<\/p>\n
Taff Up-Over part 1<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n Thursday:<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s”. For those of you who aren\u2019t “Black Books” fans, <\/span>(and if you\u2019re not, why not?)<\/span> Manny is a character who tends to get a bit hyper at times. And so it was with LeeAnne.<\/span><\/p>\n Now one of the things I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s in there, gets what she wants and out again in a flash. Or at least she used to be that way.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019ll go back to the beginning and start again…”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019ll do for me. Ok, I\u2019ll 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\u2019ll contemplate spending money on a book. How odd?<\/span><\/p>\n So I got a breather in the book shops, and three books for the flight<\/span><\/p>\n The it was back to the fray, I don\u2019t know what we bought, but I\u2019m sure it was all very useful and necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n We got home, and I slumped in a heap. Only the prospect of a Turkish Pide supper kept me going.<\/span><\/p>\n We drove my dog round to Glenn, Bethys dad\u2019s, 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\u2019s just say that as Barnum is as dumb as a bag of rocks I\u2019d have been more sure of Glenn having success if he\u2019d told me he was going to teach the cat to sing Handel\u2019s Messiah.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t looking, having first ensured that there were no batteries in it. We didn\u2019t want to be the cause of an international terrorist alert.<\/span><\/p>\n 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…<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Friday:<\/span><\/p>\n At 4.15 the alarm went off. Yes, 4.15 am…<\/span><\/p>\n So we got up, half excited at the prospect of being off, half totally buggered, and had a final brew, and just waited…<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019d 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\u2019t pay a surcharge.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019re talking several kilo\u2019s large here, bags of peanuts, and a suit that he wanted to store. The peanuts would fit in fine, but he wouldn\u2019t let the hostess put his suit in the overhead locker as; “it\u2019s an Armani, it\u2019ll crease!”<\/i> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t 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” <\/span>(script by a dyslexic five year old)<\/span>, and “Sharks Tale” <\/span>(funny, for about two minutes, then the joke wears thin).<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019m sure she would have done a ritual slaying of me if I\u2019d not have been awake for my green tea.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n And so we arrived in Japan, the worlds most polite country, boy did I feel out of place.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019t that great, we\u2019ve watched the “Iron Chef” and Japanese do make good Chinese chefs (?).<\/span><\/p>\n I finished the night off with a few shots of hot sake, a drink I could get very fond of given the chance.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Getting back to the hotel, miraculously alive still, I managed to attract the attention of a fuckwit. It\u2019s one skill of mine that I wish I didn\u2019t have.<\/span><\/p>\n This geezer came over to me and started telling me how everything about where I was, where I\u2019d been, who I was, and where I was going, were the wrong choices, and how lucky I was that I\u2019d bumped into him to sort me out.<\/span><\/p>\n Wanker.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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:<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Hang about, what time did he say he was flying out?<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t the right word here…<\/i>just use your imagination, ok?<\/span><\/p>\n Saturday:<\/span><\/p>\n So we arrived in London, jetlagged, fucked and ragged, and made our way to the car hire desk. We\u2019d 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..<\/span><\/p>\n “Ah yes Mr Thomas, here\u2019s the keys, now that will be 845 quid please.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n “I\u2019ve got an email here from you saying 404 quid for the month?”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n “Yes but that doesn\u2019t include our crash damager, special insurance, small print, rip the fuck off the customer, increase your debt surcharge, sir.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n “Well 404 quid is what you quoted, and 404 quid is what I\u2019ll pay or you can stick your car up your arse mate.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n “But if you looked at the web-page sir, you\u2019ll have noted the daily surcharge for insurance.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n LeeAnne rummages in her file of important papers…<\/span><\/p>\n “Here\u2019s a print off of your web-page, can you show me where it says that please?” “Ah, yes, it doesn\u2019t seem to be there does it?” <\/i>he admitted.<\/span><\/p>\n So we got the car for 404 quid and very nice it was too. And I\u2019d like to take this opportunity to say “Never use Enterprise car hire as they are complete rip off\u2019s, and a bunch of wankers too.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Eventually we got safely to me Mam\u2019s, 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\u2019d made me, or rather us, a bread pudding. Now my Mam will be the first to admit she\u2019s not the world\u2019s 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…<\/span><\/p>\n Sunday:<\/span><\/p>\n 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….<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t, obviously.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s political coverage is superb, its editorials persuasive, its commentary apt, and it\u2019s supplements give you a whole days reading. It covers everything, and anything.<\/span><\/p>\n The News of the World has tits in it.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s been on a spending spree on the front page, WTF??”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s failed.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t good enough so they started sodding about with it, and its gone downhill ever since.<\/span><\/p>\n They\u2019ve 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t sell Felifoel there, typical.<\/span><\/p>\n http:\/\/www.felinfoel-brewery.com\/<\/span><\/p>\n I haven\u2019t 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!<\/span><\/p>\n They were only doing a set Sunday lunch there, beef or lamb, gravy, veg, tatties, roasts, etc, so LeeAnne and me thought we\u2019d be relegated to packets of crisps. But once we explained that we were vego\u2019s, 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\u2019s not Felinfoel, at the “Friendly Rivals” pub, 12 Heol Beili Glas, Llanelli, Dyfed, Wales, if you\u2019re in the area.<\/span><\/p>\n After getting back from lunch we took a walk down to the beach, and had a constitutional walk.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t drive.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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…<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s age who were on holiday that week. Plans were made!!<\/span><\/p>\n That night I slept like brick.<\/span><\/p>\n Monday:<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s buttered, we took them all to the local grease factory for lunch, pizza and stuff. Hell we\u2019re on holiday, let\u2019s pig out!<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Funny to be visiting all the places of my childhood again. As an adult I\u2019d 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\u2019s how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a writ.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n We then went to feed Jac\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n We stopped off at Wynn\u2019s house on the way back for a cuppa, unfortunately for me his father called in at the same time.<\/span> <\/b>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.<\/span><\/p>\n Thanks Ieuan.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Tuesday:<\/span><\/p>\n We took me Mam shopping in Swansea, not the smartest of ideas..<\/span><\/p>\n Swansea is a fine place, fine that is apart that is from the people that live there. It\u2019s the birthplace of Dylan Thomas, who described it as; “that lovely, ugly town”<\/i>, so who am I to disagree?<\/span><\/p>\n 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, <\/span>(think; “Little Britain\u2019s “Vickie Pollard.””)<\/span> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n We strolled around, changed Ozzie dollars into pounds, bought an international phone card that didn\u2019t work, and ended up at the markets.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019d cough up during a particularly bad cold.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n We first drove to the village of Mumbles, along the famous “Mumbles Mile” promenade. <\/span>(It has 19 pubs, the trick is to do a pint in each of them in one night. Without dying that is.)<\/span> We looked for Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas\u2019s house, which is somewhere there. I was determined to piss though their letterbox, for personal reasons, but we couldn\u2019t find it. So we contented ourselves with taking a picture of Bethy, stood next to the sign for a street named “Bethy Lane”.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s where Dylan Thomas set the stories “Who do you wish was with us”<\/i>, and “Extraordinary Little Cough”.<\/i> 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\u2019re unlucky, you can see England across the Bristol Channel.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
\n<\/i>She smiled at him, that smile that would make a samurai warrior worry…<\/span><\/p>\n