A Traveller's Tales (and other loose ends).

Writer

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You'd be better off driving - GWR axe through trains to Pembrokeshire

'London to Wales, but only so far. While Paddington to the West country services extend all the way to Penzance, in Cornwall, GWR's West Wales trains terminate in Carmarthen, missing out popular Pembrokeshire.'

Tourism has marked Cop 26 fortnight with a call to make the sector more sustainable, and fit for the tight carbon reduction targets to come. The 'Glasgow Declaration’ launched a commitment to a decade of climate action in tourism. 300 tourism stakeholders pledged to cut emissions by half by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050, by decarbonising and other measures.

But how to bring this about? There are the obvious targets on the checklist – more renewable energy, better insulated hotels, greener catering. But what about those trickier issues – the corners of tourism where there doesn't seem to be a problem, which might not even be apparent to those working close to them? I give an example of something less obvious, a missing service which, by not being there, encourages more car use.

Putting this particular omission right isn't going to solve the crisis, but it is one example of how comprehensive the solutions will have to be, and of how tourism isn't going to achieve its targets with a simple box ticking exercise.

I spent a few days in Devon last month, travelling by train and staying in a guesthouse in Brixham. My journey, on a new GWR Class ?? train, was smooth and comfortable. The train continued on to Penzance in Cornwall, a county well served with through services from Paddington. Courtesy of a frequent service in comfortable buses in Torbay, we were able to do and see what we needed to without resorting to car.

GWR runs a shorter, but in other respects parallel, service from Paddington into South and West Wales. Or, correction, it did, until 2019. The service was understandably suspended in 2020 because of Covid, but it did not reappear in 2021. In the year of home holidays, with Pembrokeshire bursting at the seams with tourists, when the imperative was for more public transport not less, a train operator ended it services into the county.

It's a central truth of the railway system that the principal express trains start in London and radiate out to all parts of the realm. As well as trains to Penzance, there are services to Holyhead, Aberdeen and Inverness, Liverpool and Hull. But no longer to Tenby and Narberth, Manorbier and Pembroke Dock, all once famous stops on the holiday trains from Paddington.

The original GWR trumpeted the many attractions of Pembrokeshire in its advertising. The Tenby Express, which it launched in Queen Victoria's reign, evolved into the Pembroke Coast Express. That prime summer service lost its famous name, but it continued to run, Paddington to Pembroke Dock. Until 2019.

According to Google, driving from London to Tenby takes 4 h 57 min (240.2 mi) via the M4. In reality it’s a lot longer, because you have to stop, and summer jams on the M4 and A40 are notorious. The direct train, albeit holiday Saturdays only, was a relaxing alternative, a convenient mid-morning departure, taking well under five hours. That train was discontinued this year.

There are still passenger services into Pembrokeshire, but these are prosaic little diesel stopper trains, originating from Manchester and Birmingham.

If you wanted to replicate that mid morning journey last summer, this is what Trainline proposed. The first part was as usual; board the GWR train at Paddington. But then change at Newport onto the stopping train to Carmarthen. And boy, does it stop. 14 times in all. It is actually quicker to drive from Newport to Carmarthen. (There is an earlier direct train to Carmarthen - and for holidaymakers with suitcases, the change can be awkward -

requiring a much earlier start for people across the Southeast.) But Pembrokeshire is off the timetable. Now the county isn’t even mentioned on the GWR website.

Passengers who simply want to reach their destinations have to suffer the frustration of the slow drawl of the stopping train. Many could be excused for defaulting to the car. And more pressure on S Wales roads strengthens the case for the £2 bn M4 bypass at Newport.

Seven million tourists visit Pembrokeshire each year (2017-2019 figures), according to report on the economic volume and value of tourism in the county. Tourism is a key employment driver in the area, with 12,000 people directly employed in the industry; that’s 21 per cent of the workforce. Tourism body Visit Pembrokeshire is planning to grow tourism over the next five years.

But, and more than ever after Cop 26, such growth must come with an expanding, not declining, public transport.

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Communing with lions, without a fence | Directory of Destinations

The writer meets lions, while foot and without an intervening fence, in the Shambala Game Reserve in S. Africa. 30 years ago it was a water melon farm.

There are two lions in this photo. I was about 200 metres away from them, with no intervening fence between our small group (led by a very experienced ranger) and them. I took it in the Shambala Private Game Reserve, S. Africa, in Feb 2018. 30 year ago this was a melon farm. The man who owns Comparethemarket.com bought it and returned it to the wild. However, there are no meerkats. 

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Sir David Attenborough is 90 in May. I took this photo of him filming on…oh, you know where.

In 1997 I was asked by the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to write a series of essays on the new David Attenborough series Life of Birds, which the station was about to transmit for the first time. I had met Sir David several times through my work at Radio Times and other UK publications.

I wrote an introductory feature on Sir David, and a further six pieces on the series and his part in it – Making Life of Birds, Birds Brains, Evolution, Champion Birds, Parenthood, and Bird Songs. It’s good to see that, almost 19 years later, that series of articles is still live on the PBS website, although I suspect that this is mainly due to the enormous popularity of Sir David in the USA.

This is a link to the series of articles.

A link to a collection of my articles on Sir David in e-book form.

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Pembrokeshire, county of castles, coves and film star sands.

The eye was piercing. The gaze was imperious. The message an unspoken “Do you know who’s in control around here?” Eventually, of course, the human in boots, inching forward as quietly as he could along the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, prevailed over the haughty feathered hunter perched on a fence post.

I was no more than 15 feet away, with the summit of nearby Carn Llidi as a backdrop, when the sparrowhawk very reluctantly gave way. It lifted off and, after a few grudging wing beats, alighted again about six posts along.

In the space of ten minutes, as I moved slowly forward, it repeated this procedure: lift off, lazy flutter of wings and perch again, about fives times, before cutting back in a wide arc across the field to roughly where I first met it.

The guidebooks tell you to look down from the cliffs for seals, porpoises, dolphins and to the windy space between land and sea for choughs, those comical blackbird-size birds with red legs. But not a word about this top predator, which had clearly dined so well on the local singbirds that it scarcely needed to move. (The birds sang on, despite the predations.) 

