Different Slants

 (# 1 of 4 chapters)

 Bendith Duw ar Bobl Cymru a`u plismyn gwaraidd!!!

(God bless the Welsh People and their civilized policemen!!!)

 

My original motivation to travel to Britain for the first and only time, in 2001, was to investigate Notting Hill.

 

Notting Hill was long famous, even before the warm-hearted film of the same name with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, for its incredibly congested, unbroken mass of bargain-seeking and perspiring humanity crushed within its mile long length, as the best flea market in Europe.

 

While I did find beautiful ceramics, overflowing tables of eccentric flotsam and jetsam, and the original 1964  Beatles periodicals I was actually seeking, as well as a priced-to-sell full suit of medieval English armor for mounted combat or jousting, the memory I find that lingers longest are my three unplanned days in Wales.

 

The distance from London to Cardiff, the capitol of Wales, was slightly less than driving from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin.  Interesting places are much closer together in Great Britain than in the States.  The approximate size of the former homeland of the world wide British Empire is about the same size as Illinois and Indiana, together. 

 

Britannia...small, but mighty!

 

To me, the charm of travel is experiencing the unexpected, and that is what the Welsh Police Force was unprepared for, when I attempted to explore their part of that lovely little island, and they kept crossing paths with the continuously confused Jewish guy from the far more dangerous South Side of Chicago.

 

I just love those guys.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

In May, 2001, without warning them first, I flew from Chicago to England for four days, three of them of exploring Wales.

 

I was going to rent a car in London so I could wander through the Welsh hills, dales and towns. A helpful guy from American Express advised me that my rental car was covered by them as an additional benefit of having their Optima card, and not to take the expensive local insurance policy because that was unnecessary.  I thanked them, packed up my guide books and road maps and left the American Midwest to seek British adventures.

                                                                                                                                                          

This was at the height of the international concern about whether there was an outbreak of mad-cow disease in England, so being a carnivore, I was concerned by how limited that might make my choices of what I could eat there.  Because of severe food allergies, including many fruits, vegetables and even some spices, and not being a fan of East Indian cuisine, this was more than a casual concern. Plus, being slightly kosher, I didn’t eat pork.  Or drink coffee.  Or beer.  Or wine. That little British Isle was beginning to look smaller and smaller.  And even more of an adventure, too.

 

Tea, however, was ok. 

 

Not enough of course, but it was a start.

 

My initial desire to go to Wales was to visit the world famous town of Hay-on-Wye.  I first heard about it years ago when I owned a world-travel bookstore.  It was claimed to be the only town in the world with thirty-five used bookstores, each specializing in a different subject, like cooking, science fiction, art and so on.  Just thirty-five used bookstores, a pub, a gas station and the Wye River swiftly flowing by, to add to the romantic setting.

 

Mae`r Gelli Gandryll yn nefoedd ar y ddaear i  lyfrgarwyr! 

(in Welsh–Hay-on-Wye is Heaven on Earth for booklovers!)

 

I wondered if all that fairy tale charm could actually be true.  I had to see for myself.  It was irresistible.

 

So I landed at Heathrow Airport with my one carry-on bag.  I never take more than a single bag under the theory that the airlines can’t lose something of mine unless I give it to them.  To date, I have never a lost bag.  I also carry a little day bag with me with some essentials: a dozen prescriptions (sigh…); a 1982 antique Olympus X-A 35 millimeter camera, not digital and great pictures, plus ten roles of 36 exposures film; a good historical book set aside in advance especially for a long airplane ride; band aids; a tiny flashlight and a couple of imported dark chocolate bars for hunger emergencies.  My standards for what constitutes an emergency is somewhat flexible when it comes to dark chocolate, now considered to be a health food, thank God.

 

Then I went to the car rental company to pick up my reserved compact Ford, which looked somehow European to me.  The steering wheel being on the right side might have had some small influence on my first impression of how the car seemed kind of alien.  Kilometers prominently displayed on the odometer were another distraction.  But, I dismissed that as no big thing.  As advised by my credit card company I refused the offer of 100% collision insurance from the car rental company and paid them for the three-day rental with my Optima credit card.  My brief thought about that was: “Well, that’s a nice savings.”  

 

It would not be my last thought on that subject after the tumultuous days to come.

 

My first impression of London, while trying to escape from it was:

 “Jesus Christ! This is one huge, complicated and jam-packed city, man!”

 

There was concrete everywhere, big buildings, bridges and thousands of fast cars whizzing around me, as I searched for my exit. The signs being in English were of little comfort because all the names were still foreign to me. There were huge trucks and a great deal of noise surrounding me.  I wanted to get out of London as quickly as I could.  Then the exit I’d been searching for appeared in my windshield and I did. 

 

I was 132 miles from Cardiff, or about two hours away.  Now, I was in no great rush. 

 

The road from London to Cardiff, Wales was beautiful and surprisingly empty.  Little traffic and no visible towns for the majority of the distance between the two cities. No billboards.  Just green, everywhere.  England was many shades of green, was my first impression.  I read they had sixty million people living in Britain, but I saw no evidence of any of them for a long time between London and Cardiff.  That was also when I first noticed that the highway seemed somewhat narrower than in the States. The individual lanes seemed more compact, too, but I thought I might be imagining that part. 

