An American In Wales

The Grass is Always Grayer Next to the Slate Mine: Forty Five Letters from Wales

Lawrence Zeitlin

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The Grass is Always Grayer Next to the Slate Mine: Forty Five Letters from Wales Lawrence Zeitlin

Letter 1 Sept. 20, 1998 It took us 19 hours on the clock to get to Wales. Six hours in the air, four hours waiting in airports, five hours time difference, and four terrifying hours driving from London to Bangor on the wrong side of the road. We hadn’t slept much that week attending to the details of closing our house, paying the bills and arranging the finances for a year abroad. The day before we left was spent packing and repacking the bags to make sure that we didn’t exceed airplane weight limits. Then came a rush hour crawl to Kennedy airport for our evening departure. We had an early morning arrival in London. By the time we arrived I was in the terminal stages of jet lag. And, of course, the driver from the car rental agency failed to show up at the gate. Two frantic calls to the agency finally elicited the information that the drivers wait outside the terminal in a specially marked area. Obviously everyone but us knew that. Dragging our 80 pound duffel bags each plus assorted hand luggage, we managed to flag down the bus just as it was pulling out. The clerk at the car rental agency must have thought that that I was in the tertiary stage of Alzheimer’s. By that time I could hardly sign my own name much less interpret the map showing how to leave the airport and make it to the main highway. It didn’t help that he gave the instructions in a Middle Eastern accent. Fortunately Maggie travels better than I do. Her calm facade convinced the clerk that she would grab the wheel in case anything went wrong. He probably assumed that she was my nurse and attendant. By the time we got to Bangor both of us were ready to be institutionalized.

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We stashed our bags in the tiny rental car and made it to the highway with only a few wrong side of the road errors. Maggie screamed and I jerked the wheel and we tried to ignore the other swearing drivers by pretending we were French and didn’t understand the language. Just before we left New York a last minute message told us that the house the university had rented for us was not ready. The note gave us directions to an alternate temporary house on the outskirts of Bangor. The directions, written by the rental agency secretary, a lifelong Welsh resident, made two unwarranted assumptions. First, that we would be coming on the main road from Manchester airport instead of London, and second, we knew the names of the local streets, even the unmarked ones. At about 8pm as the anxiety of being stranded in a strange country with too much luggage began to reach near overwhelming levels, I recognized one of the streets mentioned in the directions. Gathering courage I interrupted the TV watching of the landlady of a bed and breakfast at the end of the street. Waving my e-mail printout in her face, I asked if she had any idea where the address was. The fall back plan was simply to get a room at the B&B. The landlady was not sure but she knew that a woman at the end of a lane a few hundred yards away often rented her house to summer vacationers. Since the rental agency arranging for our house was called Menai Bridge Vacation Cottages that was an encouraging sign. We turned down the narrow lane and into a much smaller driveway and found an unoccupied house. The key was hidden just where the e-mail said it would be. Our temporary residence was a two story, three bedroom vacation "cottage" in the middle of a small lovely garden, a short distance away from Penrhyn Castle. The “cottage” was owned by a minor member of the British nobility who rented it out to supplement diminished income from the family estate. The house looked like it had been designed primarily for formal entertaining. There was a large dining room suitable for seating a dozen guests connected by a passageway to a functional kitchen. All decorations were in white. Each room could be closed off by a door. The nicely tended garden was enclosed by a wall to shield it from neighbor’s eyes. The second floor windows gave us an unimpeded view of the green Welsh landscape with rolling hills stretching for miles.

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Letter 2 Sept. 21, 1998 Penrhyn Castle was our first tourist sight. It was new as castles go, only about 130 years old. It had been built by a wealthy slate mine owner to show off his riches and entertain the upper crust, kings, queens, and other fellow robber barons. The castle exterior was constructed of cut stone, impressive to behold but with too many windows to stave off a determined assault. The interior shouted excess. It was festooned with richly carved dark and massive furniture and wall decorations. The servants quarters, on the other hand, were tucked in remote recesses of the structure and were Spartan in their austerity. Conspicuous consumption was the mark of the gentry in those days but they certainly watched their pennies when it came to the lower classes. Offsetting the heavy handedness of the castle was its beautiful multilevel garden with unusual plants and some real palm trees. This very well manicured garden extended for several hundred yards around the castle and contained many plants that we didn’t recognize. Five days later, we moved into our permanent home in Menai Bridge on the island of Anglesey. Many houses in Britain have no street address, just a name that everyone in the vicinity recognizes. Ours was named “Sunnmore” on a street named Mywent Menai. We went looking for it on a weekend before the rental office opened. Without a map we drove around Menai Bridge hoping to catch a sight of the street name. Despite the earlier success of this random search strategy, after a half-hour of fruitless driving it seemed only prudent to ask a native for the directions. “Oh,” he said, looking at the address, “you want the cemetery.” We didn’t look so chipper that morning but I didn’t think we looked quite that bad. It turns out that we really did want the cemetery. Mywent Menai means Menai Cemetery in Welsh. After getting the key from the rental agency, we inspected our new abode.

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Sunnmore is at the end of a short, quiet lane next to the old town cemetery. Across the way is a large field with a small flock of grazing sheep and just beyond is a cricket pitch. If you gaze out the window, you can get a glimpse of the Menai Strait. The single story white stucco house seemed disappointingly small after the "cottage" but it is really quite cozy. The roof is slate. The plumbing works but is archaic. The stove is erratic. The refrigerator is small. It is very, very British. Inside, the house has an adequately sized kitchen and a combination dining and family room. Next to the family room is the living room with a nice upholstered couch and chair, end tables and a fireplace. A large picture window looks out on the garden. There is a 25” TV set with an extremely balky remote control and very poor reception, even of the local station. The living room has off white wall to wall carpeting, giving it the place a very light airy feel but inspiring terror every time one contemplated pouring a glass of red wine. There are three bedrooms, a fair sized master bedroom and two smaller rooms. I staked out the smallest one as an office and Maggie requisitioned the other as an art studio. We also have a bathroom with all the essentials including a constant flow electric shower that must be turned on by a special high capacity switch. The shower has only one comfortable setting that you must learn to love. The garden, an essential feature of all semi-rural Welsh houses, is about the size of a singles tennis court. It is bordered by trees, some quite large, on the side fronting the Menai Strait and by a crumbling brick wall on the side nearest the cemetery lane. It has a vaguely unkempt look and it obviously hasn’t been tended to since the last tenants moved out. One former resident placed an abstract sculpture constructed of concrete blocks in the corner of the garden. The verbal description doesn’t do it justice. Maggie and I agreed that it looks quite nice. The grass is very green and there are even some low growing tropical plants. Our front door opens into the garden but it is stuck and may never open at all. We introduced ourselves to the neighbors, busy working in their yards. They told us that the house we would be living in was often leased to visiting professors. Both neighboring families were connected with the School of Ocean Sciences, headquartered in Menai Bridge just about a mile away from our lane. The town is a favored location for faculty residences, especially for older faculty with families.

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The next day Kinross Kincade the owner of the house arrived to show us the idiosyncrasies of the heating and plumbing system. He was an engineer of half Scots, half Welsh descent who hated the fact that he lived just over the border in despised England. He had worked in America and apologized for the inadequacies of Welsh plumbing and central heating. The water pressure fluctuated so much during the day that most of the local houses had a large tank in the attic that was filled whenever there was enough pressure to reach upstairs. There was central hot water baseboard heating driven by a cranky boiler that supplied both hot water and room heat but apparently not both at the same time. Mr. Kincade said he would send a carpenter around to repair the front door and attend to some broken slates on the roof. Toward spring he would also arrange for a gardener to do the heavy work in the garden. In the meantime he showed me the miniscule electric lawn mower in the garage in case I wanted to trim the lawn. The mower looked like it had never been used by the former tenants. I think Mr. Kincade suspected that we wouldn’t use it either. Mrs. Kincade was proud of the white rug and told Maggie that the old one had been replaced because the previous tenants had indeed spilled wine on it. Maggie thanked her for her confidence in our housekeeping ability. The Kincades said they would call back from time to time to see if we needed anything and then vanished. Letter 3 Sept. 25, 1998 Menai Bridge is a small harbor town boasting a population of about 5000. Its Welsh name is Porthathwy, but few, except the most zealous Welsh nationalists call it that. It has one supermarket, two gas stations, three banks, four churches, and too many pubs to count. Everything, no matter how new, looks at least a century old. We live about a half mile from the center of town, a nice stroll in good weather. The road in front of our house also borders the Menai Strait so the walk is scenic as well. The burbling water of the strait frames the view of the Snowdonia mountains in the distance.

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The center of attraction in Menai Bridge and the town's raison d' etre is the bridge itself. The steel link suspension bridge across the Menai Strait was built in 1826 and was the first of its kind in the world. It connects the island of Anglesey (where we live) to the mainland. The bridge made possible a land route from Holyhead, the port where the Irish ferries docked, to England. Thomas Telford, the bridge architect, was a civil engineering genius who left his mark on most British construction projects of the early 1800s. Every town hereabouts has its Telford designed bridge or aqueduct or roadway or even tollhouse. Most are still in use, having outlived more contemporary construction. The best view of Menai Bridge is from the other side of the Menai Strait. You see the town as returning sailors would once have seen it, a village of cottages and pubs rising from the waterfront, backed by the larger houses of ship owners. In Victorian times Menai Bridge was a major port and the bridge had to be built high enough for the masts of ships to pass under. Paddle steamers from Liverpool moored at the town piers, pausing just long enough to unload passengers and cargo, while the crew nipped up to the Liverpool Arms for a quick refreshment before the return journey. The Menai Bridge waterfront still has its boats but they are usually used for pleasure and fishing. At low tide most boats on moorings near the shore sit on the exposed mud bottom. Many of the sailboats have twin keels for a good reason. They don't fall over on their sides when the tide goes out. Of course the bridge was built when horse carts and shoe leather were the primary means of travel. The arches through the Menai Bridge supporting towers are so narrow that the small town busses have less than two inches of clearance. I grip the wheel tightly and reflexively scrunch my shoulders together when I drive through. The roadway is strewn with the glitter of broken side view mirrors. A couple of decades after the Telford bridge was built, the railway came to Wales and another bridge across the Menai Strait was needed to carry the tracks. This bridge, the Britannia Bridge, was designed by Robert Stevenson, the famous railway engine builder. It is about a mile away from the Telford Bridge at a slightly wider part of the strait. Originally the Britannia Bridge consisted of twin rectangular metal tubes supported by large stone towers. The railroad tracks were inside the tubes. About 30 years ago, two boys lit a fire near the tracks to roast

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sausages. The wind sucked the fire into the tubes and the creosote soaked ties burned with such a fierce heat that the tracks and the tubes melted. Only the massive stone towers remained. By way of turning lemons into lemonade, the towers were used as the supports for a six lane superhighway that now crosses the strait and permits trucks too large to use the Telford Bridge to cross from Anglesey to the mainland. The only other way to get across is to swim. The Menai Strait itself is about 14 miles long, quite wide at each end and narrowing down to a constricted channel of a few hundred yards at the Telford Bridge. There is a regular 26 ft. tide in these parts. At the full and new moons the tide can swing up to 30 ft. The different water levels between each end of the strait force a swift current through the narrow portion that can reach almost 15 miles an hour. On a mild day the strait looks peaceful enough but when the wind picks up the waters can be stormy. The tidal currents are said to be the fiercest in the British Isles. The strait is pockmarked with small islands, some barely more than large rocks, but a few of considerable size. The small ones disappear when the tide rises, the only evidence of their existence being ripples and eddies in the current. Of the few that remain above water, the most interesting is Church Island, a five acre plot of rocky land containing a tiny stone chapel, the church of St. Tysilio. It is surrounded by a profusely flower planted cemetery. The island can be reached by a narrow causeway from shore. The dates on the gravestones show that burial on the island largely ended about the time of WWI. Bodies were interred from about 1700 through 1920. They were the local fishermen, seamen, and servicemen who died during the days of British empire building. Many of the tombstones had multiple names engraved, all with the same date of death, telling of a common tragedy that wiped out an entire family. Despite the morbid implications of the site, the island is incomparably beautiful in the afternoon sunlight. The low angle of the light gives the flowers an unearthly luminance, especially when viewed against the slate gray grave markers. A winding trail threads through the cemetery spiraling up to an obelisk at the peak of the hill dedicated to Welsh servicemen who fell in various wars. From the hill, you can see our house on the shore of the Menai Strait.

