Peninsula

So- we climbed into a hired car and sped off to a hired cottage on the coast of the Llyn peninsula. On the first night the rural peace of the village beer garden was broken by a boisterous fifteen-strong party of local lassess all resplendent in identical purple T-shirts bearing the legend 'Happy 18th Birthday Sian', and chattering away in Welsh, with maybe one English word in twenty ('two dry martinis.... twenty quid for a taxi from Bangor..... chicken Korma....outside Plaza bingo in Pwthelli, it was... ') thrown in. A couple of days later Frankie was on the seesaw in the playarea and we got talking to a girl who had emerged from an adjoining front-garden. 'So how old are you then?' I asked, and she counted the numbers out on her fingers, like Frankie might do if he was asked to say his age in French. 'One, two, three, four, five..... oh yes... I'm six years old, I am'.

Apparently the thing you really have to do when you're in the Llyn peninsula is visit the Italianate village at Portmeiron, where apparently they filmed The Prisoner. However we guessed, I think correctly, that spending an afternoon gazing at rococo archways (or whatever Italianate architecture may consist of, I've never actually watched The Prisoner, at least not while sober), figured someway down the list in Frankie's priorities for the holiday week, behind spending every possible waking moment undertaking progressively more ambitious building projects with his bucket and spade at the semideserted beach at the bottom of the road.

While Frankie amused himself by building sandcastles, dams, and air raid shelters (that was his thing last week; the Second World War) out of Llyn peninsula sand, I caught up on the local news, courtesy of the North Wales Post. This featured 35 pages of adverts for caravans, and two news stories. One of these, on the front page, gave a graphic account of a brawl in a hotel carpark. Much more diverting was the centre-spread, which was devoted to the story of a 56- year old security guard employed at the courts in Rhyl, who had failed to turn up at work on Monday morning, having lost his memory due to a bang on the head sustained in the shower. He remained missing from home until the early hours of Thursday, when he was found by the Police asleep in a bus-stop twenty miles away in Porthmadog, still in the same clothes, and with no recollection of his whereabouts during the intervening three days and nights, apart from that he may have at some point seen 'a tower'. Breathless speculation as to the whereabouts of this mysterious tower- could it have been Carnaerfon Castle, the walls at Conwy, or the disused powerstation at faraway Bangor?- took up several paragraphs.

On one of the few days when we didn't head straight for the beach, we caught a steam train (now this is more Frankie's idea of a day out) which emergd out of a lovingly preserved station at Porthmadog, and headed due upwards, climbing for fully an hour, through steepling alplike terrain, where isolated farmhouses and goats cling to the cliffsides and spectacular waterfalls hurtled downwards towards a distant, still,glacial, reservoir. You burst, eventually, through the clouds and emerge... at a fully-sized ex-slate mining town, complete with a branch of the Co-op, a large Council estate , and a group of half a dozen bored teenagers (the sons and grandsons of unemployed ex-slateminers, presumably) messing around on skateboards. This was Blenau Ffestiniog, which, in its glory days of the late 19th and early 20th century, was the source for every roofslate on every house in the coutry. Now it is a little depressed- like Bedlington, except at an altitude of 20000 feet. We had half an hour before the steamtrain back down so ambled along the highstreet, emerging through the clouds and stumbling unexpectedly across a bistro, where the teenage grand-daughter of an unemployed slateminer served us an excellent cappucino.

And then.... then it was time to come back down to earth, and back to everyday reality, of Police sirens wailing through the morning rushhour, and office life, and office gossip, and seventeen different deadlines all to be done by Friday week, and office colleagues buttonholing you at the photocopier with their unsolicited prescriptions as to what should be done about 'these yobs', and Police sirens wailing durng the afternoon rushour, and when we do eventually get home from work twelve hours later, the general and complete and utter disintegration of society being played out live for our delectation and delight on seventeen different rolling news channels (interspersed, for light relief, with furrow-browed economists informing us of the impending collapse of global capitalism).

It's enough to make you want to escape right out of the nerve-jangling city, and for good. What price a small ex-Council semi in the Welsh Alps, do you think? After all, there's a co-op and a cappucino bar, and a four times daily steam train service hurtling down to the seething metropolos that is downtown Porthmadog. I don't know what I'm waiting for, I really don't.