Holidays in the Rain

 I'm in the beautiful seaside town of Barmouth in North Wales. My friend Gwen is showing me the locations for the 1976 trash-horror novel, Night of the Crabs, which is set entirely in and around Barmouth. She's driving us everywhere and, as a fantastically useful reward for this kindness, I decide to buy her a cup with a crab on it. There is a dearth of legacy for the novel in the town, particularly galling as next year is it's 50th anniversary, but I find a nice cup in a gift shop, and approach the counter with it. I am wearing my one-off, bespoke, Tintin in Basingstoke tee-shirt. Remember that. It becomes important. 

"Is that sarcastic?" says the man behind the till as I present him with the cup. I'm confused. I'm not sure how buying a cup from his shop that sells cups could be construed as sarcastic. 

"Sorry, mate..?" I say. 

"Your tee-shirt," he says, "I wasn't aware Tintin ever made it to Basingstoke. Is it meant to be sarcastic?"

His tone is brusque and oddly careful, as though measuring every word. I'm watching my step, even though I think he's used the word sarcastic incorrectly, twice. I want to say: "No. it's not sarcastic, just a cavalier land-grab on someone else's I.P." but I forget the words "intellectual property", so I cobble together the following less successful sentence: "No, it represents an infringement of Herge's rights," which I realise isn't very good, so I add: "I'm from Basingstoke", as if that solves everything. 

He's wrapping the cup in tissue and applying Sellotape to it and, without looking up, says "You're a long way from home."

I look around the shop. Bumper stickers. Postcards. Buckets and spades. Sticks of rock and baggies of fudge. All the other people here, backpacks bumping into the knickknacks, are red-faced, grinning pensioners in branded wet weather gear. They are definitely tourists and this is definitely a tourist shop. Is he suspicious about all of them being so far off their patch? Was he the local special constable meeting a likely hoodlum and giving him a rap across the knuckles? Was I wearing an obscene publication? I decided to change tack. 

"I love being here," I say, trying to win him over, "I love being by the sea."

"Basingstoke's not so far from the sea," he says, eyebrow raised, pushing the cup towards me. Your move, smart guy. 

"I suppose Portsmouth and Southampton aren't too far..."

He pushes the card reader at me. 

"But it's pretty landlocked." I say and pay.

"It's not exactly Birmingham."

He gives me my receipt. 

"Yes, but Birmingham has more canals than Venice."

"I WOULDN'T GIVE YOU TUPPENCE FOR THEIR CANALS!" he says and gives a short bark of mirthless laughter, the sound a dog makes catching a tossed biscuit. It's all I need. I join in the laughter, and bustle out of the shop with my tissue wrapped mug, not knowing what the hell just happened. 

I later told this story, and my mate Mike, laughing incredulously, said "This could only happen to you." And he's right. I just don't know why. 

In our hotel, The Fanny Talbot, the TV turns itself off at 11.34 every night. It's a bit odd. This is their pub sign. Nothing terrifying going on here then. 

He's already got an arm off and now he's trying to eat his own head with condiments! You got trouble at home, son? 

Gwen has been trying to get me to come to Barmouth for decades but it never happened, usually because I had no money. Many years ago, I wrote the words for a musical called Night of the Crabs. The music was by Gwen's partner, Doug. Night of the Crabs, as I mentioned, is perhaps the only book set in Barmouth, and she was anxious to show me the sights, as whatever else you can say about the book's merits, it IS geographically accurate. So we went to Davy Jones' Locker, where main characters, Cliff and Pat, have their "respective melons". We visited the pub where the alcoholic Colonel Goode gets pissed on whisky and is proven useless. We visit the harbour, where The Battle of Barmouth Harbour is enacted, and the bridge where poor, troubled Dai Jones is executed by King Crab, just days before his retirement. And we travelled to the remarkably barren and remote Shell Island, where Cliff's nephew Ian Wright (not that one) and his fiancé, attempt to "strip off" and answer their "urgings" (there's a lot of this in the book) but are, unfortunately, nipped to bits by crabs before they can reach their perfect union. 

I know I'm Gen X. I know I grew up sneering at the gaucheness of the past, making fun of sexism and racism instead of doing anything about it. Night of the Crabs was written for the long, hot summer of 1976 ("why not bathe with a friend?"), so it's perfect fodder for snarky, post modern mockery. It's a short book, and not an especially well-written one. Perhaps most of the dialogue is unintentionally funny, and the characterisation a little slender. But I still love Night of the Crabs, and it is a pure love. This is not Garth Marenghi. The book may have been written as a quick knock-off of James Herbert's The Rats, but it has a purity, an innocence of it's own. It's an astonishing glimpse of a lost culture, the strange certainties, the peculiar tics and neuroses. There's the weird, unresearched carelessness of the military intervention against the crabs: first they blow up half the coastline infrastructure with limpet mines. When that doesn't work they consider deploying nuclear weapons against the North Welsh coast. Ultimately, they choose to spray the entire countryside with paraquat from a helicopter, and when the crabs crawl off, poisoned, they just assume they're dead. The Doomwatch team would be up in arms, but what are they going to do against an army of, somehow, bullet-proof, fire-proof crabs the size of sheep? No attempt is made to explain why these unusual crabs exist, by the way. They're just a terrifying sport of nature. It could happen again. Any time. In six sequels, at least. 

