giving us encouragement. Anne is missing her fresh fish. (It will be another three years before I take home freshly line caught bass, exchanged for books on the world art of tattoo.) Bait in the water, bait in the kiosk. Angling is an apt analogy for what I do. In casting from the pier, care is needed to avoid the jetty. Ah, the jetty. On the pier’s east side. Grade II listed, I’ll have you know. I know because I get it listed – this resilient narrow stone jetty, some 100 metres in length, sloping downward to the strait. Seaweed adheres to its roughly coursed stonework and the large blocks that form its surface. History resides in its architecture. And poetry too.
The jetty was marked as a pier on the 1831 Ordnance Survey map of the area, and is probably the site of an early crossing point to Anglesey. Garth Ferry was an important crossing point before the construction of the Menai Bridge in 1826. A ferry continued to operate from this jetty until the 1960s. I am given to ruminating on the jetty. Before long, I’m fantasising of re-establishing a ferry service between Garth Jetty and Beaumaris. I know a man with a boat licensed to carry passengers. But the council is decidedly unenthusiastic. You can only fantasise so much. Dan and I decide not to renew the lease.
A week preceding the kiosk’s closure, a young woman asks me for ‘that poem in the Four Weddings and a Funeral film.’ Having no Auden in the kiosk I give her directions to Dan’s shop.
The pier has an awe-inspiring panorama of wave, wood and mountain. Fixed to the benches are memorial plaques with touching inscriptions. ‘In loving memory Florence Magdalen Feasy who swam the Menai Strait in 1929, aged 15’. ‘Capt Marcel Le Comte 1938–2007 A true Garth boy Son of Henri and Gladys.’
Wind whistling through the shrouds in the boat yard is good for the lamentation of the soul. And for sheer power nothing beats Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch’s Lament for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last Prince.
‘The heart’s gone cold, under a breast of fear;
Lust shrivels like dried brushwood.
See you not the way of the wind and the rain?
See you not oaktrees buffet together?
See you not the sea stinging the land?
See you not truth in travail?
See you not the sun hurtling through the sky?
And that the stars are fallen?
Do you not believe God, demented mortals?
Do you not see the whole world’s danger?
Why, oh my God, does the sea not cover the land?
Why are we left to linger?
Prades, Pyrenees, 1995
We drive to the Pyrenees via Carcassonne. Consuming several cloves of garlic in a cassoulet there has undesirable consequences. In the night the garlic will seep out from my every pore, much to everyone’s disgust. Fortunately, by the time we call on a newsagent in Prades, a small town perched high in the Pyrenees, my body hasn’t yet worked out a purging strategy for garlic overdose. It might have undermined the business proposal.
I have compiled a 200-book collection of holiday reads; best sellers in the main, including plenty of thrillers. The newsagent is open-minded; perfectly willing to take the books on sale or return basis. We agree to go halves on a standardised sale price of three francs.
Two weeks later I descend the Pyrenees, from near the Spanish border, on a little yellow train in an open-air carriage. We pass through little villages clinging to the rocky hillside, narrow gorges and tiny valleys. This scenic narrow gauge petit train jaune connects with a standard gauge service at Villefranche, the terminus for main-line trains from Perpignan. En route, I call on the Prades newsagent to learn that she has sold 108 books. In addition to English tourists, she tells me that Dutch and Germans are also buying.
Correze, November 1996
We take turns driving to Correze in a hired van. Brian, my new business partner, is in good form; his conversation is a strange mix of the sublime and the obscene. Brian’s true passion is classical music and much
The jetty was marked as a pier on the 1831 Ordnance Survey map of the area, and is probably the site of an early crossing point to Anglesey. Garth Ferry was an important crossing point before the construction of the Menai Bridge in 1826. A ferry continued to operate from this jetty until the 1960s. I am given to ruminating on the jetty. Before long, I’m fantasising of re-establishing a ferry service between Garth Jetty and Beaumaris. I know a man with a boat licensed to carry passengers. But the council is decidedly unenthusiastic. You can only fantasise so much. Dan and I decide not to renew the lease.
A week preceding the kiosk’s closure, a young woman asks me for ‘that poem in the Four Weddings and a Funeral film.’ Having no Auden in the kiosk I give her directions to Dan’s shop.
The pier has an awe-inspiring panorama of wave, wood and mountain. Fixed to the benches are memorial plaques with touching inscriptions. ‘In loving memory Florence Magdalen Feasy who swam the Menai Strait in 1929, aged 15’. ‘Capt Marcel Le Comte 1938–2007 A true Garth boy Son of Henri and Gladys.’
Wind whistling through the shrouds in the boat yard is good for the lamentation of the soul. And for sheer power nothing beats Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch’s Lament for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last Prince.
‘The heart’s gone cold, under a breast of fear;
Lust shrivels like dried brushwood.
See you not the way of the wind and the rain?
See you not oaktrees buffet together?
See you not the sea stinging the land?
See you not truth in travail?
See you not the sun hurtling through the sky?
And that the stars are fallen?
Do you not believe God, demented mortals?
Do you not see the whole world’s danger?
Why, oh my God, does the sea not cover the land?
Why are we left to linger?
Prades, Pyrenees, 1995
We drive to the Pyrenees via Carcassonne. Consuming several cloves of garlic in a cassoulet there has undesirable consequences. In the night the garlic will seep out from my every pore, much to everyone’s disgust. Fortunately, by the time we call on a newsagent in Prades, a small town perched high in the Pyrenees, my body hasn’t yet worked out a purging strategy for garlic overdose. It might have undermined the business proposal.
I have compiled a 200-book collection of holiday reads; best sellers in the main, including plenty of thrillers. The newsagent is open-minded; perfectly willing to take the books on sale or return basis. We agree to go halves on a standardised sale price of three francs.
Two weeks later I descend the Pyrenees, from near the Spanish border, on a little yellow train in an open-air carriage. We pass through little villages clinging to the rocky hillside, narrow gorges and tiny valleys. This scenic narrow gauge petit train jaune connects with a standard gauge service at Villefranche, the terminus for main-line trains from Perpignan. En route, I call on the Prades newsagent to learn that she has sold 108 books. In addition to English tourists, she tells me that Dutch and Germans are also buying.
Correze, November 1996
We take turns driving to Correze in a hired van. Brian, my new business partner, is in good form; his conversation is a strange mix of the sublime and the obscene. Brian’s true passion is classical music and much
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