Approach this national trail as you might a long, detailed menu in a restaurant, one with a wide choice of starters, many of them a meal in itself. There are also some main courses, specialities of this county, and you will want to sample one or two of them. However you would need a giant’s appetite to consume the whole 186-miles, still less the entire 870 miles Wales Coast Path, of which this is only a section.

Let’s start with those appetizers. (The sparrow hawk would be in the “today’s specials” section.) I stayed at the county’s western end, on its final thrust towards Ireland. As the chough flies, Waterford is closer than Cardiff.

Hearabouts any three to five mile stretch contains many permutations. The trail twists, it lurches, it plunges, it turns severely back on itself then climbs steeply down into and up out of tiny coves. Little tumbling streams cross your path. Banks dense with foxgloves enclose your way. A flower strewn meadow ends in a sudden sheer drop down to waves boiling over jagged rocks. The view constantly changes. Nothing stays the same on this path for more than a few minutes.

I did an idle measurement on Google Maps afterwards. Made into a straight line the Pembrokeshire Path would stretch here roughly from London, 198 miles away. In 2010, duly impressed, National Geographic Magazine judged this the second best coastal destination in the world, just behind the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, Canada.

Every three or four miles, over much of the western end at least, there is a convenient pause, in the shape of an attractive little harbour, and there’s a fair chance it is served by the coastal bus.

This part of the coast was bristling with unexpected, at least to me, industrial history. We think of the Welsh valleys studded with smokestacks and pit heads, but there is the evidence of long and serious industry in this quiet backwater. The clues that somewhere, such as Abereiddi, was once very busy is in the eroded remains of labourers’ cottages. In other places those that stood up long enough after the decline are now holiday cottages.

We dropped down into Porthgain, an industrial powerhouse  in its day. The roads of England were paved with crushed dolerite processed here. Now gentrification is complete. The main industrial building is now the Shed Fish and Chip Bistro. On our visit no fewer than ten Norwegian-registered vintage MG sportscars were neatly parked on the quayside.

The drivers and passengers were in the Shed, where they may well have been enjoying the exquisite if expensive fresh crab sandwiches, sold at prices Chiswick visitors would recognize. We ordered the same at the Sloop Inn opposite. We were perfectly positioned, some time later, to see the MGs set off in orderly convoy on the road to Fishguard.

The coast continues like this for miles, with a spot of strenuous striding, frequent heart-lifting views, tantalising glimpses of islands big and small just off the coast. Here and there an encounter with a profound religious past, in the ruined chapel and well of St David’s mother St Non, for example.

There are other, bigger harbours. In Solva the man in the car park handed out leaflets promoting all the little art craft shops, restaurants and guest houses. The Dutch and German cars underline the county’s appeal to a discerning international market – the drivers were not there for the weather.

And so to those landscape “main courses” I mentioned. On the path from the lifeboat station at St Justinians, heading north, I am suddenly above a wide, flat,  sandy beach where somebody had expertly drawn a vast jellyfish, so big it could only be seen to proper effect from 200 yards up, on the footpath.

Pembrokeshire’s beaches are now an international hot property.  Hollywood could have chosen some enchanted strand on Bali or Hawaii as the location where Kristen Stewart thunders through the surf with 80 muscular extras on horseback in the 2012 movie ”Snow White and the Huntsman”. Instead the studios chose the wide, flat, golden film-star sands, perfectly smoothed by the outgoing tide, of Marloes Sands, on southern Pembrokeshire, even if they did computer-generate an extravagant outburst of fairy-tale towers on the conveniently flat-topped Gateholm Island, which stands just yards off the headland.

Marloes first broke into the movies in 1967 when The  Lion in Winter was filmed here. Whitesands was used in the BBC4 Richard II. 

In 2010 Hollywood came to another Pembrokeshire beach, Freshwater West. Ridley Scott had filmed Robin Hood there, with Russell Crowe. The filmmakers built higgledy-piggledy Shell Cottage there for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The beach is clearly visible in the film. You will find no trace that the scrupulously tidy film makers were ever there. It’s the same at Marloes, left just as they found it.

You could easily construct a week or ten day holday around this sublime coastland, mixing up walks with boat trips to Skomer or Ramsey, dining out in the many harbour pubs on fresh local fish. The coast path has been conveniently cut up into 200 bite-size local walks, some of them circular.

One took us a few miles inland to St Davids, which is Britain’s smallest city, by virtue of the cathedral. We arrived early to benefit from its remoteness. Most day trippers, coming from afar, don’t get there until well on in the morning. We came across the intimate little cathedral, nestling in a green valley, well before the throng.

In the nave we had plently of room for some entry-level surveying, measuring the startling incline on the spirit level app on my daughter’s smartphone. It is almost two degrees.

St David’s has an understated nobility, because of its size and unusual position. On a scale of conspicuous cathedrals, Lincoln would be a 10. St David’s would be a 1. It was a steep climb up to the city, in reality a pleasant little town, where we gave in to the Italian charms of  the Bench cafe for coffee and ice cream.

Until the early 1800s Pembrokeshire would have been as remote by land as some European cities were for a traveler starting out from London. Railways opened the county up, and oil at Milford Haven and the Irish boat traffic through Fishguard Harbour ensured the rail links survived even in the bleak post-Beeching era.

The trains helped build Tenby into as gracious a Victorian resort as Whitby or Ilfracombe. Novelist George Eliot was inspired enough by her visit to this perfect little resort in 1856 to take up writing. It has been a destination of rare distinction ever since.

A cordon of high, narrow Georgian and Victorian town houses in delicate pastel colours still wraps around Tenby’s sea front. To dodge the wind you either head to the sandy beach on the town’s north flank, or, if it’s blowing from the other direction, seek out the little harbour to the south.

Praise, then, for frequent services direct from Manchester deep into Pembrokeshire, connecting with services from London and the west and south.

It’s still the case, of course, that most visitors drive here. They will find the car necessary for visiting the centre of the county where the excellent bus service doesn’t reach.

Pembroke, is technically on the coast. The tide probes almost under the walls of the castle where  Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, was born in 1457, (It was restored to its formidable Norman pomp after a crumbly, ivy-covered interlude in the 1900s.) But it feels like an inland town.