There's no legacy for Night of the Crabs in Barmouth. We asked around the the second hand book shops but no one has heard of it despite, as Gwen pointed out, a lot of the people working in them definitely being of an age to have read it first time around. Next year's the 50th anniversary of its publication. Surely something must be done. 

Maybe it's time to resurrect that musical.     

Scary shit abounds

The Fanny Talbot is a great hotel. It wasn't that expensive. The room is large. The bathroom huge and there's a fully-stocked kitchen. The bed is, Susan claims, more comfortable than our own. We eat in the restaurant, and it's a wonderful experience from first to last. Absolutely delicious, great, slightly nervous, service, good wine, free petit fours and digestifs. And pretty reasonably priced. Would heartily recommend. 

We watched a surprising amount of Celebrity Undercover Boss USA. American sports heroes I've never heard of, wearing fake moustaches, plastic jowls and baseball caps, being weepily inspired by ordinary folk's terrible lives and doling out jobs in their entourage and ten thousand dollars and, in one case, an allotment. 

Yes, we can holiday. Susan had her first ever Pot Noodle on this trip. Not a fan. Not a fan.  

When we went to check-out, the woman ahead of us was also checking-out. Part of the oven in her room didn't work. "We couldn't heat our croissants," she repeated, four or five times. "I asked you about this on Monday and nothing was done. Also, we only had one dishwasher tablet, so..." Navven, who seems to run the place, and is on call 24 hours a day, so she could have reminded him at literally any time during the week, offered her £100 off her bill, at which point she suddenly had had a really great time in her beautiful room, and went off wreathed in smiles. 

"I'm sorry," I said to him, "There was nothing wrong with our room, and we had dinner here too and that was also really great, so you have no reason to give us a hundred pounds off our bill." There was a pause, and then a big laugh from Navven, and he charged me the full amount. As we walked away, Susan confided to me that my brilliant joke had given her "the hot elbow". 

We ran out of loo roll in the week. So we asked one of the cleaners and she gave us more loo roll than we could use in a week. If only we'd known. A rookie error. 

We're dining in The Saffron, an Indian restaurant in Barmouth, where the staff consistently call us Mr and Mrs Higgins, and we don't correct them. As we're dining, there's a youngish family sitting at the table in the window, a mum, dad and their three sons. The older boy is mid-teens and says absolutely nothing throughout the meal. The youngest boy is called Charlie and is a textbook youngest child: long, black curls, glasses, precocity blarting out of him, as he says things like: "Do I like Sag Aloo, Mummy?" and "I'd like to pay for dinner, Mummy. Really, I don't mind."

The middle child is wrapped around his mother's waist, looking forlorn. About halfway through the meal, I find out why. "I've grown some hair," he announces, "on my body." The mum and dad both laugh, and the eldest boy flushes a deep crimson, and disappears in a puff of pure cringe. Charlie knows something's up and can't quite grasp it, so he's asking a lot of questions about body hair. "Shush," says the mum, "there are people here trying to enjoy a romantic dinner." She flashes me a "bloody kids" look and I reply with an "oh, how charming" smile. Charlie and his pube-sporting brother wander off somewhere. Decorum is restored to the restaurant. 

Charlie and his brother return. "He showed me," trills Charlie, "he showed me his hairs. He has hairs."

Charlie is shushed again. "Why did you show him?" the mum hisses at the fresh adolescent in a stage whisper. "He asked." "You didn't show him your downstairs, did you?" "No, just the armpits."

The mother and I don't share a look this time. 

By the way, floor show aside, The Saffron is great. Susan and I have two enormous meals we can't finish and the food is great. We have three beers between us. The bill comes to 53 quid! 

Why is Belfast SO expensive? 

We go to The Mermaid Fish Bar (I'm slightly put off the "Arousal Fish Bar" for some reason) and head back to Gwen's delightful holiday cottage to eat them. They are the best fish and chips Susan and I have had for years. Absolutely delicious. 

Why are Belfast fish and chips SO bad? And expensive. 

