Taff Up-Over part 1
Thursday:
The day before we left was murder. Not only did I have the guilt of shipping my poor little dog out to be cared for to look forward to, but LeeAnne developed what could only be described as a serious case of the “Manny’s”. For those of you who aren’t “Black Books” fans, (and if you’re not, why not?) Manny is a character who tends to get a bit hyper at times. And so it was with LeeAnne.
Now one of the things I’ve always loved about LeeAnne, and there are many, is her ability to enter a shopping mall, visit the three stores she intended visiting, and to leave exactly 15 minutes later, with exactly the products she intended getting. She’s not like other girls, whose idea of heaven is to spend all day at the mall, browsing endlessly through identical, well identical to me anyway, knickers racks and lipstick counters. Nope she’s in there, gets what she wants and out again in a flash. Or at least she used to be that way.
This day it was like getting swept up behind a tidal wave. “Right, we want to go to this shop, that shop, the other shops, and then back to this one, and then some more, and then some others, and keep up with me or I’ll go back to the beginning and start again…”
I trailed along, desperately trying to keep up with her flashing elbows as she mercilessly mowed down any old ladies who got in her way.
The only respite I got was in the bookshop. Now in bookshops I have the upper hand, I can immediately identify if I want to buy a book with just one glance at the cover. If it meets my criteria, crime and/or humour writing by male, white, British authors, then it’ll do for me. Ok, I’ll buy a Val McDermid novel occasionally as she almost meets all the criteria. But LeeAnne browses, and reads bits, and thinks, and compares, and questions, and all sorts of unnecessary things, before she’ll contemplate spending money on a book. How odd?
So I got a breather in the book shops, and three books for the flight
The it was back to the fray, I don’t know what we bought, but I’m sure it was all very useful and necessary.
We got home, and I slumped in a heap. Only the prospect of a Turkish Pide supper kept me going.
We drove my dog round to Glenn, Bethys dad’s, house as he was looking after him for us while we were away. I hated leaving the poor dumb mutt, but was certain that Glenn would look after him well. Glenn even promised to have him trained to do at least one new trick by the time we got back. Not that I was sceptical about this, but let’s just say that as Barnum is as dumb as a bag of rocks I’d have been more sure of Glenn having success if he’d told me he was going to teach the cat to sing Handel’s Messiah.
LeeAnne of course had packed all our suitcases three days previously; they were sat in the hall ready for loading. We went through our list of “essential items to pack” for about the eighth time, and LeeAnne remembered that she had forgotten to pack her fanny hammer. So she slipped it in while Bethy wasn’t looking, having first ensured that there were no batteries in it. We didn’t want to be the cause of an international terrorist alert.
So I drove off in one of our two ailing cars, and got a whole batch of Turkish grub in, and we watched mindless TV, and got ready for an early bed…
Friday:
At 4.15 the alarm went off. Yes, 4.15 am…
So we got up, half excited at the prospect of being off, half totally buggered, and had a final brew, and just waited…
The taxi arrived at 5.30 as planned, and we drove to Canberra airport. Dumping our three huge suitcases at the check-in we were told they would be checked through to Tokyo, a great weight off my mind, but a greater one off my arms. Our three suitcases had come in at just under the twenty kilo per-person limit, we’d weighed them. A bit of astute juggling and swapping around of items, and the transferring of some bits an bobs to hand luggage, had ensured we wouldn’t pay a surcharge.
So as a consequence of this we were carrying a fair whack of hand luggage. All essentials you understand, changes of clothing for Tokyo, books, sweets, magazines, snacks, washing kits, chest of drawers, submachine guns, etc, all entirely necessary stuff.
The flight to Sydney was short but wonderful. Bethy kindly let me have the window seat. On take off we, or at least I, got my first aerial view of Canberra, and it was a great delight, I saw my house from up there! Ok, I saw roughly where my house is located, if you’re going to be pedantic. We sedately passed over the route taken by the main highway between the two cities, god what a wonderful view of the landscape. Coming into Sydney, passing over the coast, then the cliffs, then the city, was an eye opener.