 

So, driving along, casually, I passed exits for Windsor, Maidenhead, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough, Calne, Chippenham, Corsham, the ancient Roman town of Bath, then rolling through the gentle Cotswold Hills I passed Keynsham, the bigger city of Bristol, past the Bristol Channel just by the border of Wales to Newport, and then down the west side of the narrow channel to one of Wale’s largest city, Cardiff.  

 

Cardiff, a modern city of 320,000 people and the Capitol of Wales since 1955, was first inhabited by European Celts, according to excavations, at about 600 B.C.  Its name in Welsh is Caerdydd, which translates, according to most historians, into Fort Dydd or Diff, possibly named after the river Taff where the ancient Cardiff Castle is located.  The Romans built that fort in 75 A.D.  

 

It was attacked by the Normans in 1081 A.D. after the successful 1066 invasion from Normandy, now part of present day France.  The Normans built the castle over the foundations of the destroyed fort. It wasn’t until 1536 that Cardiff and all of Wales became legally part of England, involuntarily, from what I read. Calling the Welsh people British doesn’t necessarily make them believe that, in their hearts. 

 

English was forced upon its inhabitants from the 16th century on, but Welsh lives on and is still spoken there today and taught in many places around the world. The Welsh are a fiercely independent and proud people who may very well regain their independence within this current century, as England peacefully loosens it grip on Wales and Scotland. This disintegration of Great Britain is called Devolution and all sides seem resigned to it, with some Brits happier than others about its inevitability. However, no terrorism or armed conflict is advancing this slow political separation. 

After over one thousand years, the level of intermarriage between the Welsh, the Scots and the descendants of the French invaders is so overwhelming that in reality, I imagine the desire for independence is more about a sense of pride and an effort to preserve distinct geographic and cultural identity.  As an American, my opinion has no place here, but I hope all sides remain friendly and close.  During my visit, I was treated far better than I deserved to be, in some cases, by both the Welsh and the English.  I would happily go back to both places. 

 

I am not some great expert on Welsh or English history, but I read five books about the island before going there, because I want to know where I am, once I get there, especially if time is short.  My story is about an unusual series of experiences I had in a remarkable part of the world.  Besides my own recollection of bits and pieces of what I read seven years ago, I found the very attractive internet site, www.cardiffworld.com  to be a fast source of some of the facts I used in this story.  I thank them for making this writer’s job an easier one.  You can learn a lot more by visiting their site yourself.

 

 After some difficulty, I managed to find a parking place, just outside of the downtown Cardiff business district.  There were great masses of people clogging the streets and some serene-looking police on horseback watching all of them.  I had no clue about the reason for this.  I had traveled to both England and Wales without any reserved places to sleep, figuring I could find a B & B with no real trouble, because I’d done that several times in the past, including in non-English speaking countries.  There was always someplace looking for a little revenue.  But not this time.

 

I, not being even remotely interested in sports of any kind, made a strategic mistake in not taking into account how big a deal red hot soccer playoffs were to thousands and thousands of local people and not-so-local people.  The match was between Edinburgh and Cardiff (I hope that’s correct) and of major importance to all sides. 

 

When I walked from my car to where the mobs were, about a mile, I was not overjoyed to find huge throngs of people with their faces painted in their team’s respective colors.  The mounted cops, relatively few in number compared to what would have been a reason to roll out the National Guard in Chicago, seemed very adequate to keeping the peace, sort of.  It was my first close-up impression of Welsh cops.

 

One side would let out with a roar, and I mean really thundering damn roar–their team’s slogan or name or whatever– and then the other side would roar in response, as aggressively as they could be, I felt, without both sides throwing rocks.  The streets were virtually impassible and I was this bewildered Chicagoan standing in the midst of all this, pretty much terrified by what seemed to be an imminent eruption of chaotic violence. 

 

The city, and not a very large city, looked like it had seen better times, with a number of empty storefronts papered over.  This problem was not limited to Wales, of course, but it was my first impression.  Difficult economic times might be part of all of this, as far as I knew, when my eyes fell upon this walled something in the center of town, about two blocks away.  I squeezed my way toward it, seeking refuge, as my face was conspicuously unpainted and possibly suspect to the crowds I was attempting to squish through. Despite my trepidations, no one harmed me. I realized that fact a bit later, however, when I finally reached my objective, after about an hour.

 

I found the small entrance to the very old looking structure and discovered it was a gift shop, of all things, and the entrance to ancient Cardiff Castle as well.  For a very small amount of money, I paid to enter and discovered that I had the very large, and I mean square blocks of empty space, all to myself, with this tiny and crumbling castle at the center of the walled enclosure.

     

It was very eerie to be walking quietly around the silent historic grounds of what used to be royal, with the incessant roaring going back and forth like an audio tennis match, just outside the walls.  I found it to be meditative and I stayed in there a while, imagining myself to be under siege by nameless invading hordes.

 

I will survive, I thought to myself, with a smile. Let them come.