The castle, proud and imposing above this ancient town, is just one the county’s rich crop of citadels, The list includes Manorbier, Cilgerran, Haverfordwest, Lamphey, Llawhaden, and Picton castles. There are over 50 all told, if you include forts and the reconstructed 600 BC Iron Age citadel Castell Henllys. Leading the list is Carew Castle. It overlooks a serene millpond, with a 11th century Celtic Cross and Wales’s only restored Tidal Mill. Narberth is another appealing little castle town. If you buy the Welshcakes in Waitrose, they come from here.

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Rain - cricket’s cruellest enemy.

3 o'clock on the August Bank Holiday Monday afternoon 1948, at the high point of the summer’s biggest sporting event in Wales, Glamorgan versus the Australians. 

One of the most exciting batsmen in world cricket, Keith Miller, was within sight of his century – he’d already hit five sixes– before a capacity crowd of 25,000 people at the St Helens ground, Swansea. (The photo of the ground, above, was taken at the Bank Holiday fixture, Glam v S.Africa in 1950.)

Then the heavens opened.

Cricket is one of the rare sports to feature inconclusive games. The weather is almost always the reason.  And so it was in that distant Bank Holiday game. 

Within minutes the spectators’ appreciation of the great Australia team, who would go on to complete the season unbeaten, gave way to a deep sense of frustration as the thunderstorm raged over South Wales. How cruel an enemy the weather can be to this sport.

As the deluge showed no signs of abating, and it became clear there would be no more play, the holiday crowd gloomily dispersed through sodden streets.  This became the game that no-one remembers.  Except as the supreme disappointment, a game ended only halfway through - the rain ruled out any play on the third and last day too. 

Fixtures between Glamorgan and the touring teams have always had the feel of unofficial test matches, and more so when taking into account the justifiable belief in Wales that deserving Glamorgan batsmen and bowlers were overlooked by the selectors for the proper Test Match fixtures with the tourists.

The game had been keenly anticipated. Glamorgan were one of the strongest county sides, high in the table – they would go on to win their first County Championship that summer.  Now, on the second day, Australian all-rounder Miller was in full flow, on 84.

His innings had already have gone a long way to offset the disappointment in the crowd that the greatest player of that or any age, Don Bradman, had decided not to play in the game. (He was captain, on his last tour to England and the biggest box office in cricket.) No one scored more than 40 as Glamorgan elected to bat and made 197, with the four Australian bowlers, Lindwall, Miller, Johnson and Ring sharing the wickets.

The Australians were on 215 for 3. The big hitting Miller, had put on 126 with Hassett, who was 71 not out when the rain came. Miller seem to be heading towards a century, with who knows how many mighty strokes to come, as the Australians aimed for a big score with the intention of putting Glamorgan (who had batted on day one) in again before close of play. 

Today the weather affects cricket much less than it used to. Test cricket is played faster nowadays; time lost to rain can be made at the end of the day, and the drawn Test Match is an oddity in itself, even when a full day or more is lost to rain, as happened in the Third Test between England and the West Indies in the summer of 2020. It's much the same in the County game, where fixtures now last four instead of three days.

Those rain-affected games when pitches were left uncovered and sometimes became unplayable, or only playable by the most skilled batsmen, are confined to cricket history. But who could say what might have happened on the final day at Swansea if the Glamorgan spinners could have wreaked havoc on the Australian batsmen chasing a low winning total in a second innings? (Glamorgan were to beat the Australians twice at Swansea in the 1960s.) 

But unfinished games from the past are rarely discussed, and this one, so tantalisingly full of potential, must forever remain largely anonymous,  something for the statistician not the cricket historian. 

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How might we travel in the post pandemic world?

June 2020.

This is an updated version of an article I wrote in April 2020.

Many of us are beginning to think about how we might travel again in the post-lockdown world. Some of us will be even be redefining what we mean by “travel”.

We recognise this as a pivotal moment, a severe jolt to our way of life. It is also a rare opportunity to pause and think, and the best chance we may have in many of our lifetimes to make significant changes.

Many of those changes will be forced upon us, through unemployment, the new ways we have had to adopt to do our jobs, and the disruption to our family life.

The way we travel is surely something we must reassess, in the ongoing climate emergency. We need urgent, rapid action. Why not now? I refuelled my car in mid-March, and I did not do so again until June 10th.

I’m beginning to wonder quite how badly we need this car. What if, say, a fleet of hire cars arrived in my village, the sort you subscribe to in cities? Better still if they were electric, and, likely within a few years, self-driving? Scope for a behavioural switch here? Would I miss those days when the car was always there in the road, for, on average, the one hour I used it every day? Or would I think back to the spring of 2020, when I hardly gave it a thought?

What about making more use of the bus? This would be harder, for many people in rural areas, I suspect. There are buses into the nearby towns, and I use them once or twice a week as an alternative to driving and, increasingly problematic (and expensive), parking. But to make buses more attractive (which really means newer), more frequent and more direct would require significant investment. The government does actually aspire to this, in its transport plan released, almost invisibly, during the pandemic. But where would the money come from?

(The Department for Transport (DfT) wants to “decarbonize” transport with “public transport and active travel the natural first choice for our daily activities” with less car use. However two weeks earlier it’s announced ambitious road-building plans.)

One alternative to driving is using the train more. From where I live there are frequent trains into London, and, even in normal times, outside peak hours there is always space on them. Short distance travel, with a railcard, is relatively inexpensive. It’s the longer trips that are the problem, and it’s often cheaper for two people to go by car. It has long been a nonsense that it is cheaper for me to go to Cracow by air than Cardiff by train. Now it’s an insult to the environment.

And what of flying? We live under the flight path to Luton airport. For three months there has hardly been an aircraft overhead. Flying is due to resume in earnest this month (June). The airlines – and they must, as their businesses, as their businesses – must hope to get back to where they were pre-pandemic, within a year so. 

There are pressing reasons for us to fly less. Greenhouse gas emissions from aviation account for about 3% of the world figure. Still small, but it’s the fastest – doubling since 1990 –  growing source of emissions that contribute to climate change, along with shipping.