Loading up for the trip to Tokyo, we had all our stuff in the overhead locker and were settling down, when a short, chubby, black guy, obviously a puddle jumper, came and created a fuss to the airline hostess about locker space. He had three large, and we’re talking several kilo’s large here, bags of peanuts, and a suit that he wanted to store. The peanuts would fit in fine, but he wouldn’t let the hostess put his suit in the overhead locker as; “it’s an Armani, it’ll crease!” In the end she convinced him that the lockers were the only place he was going to be allowed to store it. So he moved all our stuff about so he could get his suit in without rumpling it. As soon as he sat down I went and got a book out of the locker and left his suit looking like the debris of an explosion in an accordion factory.
I couldn’t get Bethy to give up the window seat for the next leg of the journey, no matter what threats and bribes I offered, so I sulked for a long while. I sulked even more when I saw the films on offer, “Ray” (script by a dyslexic five year old), and “Sharks Tale” (funny, for about two minutes, then the joke wears thin).
So I read books, and got an hour or so of kip. I would have got more kip, but our hostess was REALLY scary looking. She had a face like a traditional kabuki mask, and I’m sure she would have done a ritual slaying of me if I’d not have been awake for my green tea.
The grub, as is all airline vege grub, was not the best, at least the Japanese stuff we got had the added interest of being unidentifiable.
And so we arrived in Japan, the worlds most polite country, boy did I feel out of place.
We dropped our stuff in the room, and sauntered off to look for something to eat. Vege grub being as rare as rocking horse shit in Japan, we weren’t under any illusion of the chances of finding anything to eat. However we did find a Chinese restaurant that advertised vegetable dishes, so we went in. We had some strange, very strange, bean curd and beansprout meals, all of which tasted ominously like they had been cooked in beef stock. Oh, and the incongruity of eating Chinese grub in Japan wasn’t that great, we’ve watched the “Iron Chef” and Japanese do make good Chinese chefs (?).
I finished the night off with a few shots of hot sake, a drink I could get very fond of given the chance.
We slept well, and I got up early and strolled around the hotel vicinity, an experience not unlike strolling onto the track at Monaco when the Formula One series is racing there.
Getting back to the hotel, miraculously alive still, I managed to attract the attention of a fuckwit. It’s one skill of mine that I wish I didn’t have.
This geezer came over to me and started telling me how everything about where I was, where I’d been, who I was, and where I was going, were the wrong choices, and how lucky I was that I’d bumped into him to sort me out.
Wanker.
He then told me that his flight out was at 11.00 am that morning, flying to Italy, and that he was just taking his wife and family on the tour bus that took residents of the hotel around the local sights. This didn’t sound to bad actually, so I rounded up LeeAnne and Bethy and told them about the trip. It took just a minute for LeeAnne to note that:
- It was now 9.45 am
- Our flight out was at midday.
- The bus took a hour and a half to do the trip
- We didn’t have enough time.
So we agreed that it would be a daft thing to do, and went off to book our cases in and get our boarding passes, all of which you could do at the hotel, which was rather neat, convenient and a good service. Just as we finished doing this, it would have been about 10.10 am by then, we noticed the fuckwit herding his family onto the tour bus.
Hang about, what time did he say he was flying out?
The flight from Tokyo to London was uneventful, and made even more uneventful by not having the scary hostess, and having the same bloody awful films. We did manage to make the flight a little bit more enjoyable by joining the mile high club over St Petersburg. Well at least I did, LeeAnne just lent a…hand isn’t the right word here…just use your imagination, ok?
Saturday:
So we arrived in London, jetlagged, fucked and ragged, and made our way to the car hire desk. We’d booked our car with “Enterprise rentals”, a seven seater Vauxhall 1.6 thingy. We got to the desk, and I gave my name and booking number..
“Ah yes Mr Thomas, here’s the keys, now that will be 845 quid please.”
“I’ve got an email here from you saying 404 quid for the month?”
“Yes but that doesn’t include our crash damager, special insurance, small print, rip the fuck off the customer, increase your debt surcharge, sir.”
“Well 404 quid is what you quoted, and 404 quid is what I’ll pay or you can stick your car up your arse mate.”
“But if you looked at the web-page sir, you’ll have noted the daily surcharge for insurance.”
LeeAnne rummages in her file of important papers…
“Here’s a print off of your web-page, can you show me where it says that please?”
