Mini-blog

I'm taking a week away this week. I wanted to do that straight after the election but it was too complicated then so I have followed my pattern last year: if you were watching, in January I planned to drive to John O'Groats but gave up at Inverness due to floods, snow and cowardice 😊. In the summer I visited a lot of new countries for me Sweden, Finland, the 3 Baltic republics and Poland. all alone in my car. I enjoy my own company (good job one person does) and I like driving on empty(ish) roads.

Yesterday I drove from Brentford to Brecon. It would have been Hay-on-Wye which is just up the road. On the principle mainly going to places I haven't been to before. So yesterday I checked out Thame. Pleasant enough market town that looked to fit its name, tame.

Hay is famous for its festival. Having found it I can't see how it manages a festival because it is pretty small (and pretty pretty). A lot of bookshops. An unusual Lambretta scooter

A funny looking bloke in the street

Well, perhaps not a bloke - hard to tell these days.

And a rather grand hotel though it only had 7 rooms and my TV didn't work 😮

Brecon nothing to write home about either though it has a lot of Beacons hanging around nearby (Bannau Brycheiniog if you're a pedant) but a bit steep for me to hike them. Well the bridge in Ealing Road is well steep enough for me.

Today I decided to head for Fishguard, which I went to years ago when catching a ferry to Rosslare in Ireland and I rather took to it. But went the complicated route, starting with Aberfan.

I was 14 when this happened and I remember how really shocking it was. The slag heap from the local colliery collapsed and took out the primary school and a lot of local houses. The cemetery is above where the school stood but I didn't see it until I was the other side of the valley and the picture is very inadequate.

Such a horrible tragedy to come to a small village. The valleys, which I hadn't really visited before, are steep and narrow. I found it very moving, and wonder what impact it had, even 60 years on, when the children would be about 70 now - all gone.

I was just following my nose and went on to Carmarthen. Has a proper castle there but not a lot more to excite me! I narrowly avoided Pembroke Dock, though I kept expecting it to refer to an Italian Medic called Doc Penfro but it was the language barrier confusing me.

I think the Welsh Maritime Heritage Society maybe should have another go at restoring this bench outside the castle.

Heading North to my hotel near Fishguard, a rather lovely piece of moorland - a large part of why I came here

When I was young I lived in the Wirral peninsula. From our house we could see across the River Dee estuary to the Cambrian mountains, and every now and then my father would sethis reel to reel tape recorder going and get us going with some of his 'pop' from the 1930s like the Mountains of Mourne https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdgJXat8KLA or I am a Gay Caballero https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpZm8w7X0ak. Bacon and eggs would be packed into the picnic box together with a frying pan and a calor gas stove and the 6 of us - 2 parents, 3 children and one aunt - would pile into a Ford Zodiac and zoom off to the slopes below Moel Famau. If he was in the mood, dad added his 2 2.2 rifles, his over and under shotgun and some old cans, so we could become a sharp shooters, and ambition we never progressed with.

But we loved those mornings, which were always sunny back then and the aroma of bacon frying in the hillsides was sublime (and eating it!)

After all that day, I ended up pretty well back at Fishguard near a place called Newport which was primarily for static caravans.

The next day I went back south, properly through Fishguard to Milford Haven ( another place ticked off my list rather pleasing location though some ugly industry not really spoiling it, St Davids (small but pretty like me) Cardigan, New Quay and finally Aberystwyth for the night.

Two things I noticed in Wales, especially in St Davids an enormous plague of dogs. Well, not plague, because they were all nice dogs, but a lot of the beggars. And flowers.

Not just in beds on the ground but on street corners in planters and up lamp posts. We seem to have given up on that in England. You don't know what you've got till it's gone.

Aberystwyth is a mix between rather sad empty shop areas and hints of a grand past. The seafront is impressive

I think that must be part of the University. Splendid and clearly being fixed. Good to see.

In the morning I was a bit unsure what was next. I had covered all my prime ambitions but I wanted some bleak, so headed for Llanidloes. Never heard of it but it seems to be bang in the middle. A chunk of what I craved on the way:

I tried to have a friendly chat with these but they claimed they did not understand English.

In Llanidloes it was a rather pleasant small town with a bit of tourism I suppose, but empty shops. Trewythen Arms is rather a fine building and 6 years older than the USA

But i'm afraid it has lost its Arms. Yes, they are hidden behind the tree but it clearly does not have its traditional use.

What's next. Well the day was still young and I realised where my late Aunty Joan lived only 20 miles away with her hubby and their horses. Uncle Norman was a Captain in the army, serving in Burma during the war. He was made an actng Major for a while but was known as The Colonel when he got to the Wirral. Nice man, though, and always dd the washing up.

Couldn't find their little farm (or didn't recognise it - nearly 50 years ago last time I was there - so I went on to Lake Vyrnwy, where I visited in what must have been the 1960s. There was a drought and this artificial lake was largely empty and I remember the eerieness of the former village submerged in the 1880s, with parts of the church and a little bridge over what was once a river still visible. Those images stay with me.

Couldn't get a picture of the lake because magnificent old trees blocked the view so you will have to settle for my next lake, Bala.

On the way between the two, the kind of road that reminds me why I love driving sometimes, though some people who have never seen me driving say I become Mr Toad

I decided I was Welshed up and would return to old haunts in England. Via Queensferry in Wales a stone's throw from the border where my mother was brought up, and where my Aunt Betty lived until she got an indoor toilet (about 1970) and died a few years later.

I went to my own home town, Heswall and found the old council offices had become a nice hotel, where I stayed.

This was obviously a council patch because right next to it is a little park, the library and the Community Hall.

A few potential lessons for my day job - all located together, a police desk within the library and a lot of sponsored trees within the park with little tributes to local people who had contributed to the locality.

Well I'll stop there. My travels will continue within England but back in Brilliant by the weekend.

I will come back next week to a couple of events in Brentford I've missed out, including a panic that hit whilst I've been away.

Whatever, hope this was of interest, though of little relevance to anything apart from me!