The Sailors' Arms

"Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson of Mary Ann Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar. The ship's clock in the bar says half past eleven. Half past eleven is opening time. The hands of the clock have stayed still at half past eleven for fifty years. It is always opening time in the Sailors Arms."

It's probably possible to write your life story across the great pubs you've drunk in, but writing about the legendary Kinmel Arms made me think of my favourite fictional watering-hole, from Under Milk Wood. I've always suspected that Dylan, who was great-nephew of a famous preacher and never missed a chance to write about the Welsh landscape in sacramental terms, was equating the welcome at his favourite pub with Heaven here ( in a way that enriches both.) Either way, I think it's a beautiful image which I stole for my Dad's eulogy.

On the Kinmel Arms website, Tim is apparently preparing "The Kinmel Arms Trail." I thought that ran from my front door at 1, Church Street to the bar ( about 70 metres ). And sometimes back.

Home

I think "home" is probably my favourite word in English - sounds like something you should be able to wrap yourself up in to keep warm through the winter.

Apparently, Rudyard Kipling wrote in the Honorable Visitors  (no, I haven't read it either ) that "All things considred, there are only two kinds of men - those who stay at home, and those who do not. The second are the more interesting." Not so sure about this : I don't think it's quite that simple.

Home for me is two streets, a handful of farms, the pub, the church, the war memorial, the whole thing perched on a north-facing hill looking out over the Irish Sea. The gales come in off the sea in winter and rattle the windows ; autumn nights you hear the owls in the churchyard across the road, the gentle twit-twoo that everyone recognises and  the unsettling screech of the banshee. The colours are green, grey and the white of the cottages; summer evenings after rain sunlight washes gently over the village like the love of God.

And yet home is also Madrid, my dirty, polluted, overcrowded, busy city of four million immigrants, kind of a city that never sleeps and often won't let you sleep much either. There's nothing quite like a stroll after work up the Gran Via, surrounded by people who have no idea who you are, anonymous : for a brief while you can hang your identity up, you could be anyone, go anywhere, do anything, at least in your imagination.

And so of course you finish up making shadow puppets, going hillwalking, watching doomed football teams, drinking too much beer, playing Gaelic football, getting into unlikely theatre groups with like-minded idiots from places as improbable as New York, Waterford, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and even England.

I'd like to think that Kipling got it wrong; I'd like to think that home can be both a physical place, and the energy and emotion you invest in wherever you are, that you can stand still and move at the same time.

But then again,  I'm a homeboy who didn't stay at home; I'll always need to find out what's around the next corner, over the next hill, while a part of me stays sitting in the churchyard, looking down to where the Clwyd meets the sea, waiting for the Kinmel Arms to open.

Llyr, by Gillian Clarke

A posting for Reyes ( Epiphany ), just back from North Wales.

Llyr.

Ten years old, at my first Stratford play :
The river and the king with their Welsh names
Bore in the darkness of a summer night
Through interval and act and interval.
Swans move double through glossy water
Gleaming with imponderable meanings.
Was it Gielgud on that occasion ?
Or ample Laughton, crazily white-gowned,
Pillowed in wheatsheaves on a wooden cart,
Who taught the significance of little words ?
All. Nothing. Fond. Ingratitude. Words
To keep me scared, awake at night. That old
Man's vanity and a daughter's "Nothing",
Ran like a nursery rhythm in my head.

Thirty years later on the cliffs of Llyn
I watch how Edgar's crows and choughs still measure
How high cliffs are, how thrown stones fall
Into history, how deeply the bruise
Spreads in the sea where the wave has broken.
The turf is stitched with tormentil and thrift,
Blue squill and bird bones, tiny shells, heartsease.
Yellowhammers sing like sparks in the gorse.
The landscape's marked with figures of old men;
The bearded sea; thin-boned, wind-bent trees;
Shepherd and labourer and night-fisherman.
Here and there among the crumbling farms
Are lit kitchen windows on distant hills,
And guilty daughters longing to be gone.

Night falls on Llyn, on forefathers,
Old Celtic kings and the more recent dead,
Those we are still guilty about, flowers
Fade in jam jars on their graves; renewed
Refusals are heavy on our minds.
My head is full of sound, remembered speech,
Syllables, ideas just out of reach;
The close, looped sound of curlew, and the far
Subsidiary roar, cadences shaped
By the long coast of the peninsula,
The continuous pentameter of the sea.
When I was ten a fool and a king sang
Rhymes about sorrow, and there I heard
That nothing is until it has a word.

Copyright Gillian Clarke, reproduced here with permission ( yes, Gillian Clarke wished me a Happy New Year - for Anglo-Welsh poetry geeks, this is a bit like meeting Justin Bieber ). Gillian Clarke's poetry is published by Carcanet.