She smiled at him, that smile that would make a samurai warrior worry…
“Ah, yes, it doesn’t seem to be there does it?” he admitted.
So we got the car for 404 quid and very nice it was too. And I’d like to take this opportunity to say “Never use Enterprise car hire as they are complete rip off’s, and a bunch of wankers too.”
We drove to Llanelli, or at least I did. LeeAnne just sat beside me hallucinating from the jetlag. She was convinced she could see gallons of milk being poured over the road. She thought of marketing jetlag as a new, cheap, high. But then she realised that tickets between Oz and the UK are not exactly “cheap”, and that it was a very unpleasant experience. So that knocked those dreams of riches on the head.
We stopped at a motorway service station, and I filled up on Red Bull high caffeine drink. I got in a right kafuffle at the till, an combination of jetlag, being knackered, no longer being used to UK coins, and being a fucktard.
Eventually we got safely to me Mam’s, but not before we had been flashed by a speed camera on the outskirts of the town. Welcome to fucking Llanelli to you too. She had grub waiting for us, baked tatty and salad, the full extent of her vegetarian cuisine. But most importantly she’d made me, or rather us, a bread pudding. Now my Mam will be the first to admit she’s not the world’s greatest cook, in fact she hates cooking. But her bread puddings are to die for, no one makes a bread pudding like my Mam. So I gorged on it, not only that night, but also for dinner and tea the next day. I did give Bethy a small sample…
Sunday:
I woke at about 6.00 am, and went for a jet lagged stroll around my old stomping ground. Not much had changed, and at that time on a Sunday morning fuck all was happening. It was a strange feeling I will admit. Seeing the old paddling pool, the kids play park, and the old grassed hill, constructed from the spent ballast of the old ships that once used the dock, was strangely moving. The foggy, chilly morning just emphasised this. It reminded me of an event from childhood….
Me and Tony Jenkins were sliding down the old grassy hill on bits of corrugated iron we had found, going higher and higher up the hill to gain more speed each time. Once I was in the lead but fell off my sheet after hitting a bump. Tony coming down after me, slid over my sheet and screamed. Skimming over my sheet had had an effect on his buttocks not unlike taking a large cheese slicer to them. He lost two round chunks of buttock muscle, and his bum ended up looking like two bloodshot eyes. Oh how we did laugh. Well Tony didn’t, obviously.
I even took a quick bimble down the beach, as I had all the time in the world on my hands, hope in my heart, and fuck all in my head.
Later in the morning I got something I had been looking forward to for ages, copies of the Sunday Times and the News of the World newspapers. The Sunday times is the worlds greatest paper, bar none. It’s political coverage is superb, its editorials persuasive, its commentary apt, and it’s supplements give you a whole days reading. It covers everything, and anything.
The News of the World has tits in it.
LeeAnne found the News of the World fascinating, she thought it was just like a newspaper, but for morons. “The pope dies, and they put some bimbo footballers wife who’s been on a spending spree on the front page, WTF??”
After lunch we all took a stroll down to the beach, to see the new look “Costa Del Llanelli.” Llanelli beach has had millions of pounds spent on it in the vague hope of making it look less of a shit hole.
It’s failed.
Funnily enough, when I was a kid, I spent every day of the week I could down on the beach fishing. It was lovely place then, one of long tidal reaches, dunes, mudflats, riptides and semi-industrial docklands. That obviously wasn’t good enough so they started sodding about with it, and its gone downhill ever since.
They’ve now built a water park, a world class golf course, a wildfowl nature reserve, a coarse fishing centre, and a couple of hundred luxury homes there.
True story… When they put out the first apartments in the new buildings for sale, some silly old cow queued up, and camped out overnight, for several days to get the “best” one. She bought it, and, once it was built, moved in. The first storm that came up the bay took the roof off it, and that coming off demolished most of one wall.
Lunchtime we drove up to a pub on the outskirts of town, where my nephew works. Its near to the best brewery in the world, Felinfoel Ales, so I was hoping for a decent pint. They didn’t sell Felifoel there, typical.
http://www.felinfoel-brewery.com/
I haven’t seen Jon, my nephew, for some time, and the fact that I was married, and had moved to Oz, were all news to him. My family!
