Grenoble? When I looked up where you can fly to from Birmingham on Easyjet (I won’t do Ryanair, I find them obnoxious and have so many random charges, soon to include use of the toilet, I have no confidence they’re cheaper), it was either Grenoble or Geneva and that was it. £43 return is still a bargain by reference to what I normally pay to fly.

Birmingham International Airport certainly adds a comedic touch to flying. I had arrived nice and early, with a big warning on my boarding pass that the gates close at 17:55 – if you’re late you don’t fly. So I get to the gate area about 17:20 – there is a sign saying “Don’t come down to the gate until we call you”. Fair enough, but then I find another sign “This is a silent airport. We do not make announcements.” Then the monitor says my flight is “boarding in 30 minutes” i.e. after the gates close, according to my boarding pass. It would have been nice to find an Easyjet staffer to get clarity but, until boarding starts, there is no gate to go to. I am damn lucky I didn’t take it as gospel, because after about 10 minutes, the message was suddenly “boarding now”. Funnily enough, I was first onto the plane – I went out through the gate to the accompaniment of the fellow behind me saying “we paid 12 pound for priority boarding and we’re not even first on”.

Despite their budget nature, Easyjet was fine to fly and even provided a moment of amusement. Going to France they of course needed safety announcements in French, but it soon became obvious that my French was far superior to that of the cabin attendants. They’d play a tape to get the French announcements then have anxious heads cocked and whispered conversations while it played, as they worked out whether they played the right one.

My hotel, the Trianon, is in an interesting area – lots of little cafes and bars and an assortment of shops, all at the ground floor of four storey apartment buildings. I arrived too late for anything to eat from these cafes, so wandered into the centre of town and found a burger place, basically a French version of Maccas, I’m afraid. I saw nothing specifically visually spectacular, just a pleasant area. That seems to be the case for all of central Grenoble, so only took a couple of photos:

Sunday was a disaster, eating and entertainment wise. Why did no-one tell me that shops mostly don’t open on a Sunday, and only the kebab and pizza cafes do? My hopes for a nice French dining experience were dashed – as it happens, even when they were open, I didn’t do much better. The menus seem pretty generic – steak, chicken, salads etc - or very expensive. So lets not mention what I ate in Grenoble.

Monday evening I went off to see Harvey Milk – curiously, Grenoble seems to have at least as many English films as Birmingham, and a wider variety, along with other international films (plus a good range of French films). Milk was a pretty impressive character – after years of repression, he moves to San Francisco, randomly starts a shop (“Castro Camera”) and not only comes out as gay but kicks off an entire movement (at least according to this dramatisation of his life), ending up as, essentially, a city councillor. I came to enjoy Sean Penn’s portrayal and became engaged in his fight for rights. I do wonder if Anita Lane, the fundamentalist Christian who had started the counter-movement to revoke anti-discrimination laws, was as horrible as portrayed in the movie.

Tuesday was an early start – I (quelle surprise) had a train to catch, to Turin. I was looking forward to a trip by TGV through the mountains, but it wasn't all that: the train was surprisingly slow, and the mountains were peirced by a long tunnel.

I knew virtually nothing about Turin, apart from reading on the internet that it is the home town for Fiat, Lavazza coffee and Nutella. What I found when I arrived was a very gracious city,





with an inner centre largely untouched by any impulse to development. Although it is ostensibly set out in a grid of solid looking stone buildings, built around the palace

this pattern was frequently interrupted by piazzas so at almost every corner I’d have a surprising and pleasant sight.