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The other interesting island is about half a mile south of Church Island toward the Britannia Bridge. It is much smaller, only about one acre at low tide. Right in the center is a stone farmhouse that would be unremarkable if it were anywhere but in the middle of the Menai Strait. There is a family living in the house and a few sheep in a pen just outside the door. There is no way to reach the island except by boat, and that only when the current is slack. At the bimonthly spring tides, when the water reaches its highest levels, little wavelets lap against the front stoop and the sheep get their feet wet. A bit more global warming and the family will be forced to move to the second floor and raise ducks. Across the Menai bridge is the town of Bangor, the major metropolis in North Wales. It has a population of nearly 20,000 people, not counting the students at the University. In days gone by it was a main port for slate roofing tile export. The location was ideal, a protected harbor and downhill from the mines. The slate was quarried, sawed into blocks, then hand split into tiles, each about 1/4 of an inch thick. Narrow gauge railway carts were loaded with the tiles and gravity took over, the carts rolled downhill to the wharf. The heavy loaded carts pulled the empty carts back uphill by a pulley system. Now the main business of the town is the University. Naive students are pulled uphill by learned professors. Letter 4

Sept. 30. 1998

Bangor is a city in miniature. Like most university towns situated in a rural area, it is both sophisticated and backward at the same time. It has an ancient cathedral dating from 526 AD, probably the oldest in Britain. The building has been rebuilt many times but the site is the same. Computer and Hi Fi stores, large and modern supermarkets and auto dealerships jostle for space on the same street with cattle and sheep farms. In fact every green area that is not officially designated as a city park, or someone's back yard supports a small flock of grazing sheep. Most University buildings are on top of a hill in the center of town with a commanding view of the countryside. The buildings were designed to mimic the much older Bangor Cathedral located at the base of the hill. They look so much like the cathedral that tourists get confused and often head to the college administration office when they want to pray. The hill itself is known as Roman Camp although there is no evidence that the

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Romans ever camped there or even visited the site where the city is now. The Romans did have a big fort ten miles from Bangor at Caernarfon. This fort, Sergontium, garrisoned about 1000 legionnaires whose job was to control the coast and keep the Irish at bay. The base operated for 400 years. When the paychecks from Rome stopped coming, most of the soldiers just stayed, married local women and added to the confused gene pool of Wales. Welsh can trace their ancestors to Celts, Druids, Norsemen, Romans, Saxons and assorted sailors who just happened to wash up onshore. After the Bangor Cathedral, the tourist feature most mentioned in the guidebooks is the Victorian Pier. In the late 1800s a group of promoters decided that a strolling and fishing pier extending into the Menai Strait would be a good way to entice visitors to stay in town. The pier, overhauled a few years ago, is a spidery metal bridge like structure reaching about halfway across the strait. The boardwalk on top is about 80 ft. wide, flanked with small shops and kiosks that offer beverages, postcards, and other souvenirs. The far end of the pier has a lower platform for fishing. Fishermen can drop a line into the middle of the strait without getting seasick in a small boat. The few times we walked the pier it was almost deserted. Shopkeepers we talked to claim that it had been the worst summer for business they had ever seen. Still, the view from the pier is magnificent - but then we are seeing it for the first time. Most of the city streets are narrow, about two cars wide. Parking is usually allowed along one side. This reduces the driving width to about one lane in most places. When two cars meet, one always has to pull into the curb or back up to allow the other one to get by. There is a protocol for this maneuver that I haven't quite figured out yet. Probably the one that gets to the bottleneck first has the right of way. A big truck or bus ALWAYS has the right of way. Pedestrians never have the right of way. Fortunately most British automobiles are small so that the restricted passages are navigable. The car we have rented on a monthly basis is a deep blue Vauxhall Corsa. It's smaller than the old Volkswagen Beetle but has four doors and will carry four adults or a surprising amount of luggage. On the trip from London we had it packed with three suitcases, a computer case, and two 80 pound duffel bags. The engine is a three cylinder buzz box but seems to have enough power to give the car a lively performance.

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Driving is a challenge. Dealing with narrow streets is essentially a matter of confidence and courage. My real problem is the requirement for driving on the left hand side of the road and observing the rules for who goes first. Right of way for the car on the left is contrary to all my prior driving experience. In addition, our car has a traditional floor mounted 5 speed gearshift, a device which I have not operated for 20 years. The shift lever is also on the left hand side of the driver. This means that the gears must be shifted with the left hand, something I've never done. The first few days were white knuckle anxiety provoking, but after about a week, I began to get the hang of it. We get along now with only an occasional gear clash and a few horn honks from other drivers. Maggie gives me a running commentary on which cars are coming from where. At the suggestion of the carpenter that Mr. Kincade hired to work on our house roof, we mounted a plastic sign with a big letter "P" on the back of the car. This tells following drivers that I am a new driver who has just passed the driving test and they should not expect too much of the old geezer who is fumbling around with the gear shift. Letter 5

Oct. 12, 1998

The reason we came to Wales was to allow me to direct a project on cultural psychology funded by Unilever, the big Anglo/Dutch soap company. Nothing was ready, although everyone was expecting us. I had no office space, no telephone, no computer, and no assistant. To top it off, Brian Maguire, the fellow who had negotiated the project and who had been my point of contact for the last year, was leaving to accept a new position at a college in Ireland. Maggie had asked me to get a definitive work statement before we left the US but I assured her that there was no reason to worry. One would be provided as soon as we arrived. In fact there is no work statement. The project is whatever I want it to be. Jane Raymond, the heir of Brian's responsibility, is a Professor of Experimental Consumer Psychology and is an expert on visual perception. While she has been most agreeable, she sees the cultural program as simply adding to her responsibility without any compensation. There is an another cultural problem too. British Universities rate departments and programs on the basis of their "scientific" contributions. Applied projects, despite the fact that they bring in money, are viewed with disdain. Well, I've got a clean sheet of paper. Now I have to figure out what to write on it.

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Speaking of clean sheets of paper, Maggie found out about some art courses from our very helpful neighbor. These courses are sponsored by the local Council and by the University and are located within walking distance of our house. The Council, roughly equivalent to the county government in the U.S., sponsored its course to give pensioners and unemployed citizens something to do with their idle hours. True to socialist doctrine, you paid what you could afford. If you had no income the course was almost free. Since lack of a work permit prevented us from earning income in the UK we were considered unemployed and our age made us pensioners. The University course was designed for bringing art teachers up to speed on a variety of creative techniques. Maggie’s fine art degree from UCLA qualified her for that course. We made the rounds of art stores yesterday for Maggie to stock up on supplies and she has been sketching up a storm. The neighboring family, the Simpsons (no not THOSE Simpsons) have been quite helpful in giving us local information. John Simpson is head of the Ocean Science program. He is in his mid 50s, tall, balding, and taciturn. He gives the impression of being stand-offish until the topic turns to oceanography. His eyes light up and he will talk for hours about ocean currents, waves, and the motions of plankton. That, and sundials. He is a collector of all sorts of information on exotic antique sundials. His wife Francis is an attractive lady with salt and pepper greying hair. She is a former French and Spanish teacher. Now she decorates wedding and special occasion cakes for a part time income and gardens for an avocation. They have two grown daughters, one a physician in Scotland, the other working in London. John’s marine consulting activities have taken the Simpsons all over the world from Japan to the US to South America. At first Francis used to go along on all these trips but lately she has been staying home. Two or three months absence just ruins her garden. Also her daughter, the doctor, is getting married in the Spring and both the garden and the wedding arrangements must be perfect when the guests arrive. Gardening is more than a hobby here. It is a way of life. Wales has such a moderate, moist climate that plants literally leap out of the ground. Almost anything grows. There are few killing frosts and no heat waves. The summer sun provides nearly 16 hours of sunlight a day. Every store sells flowers and potted plants. Two or three daily gardening TV programs provide instruction and inspiration.

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Even exotic species grow well. For years Maggie tried to convince me that palm trees grew in Britain. Now I believe her. Many of the local gardens have palms and we even have a tropic bushlike palm in our yard. True, they are not the stately Royal palms of Miami Beach, but they are palms nevertheless with fronds and even small coconut like seed pods. The other exotic plant is the rhododendron. Some time ago, an imported rhododendron escaped from the confines of a country garden, and now they cover the landscape, growing to treelike size. The true Welsh bemoan the fact that this import has taken over the Snowdonia mountains and changed the nature of the landscape, but in reality, the rhododendrons are rather pretty, remain green all year, and flower wonderfully in the Spring. Besides, being native to the Himalayas, they certainly can stand any Welsh winter. Letter 6

Oct. 18, 1998

Wales is a small country, about the size of Massachusetts. It is strategically located on England’s western coast bordering the Irish Sea. Blessed and cursed with fertile farmland and abundant mineral deposits of copper, coal, and slate, Wales makes an attractive prize. Possession of the country meant control of the Irish Sea and the right to exploit Welsh natural resources. So Wales was sequentially dominated by the Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, and the English. At the moment Wales is in the throes of surging nationalism. The recent history of Wales is one of almost constant struggle with England, first to avoid conquest, then a period of rebellion, then economic exploitation, and finally a fight to preserve Welsh culture. This area is dotted with castles built by England’s Edward I in the late 13 century to discourage the troublesome Welsh. Edward hired the premier stonemason of Britain, James of St. George to supervise construction. James revealed an unexpected genius as a military architect as well being a master of the practical aspects of stone masonry. He was responsible for planning and building at least 12 of Edward’s castles, each more sophisticated and militarily defensible than the last. These may have been the last purely fighting castles ever made since gunpowder and wall busting cannons arrived on the European continent about a century later. th

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James was also a very compulsive bookkeeper. His pay records and daily accounts survive to this day. They show that he was honest as well as parsimonious. Unlike modern day public works, no scandal or graft attached to the construction and the castles rose on schedule, one every two or three years. For this he was amply rewarded by the king and lived out his retirement in bourgeois splendor. We visited three of the castles in the “iron ring”, Caernarfon, Beaumaris, and Conwy. All are along the North coast of Wales on the stretch of water connecting Caernarfon and Conwy bays. The Menai Strait runs between those bays. Caernarfon Castle and Conwy Castle are on the mainland while Beaumaris is on the island of Anglesey. The castles are about a day's medieval foot soldier march apart or a half hour's drive by car. Caernarfon Castle was our first. It is big and impressive with octagonal towers. The castle’s size was intended to intimidate foes more than its military strength was intended to resist them. It is the theoretical home palace of the Prince of Wales but it's unlikely that Charles ever spent the night there. It has had no roof since the 16th century. The castle is next to a protected boat harbor and in the center of town. Pubs, shops and B&Bs nestle up to the castle walls. We got there in the late afternoon and saw the colors turn golden as the sun set. Truly a beautiful sight and one captured on millions of postcards available in every shop in town. Caernarfon is also the county seat of Gwynedd, the center of Welsh nationalism. The town has expanded well beyond the castle walls and is a manufacturing and market center. Although the Welsh have been under English control for 700 years, English is definitely the second language in this area. Most public signs and political posters are in the Welsh language. Nationalistic fervor is almost at religious intensity since an election is scheduled within a few weeks. Caernarfon is also known as the political seat of Lloyd George, Britain’s Prime Minister in the early part of the 20 th century. It was also the home of Lord Caernarfon, the amateur anthropologist who financed the search for King Tut’s tomb and later died suddenly of either bad oysters or King Tut’s curse. Our next castle was Beaumaris, on Anglesey, just a few miles from our house. This castle is a lean, mean, fighting machine, reputed to be the most advanced example of 13 th century military technology. This castle