They were only doing a set Sunday lunch there, beef or lamb, gravy, veg, tatties, roasts, etc, so LeeAnne and me thought we’d be relegated to packets of crisps. But once we explained that we were vego’s, and had just flown in from Oz, they gave us carte blanche to chose what we liked from the normal menu. And jolly good grub it was to. So I can heartily recommend the food, and beer, even if it’s not Felinfoel, at the “Friendly Rivals” pub, 12 Heol Beili Glas, Llanelli, Dyfed, Wales, if you’re in the area.
After getting back from lunch we took a walk down to the beach, and had a constitutional walk.
That evening I was still buzzing from the trip, so I persuaded LeeAnne and Bethy to come for a spin in the car. I drove off aimlessly, and we ended up at Ferryside. Ferryside is a lovely little village, on the “Three Rivers” estuary of Carmarthen bay. I used to go there with my family as a kid, as you can get there by train and my father didn’t drive.
It’s a lovely sleepy little place, with views across the bay to Llanstephan castle. We bumbled along on the sands, Bethy drew some pictures on it, I took some bloody awful photo’s of it, and after an hour I began to feel chilled out enough to go home. That, and my duty free Laphrohaig was calling me to sample it…
We had just got home when my mate Wynn came around with his two barmy dogs. And so we went off for yet another beach walk, the fifth for me that day! It was lovely to catch up with Wynn, get all the gossip, and, as a bonus, Wynn has two kids about Bethy’s age who were on holiday that week. Plans were made!!
That night I slept like brick.
Monday:
We got up late, still jetlagged and groggy, and then called around to see Wynn, his lovely wife Jac, and their two great kids, Bronwen and Dylan. As a bribe, we know which side our bread’s buttered, we took them all to the local grease factory for lunch, pizza and stuff. Hell we’re on holiday, let’s pig out!
After that we visited a local park, Parc Howard, so the kids could burn off some of the several million calories they had consumed, and I could walk some flab off and fart without killing anyone.
Funny to be visiting all the places of my childhood again. As an adult I’d never bothered going there on my return journeys, but now, with a kid of my own, it made sense to revisit. The nice thing was that I was able to wallow in the nostalgia of it, without feeling the dead inertia of the town trying to drag me back. However it is saddening to see how many of the play parks are having their play equipment removed due to insurance costs. Bloody insurance agencies and personal injury lawyers will be the death of childhood fun before long. “That’s how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a writ.”
We then went to feed Jac’s horse, who goes by the unusual, but apt, name of Floyd. There followed a lengthy session of telling Bethy all the very valid reasons why she cannot have a horse.
We stopped off at Wynn’s house on the way back for a cuppa, unfortunately for me his father called in at the same time. Ieuan has a wealth of stories about me in my younger days, all embarrassing, which he took great delight in telling to a rapt audience of LeeAnne and Bethy.
Thanks Ieuan.
That night Wynn and Jac kindly, and rather bravely, had Bethy for a sleepover, unfortunately me and LeeAnne were still to spaced out to take full advantage of the respite.
Tuesday:
We took me Mam shopping in Swansea, not the smartest of ideas..
Swansea is a fine place, fine that is apart that is from the people that live there. It’s the birthplace of Dylan Thomas, who described it as; “that lovely, ugly town”, so who am I to disagree?
The citizens of Swansea are all a uniform grey colour. They seem to consist only of old age pensioners at deaths door, and young mothers of an average age of 13, (think; “Little Britain’s “Vickie Pollard.””) There is a strict dress code for these “young ladies” which consists of short skirts, high heels, and crop tops that reveal rolls of blubbery belly. The cause of these bellies would have to be the dozen or more snotty kids trailing around behind them, munching on crisps, drinking blue coloured soft drinks, and occasionally getting thumped. The girls are sometimes accompanied by dangerous looking young men who all have tattoos done by the blind.
We strolled around, changed Ozzie dollars into pounds, bought an international phone card that didn’t work, and ended up at the markets.
There I was able to introduce LeeAnne and Bethy to the local delicacies, laverbread and cockles, both of which are harvested on the nearby Gower Peninsular, more on which later.