Many people who normally work in offices, and travel to conferences and meetings at home and abroad, will have adapted, with varying degrees of success to their new Zoom-enabled, working world. I suspect a significant number will carry on like that. It's hard to see how this would not mean fewer people travelling, and more specifically, flying.

How the new thinking will affect leisure travel is harder to foresee. People may well narrow their horizons and take short breaks and holidays in the UK, in the short term. But many, according to their budget, will then want to take those cheap flights to Europe again, and the long haul flights to Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal and Uluru (Ayers Rock).

All we can realistically hope for is to persuade some, and it’s probably not going to be enough to reduce the impact of flying on climate, (with the first large electric plane still some years away) to take the train to Europe and Scandinavia for example, whenever possible.

This could change if the cost of the ticket is increased to reflect the environmental impact of the flight. But it’s likely that only concerted action by governments around the world can make that happen.

Former UN climate leader Christiana Figueres holds out hope: “If we really sustain several months of reduced travel we may realise that we don’t have to travel as much. Can this have actual behavioural change impacts?”

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The most important, beautiful, magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world - Bagpuss

I wrote this on #Bagpuss after a visit to Canterbury.

Magic cat 

"The most important, beautiful, magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world" -- and the star of one of the most enchanting children's TV programmes -- lives in a display case at Canterbury Museum.  Oliver Postgate's pink and white-striped Bagpuss slumbers on with Professor Yaffle, Gabriel the Toad and Rag Doll Madeleine.  And, of course, the mice.  On my visit they were showing the episode from the BBC animated series where the mice scurry around scrubbing and polishing the bottle.  Also on display are other creations -  Pingwings, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine and the Clangers - from the wonderful dynasty created by Postgate and his friend Peter Firmin. There's also a permanent display devoted to Rupert Bear, and the succession of artists who have drawn him.

www.canterbury.gov.uk

This was the rest of the article.

A zippy new train service, in place two years early for the Olympics, put Britain's tranquil cathedral city in Kent within an hour of London, turning it into an easy visit from many people. I followed at high speed in the footsteps of the Canterbury Pilgrims.

 Sharp train 

 Canterbury is within day trip range for many people since the new Javelin high-speed service from London St Pancras started in 2009, running on the same track as the Eurostar trains. Journey times to the city have been falling steadily since Chaucer’s story-telling pilgrims (to the tomb of St Thomas a Becket) made their fictional trip in the Canterbury Tales. Now it's possible to get there from the capital in under an hour. I took one of the Japanese-built trains, the fastest in Britain apart from Eurostar services to the continent. You pay more than on conventional trains, but it was worth it for the exhilarating 140 mph hurtle down into Kent. 57 minutes after leaving London, I was walking under the arch of the ancient West Gate into this gracious old city. www.southeasternrailway.co.uk.

 Saintly peace

There are many reasons to visit Canterbury Cathedral, Including the wonderful mediaeval stained glass, very sensibly removed during the war, when Canterbury was badly bombed. But the most striking feature is a big blank space, surrounded by a deep peace.  The clue is in the stairs that lead to it, worn into grooves by the feet and knees of pilgrims, climbing to the shrine of Thomas à Becket. The archbishop was cut down by four of Henry II's knights one December night in 1170. Becket's tomb was at this spot until 1563, when Henry VIII had it torn out. (Canterbury Museum displays the remarkable tapestry telling the story, designed by Oliver Postgate.) A single candle burned poignantly where the tomb stood, to the mood music of a gently purring organ.  There is an entry charge. But guests at the cathedral’s own hotel, http://canterburycathedrallodge.org, on the precincts, may stroll around for nothing in the perfect piece of the evening or early morning, when it is empty of tourists.

Tale story 

 Some of the city's most famous "visitors", Chaucer's Wife of Bath,  the Miller, Pardonner Knight in The Canterbury Tales, are quite convincingly re-created, with Chaucer was the first tour guide, picking a route through the C14th throng in Canterbury Tales. Among the real visitors were the invading Emperor Claudius, and Julius Caesar. This is an excellent collection of Roman finds from the city in the Roman museum.  The story continues in St Martin's Church, the oldest in the English speaking world still used for worship. Parts date from the C6th.

It belongs to the World Heritage Site, with the cathedral and nearby ruins of St Augustine's Abbey.  Victorian artist Sidney Cooper, the Stubbs of cattle painting is buried here. 

 River ramble

 One of the unexpected delights of Canterbury is the boat trip on the Stour.  A team of knowledgeable and engaging guides drift you along the quiet river in the heart of the city, where the banks, as you'd expect, are dense with history. A wonderful oversight of the city in an hour. Highlights of the tour, which begins at the bridge by the Old Weavers Restaurant, include Greyfriars, a C13th chapel which spans the river.  It's the oldest example of Franciscan architecture in the country, built in the lifetime of the order's founder St Francis of Assisi. There are wonderful views of the cathedral.  www.canterburyrivertours.co.uk. Afterwards the city offers soothing retail therapy, in the recently refurbished Kings Mile shopping district. Independent shops offer hand made chocolates, designer fashion, Fairtrade produce. And much more Look for the remarkable, drunkenly- tilting C16th  Sir John Boys’ House . 

  Top tavern

 In a perfect world we would save all old pubs from closing. But if there are to be new ones, let them be up to the high standards of Old Brewery Tavern (opposite the Canterbury Museum). It opened in 2006,. putting an old building to very good use.  I liked the smart but spare lounges, with a liberal scattering of comfy low sofas and wooden furniture. My leek soup, and homemade pork pie with ale chutney (with a glass of Whitstable Brewing Company East India Pale Ale) was superior simplicity. They offer two sizes:  “ample – for a quick snack”; and "generous, for the really hungry." At the catering helm is Michael Caines, the 2 Michelin-starred chef who also runs the restaurant in the adjoining Abode hotel, one of a collection of “lifestyle hotels” - opened at the same time.  

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Fabritius, the man who painted The Goldfinch

Many artists  have died  young  down the centuries,  but few succumbed as dramatically as Carel Fabritius (1622-1654),  said to be Rembrandt’s greatest pupil. He painted  The Goldfinch, which inspired a book.  The film based on it that  is released  this week (September 27th 2019).