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seems less imposing than the others but that's because the construction money ran out before the towers were raised to full height. The compact size is an optical illusion. The physical dimensions are quite a bit bigger than other castles in the “iron ring”. Beaumaris castle consists of four concentric rings of walls and an outer moat about 30 feet wide, probably intended to be inhabited by man eating sharks. Each wall is a complete defense system with an independent supply of food and water. Arrow slots and holes for dumping boiling oil cover both sides of each wall. Any attacker would have to conquer four successive defenses before getting to the central chamber. The war with Wales was over before it was finished. As it is, the castle was tested in battle only during the War of the Roses where it held out for years with just 23 defenders. Apparently the towers were high enough. The town of Beaumaris is unique. It is a little English enclave in this very Welsh part of Wales. The English builders of the castle forcibly evacuated the local Welsh population to a town on the other side of Anglesey. This was considered a merciful action. In other venues the locals probably would have been killed. To get a friendly citizenry around the castle, the seized land was subdivided into small plots and offered to loyal Englishmen at a very reduced cost. A 13 th century advertising campaign touted the advantages of a seaside location to English settlers. The town was renamed Beaumaris or Beautiful Marsh in the frenchified English that the upper classes spoke at the time. The campaign succeeded. The English came to Anglesey and eventually built a proper English village. Today the harbor front is lined with fine old stone houses that resemble those in Bath or in one of the London mews. The yacht club is the biggest in Wales and the main hotel looks transplanted from Brighton. Beaumaris also boasts the oldest house in Britain, a sagging half beamed structure that is still used as a curio shop. As you might expect, the town’s biggest business is tourism. The town of Beaumaris is now a resort area with a big boating contingent and several yacht clubs. This harbor, too, dries out twice a day so a sailor keeps one eye on the sails and the other on the clock or he won't make it back before he is high and dry. Conwy was the final castle in our tour. The 13 th century town walls still exist and it is possible to walk the wall around the whole center section of the city on stones that were laid 700 years ago. The castle itself

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is fairly well preserved. It was used as a military base until the 1600's and was fortified and attacked during the Cromwell rebellion. The reason for the town’s preservation has little to do with the British love for antiquity. Rather is is due to the fact that the main highway to England bypassed the town, leaving it as an occasionally visited backwater. We acted like true tourists in Conwy. We strolled on the town walls and peered into the second floor of houses all around central Conwy. After walking the walls, we explored the castle, climbed every staircase, peered though every portal, camcorder at the ready for each photo op. We ambled along the harbor walk and looked at the smallest house in Wales, only six feet wide. It filled the existing space between two adjacent houses and served as home for a local fisherman for almost 40 years. Maggie had a little cup of cockles with vinegar, which tasted pretty much like minced clams. We ate ice cream cones and took a harbor boat ride. Since we arrived in Wales, everyone has been apologizing for the weather. They must have had a terrible summer. The last few days have been delightful. Of course, tomorrow it will rain. Letter 7

Oct. 20, 1998

We are getting a crash course in Welsh spelling and pronunciation. There is a big nationalist effort to revive the Welsh language and Gwynedd, our home region, is at its epicenter. Most of the people hereabouts speak Welsh. They speak English too whenever they have to conduct business with those foreigners from England. So far we have gotten along fine in conversation. It's just those damned highway signs. Every direction is written in Welsh first, then in English. By the time you read the English wording, it's too late. You have missed the turn and have to drive miles down the narrow lane before you can find a space wide enough to reverse directions. Welsh is taught in schools as a required language and most locals speak it in their homes. This is a matter of pride rather than necessity. It is symbolic of the fact that the Welsh feel that they are a sovereign nation and that the British conquest in 1300 was only a temporary inconvenience. The Plaid Cymru political party devoted to Welsh nationalism feels that they will carry the next election, at least in this area. Their platform is the promise that Wales will have its own parliament, just like

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the Scots. This is called "devolution" and will probably end up with three independent countries on this little island. Not everyone is happy about learning Welsh. The Simpsons have been here 25 years and still don't speak it. The children of non-English speaking immigrants are required to learn both Welsh and English at the same time. Actually, we have been told that it’s not too hard. Every letter is pronounced the same way most of the time. It's just that some of the letters have no equivalent in English. Writing it should be easy. All you have to do is type each consonant twice. The Simpsons invited us over last night to meet our other neighbor on our short street, Chris Richardson and his wife Claire. Maggie and Francis have been trying to get together for tea and crumpets for several days but something has always interfered with their plans. It turned out that Chris was actually the first person we had talked to in hunting for our house. He is an underwater geologist and an expert on all the subterranean rocks around the British Isles. He isn’t Welsh either. Watching local TV is like watching two channels of PBS and two channels of the worst of the UPN network. BBC 1 and BBC 2 are chock full of educational shows, carefully mounted dramas, and documentaries, all without commercials. The other two channels are almost entirely devoted to bad sitcoms and sexploitation shows, some from US TV, some domestic and some in Welsh. The news programs are intelligent with serious newscasters, no "happy news" clowns, but the main story of the moment is the Clinton show, which is hard to distinguish from the Rikki Lake sleaze. Thankfully commercials are concentrated in the five minute interval between shows. Just enough time to fix a snack or go to the bathroom. It was a real shock to have to buy a TV license to use a set. The license, paid at the local post office, cost about $175 for 12 months. A black and white TV license is half that but B&W sets vanished along with the dinosaurs. In some respects the Brits are ahead of the US. The stores are full of wide screen sets with screens half again broader than the usual dimension. Digital transmission of television started yesterday in this area. The picture quality is fantastic but it doesn't do a thing for the plots of the old movies that will probably be its staple for a few years. The picture quality on our own set improved significantly when the carpenter who fixed our roof and door replaced the TV lead in wire. Apparently the old wire had been in place since the advent of British TV a half century ago.

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The insulation had crumbled off allowing the TV signal to escape before reaching the set. There is torrential rain now in Wales. TV coverage is full of pictures of flooded villages, often interspersed with shots of the carnage of Hurricane George. Our neighbor is thinking about building an ark. Letter 8 Oct. 24, 1998 My erstwhile colleague, Brian Maguire left for his new Irish job this week. He sold his home a couple of days ago. His wife and children are already in Ireland. Some members of the department gave him a goodbye send off at a Chinese restaurant and, as the new boy (and girl), we were invited as well. The Sunshine restaurant is only a short walk from our house and it seems to be the best one in the region, nestled amongst the pubs and fish and chip shops. It's like opening a clam and finding a pearl. A Chinese banquet for 16 is quite a production. Dish after dish arrived to be placed on a spinning lazy susan in the center of the table. The trick was to spear goodies with your chopsticks as they passed by. The food was excellent although different from US style Chinese food. Chinese cooks adapt their cuisine to suit the taste of their adopted country. In India all the Chinese food tasted like curry. The only downside, and the reason why we probably won't eat there too often, is that the prices are about twice as high as the equivalent meal in the US. That seems to be the general rule for restaurants here. Burger King hamburgers cost about $5. It is strange considering that food prices in the supermarket are similar to those in the US. We have been told that the Brits view eating out as entertainment and the high prices are sort of an informal amusement tax. The high food prices also puzzle the local farmers who raise sheep and cattle for market. The "mad cow disease" scare has depressed the beef market for some time. Just before we arrived, a university professor made the news by suggesting that sheep also are infected with the disease, and lamb prices plunged. At an auction this week, four live sheep could be bought for a pound. That is about forty US cents an animal. The farmers are protesting and picketing slaughterhouses. The more reckless are simply giving their sheep to the Animal Protection Society, saying that if they care for stray cats and dogs, why not sheep as well? To add a final insult, the supermarkets are featuring frozen New Zealand lamb.

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We anticipated that our food buying would be in small mom and pop shops and, indeed, there are plenty of them in Menai Bridge and Bangor. But we and most of the staff at the college patronize the big food chains. Safeway and Pioneer are divisions of their US parents and Aldi is a German chain. Our favorite chain is Tesco, about a five minute drive over the Britannia Bridge. This is a super sized supermarket covering a square block of turf. It has a garage, petrol station, liquor store, clothing shop and bakery, all studded through a gigantic store like raisins in a raisin bread. Tesco sells motorscooters and Christmas trees depending on the season. Incidentally they sell food as well. British meat, at least that sold in the supermarkets, is inferior to that sold in the US. The few times we bought it, it was tough, expensive, and tasted as if it had been aged in an outhouse. Fresh chickens are expensive when bought at the supermarket. Surprisingly every supermarket sells roasted chicken, usually shown spinning on a spit behind the meat counter. The chickens are delicious and cheaper than the uncooked fowl available a few feet away. Go figure. We eat a lot of precooked chicken. Maggie’s favorite market is the used fruit shop just down the street. Well, the fruit is not really used but definitely shopworn. A big produce distributor on Anglesey bought an old church, stripped out the pews and replaced them with bins. Fruit and vegetables that have been in stores too long are sent to church, the last stop before garbage heaven. True, some of the stuff is blemished but much is in perfect condition. Maggie picks and hunts, along with other Welsh ladies, and comes up with bags of first quality fruits and veggies at a small fraction of Tesco’s price. The shop sells flowers too and we have bouquets of slightly used blooms on our dining room table most days. So far we have had only two servings of the original British fast food - fish and chips. Surprisingly, it was really good, big cod fillets, breaded and deep fried with a generous helping of french fries, all wrapped up in a newspaper. Delicious and only 5000 calories. Twiggy aside, there are very few thin people here. Pub meals, too, tend to be on the heavy side; extra large helpings of whatever you order, mostly fried or in a pastry crust. We have taken to ordering the "lite snack" offered on the

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menu. It's more than plenty. The saving grace of pub meals, of course, is the excellent beer that comes with them. Every pub we have tried offers at least a dozen varieties of beer ranging from stout, so thick that you have to drink it with a knife and fork, to shandy, a mix of half lager and half lemon soda. Maggie has grown to like shandy, but she still thinks water tastes better. Letter 9

Oct. 30, 1998

A couple of days ago, while we were hanging laundry, and trying to prevent the pole from collapsing under the force of wet sheets flapping in a fresh wind, a small car backed up to the gate of the vacant field. The car was towing an even smaller closed trailer about the size of a steamer trunk. The farmer's young son opened the gate. The farmer lowered the trailer ramp. A dozen sheep exploded out of the trailer on to the grass, then scampered away to the best grazing spots. It was like watching 12 circus clowns get out of a VW. The sheep must have been standing on each other's heads to fit into the trailer. The field belongs to the town and was intended to be an addition to the old town cemetery. But these days more and more people are choosing to have their dead loved ones cremated. The town council decided that more burial space wasn't needed after all and that the land could be put to better use as a rental pasture. Farmers pay a small fee to graze cattle or sheep on the land for a week or so, then round up their animals for still greener acres. Maggie looked out the window this morning and saw that the sheep were missing from the field across the way. We asked Frances, our neighbor about the sheep, and she replied "Do you eat lamb chops?" Then she relented and told us that the sheep probably weren't on their way to the butcher shop. At least not yet. Farmers move the sheep from pasture to pasture to get fresh grass. I guess their appointment with mint jelly will wait for a while. All this consideration of lamb has whetted out appetites. We will probably go to the Antelope pub at the other end of the Menai Bridge for a dinner of lamb steak this evening. We have no compunction about eating lamb as long as it doesn't come from "our" sheep.