Laverbread is a type of seaweed, that when boiled and combined with oatmeal, then fried, has the consistency of boiled fried seaweed and the taste of slate. Cockles are a small shellfish, which yield an edible interior that looks and tastes like something you’d cough up during a particularly bad cold.
After exhausting the pleasures of Swansea, which took under an hour, I decided to drive us all around the Gower. The Gower is the most beautiful part of South Wales, it is beautiful despite being located amongst the industrial heartlands, or maybe its just all the more beautiful for being set there like a diamond on a slagheap.
We first drove to the village of Mumbles, along the famous “Mumbles Mile” promenade. (It has 19 pubs, the trick is to do a pint in each of them in one night. Without dying that is.) We looked for Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas’s house, which is somewhere there. I was determined to piss though their letterbox, for personal reasons, but we couldn’t find it. So we contented ourselves with taking a picture of Bethy, stood next to the sign for a street named “Bethy Lane”.
We drove out to Rhossilli bay, a place where I used to fish, then rock climb, then flew my paraglider as my sporting tastes developed. Rossilli is lovely, a sweeping headland overlooking a beautiful long sandy bay, nothing between its shore and America but sea. It’s where Dylan Thomas set the stories “Who do you wish was with us”, and “Extraordinary Little Cough”. It has the famous promontory; the “Worms head,” which is an island at high tide. The views from there are amazing. It has colonies of seabirds, and, if you’re unlucky, you can see England across the Bristol Channel.
But when we got there it was pissing down and foggy and we couldn’t see a thing, so we sodded off home.
http://www.geocities.com/colinswalesuk/Rhosillibay.html
On the way back, we stopped off at my friends Jamesy and Rachel’s new house. Jamesy’s my oldest and best mate, we grew up two houses apart. I do get a bit concerned though when he keeps moving house every time I’m away for more than a month. So we had a cuppa with them, had a look around the new gaff, swapped stories, compared beer guts and generally kicked back. Their new house is a very minimalist place, lots of chrome, leather, monochrome art works, pastel colours on the walls, and you know, stuff. Mam wanted to know how hard it was to keep clean, typical.
Anyway, we bade them adios and headed off into the night, with a promise to meet up for beers on Friday night. We stooped off at a chippy on the way back, and in lieu of anything more appropriate to eat, I had chips, mushy peas and a couple of bright purple onion baji’s.
Mam was knackered after this expedition, and refused to go anywhere else with us ever again..
Wednesday:
Bronwens friend was having a birthday party at the ice skating rink in Cardiff, and Jac had managed to wrangle us an invite. So we picked them all up in the morning, and shot off down the M4 to Cardiff.
Our first stop was at a place I’d wanted to visit for ages, something Bethy on her first visit had called “The Fairy Tale Castle”. Castell Coch, sits on a wooded bluff overlooking the M4, it really does look like something out of a fair tale. Well it would if it didn’t overlook the M4.
We strolled about in awe, the kids were totally blown away by it, and I took enough photos to guarantee getting one or two decent ones. (Roughly 300)
We ate a bit of lunch in the “medieval dining room” paid a fortune for the castle guide and photo book, and romped off to get muddy in the moat.
Go here to learn more about the castle.
http://www.castlexplorer.co.uk/wales/coch/coch_photos.php#main
At the skating rink we met up with the birthday party. Luckily we’d brought a couple of spare boxes of Ozzie chocolates over, so the birthday girl got one. So we skated around. I used to be quite hot on ice skates, so I whizzed about showing off in front of the other parents, all of whom couldn’t skate at all. While skating backwards, taking photos, I tried a spin stop, quite successfully I may add. So I tired another. What wasn’t so successful about this one was my bouncing off the wall which I’d forgotten was behind me, doing my “scarecrow in a hurricane” impression across the rink, and landing flat on my arse in the middle of everyone. I had the dubious distinction of being the only one to fall the whole day.
We dropped everyone at home, after thanking them for a great day out, and shot off to Tesco’s to get the shopping in. One thing I miss about the UK is the great range of vege convenience foods, as there next to fuck all choice over here, and what choice there is is shite.
