The wet streets of Swansea reveal once more this city perched on the sweep of a curved bay backing onto hills and valleys, dividing the place up into the posh and the less desirable at the whim of geography.
When you enter the better off parts of London they stretch into the distance, the post codes giving the house prices a mounting preposterous value where a single garage can cost hundreds of thousands to buy.
The landed gentry have always enclosed themselves with walls. The
huge houses, sitting amongst cultivated gardens and an artificial lake
have that sense of unreality. How can any one family live in and need so
much space with an the added sobering reality
that the upkeep would send many a person quite mad as Spring approaches
and nature try's, once more to reassert its control. The eternal
weeding out of what comes natural and its replacement with the
artificial, man's enormous ego at work once again.
Swansea has no clearly identifiable estates or houses which one
would call magnificent instead it bleeds the classes into each other as
it were a delta blessed with that most natural flank, the sea. That's
not of course to say one can see the sea. For
large parts of the day its, 'out there' somewhere. There are no
Atlantic rollers crashing in to reveal the seas power rather a timid,
insipid tidal flow which comes and goes like the repetition of a good
clock without cause or to make much of a fuss of. The
town council have, probably with this passivity in mind, flanked the
bay with wide path along which the strollers stroll and the cyclists
ride their bikes each oblivious of the sea. There are no whales spouting
in the bay, no dolphins, no seals, no penguins
only the gregarious sea gulls waiting to snap up the discarded chip.
Of course there will be the outraged local who might take umbrage
and demand I mention Singleton Park and the gentrified housing close by
and, not far away Cwmdonkin Park mentioned by the Welsh bard, Dylan
Thomas. But there is nothing to match the Royal
parks in London, the mansions at Audley End near Safron Walden, or
Harewood House in Yorkshire (where they do have penguins) or the many
other stately pads around the country which were built to house our aristocratic masters.
Swansea is not famous for its town-centre either, no architectural
wonders, no centres of excellence, no historic buildings other than
fragments of a time when the Welsh were more warlike and castles were
built to either keep them in or keep them out.
That's not to say the centre of town doesn't have its quota of lurching semi clad girls and incoherent young men
roaming around on a Friday or Saturday night. The bars and the bouncers
sit, cheek by jowl down Wind Street, music cascading from open doors
onto the street from cavernous buildings which look as if they served a
different era and a different purpose and add a certain sobriety to a
very un-sober street. A narrow passage at the end of the street called
Salubrious Passage, leading to Salubrious Place
has a distinctly Dickensian feel to it, and I wouldn't venture down it late at night if only, to avoid stumbling over some drunken body.
There has been an explosion of small cosmopolitan restaurants. From the ubiquitous Chinese to their neighbours the
Vietnamese. Japanese sit side by side with Italian and French cuisine
and one is spoilt for choice as each business is fully aware of the
competition from this less than well-healed town where many seem to be
on part-time odd jobbing work and some neighbourhoods have a bad name.
To counteract the lack of prosperity the jaunty Welsh character makes a
very pleasant change from the, aren't I so
sophisticated English. Their welcome seems genuine and friendly, the
atmosphere in the pub (other than the city swill) is often laced with
music, particularly jazz where the "older" performer still strums his
stuff and the night is a deafening, foot tapping
limited conversation event and no worse for that.
Of course a mile or two outside the town is the gem of the Welsh countryside. Narrow roads leading to quaint villages
and more castles. The sea and the estuaries dominate the route and one
is forced to do detours of many miles to get to the other side.
The tides come in flooding the fields leaving the sheep stranded but
safe as the moon experts its pull and we are reminded of the nature of all things, not withstanding our own bloated self importance.
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