Occasionally there would be a scary one

– trams and cars would come out without warning

Here, I had no problems at all finding authentic local food, although the menus completely bamboozled me to the point I still don’t quite know how to order a coffee to meet my tastes. So evasive was the language that I even had trouble finding the gents in one particular restaurant – while I thought Donna was woman, what looked like Vomini also made me think of women. My first meal I got round the problem by the good old method of pointing at what someone was eating and hoping for the best. In another, I could point to the kitchen staff what I wanted them to make for me and another they had all the meals lined up in a cabinet (and could explain them). Best of all was the concept of Apertivo - after work, bars put on a buffet. You go in, you buy a (slightly expensive) drink but then you help yourself to what can be a substantial meal - a lot of food was like the Spanish tapas, but there were main course type meals as well, such as a delicious seafood risotto steaming away in a large flattish woklike pan.

But I finally came face to face with an Italian menu in quite a fancy restaurant, no English speaking staff, nothing to point to, nothing on display. All I had to guide me was the ability to eliminate olives, and to recognise a few basic words like wine, tomato, meat and black pepper.

Not that this helped very much – I ordered something that had linguine, white wine, black pepper, no olives and got this:

(yes, they gave me the wrong dish – I’d thought the pasta didn’t look like linguine but, hey, what do I know). For my main, all I could work out was grilled meat, and got this

I did envy the woman at the next table – she had an enormous salad built around what looked like a small castle made out of pastry. Every so often, it seemed to me that I was catching some sort of movement from above me; sure enough this “lady” was waving

I stayed in the Turin youth hostel, which was not particularly flash, but was in amongst an area dominated by posh houses and major churches,

It worked out pretty good as a place to work, as during the day it was deserted. On the Friday I did take some time to go see the National Film Museum, which is in what was the tallest brick structure in the world

To be honest, the museum was less than I’d hoped. Quite a few little spaces set up like film sets showing snips of movies to suit

with the road runner one being the funniest

The main event was the grand hall, set up with a couple of screens, showing snippets of various films connected together by themes (such as song and dance)

majorly comfortable chairs

and a very static display that claimed to tell the combined history of film and TV



Back in Grenoble, I finally managed to find an authentic French meal for dinner – galletes (a sort of pancake from Brittany) and crepes. I also saw the Watchmen movie.

Reading

I managed to read through the Watchmen graphic novel, which resolved into a relatively straight-forward narrative, if you discount a couple of levels that don’t add very much (which is exactly what they did with the film). The basic idea is that there is a community of costumed heroes, crimefighters but lacking special powers, and one super hero (Dr Manhattan) who, thanks to an accident in a nuclear plant, has power over matter (although not, it seems, sufficient to change his colour away from blue) and sees all moments in time at once. He is the American ultimate deterrent against nuclear war.

I’m no expert with comic book heroes, but it seems to me that they are traditionally engaged in the age old fight of good against evil but in the world of the Watchmen, the heroes face a problem similar to that faced by Bulgakov’s devil under Stalin – what if there is no unambivalent good to preserve? You might need to take extreme measures for the good of humanity - save society from itself. Dr Manhattan's world view is that there is no difference in substance between dead people and live ones - they all have the same number of particles.

I also read Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor – a book from South Africa which one the Booker a few years back. I am not sure who “they” were, it isn’t made clear, but they established areas of land for the black South Africans, which was supposed to have services established equivalent to areas occupied by the Whites. This book was set in post-apartheid South Africa, in a hospital set up in the capital of one of these lands, one that has not found favour with the locals so hardly anyone lives there, let alone uses the hospital. The main characters are two doctors - one from the old days who has trouble dealing with the new, and another young doctor, full of idealism and ready to change the world. But is it ready to change, when the ghosts of the old way are still around?

This was a quick, one day read, so I had to resort to the emergency supply on my laptop - Wilkie Collins' The Lady and the Law. The lady in question finds there is a deep secret to her husband, one which makes him flee her in shame when she finds it out - that a Scottish jury had found it "not proven" that he poisoned his first wife. Valeria loves Eustace, so of course he is innocent, and this must be established.

Writing

Up to now, I have been engaged in reading and preparing a literature review (some 50,000 words worth) but this week, I finally started writing up my paper. I was able to put my head down, and by the end word count had gone from 0 to just under 10,000 words.