 

I decided, while waiting for the mobs outside the walls to go someplace else, to pretend that I was in the Welsh Alamo…and (what the hell) that I was Davy Crockett Jones.  Maybe someday, people would write songs about my valiant last stand…

 

Later, and very curious, perhaps because I named my son David after Davy Crockett, I looked up Crockett’s ancestry on the internet.  To my surprise, the famous frontiersman’s family name was originally de Crocketagne and his ancestors were French Protestant Huguenots who fled religious persecution in France around 1690, first emigrating to Cork, Ireland and later to Donegal.  Crockett’s grandfather, also David, sailed for America about 1760 and his father John was supposedly born at sea on the way over. Later John fought in the Revolutionary War against the British. 

 

From this wonderfully convoluted history of an American hero, I concluded that Crockett, being sort of Irish, if only because his French family was there for seventy years on their way to America, that Crockett was Celtic (by association) and Ireland being incredibly close to Wales, he could have been a Welsh hero if his family hadn’t left for the “Streets of Gold” to the West.

 

Where was I?

 

Oh, yes!  Cardiff Castle.

 

So, later that afternoon, noticing it was getting darker and remembering I had no place to stay, I left the castle and walked back toward my car through streets that were now largely empty and unusually quiet.  I decided that it was useless to try to go to a government office in town to find someplace to sleep, with all the out of town soccer-mad people already lodged there for the big match.  So, that situation only left my going door-to-door-to-door, stopping at every single house or row house on my way back to my car. 

 

Persistence counts, I learned long ago.  After about one hundred “sorry, no’s” a balding, friendly middle-aged man came to his door in an undershirt, listened to my bedraggled question and replied,

 

“Sure, yeah, I gotta room left. Some guy reserved it but he never showed up, so lucky for you, eh?”  

 

I believe the rent was thirty pounds (then, about $45.00) a night and I for stayed three nights. That included breakfast, but the next morning I didn’t recognize anything on the tray that was offered to me, so I thanked them and left for the day. 

 

To avoid offending anyone, always a good idea when in other countries, I told them I was an Orthodox Jew and I never ate breakfast, assuming that was exotic enough of an excuse that they would shrug their shoulders and go back to watching a BBC story about soccer on their television. 

 

Years earlier, I had gotten seriously sick in New York City and later in San Antonio from food poisoning, so for me, no food was better than pot luck. Better hunger than agony, always.

 

So, as I had learned to do long ago, I found a friendly neighborhood grocery store, bought a small loaf of hard crusty bread, some slices of Cheddar cheese, a bunch of purple grapes and a local soft drink.  I walked all around town, eating out of the paper bag and it was great.  And very cheap, too.

 

I visited bookstores and craft shops and department stores to see how the Welsh merchandised their products. I talked to lots of people.  Everyone was open and friendly.  Some people asked me where I was from, since I don’t look very Welsh, I guess, but it never seemed important to anyone and I felt at home and at ease, while there.  Many of the young girls were very pretty and quite distinctive looking.  Yes, I noticed.  I may have been fifty-one at the time, but I wasn’t dead. 

Mae yna ferched del i`w cael, ond dim byd tebyg i ferched Cymru

(In Welsh–There are pretty girls, and then there are Welsh girls, in a class by themselves)

 

I couldn’t sleep, probably from jet lag, so I got up at 1 am and wandered around the empty streets of Cardiff. Except for some voices feeling no pain at a couple of pubs and some fish and chips joints, the street was silent.  It was eerie.  I didn’t feel concerned for my safety, which was not true for every place in Europe where I’d wandered around the streets late at night. 

 

I was still hungry, so I walked over to a garishly lit chips stand.  Fish is usually safe to eat, if it’s well-cooked and fresh.  Potatoes are also on my eatable list, so, not noticing any dead bodies lying around the stand, I decided to take a chance. Plus, I was curious after years of hearing about chips places in English movies, and I wanted to share that experience. 

 

I got in line, with about a half a dozen people ahead of me, and soon a few more behind me.  It was a busy little place for it being so late at night.  The guy behind the counter was working alone and had just run out of a supply of fried fish, so we were all waiting for a fresh batch to finish frying. 

 

The minutes went by.

 

Most people were quiet, maybe on their way home after working a late shift in a factory. Several were smoking English cigarettes and I inhaled the strong and unfamiliar aroma, as the smoke sort of hung there in the air on the windless night.

 

Then, out of the dark streets around the chips joint appeared a very drunk, blond, middle-aged woman wearing bright red lipstick who, after surveying the line of customers then walked right up to me, specifically, as I waited there in that fish and chips joint, at about 2 am. 

 

Without a word, she grabbed me and kissed me in a wet and passionate way, while I stood there, paralyzed with uncertainty. I didn’t know, in Wales, if this was a good thing or a bad thing, being singled out that way.  Was she trying to warn me away from the fish and chips place?  I wish she had. But never mind that. 

 

That was the end of my first night in Wales.

 What sorts of unexpected experiences would the next day bring?

                                                     The Compassionate Cops of Wales 

 Good Night!

 Bob Katzman