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Driving around Anglesey is an adventure in itself. The island is about 20 miles across. The main road bisects the island, running from the Britannia Bridge near our house to Holyhead, the closest port to Ireland. By Welsh standards, this is a throughway with double lanes for much of the distance. Skirting the periphery of the island are two more roads, one on the north shore, another on the south, both adequate, although a little narrow for our suburban tastes. Many of the other roads are little more than paved wagon tracks, sometimes two car widths wide, often one car width wide. Meeting a car, or God forbid, a truck on one of these lanes is an anxious exercise in vehicle maneuvering as one or the other cars tries to find a spot wide enough to permit passing. I've already knocked the driver’s side mirror off once when I got too close to a truck. The Brits anticipated that this sort of casualty would be frequent since the mirror snapped back in position fairly easily. We bought an Ordinance map of Anglesey showing all the roads, lanes, paths, and walking trails on the island. Its a fine graphic aid to navigation except for the fact that few of the smaller roads are named and you can't tell where to go unless you know where you are. The locals already know where they are, and visitors probably shouldn't drive those roads anyway. The map does show and name local landmarks and the bigger pubs so navigating is based on pub crawling from town to town. When the weather is particularly good, Maggie drags me out on long walks. I don’t really have anything against walking but I’ve always thought of it as a form of locomotion from place to place. To Maggie it is a positive adventure. A chance to discover new and unexplored territory. When we go for a walk, she always wants to go further. I always have to remind her that we must eventually walk back to where we started so prudence dictates that we only walk until we are half tired and not totally exhausted. Usually my pleas are ignored. They just encourage Maggie to stroll on at a faster pace. One memorable walk was around the Anglesey shoreline just east of Beaumaris. The land comes to a point jutting out into Conwy Bay. On the end of the point are the ruins of a 9th century monastery that has the reputation of being the holiest spot in Wales. We drove toward the ruins on a road that must have been spanking new when the monastery was built. The road petered out into a couple of tire tracks and ended at a tiny

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parking area along the beach. A sign marked the beach as a Welsh scenic wonder but to my uneducated eye it looked most inhospitable for swimming. All you could see was rock rubble in either direction. The low tide exposed the entire coastline, a rocky beach backed by huge boulders at the high tide mark. We set out on the beach walking in the general direction of Beaumaris, about 10 miles distant. I was mentally calculating how long till the tide came rushing back and we had to swim for shore. In a short while we forgot about the tides. In the distant past the beach had been used as a smuggler’s hideout and the boulders were pockmarked with caves used to store the loot. Cryptic marks were scratched into the sandstone rock face. Whether this was done by thieves or teenagers we couldn’t be sure but the worn surfaces showed the age of the markings. Maggie found one rock with the name “Karen” deeply engraved into its surface. This one probably wasn’t made by a smuggler although it could have been done by a lovelorn Viking. Other rocks had bas relief faces carved into their flanks. Again the wear and tear showed that the carvings were done centuries ago. As we picked our way more miles down the beach we discovered hunks of coral. There is an unmistakable surface pattern of coral rock that we learned to appreciate down in Florida. These were fragments of brain coral, a very unlikely find on the shores of the Irish Sea. Maggie retrieved a sample to show to our neighborly ocean science experts. By this time a couple of hours had gone by and the narrowing beach showed that the tide was indeed rolling back in. We retraced our steps and made it to our lonely car just as the beach was obliterated by the sea. Later that evening we asked John Simpson about Maggie’s rock. He conferred with Chris Richardson, the undersea geologist. Both concurred that it was a rare but not unprecedented find. The European continent was much further south at the time of the dinosaurs and has slowly been drifting northward. The coral may have been part of the ancient tropical seabed which was torn loose by wave action. An alternative, but less dramatic, explanation is the coral may simply have been a hunk of ship’s ballast which was discarded when a sailing vessel filled its hold with cargo to trade in southerly regions. In either case the rock is a hunk of memorabilia that has a prime place on our mantel.

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Letter 10 Nov. 2, 1998 The following paragraphs are pretty salty so if your interests are firmly rooted on dry land, you can just skip them. This strip of the coast is an intense boating area. The water is quite warm for a latitude of 53'N, thanks to the Gulf Stream. Local boating conditions are entirely different from those of most of the US and particularly the Hudson River. The wide tidal range means that anchoring areas along the shore dry out and boats settle on the bottom for half a day. In a perverse way many local yachtsmen consider that a convenience. You can walk out to your boat at its mooring, stow your muddy boots in the cockpit locker, have a cup of tea; and, if your timing is right, float free on the rising tide for a good day's sail. In the evening, you reverse the process and walk home. Boat to shore dinghies are regarded as unnecessary hereabouts, but a tide table and waterproof boots are essential. The unusual conditions influence boat design too. For one thing a cloudless sunny day is a rarity. In the last month we have had only three totally sunny days. The rest were either cloudy with occasional sun and brief showers, or just plain miserable with drizzle mixed with cloudbursts. The wind blows most of the time, sometimes pretty hard. In fact, in a field just a few miles from our house is a wind farm with towering high tech wind power generators feeding electricity into the local grid. Boats have small cockpits since no one wants to sit out in the bad weather. The interior accommodations are large, even for boats intended for daysailing or short cruises. The rigging is strong. Inner forestays are the norm rather than the exception and the rigging wire rope sizes are at least one step larger than common in the US. The typical sailboat above 20' is used primarily for coastal cruising. This is a somewhat different concept than in the US. For me at least, coastal cruising represents one step beyond a day sail, a leisurely voyage to another harbor in the semi-protected waters of Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay or the Florida Keys. Here it represents a slog in heavy weather across the Irish Sea or to the Continent. Weather conditions on the Irish Sea or the Channel are notoriously fickle and boats have to be constructed to withstand any sudden storm. Their seaworthiness helps me understand how a large fleet of private boats could evacuate the trapped British forces from Dunkirk during WW2.

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Most boats intended for coastal cruising have comparatively flat bottoms with swing keels or are of twin keel design. In the US we think of twin keel boats as a bit tubby and slow, a compromise design that sacrifices performance for a bit of functional utility. We have had such a boat for over 20 years, a 23' Westerly Nomad that we bought from a British engineer who was called home. While I recognized its advantages for shallow water gunkholing in the States, I never fully appreciated its reason for being until I walked the shoreline here. Our twin keeler was an early design and looks archaic next to the modern versions of the type. Most of the large European performance boat manufacturers supply twin keel versions of their models for high tidal areas. According to local skippers they are fully competitive in most cruiser racer classes, giving up a little performance in light air and gaining it back when the wind blows hard. The single fixed keel coastal cruisers have either bilge skegs or permanently fitted supports to hold the boat reasonably level in a dried out mooring. Cruising catamarans, but not trimarans, are also common. The stress seems to be on accommodation rather than high performance. That's not to say that the traditional deep keel "plank on edge" design is extinct. Some areas of Britain are not subject to such tidal extremes and deeper water moorings are available. The husband of one of my university colleagues owns such a boat and makes frequent crossings to Ireland. Irish prices are about the same as those in Britain but the British pound exchanges for 20% more in Ireland. I suspect that on the return trip his hold is loaded with good Irish whiskey, but who am I to pass judgment in a foreign land? Prices are about 50% higher than in the US for comparable boats and marine supplies. Some of this is the 17.5% value added tax applied to everything, some to just plain high labor costs and inefficiency. There is an active used boat market but people just tend to hang on to their boats longer and do much of the maintenance work themselves. There are twice as many boating magazines on the stands as in the US and a lot of the pages are devoted to do-it-yourself maintenance. Boating here is an obsession rather than a casual leisure activity. Salaries tend to be a good deal lower than in the US, so owning a boat is a big investment. It does, however, give the yachtsman a sense of freedom and control over his/her own destiny that is hard to achieve otherwise on this tight little island.

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Letter 11 Nov. 6, 1998 We are fortunate in living about a mile away from the biggest tourist attraction in Wales, located in a town so small that if you blink while driving through at 30 miles per hour, you have missed it. The town contains a couple of pubs, a mini market, a gas station, a woolen store, and a railway station. What makes it such a tourist draw is the town's name Llanfairpwllgwyngllgogerychwyrndrobwillandtsiliogogogoch. Crowds of visitors flock to the railroad station to be photographed standing by the station name sign. The news dealers do a brisk business in postcards showing the town name. The locals are ambivalent about the name because, although it does bring in free spending tourists, it's finger numbing to write as a return address on a letter and mind boggling to spell out on a telephone. They are also a bit ashamed that the name is a hoax, concocted about 100 years ago by a tailor, who lived in our town - Menai Bridge, to bring in more suit buying customers. On most road maps the town is called Llanfair PG to save space. Otherwise the name would stretch on the map to the border of Scotland. The tailor's marketing inspiration lives on. Pringle's woolen shop, next to the station, is huge. It is a supermarket of sheep shearings, offering sweaters, coats, jackets, throw rugs, etc. in every conceivable style and color - and at fairly reasonable prices too. After the tourists get their picture taken at the station, they browse the shop, snatching up bargains by the armfuls. Periodically the loudspeaker announces the imminent departure of a tour bus to London or Glasgow and the store partially empties, only to be refilled by the next bus load. We have done a little shopping there ourselves. There is a practical reason for this wool mania. Welsh and English houses are cold! Most are built without any insulation at all and have single glazed windows. The heating systems are woefully inadequate and are turned off most of the time to save fuel. My colleague, Jane Raymond, a Nova Scotian by birth, says the only time she gets warm in the fall and winter is when she goes back to Canada. I'm writing this with the house at a 59 degree temperature, wearing a sweater, with my fingers turning white. Time to have a cup of tea and turn up the heat. Either that or return to Pringle's.

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Letter 12

Nov. 9, 1998

Anglesey is surrounded by water so there is a lot of local seafood. Last Saturday was the start of oyster appreciation weekend, the 4th Annual Oyster Faire. The local pubs and hotels offered oysters and Guinness Stout, or mussels in cheese sauce for a reasonable price and threw in some entertainment too. Our day started with a short walk to the Anglesey Arms, an inn just on our side of the Menai Bridge. We, a few passers by, and some early pub habitues were the small audience for a Morris Dance accompanied by a band named Clerical Error. The band and the dancers were employees of the local banks and offices in town, hence, I guess, the name. Morris Dancing is an ancient folk style. Dancers dress in costume and do a variation of square dancing in which they hit each other with sticks. The costumes are slightly to the left of bizarre. The dancers were in black face, reminiscent of Mississippi minstrel shows, and wore frock coats and top hats, liberally decorated with flowers and sewn on patches of color. Coats were covered with pins and buttons of the kind used in election campaigns and many had embroidered fanciful scenes. The pants were black knickers. Most dancers, male and female, wore hiking boots. The leader of the group was in a red alligator costume, like an escapee from a bad Peter Pan movie. The dancers carried batons or sticks about three feet long. When the lively music started, the dancers paired off, then clashed sticks in a parody of a sword dance. After a dozen or so strokes of this mock stick battle the dancers whirled to select a new partner to beat on. In time the dancers formed a circle, spun around a few times into a new formation, and the whole cycle repeated. Everyone was clearly having a good time. At the intermission, while the dancers were sipping a few sups of the pub's good beer, the pub's waiters formed up for a race. Each waiter carried three pints of beer on a tray. The course was about half a mile of twisting and hilly road through the park along the Menai Strait. The fastest time with the least beer spilled won a £100 prize. That's a pretty good tip. On Sunday we drove to an art show that Maggie wanted to catch in Holyhead. Holyhead is the largest city on Anglesey and is about 20 miles away on the other side of the island. It is the major ocean port in North

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Wales and is the Welsh terminal of the ferry to Dublin. Other than that it has little redeeming esthetic value and looks like any run down harbor town on either side of the Atlantic. Near the art center is an old lighthouse at South Point marking the rocky hazards of the Holyhead coast. It is at the base of a hill and is famous for requiring a 450 step downhill (and of course uphill return) trek to reach the site. Some exhausted kids discouraged us from taking this trip. Besides the lighthouse closes to visitors in September and it was already November. We opted instead to climb the rock hill behind the light in the face of gale force winds and were rewarded by a magnificent view of the rugged shoreline. On the way back we stopped at another Oyster Faire venue at the Trearddur Bay Hotel. This hotel fronts a rock strewn bay which, surprisingly is a favorite water sports site. The day was bright but still windy and cold. Zigzagging around the rocks in the bay, playing leapfrog over the waves, was a jet skier doing slalom turns between the boulders. Any error would have torn out the bottom of the jet ski and surely landed him in the hospital. The hotel featured a mussel buffet and plenty of Irish music and pub ambience. Why Irish music? Anglesey is only a 90 minute ferry ride from Dublin. Because of the exchange rate differences most people on this side of the island do much of their seasonal shopping and serious entertaining in Ireland. The band was a local favorite that welcomed anyone to join in, even if the aspirant musician could only play the spoons. After a few sets, and a few pints, the pub patrons elbowed enough room on the floor to do impromptu Irish jigs. Not Riverdance, to be sure, but very enthusiastic nevertheless. This was real movie type pub jollity. Beer, food, music, smoke and wall to wall happiness. Two pubs in two days - regular pub crawlers. Pubs are always shown in British movies as havens of merriment, good fellowship and warm beer. They may be all that, but great eating places they are not. There is a ritual to ordering food and drink in a pub that takes a bit of learning. Brian filled us in on the first day we arrived. “You grab a table," he advised, "and throw your coat over the chairs. There will be a number carved on the table. Remember the number, elbow your way to the bar, shout your food order and number to the barmaid, grab your drinks, then go back to the table and wait. Eventually your food will come." And come it does after about the third drink.