So we loaded up with Linda Mc Farty pies, Quorn bangers, ready made colcannon, and other easy to cook stuff. Half way around the stores I saw me Mam shopping. Luckily I didn’t rush over and shout embarrassing things like “Ere, didn’t you used to shag me dad?” or some other humorous quip guaranteed to embarrass her, as it wasn’t Mam after all. You’d think I’d recognise me own mother, or not as the case may be, or maybe the jetlag was worse than I had expected…
Thursday:
That morning we went into town to see if we could buy a few bits and bobs, and for me to see if anyone there still remembered me. After all I did live the first twenty odd, some very odd, years of my life there. The only person I did bump into was my nephew. Yes the same guy who I hadn’t seen for all those years, who I had just a few days ago got reacquainted with, was the only person in the town that recognised me. Hmmm…
We strolled about town. Some of the shopping centre streets there are in a shocking state, including the street I lost my virginity in. (I don’t think there’s a causal link there, and they still haven’t put up a plaque on the house commemorating the event.). Isn’t it stupid, they spend millions doing up the beach to attract in visitors, and the town is rotting, so outside the beach area there’s no place for visitors to go or see. Soon they’ll be spending millions on doing up the town and letting the beach rot.
In the afternoon we picked up Jac and the kids, and headed off to Folly Farm. Having first got spectacularly lost, as only a person who thinks he knows an area can get lost, and heading at high speed down a bit of roller-coaster road which had everyone, everyone apart from me that is, getting the old freefall tummies, we got there. And it was great.
We spend ages at the working farm, LeeAnne identified several new breeds of chicken she wants to get, and then looked about the zoo, and saw strange exotic creatures like kangaroos, koalas, cockatoos, emus and wallabies. Hang about…
Some kid had lost their balloon, it has blown into in the groundhog pit. It was one of those big punching balloons, the sort that actually survive more than three minutes after being inflated. It was too deep in the pit for even me to reach, but Bethy rose to the occasion. She gathered up a handful of small rounded pebbles, and by rhythmically throwing them down onto the balloon got it to bounce higher and higher until she could catch it. Smart kid.
We got to go on the go-carts, and so I got in with Bronwen. She drove, so Jac and LeeAnne weren’t able to blame me for the massive crash we had, one that left my shins battered and bruised for weeks after. The crash was great fun, even though I crapped myself. (Not literally, that would have killed poor Bronwyn.)
And then we went on the Ferris Wheel. Not a particularly big Ferris Wheel, but one that swayed nicely in the breeze, and “had do not swing” in BIG writing on the back of each chair. So I didn’t. Not much anyway.
There were fairground rides from days gone by, preserved and working there, we had a go on all of them. The chair-o-plane was the best by far, so simple a concept, just seats suspended on chains on a merry-go-round structure, yet so lovely.
But all good things must end, and we eventually wound our weary way home.
Friday:
In the morning my good mate Pete dropped around to see us. We took, yet another, stroll down the beach. I was seriously thinking about getting a fishing rod seeing as I was spending so much time there. We caught up with Pete’s tales. Pete and I used to do martial arts together, that’s martial not marital, and he’s now got his umpteenth Dan grade. If I had carried on training I’d have got another stripe on my yellow belt by now I bet! And so we had a coffee in the new cafe, and I caught up on who’s screwing who in the Aikido club nowadays…
That evening, after leaving Bethy with me Mam, we took a taxi into town, the driver managed the remarkable feat of getting us lost. Eventually we got to the pub where we had agreed to meet the crew. We set about carousing the evening away, totally forgetting that the plan for the evening was to first eat, then booze. LeeAnne, who’s normally totally abstinent, joined in the fun and hit the G & T’s. A great evening of catching up, joke telling, bullshitting, and by the end of the evening, drunken nostalgia, was had by all. Pete told me, and I’m forgiving him here as he was as pissed as a fart at the time, that I had become; “boringly staid since getting married,” Hrmmph!
A few of us decided to go for a curry as we were pissed, and that’s what you do when you’re pissed, in Llanelli, and the pubs have shut. We found one that was empty, and therefore very glad to see us even in our inebriated state. I cannot remember if it was good food or not, nor how much it cost, but I do remember going for a piss in the ladies loos. At least I think it was the loo I pissed in, it may have been the washbasin.
So after bidding farewell to everyone, and pouring Pete into a taxi, we made our merry way home. A great end to our first week in the UK…
Next……SENNEN!!