At 10.30am on October 12, 1654, the gunpowder magazine of Delft exploded, devastating a large section of the city,  leaving a huge crater. The 32-year-old Fabritius was among the dead.  He had been working in his studio nearby.  Many of his paintings are thought to have been destroyed.  Writer Donna Tartt  draws a deliberate parallel in her  2013 Pulitzer Prize winning book. The movie,  directed by  John Crowley,  stars Nicole Kidman and Ansel Elgort.

The National Gallery has a  painting by Egbert van der Poel of the scene just  following the explosion.  ( I quote Jonathan Jones,  writing in The Guardian in 2000). “It shows a space cleared of houses, with nothing but dirt, water and broken timbers. Houses are shells, the sky is .. tumultuous.., and in the foreground survivors are pulled clear of the rubble, while corpses - perhaps Fabritius among them - are wrapped in canvas shrouds.”

The Goldfinch  itself  was, and is,  quite safe. it was  bought by by Abraham Bredius in 1896, and is in the permanent collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The Fabritius’s self-portrait ( there are others)  is, or rather was in the Bojimans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam.  The website notes: “This masterly portrait was once believed to be the work of Rembrandt. But it is actually  made by his brilliant student Carel Fabritius. About ten paintings by Fabritius have survived.”

However the museum gallery is shut for refurbishment,  and the painting,   with perhaps  appropriate  mystery when you consider the  plot  of the film,  is said to be “travelling”.

Fabritius, as a pupil of Rembrandt,  worked in his studio in Amsterdam.  He developed his own  distinct artistic style and experimented with perspective and lighting. He moved to Delft in 1650,   where he did views  experimenting with strange perspectives.  He was an influence on Vermeer.

Jones describes him as “a passionate man, a tempestuous soul full of energy.”   In his article he was writing about another  self-portrait  which ‘proves he was special.  His eyebrows flare furiously and his gaze is intense; you can’t look back for long.

“He is not in the least derivative of Rembrandt: Fabritius has a very distinctive, pale palette and a sparse, rigorous dryness completely different from Rembrandt’s dark luxury. Yet, as in a Rembrandt portrait, you feel this is not just paint on canvas, but a real, rather astringent human mind confronting you.”

Fabritius was most famous for his murals. His View of the City of Delft (1652) in the National Gallery deploys “disconcerting, panoramic trick perspectives.”

Contemporaries  considered the death of Fabritius, “the most talented of Rembrandt’s pupils”,  and an influence on Vermeer, as a tragedy.  350 years old the book, if not the film,  should ensure we never forget him.

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This is another in my series of new, created destinations that simply didn't exist in the middle of the last century. The topography and wildlife of of Pembrey Country Park were there of course. but it was inaccessible to the public. The main features of the park, just west of Llanelli in Carmarthenshire,is an 8 mile long golden sandy beach, where the tide retreats vast distances, and a buffer of sandy, wooded shore rich in nature. It's so extensive, with so much space for visitors. Think of it as a sort of overflow attraction that never fills up and can easily accommodate the crowds who put pressure on smaller, less resilient attractions elsewhere. Is where the "over-tourists" should go when their "overtourism" destinations are full?

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Pembrey Country Park, just west of Llanelli in Carmarthenshire, is a blend of coastal countryside, a mix of sand dunes and wood and grassland (Pembrey Forest) and eight miles of wide open golden sands. When other places on the South Wales coast are jam-packed - the Gower Peninsula, enticing and magnificent just over of the estuary, is the classic example - there is always plenty of room in Pembrey.

There's enough parking to accommodate half the county of Carmarthen, and a new numberplate recognition system to speed things up. (A minimum £3 for two hours is a stiff enough fee to remind people that their car journey now comes at an environmental cost).  it's only three miles from the nearest railway station (Pembrey and Burry Port), and regular buses pass close to the entrance. It's flat around here, so it's cycling is easy too. There was high-profile recognition of this in 2017, when the park was the official starting point for the Tour of Britain cycle race

Pembrey is another of those now publicly-owned facilities that might not have survived in its present state without a determined local campaign. The dunes, providing a natural screen in the event of explosions, had been the site of a ordnance factory, producing dynamite and gunpowder since 1881. (Pembrey  had grown up, before that, as a mining community in the 1800s.)

The factory played a vital role in in World War Two, and the German Air force included it their bombing raids. There was a RAF base at Pembrey. One of the crew based there was the illustrious Guy Gibson, who led the Dumbuster attack in Germany.

The 1969 the Ministry of Defence proposed setting up a munitions testing range there. The local community launched its defence under the Save our Sands banner. Their campaign was successful and the plan was dropped in 1971 after a public inquiry. The Country Park was created shortly afterwards.

Reaching Cefn Sidan Beach, you have, depending on the state of the tide, the rare choice of three long walks in three different points of the compass. If the tide is out, the water could be almost half a mile away, half way to Devon, or so it sometimes seems.

Turn left and you head towards the glorious bulk of the Gower Peninsula, just across the Loughor Estuary. But it is to the west where the word 'endless' fits best. The beach just goes on and on, into a misty distance that comes into sight then dissolves through the clouds of scurrying sand. If the tide permits, you might see the remarkably robust remains of a wreck dating from four masted windjammer Paul, beached in a storm in 1925.

Carmarthenshire council has installed some family attractions, including a dry ski slope, a miniature railway and nature trails. there is a well established camp camping and caravan park. This year it the council opened a new cafe.

The park has an enviable reputation to protect. This is one of the few beaches to earn both the Blue Flag (for water quality - it was the first in Wales) and the Green Flag. This is the international standard of excellence for a park, awarded for such criteria as biodiversity, cleanliness and environmental management. They were promoting a 'two minute beach clean' when we visited. Visitors are invited to remove whatever litter they can manage. We picked up some conspicuous red plastic wood sacks, as our token gesture.

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A public meeting tonight, Monday, September 16th, will discuss the future of the signal box, above, and its possible conversion into something of value to the community.

But this is no humdrum old railway building. The box, at Ferryside in Carmarthenshire, on the man line between London Paddington and Carmarthen, is a remarkable piece of surviving transport infrastructure.