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Most pubs are owned by large breweries and their products are the ones that are featured at the bar. It is only natural that the food is designed to raise a thirst. In our area the brewers tend to be Liverpool based, a fortunate circumstance since Liverpool is known for good beer. A few local pubs have a reputation for good food too. Not real gourmet cooking but wholesome plentiful meals. The one we eat at most often is the Antelope, about half a mile from our house and just over the Menai Bridge. The walk to the pub is a visual treat as enticing as the food. We stroll down the road paralleling the Menai Strait and cross over the bridge, usually pausing for a while to appreciate the view. The pub is light and spacious and the decor is reasonably modern and refreshing to American eyes. Most British pubs tend to decorate in such a fashion that Prince Hal and Falstaff would feel right at home. Heavy dark beams, wood panels, and wall ornaments made from antique military swords and shields are typical of the decor. The Antelope has a large selection of dishes on the menu, some even familiar to Americans. It engenders a vague Howard Johnsonlike confidence. You know that whatever you order will be unexceptional but will be more than satisfactory in assuaging your appetite. The one exception, also Howard Johnsonlike, is the ice cream desserts. The Welsh pride themselves in having cows that give the richest milk in all Britain. The ice cream is superbly creamy and bursting with flavor. And served in very large portions too. The place is a favorite of teenagers on dates. We often see a pair of would be lovers gazing passionately at each other over triple decker ice cream sundaes heaped with whipped cream and garnished with cookies and cherries. How they would be able to consummate their romance after knocking off a half gallon of ice cream each is an unanswered question. If it is early enough to continue our walk after dinner we head to the University botanical gardens bordering the mainland side of the Menai Strait. This is both an experimental and a display garden featuring every type of plant which will grow under Welsh weather conditions. Since gardening is such a popular pastime there are small armies of volunteer helpers who do their best to keep the botanical garden pruned, mulched and tended. Their payoff is not only in the satisfaction they get from a job well done but in cuttings and surplus pots of rare plants which they would not be able to acquire on their own. Our neighbor, Francis, is one of these volunteers and she has planted her own garden with species from all

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around the world. She has sectioned off her 1/2 acre yard into little subgardens from Japan, India, North America, and the tropics. She is working on a cactus plot but the weather has been too rainy to cooperate. Another one of our favorite pubs is the Red Wharf Inn. Jane Raymond told us about this one. Her directions went somewhat like “follow the road on the north coast of Anglesey until it looks like you are getting lost, then follow it further. Just before you panic, turn into a one track lane that heads down to the water. You may find the Inn at the end of it. If we don’t hear from you in two days, we’ll call the police.” With those clear and concise directions we went looking for the Inn, we found it. Jane’s routing was right on target. She simply neglected to tell us that there were signs all along the way telling us where to turn. Her little joke. The Inn is in Red Wharf Bay, a sand covered stretch of water from which the bottom entirely emerges every low tide. When the tide goes out you can walk hundreds of yards out to sea and stroll among the small boats that recline leisurely on the sand. The pub itself is an old sailors hangout that has been restored to mid-19 th century condition and features both pub food and gourmet cooking. So far we have only had the pub food since we inevitably arrive just before or just after dinner is being served. Letter 13

Nov. 11, 1998

We had to do something about our rental car. I've finally managed to cope with left hand gear shifting and keeping to the wrong side of the road. Driving is no longer a white knuckle exercise. Maggie can even relax and look at the scenery. I still drive a lot slower than most of the motorway traffic but I like the scenery too. Unfortunately, the rental agency just raised its rates and priced monthly fees slightly shy of paying off the national debt. I would have expected the reverse given that the tourist season has ended. Unfortunately, that's not the way it works over here. Plan A was to lease a car on a long term basis from a commercial firm, but after a week of trying, even offering to provide complete bank references and pay up front, we found no takers. They worry, I am sure, that as non-UK residents we will simply drive across to Europe via the Chunnel and disappear.

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Plan B was simply to buy an older car sufficiently capable of driving around the Bangor area. After a lot of tire kicking we bought a 1990 SEAT (that's a car not a piece of furniture) with about 108,000 miles on the clock at a nearby used car dealer. I never heard of SEAT before but it is a Spanish car maker that has just been purchased by Volkswagen. The old Spanish Civil War allies have reunited at last. Hitler and Franco are shaking hands in Hell. The car’s lawnmower sized engine has just enough power to pull a greased gum drop out of a baby's mouth, but should be very economical on fuel and cheap to insure. An encouraging sign was that the engine was designed by Porsche. The price is cheap enough to abandon the car at the airport when we leave and still save half of the equivalent rental fee. Anyway, if the car survives until the end of our stay, I have fantasies about taking a European tour up to the northernmost city in Norway in the spring. I couldn't convince Maggie though. She has fantasies of taking the same trip on a modern Norwegian coastal steamer. Incidentally, the salesman was a cute young guy in his mid twenties, Maggie embarrassed both me and him by asking if he was married. If he wasn’t, would he be available to tell daughter Karen about interesting places for young people if she were to visit Wales. Letter 14 Nov. 18, 1998 We returned our rental car at the agency in Chester yesterday. Chester itself is an old walled city about 60 miles away just on the English side of the England/Welsh border. It's a bustling, vibrant city with half timbered buildings, a 1,000 year old cathedral, and a booming economy. It was more or less what we expected Bangor to be like before the reality of Wales. The best way I can describe it is to suggest that it could have been the conjoint brainchild of Walt Disney and Isadore Strauss. Imagine if you will a medieval wall surrounding about six solid city blocks of shopping mall, centuries old buildings turned into boutique shops, covered arcades of fine stores worthy of Fifth Avenue, and all the cobblestone streets restricted to pedestrian traffic. Early on Friday afternoon the city was packed with shoppers. We wandered, goggle eyed, from store to store. Our neighbor, Francis, says that everyone from Northern Wales and central England goes there to shop.

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It must be true. Maggie found a sweater in just the shade of blue she had been wanting for years in the big Marks and Spencer department store. She agonized a split second about paying full retail for it, then took it to the register. Unfortunately they wouldn't take either Visa or MasterCard and we didn't have enough cash to both buy the sweater and assure that we could get train tickets home. Anyway, the Marks and Spencer coffee shop has the best coffee that we have had in the UK. The old Chester cathedral is impressive despite being a comparative youngster amongst church buildings. The Bangor cathedral is over 400 years older but would fit nicely into a small portion of the Chester cathedral nave. The cathedral, too, is a little like a Disney attraction. Monks offer guided tours of the holy spots and relics of the Saints are on display. Lifelike statues of Hugh (the Horrible) Lupus the "pacifier" of the Welsh (remember that this is England) and St. Anselm, the founder of the Benedictine order greet you as you enter with a recorded history of the site. The only thing missing is animatronic movement. Toward dusk we took our leave of Chester and walked to the train station a short way from the town center. Fortunately they took our credit cards and for a moment Maggie thought of returning to buy the sweater with our, now surplus, cash. The station clock warned us we had too little time before the train. Had we known about the delays common on British Rail we could have returned for the sweater and had a sit down four course meal with plenty of time to spare. A couple of slightly inebriated hangers on at the station heard our accents and started saying "God bless America". It turns out that they meant it. One had had his father freed from a German prison during WW2 by American troops and the other had been in a US hospital during Vietnam. Eventually our crowded train arrived. Chester is well worth another visit. Letter 15

Nov. 22, 1998

There is no chance that a TV sports addict would have withdrawal symptoms watching the British tele. His mix of fixes might be different but the total exposure would be even greater. Right at the moment the airwaves are flooded with Premier Football (soccer to us) with the complete game of the day shown live and 10 to 15 minute highlights of

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each of the remaining dozen or so games shown in the evening. The game coverage is excellent. Since there are no commercials, action is continuous. The camera men know what they are about, probably having played soccer since they were toddlers. They show both full field shots and zoom in on critical plays. They never miss a thing. Last night's show featured Michael Owen, an 18 year old striker for Liverpool, who scored 4 times in one league game. This is the second time he has had a super hat trick this season and the commentators grudgingly admit that perhaps he has a future. Intermixed with the Premier League games are those of the European Championship. Select teams from each country compete in what is basically a continental version of the World's Cup. So far Wales and Scotland have won both their games, aided by some outstanding luck, while heavily favored England has put in a lackluster performance. The future of the English coach has elbowed both Clinton and Kosevo off the front pages. Half the population wants to fire him, the other half is for a quick beheading. Just behind football in air time is the Snooker World Championship. We spent several hours watching this hypnotically slow pool game with almost incomprehensible rules. The traditionalists are agog at the challenger, a 20 year old Hong Kong pool shark, who has beaten all the Brits at their own game. The finals are tonight - we will be glued to the TV. Eating Chinese take-out food, of course. Then there is rugby, that macho Welsh favorite. Despite the bad local economy, Wales is building a huge stadium to host the Rugby World Cup this coming summer. It has even authorized double time for round the clock work to make sure everything is ready when the big boys arrive. All we know about rugby is that a lot of guys run around the field with an oversized football. On occasion a huge mass of players congeals around the ball and when it squirts out of the scrum, someone picks it up and runs with it. I suppose American football (the not-soccer alternative) would be just as incomprehensible to the uninitiated. The cricket season will start soon - we can hardly wait. Games last as long as five days and the players are so immobile they wear sweaters to keep from getting a chill. Basketball here is played by girls and field hockey by men. Ice hockey is played by no one at all, although there are

