England and Wales
... and more London Yuppie Scumme
ot much to say, really. I just spent the day wasting time.
Come to think of it, that's often the whole point of one of my vacations.
The day would have started off nicely. There I was, in my private berth on the sleeper train, sleeping away. I was nicely awakened by the porter who brought me a glass of orange juice and a morning paper. This would have been great, other than one little problem.
I awoke in a train parked in London Euston station. The train was nice, but the locale really sucked.
I dragged my sorry butt off the train, and tried to drag it, and my luggage, around Euston station, looking for a train to Paddington. That itself was merely irritating. What was infuriating was being repeatedly stampeded by tidal waves of plastic yuppies, heading from one subway train to another, walking in their plastic clothing, with their plastic hairdos, travelling from their plastic houses to their plastic jobs. Fortunately, we were underground, so cellular phones didn't work, but that didn't stop some plastic people from trying, anyway.
Somehow, I got to Paddington station, although it meant changing subways somewhere farther into London (and getting stampeded by more plastic yuppies). From Paddington, I caught the first train to Somewhere Else. In this case, that meant southern Wales.
I really wanted to go to Wales on this vacation, but
I'd really had my heart set on northern Wales. Still, I was going to places I'd
never been to before, so it seemed like a nice enough idea to try the part of
Wales that everyone thinks of when they think of "Wales."
This meant traversing the southern English countryside first, which is something I generally wanted to avoid. I'm not sure why this was, but it seemed that the more time I spent in Scotland, the less time I wanted to spend in England. And, as we recall, my only reason for even coming to England even a day before I was supposed to go home was to meet a friend for a curry in Reading.
In reality, the southern English countryside wasn't that bad
looking, although my own bias says that the southern Welsh countryside looked
just a smidge better. This was probably a good thing, because all I really had
time to do was ride out to the western coast, turn around, and head back to
Reading in time to meet Graham.
It was nice sightseeing. I got to see Cardiff, change trains at Swansea, then on to the west coast.
Perhaps the best part was the near total absence of people who wanted to ask me why I'd spend good money to fly over to the UK in the middle of winter. I didn't get a chance to find out whether this was due to the Welsh having less of a sense of loathing for their country than Scots, or because they were just less social. Either way, I didn't really care.
The farther west I rode, the more aware I was of what
other people were doing. Evidently, the only reason why anyone wants to travel
west of Swansea is to get to Ireland. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out
why, but I suppose none of them could figure out why I wanted to travel this far
west without going to Ireland.
I wanted to do it because the scenery was so nice. And because I wanted to kill time.
This is what brought me all the way out to a quaintly named town, "Fishguard," which seems to consist solely of a ferry terminal for the boat to Ireland.
I bet they didn't have any haggis on this ferry.
One of the things I remember from the last time I went to Wales
were the incredibly shallow beaches where the tide would go out for miles,
leaving huge expanses of marsh. I spent easily an hour staring at what I thought
was a prime example of this until I finally realized that what I was really
looking at was a river, and one that was very shallow at that.
It really was nice, even if I got it all wrong.
This really was a pleasant day, probably because I just never got around to trying to do anything very meaningful.
Well, I did discover that there's at least one place on the island where Major hasn't got the trains to run on time yet, and that's in Wales. The train coming back seemed to want to stop every fifteen feet, or so, just to keep from catching up with the previous train.
It was tedious, but it was a way to keep from getting back to Reading before Graham got off work.
But, that's pretty much it. I got to Reading, met Graham for the
long-promised curry, and we had a rather nice dinner, talking about old times,
and telling DEC war stories.
He also answered one important question I'd been asking all along during this vacation: If the island was so damned small, and if it took such little time to get from one end of it to the other, the why is it that so many people -- so many monied people -- had never managed to go to half the places I'd been to in a week, even when they were just an hour's drive away.
Graham just shrugged, took a gulp from his beer, and said "Who the hell would want to?"
I guess that pretty well sums it up.
Graham dropped me of at a hotel, which was insufferably yuppie, and bade me farewell. I settled in for my last night of British TV, and thought longingly of getting back home to my kitten.
Hey, sorry nothing funny happened, but I actually had a good time. And, I'd also be sorry for not having any pictures of Reading, but then again, why would I want pictures of Reading?
Follow me home, past the firing squad and back to the drudgery of real life.
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