Contrary to popular opinion, not so much on the railways is particularly old, apart from some station buildings. This is genuinely ancient, dating from the Victorian era, but still fully functioning. Every day it efficiently and safely gives safe passage to dozens of trains.

This GWR type 3 box has been in service for a scarcely believable 130 years, at the end of the platforms of this small seaside station. It is still operated by shifts of staff who command a sequence of venerable semaphore signals that clank down in the old fashioned way to tell trains the track is clear.

Once signaling of this kind was standard across the railway network. I remember the constant rattle of lowering and rising signals on the main Swansea to London line near my school. This old technology survived on the less well used line in West Wales because there probably wasn’t the budget to replace it, and, anyway, it worked perfectly well.

But, as even the most misty-eyed enthusiast must concede, this box, a unique survivor of its type, cannot last for ever. The signalling system on the line west of Swansea is scheduled for an upgrade.

Soon the box will become redundant, to be replaced with a modern electronic system operated from afar. The hope is that the box can be saved and preserved, perhaps as some kind of community asset, and the meeting in the village will discuss the possibilities - although it isn’t clear to what purpose a raised room containing the now very rare set of locking levers, block shelf, bells and track layout plan,and a lower floor with 24 lever frame dating from 1898 could be put other than that of a museum.

The village of Ferryside grew as a seaside resort after the Swansea-Carmarthen branch of South Wales Railway was built in the 1850s. The Signal Box followed just 30 years later, and only ten years or so after Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s original broad gauge tracks were removed. It is shown on the 1st Edition Ordnance Suvey map of 1889.

Not so long ago the Ferryside signal box would have been demolished, without a thought to its history, unless a private railway or enthusiasts bought it. Fortunately this box was given a Grade II listing, as recently as 2014.

Apart from minor changes, the box is much as it was. The ‘Reasons for Listing’ are given as 'its special architectural interest as a well preserved signal box, the best surviving example of a GWR Type 3 box in the United Kingdom.’

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The home of a low-energy future is already here

The low-energy house in London shown on Channel 4 news recently ( June 12 2019) has no central heating and is powered by two electric towel rails, according to reporter Minnie Stephenson. it demonstrates how we might live in the future, as we strive to meet the net zero carbon emission target set for the UK by out-going PM Theresa May this month. (The Chancellor already announced in the budget this year, 2019, that gas boilers will be replaced by low-carbon heating systems in all new homes built after 2025.)

There is nothing particularly revolutionary, or even high-tech, about the house we saw. It is simply that it is insulated to a level beyond the comprehension of the average house-dweller, or big builder. Smaller builders will be aware of what's possible, but it's up to their clients to ask them to build like this.

This is a 2-bedroom 2-storey Passivhaus, the first to be certified in Hackney. Completed in 2015, it was designed by Bernard Tulkens of Techtonics Architects.

The  planning authority required the building to be set half a level down from the street to keep the profile low. Entrance and bedrooms are at lower ground floor, within reinforced concrete, with an open plan living space on the upper level in a zinc-clad prefabricated  structure in cross-laminated timber. 

The site was a challenging one as it is situated immediately to the north of a 4-storey Victorian terrace, and does not benefit from direct sun from the south. 

The prefabricated structure was erected in 2 days - floors, walls and roof - and insulated with wood fibre insulation.

See the house here.

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Parkland stroll around fixed-in-time Calke Abbey

Latest in my occasional series of UK country walks.

Directly above us the avian equal of an Olympic athlete pins back its wings and zips away in warp drive.

We quickly eliminate merlin and peregrine falcon. This has to be the hobby. (Thank you, RSPB). “Long pointed wings” – tick. “Reminiscent of a giant swift” - quite so. “Dashing flight, accelerates rapidly, high-speed aerial manoeuvres.” Oh yes.

The National Trust has charted a circular walk through the national nature reserve that wraps around the 300 year old #Calke Abbey, where the rooms were left exactly as they were when the trust acquired the estate in 1985.

It’s a parkland stroll so gentle (1½ miles) we hardly raise a puff. Plenty of time, then, to sleuth out the intriguing details.

Top of the hard-to-see list is the “globally rare” white-clawed crayfish. We imagine it darting furtively around the 18th-century ponds. Badgers are equally elusive, but their tracks are everywhere. Easier to spot are some very rare fungi surviving since the last Ice Age, a selection from 350 resident species of beetle. And the hobby.

Top of the “can’t miss” list is the moorhen. A posse eyes us as likely providers of bread. When we don’t deliver, they paddle off in a huff. A heron glides gracefully past, after a laborious, flapping take-off.

We climb a gentle hill, garlanded with cowslips, alongside a dry stone wall, to stop number 2. Derbyshire hills roll serenely away south.

Stop 3 is on the edge of a wood, overflowing with bluebells and bird song.  That two-tone call, was it a chiffchaff (which fly from West Africa to be here)? Or the great tit – which never goes beyond the next field? No argument, though, that the big bird yaffling away into the trees, outraged by our arrival, is a green woodpecker.

We reach stop 4. This is the big one, the Old Man of Calke. This original oak is “at least” a thousand years old, say the experts. As a speculative sapling it burst through the leaf litter when Ethelred the Unready was on the throne.

It’s taken every knock our weather can inflict, except glacier strike and sandstorm. And still it stands, frayed around the edges, but green and very alive.

We leave the tree to its second millennium, and complete the circuit along a fine line of horse chestnuts.

Then back to the perfect National Trust ending -- cream tea in the cafe, with scones made to a 300 years old recipe.

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Today, London - A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square

Today 6pm - 9pm Monday 29 April, Berkeley Square, London

A musical Extinction Rebellion in collaboration with ‘Sam Lee’s Singing with Nightingales’ & The Nest Collective

Poets, musicians and nature lovers join to perform “the most romantic rebellion”.

Using clever tech, #ExtinctionRebellion and The Nest Collective will rewild #Berkeley Square from 6pm today (Monday 29 April) with the song it is most famous for. Through synchronised streaming of the nightingale’s mesmeric yet seldom heard courtship song via mobile phones and mobile speakers, the pop-up action will fill the park and surrounding streets with the song of a bird nearing extinction in the UK.