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rumors that an ice rink may be built in London and an expatriate Russian team imported. My Canadian colleagues have hockey videos sent over so their kids retain their native language. Oh yes, the papers reported that the New York Yankees won something called the World Series in that strange derivation of cricket called American baseball. Letter 16 Nov. 26, 1998 Menai Bridge is a sleepy little town except for this weekend's main event, the exciting Menai Bridge Fair. This fair has a long history. It started in 1691 as a general livestock exchange. It was located in Menai Bridge instead of more populous Bangor so that Anglesey farmers did not have to risk their cattle by swimming them to the other side of the strait. Flush with profits from selling their beasts the farmers were intent on having a good time. Cattle and horses are no longer sold but the funfair remained, complete with fortune tellers, merrymaking, food and excitement. For the past week traveling carnivals from most of the UK have converged on the town to set up their rides and concessions in the narrow streets. The diesel trucks are BIG, even by US standards. On Friday they turned, toy Transformer-like, into Ferris wheels, fun houses, bumper car plazas, concession stands, and a variety of nausea inducing rides. Families from all over Wales bring their kids to this once a year fun fair. The weather has been terrible for the last week. Gale force winds gusting to 80 mph have been driving heavy rain almost continuously for three days. Southern Wales and parts of England have flooded. The papers called it the worst storm in 20 years. Still, the carnies came and set up their rides and tents. To our surprise the people came too. The crowded streets rang with kid's laughter and shrieks. The scent of hot dogs, burgers and chips filled the air, and the Ferris wheels, bumper cars, and loop the loops carried on despite rain, wind and chill. The Welsh are hardy people. A good time was had by all. We walked the streets, caught up in the excitement of the crowd. The town had been transfigured into one giant midway. Wicked rides, designed to induce queasiness in the strongest stomach, competed for patrons. Teen aged boys, who looked so cool getting on the loop-the-loop, struggled to keep their suppers down getting off. Girls used every

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opportunity to clutch their dates in mock fear. Bumper cars crashed violently as drivers did what they couldn't do on the road while their wives, girlfriends, and children stared with horror at the monsters their menfolk had become. A good time was had by all. Every ride was outlined with light from hundreds of colored bulbs. When the action started, strobe lights flashed on jets of steam to accent the thrill and thousand watt high-fi speakers blasted out a drum accentuated rock beat. The lighting, the noise, the wind, the rain and the fast food smell combined in a complete sense involving psychedelic synergy. A good time was had by all. One teen aged boy, noticed my camcorder and asked if I would take a picture of him kissing his girl. I nodded and they kissed. It went on and on. I finally realized that they would keep kissing as long as the camera was pointed at them - so I made the lame excuse that I was running out of tape. After coming up for air, they wondered who was going to see the video. Maggie said that it would be shown in New York. Both would be instant celebrities. Maggie's accent amused them and she had to say a few words in New Yawkese. The kids laughed when Maggie said "I love New York." I couldn't understand why they laughed. She sounded perfectly normal to me. On the walk home, the wind blew out Maggie's umbrella. A good time was had by all. It is now Sunday and the fair is over. The rain has stopped, except for the occasional flurry, and the winds are much lighter. The carnies worked all night to transform their rides back into trucks and have left town. Stepping out to get the Sunday paper we saw the last straggler, a huge diesel truck laboring up the hill to the main highway, spewing black smoke which smelled like burning garbage. Nothing remains of the fair but discarded bottles and food wraps and the deep gouges left in the grass covered road shoulders where the trucks parked. Ironically, it promises to be a beautiful day. The sun peeped through a chink in the fast moving clouds and the landscape sparkled in newly washed splendor. Welsh weather never ceases to amaze me.

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Letter 17

Nov. 29, 1998

Wales has suffered a series of almost biblical misfortunes in the last days. The torrential rains and gale force winds are now called the worst in nearly half a century. Rain running off the Welsh hills has flooded the rivers Severn and Wye to the point where most riverside towns are several feet under water. The Severn is 21 feet above flood stage. Commentators say that this has happened only three times since 1700. Several large Japanese owned factories in Wales have closed because of their own financial crisis, raising local unemployment to a near depression level. Sheep are still selling for the price of a Sunday newspaper and farmer's protests are so frequent that they no longer make the news. The leading Welsh politician, Ron Davies, the man slated to be the Prime Minister of the Welsh Assembly, has been caught in a Clintonesque sex scandal (homosexual) and has been pressured to resign. Finally, most distressing to Welsh pride, it has become apparent that the rugby stadium intended to host the Rugby World's Cup this summer will not be ready in time. We expect a plague of locusts any time now. As long as I'm in a complaining mood, I might as will list the minor aspects of Welsh and UK life that are irritating. For a little island, the Brits have an enormous variation in speech. The concept of "BBC speak" no longer holds on TV. Commentators are as likely to communicate in a thick Scots or Welsh accent as they are in Oxford English. Local television takes pride in its Welshness, particularly in the fact that no one who was not born and bred within 100 miles of Harlech can understand a word spoken. At first I thought that it was just me but I found that my colleagues at work have the same problem. One woman, raised in Scotland, is married to a Londoner. She has to translate for her husband whenever the Scottish football matches are shown, and he, in turn, has to translate the Cockney dialect for her whenever they visit London. Just as in Pygmalion, the foreigners often speak better English than the natives. No one has any trouble understanding Americans although they find our accents funny. This is probably because US movies and sitcoms are the staples of TV. Old episodes of Friends, Seinfeld, Startrek, Allie McBeal, Third Rock from the Sun, and Frasier are on every week and a new prime time BBC series featuring old classic B&W Hollywood movies is starting soon. American English has become the lingua franca of the British Isles.

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The more mundane physical aspects of the environment appear as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything is slightly distorted. Cars and appliances are a few years less advanced and smaller than the US norm. The medium sized Camry we drove at home is regarded as a large luxury car here. The Queen rides in a car only slightly bigger. The clothes washing machine, reminiscent of an old front loading Bendix, takes only a six pound load. The refrigerator is tiny, the stove about the size of the one we discarded from our sailboat. The large roasts and turkeys pictured in British holiday scenes are served only in restaurants. Either that or they must be cooked in sections and reassembled at the dining room table. Houses and rooms, except for the castles and manor houses of the upper crust, are smaller too, perhaps about two thirds the size of the equivalent US residence. Maggie says this is a virtue. They are a lot easier to clean. Still, I have the nagging feeling that I am Gulliver not yet awakened from a Lilliputian nightmare. The electrical system is different, but tolerable after you get used to it. The voltage is twice the US standard, the alternating current frequency about 20% less. This guarantees that any US device which must be plugged in will either burn out or not work at all, a sad fact that I learned after I fried a couple of pieces of computer gear. The manufacturer agreed that his internationally labeled equipment wasn't truly international, and is sending me some UK certified replacements. We may have the reverse trouble when we return home. Electrical plugs here are chunky devices about half the size of a pack of cigarettes so a multiple plug socket or three way adapter is about the size of a large dinner roll. It's better to find a separate wall outlet to plug in each device. On the other hand, each outlet has its own switch so the appliance can be turned off from its own control or from the socket. Of course you must remember which one you used last or you will wait a long time for the water to get hot. The physical problems of coping with the Welsh environment are trivial compared with my search for a good barber. In a fit of pique at being dragged off to Wales Maggie decided to stop giving me haircuts until we got back home. She has been my barber for the last 30 years. Despite the fact that I have had only about 60 haircuts in that time, she does an excellent job. Fortunately I like my hair long. There is one barber shop in Menai Bridge. It is in a small store front with a few chairs along the wall and a stool in front of a mirror. The sole barber is a crotchety

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Welshman who wields a mean pair of scissors. No other barber equipment, just scissors. He is open three days a week, appointment required. Because I am not a regular customer I had to wait until all the other hairy patrons were served. After I was seated on the stool, he asked something in an undecipherable dialect. I assume it related to how I wanted my hair cut and I muttered something about trimming it around the edges. He could as well have asked about the weather or the state of local politics. Anyway, I was scalped. It was the worst haircut I have had since the army. To add to the insult, I had not a clue of how to pay the barber. No prices were posted and I had no idea of how much to tip. I pressed all the coins I had into the barber’s hand and fled the shop. He didn’t come running after me so I must have exceeded the minimum charge but he had a good story to tell his pub cronies about the stupid Yankee who didn’t understand Welsh ways. Maggie laughed at my haircut but she refused to repair the damage. I’ll have to find a way to get back at her. Maybe stay for another year. On a cheerier note, I have met with the staff at the Unilever Research Lab and we reached a consensus on where the cross cultural research project is heading. Basically they are interested in selling soap to the unwashed of the third world, convincing people who don't believe in germs to buy disinfectants, and encouraging the use of cosmetics by women who traditionally use yak butter for cold cream. I laid out a plan to do just those things. Fortunately our contract is over before the theory is put to the test. We are going back home for a month, January 13 through February 13 to present a paper at the International Cross Cultural Research conference. By a strange coincidence, such conferences are usually held in balmy climates while Europe and most of North America are frozen in winter snow. This year it is in Santa Fe, NM. This will give us the chance to do our income taxes, bask in the New Mexico sun, show our home videos to long suffering captive audiences, and then disappear when our welcome wears thin. After all, we deserve a little rest and relaxation after the last few weeks of Welsh precipitation.

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Letter 18 Dec. 1, 1998 Of course not every day is rainy. When the clouds scoot over to France and the sun peeks out we try to do a little sightseeing. Yesterday we drove to Llandudno, Wales' most enduring specimen of the genteel Victorian era seaside resort. The town is on a small peninsula about 20 miles east of Bangor on the seacoast between two limestone minimountains. The tallest, only 680 feet, is called the Great Orme and its companion, the Little Orme. The core of the town occupies a low isthmus between the two peaks. Long, beautiful beaches front both sides of the main shopping area. Just back of the beach is a gently curving row of once grand Edwardian hotels with glass verandas and wrought iron fences. The town was the favorite resort of the British upper and wealthy middle classes around the turn of the century. Bismarck, Disraeli, Napoleon III, and Gladstone came to Llandudno to escape the sticky London summers. The benign protection of their ghosts has probably preserved the town from the perils of modernization. Even the Romans liked Llandudno. Their artifacts are uncovered on a regular basis and one can even take a tour of their copper mines deep within the heart of the Great Orme. The main streets of the town are devoted to the type of shopping that people usually do on vacation. The major London stores all have their Llandudno branch, just as Miami Beach has its Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany. The Marks and Spencer store here DID take our credit card and Maggie finally bought the sweater she has been looking for. It was the last one in her size in stock. It is an ordinary sweater but just the right color blue. The unofficial start of the Christmas season in the UK is Halloween so we are well into preparation for the festivities. We are getting mixed signals about the way the celebration is observed. On the one hand the stores are loaded with Christmas merchandise, mostly sweet, fatty things to eat. Supermarkets give away glossy magazines full of happy familial scenes. They offer recipes to encourage the cooking of huge meals of stuffed goose or turkey or even suckling pig with the traditional apple in its mouth. On the other hand every restaurant, pub, and hotel advises making early reservations for Christmas or New Year's dinner. Obviously anybody who is anybody doesn't eat at home. In fact getting away for the Christmas holiday seems to be the big preoccupation, very much like the Labor Day exodus in the USA. We are agonizing about whether to

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celebrate the holidays in a big way or simply to draw the curtains and ignore the whole thing. Perhaps we will only buy a tabletop tree, one Chanukah candle and a bottle of good Scotch whisky. On the way home from Llandudno, our "new" old car made some peculiar engine noises. A wisp of smoke emerged from under the hood although the engine was running quite cool. I discovered that the oil seemed lower than when we started. As luck would have it we stopped within a short distance of a large auto supply store and a topping off of heavy duty oil allowed us to get home. I'll have to look at the car today and decide if the low oil was due to a leak or just a 100,000+ mile hearty appetite for lubricant. Our service guarantee runs until the middle of next month. The car will probably work perfectly until then. Letter 19

Dec. 3, 1998

On one sunny day we took the opportunity to visit Portmerion, another Welsh cultural landmark. The name is familiar to most pottery mavens but that was not the reason we wnt there. We wanted to see it because it was the setting for the "Prisoner", one of our favorite TV shows of long ago. The series plot revolved around the struggle of a forcibly retired British secret service agent to resist being "spindled, folded, or mutilated" by the "system". He was held captive in a location known only as "The Village", a community consisting of an improbable collection of buildings from all locations and eras. In fact the "Village" was Portmerion and the unusual setting was real, the dream of eccentric architect Clough Williams-Ellis. In the 20's he started collecting unwanted buildings with interesting features. He had them reassembled on a hillside overlooking a sandy spit of land on the Welsh coast. What he ended up with was an eclectic collection of structures, including neo-classical colonnades, sweeping porticos, Siamese figures on Ionic columns, a Buddha in a small temple, Italianate bell towers, flower gardens and plazas, all artfully arranged to resemble a light opera stage set in a Mediterranean villa. The result is theatrical and, in the right lighting conditions, a little magic. Laws of perspective are violated. Unusual vistas are revealed offering a view of the sands below or a glimpse of the mountains.