For non-specialists, the poem plays off the first scene of Shakespeare's play King Lear, in which Lear announces he will divide his kingdom between his three daughters, only first they must declare how much they each love him. Cordelia, the youngest, is unable to put her feeling into words, and so is disinherited.

The Welsh for river is Afon - so Stratford, that centre of Englishness, carries through it's centre a memory of those "old Celtic kings". The whole poem washed through with water magic, the river and the sea.

Happy New Year !

Since we're now in the month of Janus, the two-faced god who looks back at the old year and forward to the new, I thought I'd share this story, borrowed from Thomas More, but it's not his either - he ripped it off from a haiku, methinks. If you read the story, you have to go to the link as well : )

A traveller was walking through an unfamiliar country, when he came across a group of what looked like monks, surrounded by many large stones, wheelbarrows, and lots of building equipment. So he went across to the monk who seemed to be in charge.

"Building a new temple ?" he asked. "When do you start ?"

"Actually, we've just finished pulling it down," was the answer.

"Now we can see the sun rise."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSIrHyMJVlQ

And may 2012 bring you all good things.

Bardsey, the island in the current.

Bardsey Island, or to give it its Welsh name, Ynys Enlli, ynys yn y lli, the island in the current.

There's a little bit of magic about the whole of Llyn, the Lleyn peninsula, in north-west Wales. First of all, it's a long, long way from anywhere but itself, and it's only a destination : nobody goes there on the way to anywhere else.

 Walking west from Caernarfon, it's hard not to imagine yourself on some type of mythic journey : you leave the battlements of the castle behind you to cross the empty spaces of Yr Eifl, the mountain you can see early in the video :  and then you're into a landscape of clifftop paths, deserted beaches, old mine workings, seals bobbing up and down offshore coming to take a look at you, and the sea all around.

 Like any long walk on your own, however many maps you carry, it's all a bit disorientating, and the objective may be to lose yourself anyway.There seems to be more sky, and more light, than inland. Signposts are in both languages, but point to places you've never heard of anyway, and just as easily point to Ireland or Patagonia. The sheep and gulls are happy with either language.

You climb down the steep forested hillside past the waterfall to the language centre at Nant Gwytheryn ( Vortigern's Valley ); up the other side to Pistyll with its overgrown churchyard, and along the beach at Porth Dinllaen to the Ty Coch inn, which I've always thought of as the pub at the end of the world ( the golf course at the end of the world is just behind it ).

And after three days, just when you're running out of land and the sea seems all around you,  you get to Aberdaron, with its poets' church and the strange old churchyard running down the hill to the beach... and the next day you walk over to the next cove to meet Colin, the Bardsey boatman. And suddenly this feels like the end of a pilgrimage that you didn't know you'd started, crossing Bardsey Sound in a small boat to a holy island.

And Bardsey is known as the island of 20,000 saints - which I guess, in medieval times, just meant "a very big number" : at any rate, it seems a lot for a rock perched in the Irish Sea, a mile wide, a mile and a half long, the lighthouse at one end, the mountain at the other, the ruined monastery and a couple of farms in between. In winter there are only 7 people on the island, although in summer it fills up a little more : no electricity or running water ( water has to be raised from the wells ). It's home, bizarrely, to 60 % of the world population of Manx Shearwater ( a big seagull ), who fly south to winter in Patagonia and then back north, every year, to Bardsey. And as for the seals - well, just look at the photos.

 Colin gives you four hours on the island before you have to return to the landing-place for the crossing back, but that's plenty of time to do pretty much everything : walk to the lighthouse, watch the seals, scramble up on the mountain, even time for a cup of tea at Cristin, one of the farms. But the point of the place is that there's not much to do, so you have to stop doing. And then you're back in the little yellow boat, bouncing across the sea back to Aberdaron, and the rest of your life.

But the experience stays with you, I'm not sure why : maybe because it's an island, maybe it's the sheer effort required to get there, perhaps the way that there's nothing really to do when you're there except walk from one end to the other and back, then sit and watch things...a place of deep calm. I quite fancy trying a week or so there one day ( not sure if I'll be able to convince Sofi about the no hot water bit, never mind the backpacking... )

The main website for more info is http://www.enlli.org/

The route I followed was more or less the same as the one devised by this company : http://www.edgeofwaleswalk.co.uk/ . They also have a pretty amazing video, for anyone who wants to see more : http://www.edgeofwaleswalk.co.uk/video.htm

Walking Shadow

Well, here it is : I thought I'd try out this blogging thing, partly as an experiment, partly because I'm fed up with Facebook, partly to get out some of the stuff that's been building in my head for a while now, and partly because - hey, I think I have a responsibility to share my profound thoughts with the world, right ?

So I'll be using this space to babble on autistically about hiking, acting, Atletico, North Wales, poetry, pilgrimage, rugby, schools, loss, Japan, shadow puppets, storytelling, books, anthropology, and basically any old shite that springs to mind.

                                         The Walking Shadow. It's also my Indian name.