The birdsong will be accompanied by musicians, singers, poets and anyone who wants to collaborate with one of the finest singers in the avian world.

After rising attention to the ecological and climate emergency, Extinction Rebellion are bringing people together to celebrate of the musical beauty of the natural world. This central London rewilding action aims to focus attention on the shocking demise of our own native species and give Londoners the opportunity to hear a once ubiquitous songbird in its mythic notional home.

Written in 1939, the song tells of the impossible moment when the #nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos) sings in #Mayfair’s famous garden square. Nightingales have not been heard in Central London, let alone Mayfair, for several hundred years. However Extinction Rebellion, Sam Lee, The #NestCollective and a pop-up flash mob of nature enthusiasts, musicians and supporters will gather to bring nightingale song briefly back into #BerkeleySq. The public are invitred to use their 3G connected smartphone device or tablet and a mobile bluetooth / wired speaker to stream the birdsong to be amplified in a sonic rewilding of the square.

Every Spring for the last five years, folk singer and nature conservationist #SamLee has been running intimate ‘Singing With Nightingales’ concerts in the woods of Sussex, Kent, Essex and Gloucestershire, bringing audiences into ‘ear tinglingly close proximity’ to wild birds while in their season of renowned courtship song. Musicians and singers collaborate with the bird in a sublime duet as the finale of a woodland/campfire experience with conservation awareness at its heart. The event began as an homage to the BBCs pioneering first ever live broadcast in 1924, with Beatrice Harrison famously dueting on cello with a nightingale. Nearly 100 years later, Sam continues that tradition with contemporary players.

The Nest Collective will broadcast nightingale song to Berkeley Square at 6pm on Monday 29 April. Visitors will be invited to stream and play the song through their mobile phones via a dedicated url. Musicians are encouraged to bring their instruments, cellists especially, to make music with this natural improviser. 

This is happening just after the end of Extinction Rebellion’s blockade of a number of high profile locations in London, and will be a peaceful sit down affair.

Schedule

6pm Gather in Berkeley Sq for a first centralised hour of songs and music with XR’s mobile sound system. Includes playing of the RSPBs ‘Let Nature Sing’ single, released on 26 April. This composition is made of red-list endangered bird song and is aiming for that weeks chart as a first ever ‘Getting Nature To #1’

6.50pm Communal sing along of ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Sq’ & teaching of ‘Bon Soir’ - short French round about the nightingale.

7pm Audience members will disperse across the Sq and surrounding street in groups to stream their live feeds through mobile phone speakers, rewilding the entire site with birdsong.  The Nightingale song can be streamed from this webpage www.thenestcollective.co.uk/nightingale. Musicians, bards and poets will pollinate these mini gatherings to share their music. Groups can also recite their own writings or choose from the selection of suggested nature based prose listed on the web link.

9pm ends.

What to bring

Your picnics, blankets, cushions, fully charged mobile phones, laptops, tablets, battery packs, speakers and minirigs, umbrellas, sunglasses, banners, warm clothes, water bottles & drinks, songs and poems to share, candles an open heart and your listening ears.

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I support Extinction Rebellion

Huge admiration for the #ExtinctionR Rebellion #climate protesters in London and elsewhere. My generation have a lot to answer for, particularly those who made it to positions of power in politics and business. Many have been complacent about this challenge and downright indifferent, when they could have pressed for much firmer action years ago, when the evidence was already in. And those who felt politicians would take care of it on our behalf have been far too trusting. We can't put sufficient pressure on them at the ballot box. Civil disobedience is the only way to make politicians (the only people with real power) to change things. And if you ask what have I been doing, well I have been writing about it for almost 30 years, as have so many others with much greater influence than me.

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Is Rome the best international rugby venue?

Nobody should need an excuse to visit Rome, but rugby fans have an extra inducement. In the annual Six Nations tournament, Italy play, depending on how the fixtures work out, two or three games there every year in the Stadio Olimpico.

Seasoned followers of the game will have their favourite Six Nation venues. Dublin, perhaps, for the best atmosphere, the warmest hearted fans, and the most fun in the pub. Cardiff, for concentrated passion in a city centre cauldron. Edinburgh for a polite and  formal kind of big match occasion, with rugged fans in kilts up from the borders, just off a distinguished city centre. 

Paris is just grand, although the excellent public transport can take away the excitement of arrival. London simply carries on being London; nobody notices the 90,000 gathering, easily absorbed in its south-west suburbs. (Although the walk to the Twickenham stadium from Richmond, across the parks and over the River Thames is one of the best ways to arrive at a major stadium in my opinion.)

But nothing beats Rome – where even the directions are part of the thrill of the city – ‘Metro line A (from Termini train station) to Ottaviano station; then the bus 32 to Piazzale della Farnesina. Or Tram # 2 from Piazzale Flaminio.’ Rugby is just more one more pageant there to add to 2000 years of pageants, in the greatest sporting setting of all. Even though I speak as a rugby diehard, it’s the one city location where, if you arrived at the ground to discover you’d left your tickets at home, realising you have an extra three or four hours to experience Rome wouldn’t seem such a poor consolation.

My article:

www.directoryofdestinations.com/destination/rome/

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Communing with lions, without a fence | Directory of Destinations

The writer meets lions, while foot and without an intervening fence, in the Shambala Game Reserve in S. Africa. 30 years ago it was a water melon farm.

There are two lions in this photo. I was about 200 metres away from them, with no intervening fence between our small group (led by a very experienced ranger) and them. I took it in the Shambala Private Game Reserve, S. Africa, in Feb 2018. 30 year ago this was a melon farm. The man who owns Comparethemarket.com bought it and returned it to the wild. However, there are no meerkats. 

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Above: Swansea in December 2010, “as white as Lapland”. Photo:  Laura Davies

Come home to the real “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

Dylan Thomas’s address in Swansea hosts the perfect seasonal stay.

In the deep repose of an old Welsh front parlour in Cwmdonkin Drive, furnished for the early years of the last century, before the days of TV and radio, I conjured up the ghosts of Christmases past.

I could see the Uncles in my mind’s eye, jolly ruddy-faced men tentatively holding their cigars at arms’ length “as though waiting for the explosion.”