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We walked the streets, peeked under arches, and ate ice cream surrounded by an eccentric's fantasy. There is a yearly "Prisoner" convention scheduled for fans of the show, just like the Trekkie conventions for Startrek. The show still has a cult following 30 years after it was shown on prime time. On the way to Portmerion we took an opportunity to ride on the other great attraction of this part of Wales' West Coast, the Ffestiniog narrow gauge railway. During the slate mining days, Wales had a number of these narrow gauge rail lines linking the mines in the mountains with the ports on the coasts. The spacing between the tracks was about two feet. It was cheaper to build and the trains could make tighter curves while clinging to the contour of the hills. The trains carried people as well as rock. The miners used them to get to work and hikers to the hills. When the slate industry declined, the railways were abandoned. Wales is festooned with these little railways. They snake through the valleys and connect the mines and quarries to the seashore. They were a vital part of the economy for about 100 years, getting the stone and slate and coal from the hills to the shipping docks. After WW2 most of them were abandoned. Trucks took over the hauling chores. The mines themselves became worked out. But 100 years of use is long enough to establish a tradition and nothing traditional is ever discarded in these isles. In one of the great nostalgic surges of the high tech 20 th century, rail buffs banded together to restore the old lines. Railway buffs took over the more picturesque of the old lines, at least those that hadn't been sold to the Japanese for scrap iron. Tracks are laid and spikes hammered on the weekends by rail hands who are weekday accountants and school teachers. There is even a booming black market in old engine parts. Engines sold a century ago to Africa and India are finding their way back home. The Ffestiniog railway is one of the shining examples of restoration. The tracks run a distance of about 20 miles from the seaside town of Porthmadog up through the very beautiful rolling green hills of the Vale of Ffestiniog, through the Snowdonia mountains to the slate mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. Naturally you are not expected to remember how to spell these names. The little steam engine and the passenger cars sparkle with new paint and polish. Most of the trainmen are volunteers playing engine driver. No toy Lionel trains for these folk. They

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have the real thing. The train is actually a money maker and the line has been incorporated into the Welsh National railway system. We caught the train just before it started and grabbed window seats for the scenic view. This was not as selfish as it seemed. Many of the riders read newspapers the entire way, while another portion used the trip to save climbing into the Snowdonia mountains for camping and hiking trips. The track wound around the hillside, exposing views of stone fenced farms perched on ever steepening slopes. Even this late in the year, flowers were everywhere. Blossomed bushes brushed against the sides of the coaches. When we reached the higher elevations we could see the indented shoreline and sandy beach front. Near the end of the run, the view quickly turned monochrome. Dark gray slate mining waste heaps covered every surface. Today the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog exists primarily as a reminder of the Welsh past. The slate mines are now operated as museums and the primary industry is the manufacture and sale of carved slate tourist trinkets. It also boasts the highest annual rainfall in rain soaked Wales. Letter 20

Dec. 6, 1998

Britain is in the midst of one of its periodic flirtations with egalitarianism. These have occurred approximately once a century since the signing of the Magna Carta. Prompting the present surge is the disenchantment with the dysfunctional royal family, the re-election of the Labor Party, and the looming specter of recession which encourages penny pinching in the public domain. Just as Prince Charles was on the way to rehabilitation, at least in the tabloid press, another tell-all book emerged claiming that it was Diana who was the villain. She cheated on Charles with assorted palace hangers on while he was merely discussing matters of state with that old family friend, Mrs. Parker-Bowles. Naturally Charles and his lady friend denied any involvement in revealing the details of the sordid life of the royals. The press decided that this was an outright admission of guilt. Too bad since the publicity engines have made Charles out to be almost a regular guy, although a little boring. He was even serenaded on the celebration of his 50th. birthday by Geri Halliwell, formerly Ginger Spice, in a parody of

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Marilyn Monroe's "Happy Birthday" salute to John Kennedy. While not considered an outright joke, the royal family is accorded a good deal less respect than that given to Bill Clinton but more than that accorded Billy Boy Carter. All except the Queen Mother, of course. She is every Brit's grandmum. If not for the Queen Mother, the royal family would be in the dumpster and Buckingham Palace a car park. Tony Blair's Labor government has decided that Britain's hereditary peerage must go. The House of Lords is an anachronism. Besides, the Lords’ sympathies are with the Tories. Even John Major has sided with Labor on this one although Margaret Thatcher has her doubts. The Lords will fight this battle to the last tea and crumpet but there is no doubt that the sweep of history is against them. They can always survive renting out their baronial mansions for weddings and bar mitzvahs. The anti-establishment attitude has also been fueled in recent weeks by the posthumous publication of Woodrow Wyatt's diary. Wyatt was a minor government functionary for 20 years. I think he was head of the Totalizer Board, the British equivalent of racing commissioner. Wyatt was very well connected, belonged to the right clubs, and threw lavish parties which important people in the establishment were pleased to attend. Margaret Thatcher and other politicians were addicted to his flattery and confided their secrets. They also asked Wyatt for advice on which appointments would meet with the favor of the social establishment. He was fond of including his friends and cronies on the short list so that they, in turn, would be obligated to him. Wyatt returned the trust of the politicos by transcribing the meetings verbatim, documenting the mechanism of government as the trading of favors by the upper class for their own ultimate advantage. No one, least of all Wyatt comes off well. The diary has been serialized by the Murdoch papers. Reading it is a hypnotic experience, like watching a cobra weaving to strike. You never know who or what will get bitten next. Former Prime Minister Edward Heath pointed out that Britain is the most secretive of all western democracies, and the habit of telling its citizens as little as possible has become ingrained in the ruling classes. If Wyatt were not already dead, he would be hanged for telling all the secrets of the elite.

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The final attack on the British ruling class is the feeling that most cities will have popularly elected USA style mayors within a few years. Right now the title of "Mayor" is largely ceremonial. He or she is typically a beefy red-faced beloved political hack who dresses up in 18 th century garb to officiate at ribbon cuttings. The cities are controlled by Town Councils which in turn are directed from London. This results in a uniformity of the appearance of government. In other words, all Bobbies dress alike. It also puts all local patronage directly in control of the national political party in power. I'm not sure that the mayoral system will be any better but at least corruption will be local. Living in Wales during this stint of bad weather is a lot like being snowbound in Alaska. Maggie and I know few people other than our immediate neighbors and university colleagues. We are, as are most Welsh, almost house bound this time of the year. In Maggie's art class, the old timers are complaining that this has been the worst summer and fall weather that any of them can remember. Every once in a while the rain lifts and we use the opportunity to sightsee or better, hang out the laundry. Clothes washing is dependent on the forecast for the day. So far we have gotten along reasonably well in each other's company with no more than the usual share of meaningless arguments. Thirty five years of practice pays some dividends. At home in Peekskill we are surrounded with the accumulation of several decades of living in one house. I have my books and junk. Maggie has her paintings and art materials. Here I have a couple of paperbacks and Maggie has a box of pastels. Now that my work is getting underway, I get some surcease from the weather but Maggie has taken to tearing pages out of the newspaper and drawing on them. There is a local library which has a random opening schedule that neither of us has figured out. A few of the books are even in English. We have developed a pleasant rapport with the head librarian who recommends CD discs for us to listen to. Her favorite group, and a favorite of Maggie’s too, is a pair of young local singers named John and Alan. They sing a program of lively Welsh country tunes, sounding like a mix of bluegrass and Appalachian folk songs. The music is infectious but, of course, we can’t understand a word. For all I can tell, they may be complaining about the price of potatoes.

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Just as I wrote these lines the sun came out and Maggie is calling me to go for a walk. Our walks usually take us down to the Menai Strait, through a park, and under the Telford Bridge. There is a narrow road that borders the water, passing by old houses stacked in tiers from the water’s edge to the main part of town. Houses are painted in a variety of colors and most have a narrow garden reaching from the edge of the house to the street. Our walk generally ends at the town bowling green, a small tree bordered park with a very carefully tended square grass patch about 30 yards across in the center. A bowling contest is usually in progress whenever we visit. British lawn bowling is similar to Italian Bocce. A bowler rolls a small target ball across the lawn. Successive bowlers try to get their grapefruit sized balls as close as possible to the target. If the bowler is really skillful, he or she can knock an opponent’s ball out of the way and block the path to the target. It looks easy but the few times I’ve tried it showed that it is a skill that would take a long time to master. It doesn’t take much strength but it takes far more hand/eye coordination than I can muster. Maggie should be pretty good at it but she has been too shy to take up the offers to participate. We sit and watch the contests and critique the bowler’s technique just as if we knew what we were talking about. After a brief rest from our arduous half hour stroll we continue on our way past the pubs and busy main street of the metropolis to our cemetery lane home. Apart from lawn bowling, walking the countryside seems to be the other popular active participation sport in Wales, provided, of course, that you omit dart throwing in the pubs. The country is crisscrossed by a network of walking trails clearly marked on the Ordnance Maps available in every gas station. Trails are signed by small markers with a cryptic symbology that gives experienced walkers some foretaste of the path ahead. There is tacit agreement, legally supported by years of precedent, that gives hikers the right of passage on private lands, provided they keep to the trail and not chase the sheep or farmer’s daughters. At times we too have gotten caught up in the walking mania. As I have mentioned before, walking is not my favorite pastime but Maggie is very persuasive.

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Letter 21

Dec. 8, 1998

Despite the narrow roads and the high price of gasoline, I mean petrol, the British are absolutely car crazy. I haven't heard this much car talk since I was a teenager. There are scores of automobile magazines on the stands, some weeklies, others monthlies, each reporting on the latest news of motordom. One even offers cash prizes to photographers who snap pictures of secret prototype models, sort of an automotive paparazzi. Car shows are among the most popular on TV. The Formula 1 race in Japan, which would decide this years' driver's championship, was shown in its three hour entirety at least four times on the BBC, so that no auto fan would miss a second of the action. One TV car show host made headline news and sparked off an international incident by warning car fans not to walk their dogs past Hyundai dealerships for fear that the Korean salesmen would barbecue and eat their mutts. It was his backhanded way of suggesting that the Hyundai cars were dogs. The Foreign Office made profound apologies to the Korean Government, saying that the commentator didn't mean that the Koreans would literally eat dogs. Rather it was simply Monty Pythonesque humor. He meant, they said, that the car business is full of dog eat dog competition. Have a little mustard with that apology. Once you get used to its idiosyncrasies, our "new" little SEAT with 108,000+ miles on the clock and its lawnmower sized engine is performing adequately. The oil consumption problem that we noticed seemed to be almost entirely due to splashes coming out of the dipstick hole. The illness was cured by firmly seating the dipstick. So far we have put a few hundred miles on it without incident while obeying the backward English rules of the road. The downside is that you have to drive the motorway carefully since the SEAT has the acceleration of a turtle in a nation full of rabbits. The upside is that it gets nearly 50 miles to the gallon. This is a boon in a country where gas is three times more expensive than in the USA. Of course it requires a lot of jiggling of the ignition key to get it to start, but I look upon that as an anti-theft feature. Surprisingly American cars are the rage. Not only are the Jeep Cherokee 4x4s outselling the legendary Range Rover but old fin tailed Caddies, ancient Packards and four port hole Buick Roadmasters are the stuff of collectors' dreams. There is even one entrepreneur who makes a

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reasonable living selling home videos of US junkyards, showing American cars rusting in peace. He says that collectors use the videos as a guide in hunting down spare parts for their loved ones. Speaking of big, ugly things, the Welsh Giant Vegetable Fair was held last week. During World War II Welsh coal miners were encouraged to grow vegetables in their yards to ease the food shortage. After the war, the miners kept their gardens and, as so many gardeners do, started competing with each other to see who could grow the best crops. Things are now out of hand. At this fair there were onions as big as footballs, a 19 and a half pound radish, two foot long string beans, 69 pound cabbages and a 343 pound pumpkin. The grand prize was won by a man who brought in a dozen three and a half foot long leeks. He said his secret was using beer as a fertilizer. The leek, by the way, is the national emblem of Wales. No one knows quite why. One legend has it that St. David, the patron saint of Wales, advised Welsh soldiers to wear leeks in their caps when battling the Saxons to easily distinguish friend from foe. The story gets a bit confused because the word for daffodil and leek are the same in old Welsh. This suggests that the soldiers may have worn yellow flowers in their caps instead of green relatives of garlic, unless, of course the Saxons were from Transylvania. This confusion explains why both leek and daffodil have been adopted as national emblems. Maggie is constantly amazed at the intense color of flowers in Wales. They are far brighter than in Peekskill. At one point she suspected that they were dyed, but Francis, the dedicated gardener, says not so. One thing for sure, they certainly don't have a chance to bleach in the sun. Here it is December, at a Labradorian latitude, and some flowers are still blooming. Green thumbitis must be contagious. Maggie just planted fifty daffodils and jonquil bulbs. Such is our faith in the growing power of the Welsh climate that we expect them to burst into brilliant bloom long before we return home.

