Then suddenly the caravan parks thinned, the landscape around Colwyn Bay took on a blush of beauty and grandeur, the train made a sharp jag north and minutes later we were in Llandudno.
It is truly a fine and handsome place, built on a generously proportioned bay and lined along its broad front with a huddle of prim but gracious nineteenthcentury hotels that reminded me in the fading light of a lineup of Victorian nannies. Llandudno was purposebuilt as a resort in the mid1800s, and it cultivates a nice oldfashioned air. I don't suppose that Lewis Carroll, who famously strolled this front with little Alice Liddell in the 1860s, telling her captivating stories of white rabbits and hookahsmoking caterpillars and asking between times if he could borrow her knickers to wipe his fevered brow and possibly take a few innocuous snaps ofher in the altogether, would notice a great deal of change today, except of course that the hotels were now lit with electricity and Alice would be what? 127 years old and perhaps less of a distraction to a poor, perverted mathematician.
To my consternation, the town was packed with weekending pensioners. Coaches from all over were parked along the sidestreets, every hotel I called at was full and in every dining room I could see crowds veritable oceans of nodding white heads spooning soup and conversing happily. Goodness knows what had brought them to the Welsh seaside at this bleak time of year.
Further on along the front there stood a clutch of guesthouses, large and virtually indistinguishable, and a few of them had vacancy signs perched in their windows. I had eight or ten to. choose from, which always puts me in a mild fret because I have an unerring instinct for choosing badly. My wife can survey a row of guesthouses and instantly identify the one run by a whitehaired widow with a kindly disposition and a fondness for children, snowy sheets and sparkling bathroom porcelain, whereas I can generally count on choosing the one run by a guy with a grasping manner, a drooping fag and the sort of cough that makes you wonder where he puts the phlegm. Such, I felt gloomily certain, would be the case tonight.
All the guesthouses had boards out front listing their many amenities ' Colour TV', 'En Suite All Rooms', 'Hospitality Trays', 'Full CH' which only heightened my sense of unease and doom. How could I possibly choose intelligently among such a welter of options? One offered satellite TV and a trouser press and another boasted, in special jaunty italics, 'Current Fire Certificate' something I had never thought to ask for in a B & B. It was so much easier in the days when the very most you could hope for was H 8c C in all rooms.
I selected a place that looked reasonable enough from the outside its board promised a colour TV and coffeemaking facilities, about all I require these days for a lively Saturday night but from the moment I set foot in the door and drew in the mildewy pong of damp plaster and peeling wallpaper, I knew it was a bad choice. I was about to turn and flee when the proprietor emerged from a back room and stayed my retreat with an unenthusiastic 'Yes?' A short conversation revealed that a single room with breakfast could be had for .19.50 little short of a swindle. It was entirely out of the question that I would stay the night in such a dismal place at such a larcenous price, so I said, 'That sounds fine,' and signed in. Well, it's so hard to say no.
My room was everything I expected it to be cold and cheerless, with melamine furniture, grubbily matted carpet and those mysterious ceiling stains that bring to mind a neglected corpse in the room above. Fingers of icy wind slipped through the single illfitting sash window. I drew the curtains and was not surprised that they had to be yanked violently before they would budge and came nowhere near meeting in the middle. There was a tray of coffee things but the cups were let me be charitable disgusting and the spoon was stuck to the tray. The bathroom, faintly illuminated by a distant light activated by a length of string, had curling floor tiles and years of accumulated muck packed into every corner and crevice. I peered at the yellowy grouting round the bath and sink and realized what the landlord did with his phlegm. A bath was out of the question, so I threw some cold water on my face, dried it with a towel that had the texture of a Weetabix and gladly took my leave.
I had a long stroll along the prom to boost my appetite and pass an hour. It felt wonderful. The air was still and sharp and there wasn't a soul about, though there were still lots of white heads in the hotel lounges and dining rooms, all bobbing merrily about. Perhaps they were having a Parkinson's convention. I walked nearly the length of The Parade, enjoying the chill autumn air and the trim handsomeness of the setting: a soft glow of hotels to the left, an inky void of restless sea to my right and a scattered twinkling of lights on the near and far headlands of Great and Little Ormes.
I couldn't help notice it seemed so obvious now that nearly all the hotels and guesthouses looked markedly superior to mine. Almost without exception they had names that bore homage to other places ' Windermere', 'Stratford', 'Clovelly', 'Derby', 'St Kilda', even Toronto' as if their owners feared that it would be too much of a shock to the system to remind visitors that they were in Wales. Only one place, with a sign that said 'Gwely a BrecwastfRed and Breakfast', gave any hint that I was, at least in a technical sense, abroad.
I dined simply at a small nondescript restaurant off Mostyn Street and afterwards, feeling disinclined to return to my dingy room in a state of stark sobriety, went hunting for a pub. Llandudno had surprisingly few of these vital institutions. I walked for some time before I found one that looked even vaguelyapproachable. It was a typical town pub inside maroonplush, staleodoured, smoky and it was busy, mostly with young people. I took a seat at the bar, thinking I might be able to eavesdrop on my neighbours and receive more immediate attention when my glass was empty, but neither of these was to be. There was too much music and background noise to discern what my neighbours were saying and too much clamour for service at a spot near the till for the single harried server to notice an empty glass and a beggarly face up at my end.
So I sat and drank beer when I could get some and instead watched, as I often do in these circumstances, the interesting process by which customers, upon finishing a pint, would present the barman with a glass of clinging suds and golden dribble, and that this would be carefully filled to slightly overflowing, so that the excess froth, charged with an invisible load of bacteria, spittle and microfragments of loosened food, would run down the side of the glass and into a slop tray, where it would be carefully 1 might almost say scientifically conveyed by means of a clear plastic tube back to a barrel in the cellar. There these tiny impurities would drift and float and mingle, like flaky pooh in a goldfish bowl, awaiting summons back to someone else's glass. If I am to drink dilute dribble and mouth rinsings, then I do rather wish I could do it in a situation of comfort and cheer, seated in a Windsor chair by a blazing fire, but this appears to be an increasingly elusive dream. As sometimes also happens in these circumstances, I had a sudden urge not to drink any more beer, so instead I hauled myself from my barside perch and returned to my seafront lodgings for an early night.
In the morning, I emerged from the guesthouse into a world drained of colour. The sky was low and heavy and the sea along the front vast, lifeless and grey. As I walked along, rain began to fall, dimpling the water. By the time I reached the station it was coming down steadily. Llandudno Station is closed on Sundays that the largest resort in Wales has no Sunday rail services is too preposterous and depressing to elaborate on but there was a bus to Blaenau Ffestiniog from the station forecourt at eleven. There was no bench or shelter by the busstop, nowhere to get out of the rain. If you travel much by public transport in Britain these days you soon come to feel like a member of some unwanted subclass, like the handicapped or unemployed, and that everyone essentially wishes you would just go away. I felt a bit like that now and I am rich and healthy and immensely goodlooking. What must it be like to be permanently poor or disabled or otherwise unable to take a full and active part in the nation's headlong rush for the sunny slopes of Mt Greedy?