Then the Aunties in the scullery, busy with tureens, flushed with a surreptitious tipple. And upstairs in his cramped bedroom, a small boy was sifting through his presents—“the useless and the useful.” That boy was Dylan Thomas. This was his home, and these very rooms inspired his “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

It’s now possible to stay in the setting for that perfect piece of seasonal nostalgia (supply your own uncles and aunties for your re-enactment, if you like), something which so many of us return every year, along with “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Snowman”. And, perhaps, even commune with the muse that inspired Dylan, who was one of the great 20th-century poets writing in English, despite his reputation as a liquor-fuelled hell raiser.

5 Cwmdonkin Drive, the solid, semi-detached house on the steep hill in genteel west Swansea, one of the most important addresses in British literature, is safe for posterity. A local couple, dismayed at its poor condition 71 years after the Thomas family moved out, restored it to the home Dylan would have recognised in the 22 years he lived here, and are letting it for weekend or week long stays. It is open to visitors when there are no guests staying.

I climbed Dylan’s famously steep “chilly, glinting hill” from “A Child’s Christmas”, up from the broad sweep of the bay and, pausing for breath, glanced back to the “carol singing sea.” I knocked at number 5. Geoff Haden opened the front door and drew me instantly back into the tumultuous months of late 1914 when D.J Thomas and his heavily pregnant wife Florence moved into their brand new house.

A scattering of casual domestic particulars immediately fixed the house in its time – stair rods on the stair carpets, a glimpse of lino in the parlour, some hefty Welsh dressers. But the most striking detail was the bold, and it turned out entirely authentic, burgundy paint up the stairway. This vivid alcoholic hue must have etched into the passionate poet’s brain from early babyhood.

With its mix of the new, the second hand and the hand me downs, this is much as the house must have been as the Thomases prepared for the birth of their son in the front bedroom in October 1914. But Geoff and Anne Haden did not create a museum, where people shuffle through the rooms behind ropes, muttering reverentially. Dylan would have found the idea ludicrous. 

The house they remade is to be stayed in, and enjoyed, as a living monument to a man of words. “We are winding the clock back to 1914,” Geoff told me on my visit. “There is no TV, radio or telephones. And mobile phones have a terrible signal here too, so everything conspires against you communicating with anybody other than the people you are with.”

Geoff is a Swansea man himself. He attended the same school as Thomas, five years after he died after a session of heavy drinking in New York City in 1953. He and Anne felt their city had neglected its famous son. When he was alive, strait laced Swansea felt uneasy about its association with the vagabond poet. (That was certainly put right in 2014, with comprehensive celebrations for the centenary of his birth in Swansea and London and many other places.)

Beyond the city his fame was more assured. John Lennon put him on the front cover of the Sgt Pepper album cover. And President Jimmy Carter opened the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea in 1995. “We invited him to the opening of the house, and he sent us a note of good luck.” Bill Clinton, another Dylan fan, did not reply.

The couple first saw the house in 2004, around the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s death, when it was briefly open to visitors. There had been a number of private owners since Thomas’s parents sold it in 1937, Dylan having moved to London a few years earlier. “I was horrified,” said Geoff. “It looked like a rundown student bedsit.” The couple resolved to rescue an important piece of literary heritage.

(Purists may argue that Thomas never lists the address of the boy’s house in A Child’s Christmas. He doesn't say it is Swansea. Nor does he identify the child as himself. But Anne Haden has no doubt that Dylan set the charming fantasy, first published in the Christmas 1950 issue of Harper's Bazaar, in and around his own home. Take away the meteorological hyperbole – severe Arctic winters are rare in South Wales – and the clues in the story are compelling.)

They negotiated a 30 years lease with the owner, a local solicitor, who must give them first option to buy if he decides to sell. Apart from a few original fireplaces and doors, nothing remained, so the Hadens scoured the auction rooms, second-hand shops and antique stores of the locality. They issued media appeals for furniture and fittings from the first part of the 20th century, and gradually filled the house with authentic period detail.

They found beds and mirrors, a Swansea-made piano, and an old bath on legs, now expertly re-enamelled. People donated old Welsh blankets, a mangle for the washroom, and a little push lawnmower. They tracked down an original cooking range for the kitchen, where the Aunties gathered (it cleverly covers a modern cooker, to make life easier for guests). They rebuilt the wash room in the backyard, where Auntie Hannah sang “like a big bosomed thrush.” There used to be a gate here, where Thomas’s father would escape to the pub. So they put it back, although it doesn’t open as houses have been built since behind the property.

Internally the shape of the house is much as it was, with only a few doors moved and walls altered. The Hadens restored doors and walls to their original positions. Craftsmen repaired and revived period details, such as sash windows. Tiles in the original pattern were found in the local DIY superstore. Authentic period light switches were sourced on the Internet in Australia, and were delivered in days.

Crucially the walls had not been re-plastered, a process that would have destroyed the original decoration. The builders stripped them down and discovered traces of the paint applied in 1914. An expert from a local paint store made an exact match. So the shade of burgundy in Mr and Mrs Thomas’s bedroom and on the stairs, the pea green on the landing, and buttercup yellow in Dylan’s sister’s room, were exactly as they were when the house was new.

“We were surprised at the brightness of the colours,” said Geoff. “Somebody came in and said they were too modern. But that’s exactly how they were in 1914, when this was a `modern’ house.”

The large high-ceilinged front bedroom retains the original fireplace that would have warmed the arrival of Dylan on October 27th 1914. Geoff Haden believes the growing boy would have moved from room to room to write his poems and short stories, including “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, written here when he was 19. But the real emotional thunderbolt strikes in Dylan’s own cramped bedroom. He described it as so small he had to come out of it to turn around, and so cold he had to stand against the airing cupboard for warmth.

The room has the only gas lamp in the house. And so, on December 25, some lucky person will be able to turn the gas down, snuggle into the single bed, say some words to the “close and holy darkness” and sleep.

https://www.dylanthomasbirthplace.com

@dylanthomashome

http://www.dylanthomas.com

http://www.garethhuwdavies.com/travel/travel-features/dylan-thomass-worldwide-party-centres-swansea/