We go to Portmeirion. Are there loads of mods in blazers and Alexis Kanner sidies? No. I'm the closest thing to a mod here, as I'm wearing a Matelot sweater. I'm also wearing skinny jeans and hiking boots, so really quite far from being a mod. We're here at half-term so the place is teeming with children and dogs and, at first, I cannot imagine why anyone would want to bring a child to gawp at the beautifully maintained shrubberies and Italianate architecture. I assumed it would be full of Prisoner fans. But after spending a few moments here, I can see it's exactly the sort of place I would have dreamed of coming to as a child: all the grottoes, the alcoves, the peculiar, magical sculptures, the forests, the ponds and ultimately, a massive, empty beach. My imagination would have fireworked. 

The beach goes on for miles, utterly unspoiled by human beings, and utterly unspoiled by the jellyfish that lie on the sand, crisping gently in the sun, like someone sneezed up a frisbee, or dropped a gelatinous plate full of worms, like Judy Chicago's least appreciated dinner guest. 

We walk about the beach for a while. The sky is enormous, puffy with cotton clouds, ambling past like the sheep we've seen clinging to every hillside in Wales, which is admirably on message. I don't love sheep - I much prefer pigs - but I do like their poetic resemblance to clouds, so I get annoyed when farmers graffiti them - the sheep - and they end up looking like frosted birthday cakes left out of the fridge too long, the heartfelt messages now blurry and indistinct. The beach is seemingly endless, the sky a carnival of tumbling ghosts. The seaside, with a proper beach, a distant, twinkling tide and a high, blue sky, is a glimpse of the infinite. It's primordial. All there is is sea, sky, trees, rocks. What more do you need for a planet? Certainly not the ghastly intrusion of humanity, shitting in the water and dropping energy drink cans, like perma-pooing rats. Actually, I'm always surprised by how long the world managed without trees. Trees and grass are remarkably recent. I think sharks have been around far longer than both. But then sharks are older than the rings around Saturn, so...I feel for sharks. When you're the best, why get better? I should try that in Latin as the family motto. Or, more, appropriately "Bite Me!"

(Cum Tu Optimus Causa Meliorem" and "Mordere Me", respectively. I like both so it depends on whether they're charging me by the word).

I'm in an airport bar describing itself as a Whisky Bar and Gin Palace, which is a stretch as I'm drinking a Heineken. There's a video screen showing what I recognise as Peaky Blinders. We are in Birmingham, after all. There was a Peaky Blinders themed bar in Belfast for absolutely no reason at all. I can't tell whether this is an actual episode or just clips, as I've never seen the show, but this seems to be just groups of men in hats, occasionally flanked by women in hats, walking with purpose in slow motion down cobbled streets. It's meant to be cool and stylish, but that's rather undercut by the fact it looks like couture models sashaying down the catwalk, or a high-end wedding video, featuring the groomsmen skylarking under a shower of sparks. They're never out from under a shower of sparks. Sparks everywhere. Must be why they need the hats. 

Reservoir Dogs has a lot to answer for.  

Birmingham Airport is surprisingly civilised, but still, after being funnelled through the various bars, shops, parades of fey boys in waistcoats attempting to spritz you with something pungent and expensive, you can't avoid spending half an hour trapped in an airless tunnel busting for a piss. Why? If the plane isn't ready, why are we here? Why have we been called? We're already trapped. We could be enjoying murderously expensive hospitality elsewhere. This isn't terrorist business. This is just uncomfortable nonsense contrived to make flying that bit more like trying to negotiate your way through something's digestive tract. And that's how you're treated. 

In the golden age of air travel, you could wander into an airport, buy a ticket in a massive overcoat and hat, and waltz onto a plane like it was the 8:15 from Fleet, smoking and drinking your way through the skies in a seat like an armchair, staring at the clouds through your porthole window with a mouthful of whiskey and skoal bandits. Bliss. And I'm standing in a corridor that smells like the evil ghost of a business man's lunch for half an hour for no reason. Is it an idiot tax? Am I being punished because people can't get it together enough to get to the flight when the plane is ready (it was already delayed)? Or is it that flying a plane is surprisingly tricky every single time? There's always something to forget. 

 "Let's stuff them into that corridor so we can get them to board the pla...wait! we haven't put any fuel in the plane! We're numbskulls! Wait! the captain's still in the bar! Wait! The captain's still in the cabin crew. We just haven't thought this through. Lets just herd them into the corridor and leave them there to make awkward conversation, because all the Duty Free perfume no one ever buys, is still on the tarmac waiting to be loaded by a man who has never seen either a plane or a diffuser before."

I hate that corridor. Flying is a faff.     

But we had a great time. It was amazing to finally see Barmouth after all these years, and great to catch up with Gwen, Eirlys, Mike, Row and Mabli, and even Buddy Gask, the co-singer of Showaddywaddy, taken too soon, but returned in the form of a charming dog. Three steps back from heaven, eh boy?

I may go back. So much more Night of the Crabs stuff to investigate. I may finish that musical. 

Found a statue of Bez doing that "Oops Upside Your Head" dance. So that was nice. Barmouth delivers every time.