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Letter 22 Dec. 10, 1998 Last night we had an unexpectedly delightful musical evening. We noticed an obscure listing in the University calendar of a choral concert "Music for All Souls Day" and, because there was nothing good on TV, decided to go. The Bangor Cathedral, the site for the concert, is very old and very small, less than a quarter of the size of the better known cathedrals. It has been beautifully restored and it is in constant use both for church services and for community events. Its compactness makes it people friendly. You can view the carved ceiling and altar woodwork from close up, and, if you are so inclined, run your fingers over the stained glass windows. We arrived early and took our seats in the front pew. The audience, primarily university dons and gray haired pensioners straggled in. By a couple of minutes to eight most of the seats had been filled. The chorus entered, a group of 30 or so college aged men and women who, except for the fact that they were dressed formally, looked like any crowd you might see hanging around the Student Union. They smiled, waved to friends in the audience, and casually arranged themselves in a semicircle in front of the altar. The director took his position, bowed slightly and, just as the last chimes of the cathedral clock faded, signaled to the choir. The first notes were magical. In an instant the collegiate choir was transmuted into singing angels. So unexpectedly lovely was the music that it brought tears to my eyes. Sounds of song echoed through the cathedral and were reinforced by the next note from the choir. They had a perfect mastery of their music and of their environment. The full choir ran through a set of 16 th and 17 th century hymns, then paused and divided into separate groups, each specializing in a different musical era. A dozen singers treated us to a short program of 13 th and 14 th century Gregorian chants. Still another group, this time accompanied by trumpets and trombones, specialized in the more dramatic church music of the Elizabethan age. Finally the whole group combined for an ensemble wrap up of newly discovered works by Purcell and Tallis. When the music was over, we in the audience sat transfixed for several minutes before we could get up, put on our coats and leave.

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I suppose we shouldn't have been so surprised. Choral music has a long tradition in Wales. Bangor University, perhaps because it is in the most Welsh part of the country, is regarded as having the best music school, particularly for choral music. To be the best choir in Wales, then, is surely to be among the best in the world. Certainly we were convinced that it must be so. My office is near the college music practice rooms. On days when I can open the windows I hear the lovely sounds wafting up. To my unsophisticated ears the students never make a mistake, but obviously they must. Else why would they practice. Whatever their reason, it’s far better than piped in Musak. Letter 23

Dec. 12, 1998

Both Maggie and I work a more regular schedule than we ever did in Peekskill. I go to the office every day (almost), something that I haven't done for thirty years. Maggie, too, has a regular schedule and has signed up for art classes at the university extension (despite my conviction that she is a far better artist than anyone in the class including her teachers). My work is finally getting into some semblance of order. I've met many times with Unilever's research director Joe Sime and his group in Port Sunlight, a town named after a soap powder. Joe is unusual in the British hierarchy of large companies. He is both a Yorkshireman and a product of a red brick university and not Oxford or Cambridge. These red brick colleges were built after WW2 to accommodate the large number of military veterans who wanted to study for something other than being a taxi driver or working in a coal mine. The education was first rate but the colleges never possessed the social cachet of their older rivals. The relationship is roughly the same as that of municipal or community colleges in the US to Ivy League schools. Wales/Bangor would probably occupy the same slot as a large State college. Joe and I established a very good rapport, first because I had worked at a city college myself and second because we were nearly the same age and remembered the same musical groups of our youth. He also was helpful in clarifying some minor cultural aspects of the British academic system. These were things that everyone assumed that I knew and no one bothered to explain. Like what an A level or an O level was. In his Yorkshire accent he told me that Unilever funded my project not only

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for a pure and altruistic advancement of knowledge but to evaluate crosscultural issues in the product positioning of the many varieties of cleaning agents that the company makes. And by doing so to sell more soap. After years of industrial consulting that was hardly an unexpected revelation. It must have surprised Joe that I accepted the news with equanimity. Most British academicians would have protested the corruption of their discipline. The Unilever Research Lab is in the town of Port Sunlight, a picture book pretty community that looks like a Disney World version of the ideal 19 th century English village. It is just across the Mersey from Liverpool, nestled between a giant Vauxhall auto assembly plant and a row of ship docks. It takes me about an hour to drive there from Bangor on the one really high speed highway in North Wales. Most cars pass me and I’m going 80. Port Sunlight was built by William Lever in the late 1800s as a company town for the workers in his soap factory. About the time of the Civil War, William Lever started making soap with the leftover fat from his father's grocery and butcher shop, peddling it from door to door in a wheelbarrow. He jumped through the window of opportunity just as the Victorian "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" craze started. I don't know much about the quality of his soap but he was a marketing genius. His Yellow Sunlight Soap was the first soap sold in a package. He offered a £1000 reward to anyone who could prove that his soap "contains any form of adulteration whatsoever or contains any injurious chemical." This was long before the days of Ivory Soap's claim of 99 44/100% pure. His brilliant idea of grinding up bricklike soap bars into a powder so that it would be easier to dissolve in the laundry made him Europe's soap mogul. Lever's Sunlight soap became as essential for washday as the scrubbing board and the wringer. He ruthlessly out competed all his rivals. Within a couple of years he had several thousand soap making elves at his factory. Lever was a unique industrialist. Apart from his aggressive business stance, he had both an artistic and an altruistic streak. To keep his workers close to the factory, Lever built housing. He insisted that it be of the highest standard and as attractive as his money could make it. He delighted in planning his garden village and employed thirty different architects to make sure every house was an individual creation. The streets are wide and tree planted, unlike most British towns, and are lined with

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half timbered houses midway between traditional and turn of the century modern. You get the notion that if you peeked through a lace curtained windowpane you could see Shakespeare typing away at his latest play on a laptop computer. Port Sunlight is so unlike the typical drab minimalist factory town that the whole village has been put on the National Heritage register of historic places. William Lever would have been proud. I'm well settled in at the University now. They are letting me call my own shots and, apart from a few seminars I've given, I have little to do with the day-to-day activities of the department. I understand that this is the norm for all the senior staff here. It's just like the army, the juniors do all the work. Jane Raymond's group in Experimental Consumer Psychology was created to isolate the nasty commercial aspects of research from pure scholarship. Jane couldn't care less. Her real interest is in obscure aspects of eyeball functioning. She was lured from McGill University in Canada to do work on a grant on the visual aspects of package design and inherited the job title. She sees the grant primarily as a way to bootleg her own research. Unilever supports research at the University both for its own commercial reasons and because the head of the School of Psychology, Fergus Lowe, is one hell of a good salesman. Everyone in the department wonders why he is still in academia. In the business world he could be making at least 10 times his college salary - but then, what would he do for aggravation? Jane is about 40 years old, more or less. She has two kids and is married to another faculty member, Kimron Shapiro. Kim is a South Carolina native with a trace of Southern accent that several years of living in Wales has not erased. I didn't realize they were married until Jane introduced me to Kim as her husband at a faculty social. As it is, Jane outranked Kim in the arcane hierarchy of the university system. She was appointed to fill a professorship slot because her grant called for a professor to do the work. The only other available position for her husband was as a Senior Fellow, a title that has no exact parallel in the American university system. During our stay, Kim was promoted to Professor, keeping peace in the Raymond/Shapiro household. The precipitating factor in Kim's promotion was a study he published showing that warm beverages such as tea increase blood flow to the brain which in turn lowers reaction time and increases problem solving ability. The press

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picked up the story and transformed it into a statement that drinking tea raises intelligence, thus making the British just about the smartest people on earth except, possibly, for the Chinese. Kim is still trying to apologize to his coffee drinking friends. Like Kim, my nominal title is Senior Research Fellow but because of strict university social protocol my highest title, that of Professor, is used. In fact, because of my 32 years of seniority and date of professorial appointment, I am one of the highest ranking faculty members in the department. This is very confusing to the junior staff but the British pay close attention to those things. One person who doesn't is my assistant, Vardit Danziger. Vardit is an Israeli who trained as a social worker then got an advanced degree in botany. I guess she intended to work on a kibbutz solving family disputes among plants. She is married to Shai Danziger, also an Israeli but who has lived much of his life in California on a series of student visas. Shai is a perceptual psychologist who was recruited to Bangor by Jane to do much of the work on the Unilever package design research project. I met Shai earlier at faculty conferences and assumed he was a lapsed New York Hassidic Jew because of the very slight accent. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I speak better Yiddish than he does and the last time I spoke it was to my grandmother when I was six years old. Vardit answered the college advertisement for an assistant and Jane suggested that I interview her. She readily admitted that she totally lacked experience in cross cultural research but she seemed so eager to learn that I hired her. I suspected that, given the low Welsh pay scale, they could probably use the additional income. After we got to know the Danzigers socially, we discovered that we were correct. Shai received his Doctorate just before coming to Bangor and didn't realize the discrepancy in salaries between British and US universities. I would estimate that the purchasing power of a newly hired researcher in the UK is about half that of a person in a similar job in the USA. Still, a job is a job and it would look good on his vita. The alternative is that he would have to return to Israel and fight Arabs.

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Vardit was quick to learn indeed. In a short time she mastered the library filing system and the computer programs we use to download articles and collect data. Within a few weeks she was giving me instructions and handling research projects on her own. Unlike most Israeli women I have known, she is slight, reserved, and very unassuming. She even gets me coffee - a big plus in my book. I have a large but sparely furnished office in a very functional building that vaguely looks like a prison cell block. Its appearance is unusual in this college setting since most of the other structures reek of antiquity, or at the very least, of old ivy. At any rate, the heat works, it is well lit, and I have a jet speed Macintosh computer with direct Internet access. Just down the hall another office was occupied by an older bearded man named David Piggens. He looked very familiar but I couldn't place the face. It was not until a few days later when reviewing the video tapes we took at the Anglesey Oyster Faire that I identified him as the drummer in the Irish band that entertained us at Treaddur Bay. During the week Dave is a respected professor but on weekends he moonlights as an Irish musician. Actually he is not on the faculty but is a semi permanent visitor, another Canadian, who flees to Wales whenever he has a serious fight with his wife. It is the moral equivalent of taking a walk around the block to cool down after an argument. In his case the arguments must be frequent and serious because he takes residence in Wales for a few months every year or so. I am not the only one with a fast computer. Everyone, in fact, is fully computerized. Our department maintains a staff of a half dozen technical experts just to make sure we stay way ahead of the curve. One rarely goes to the library for a paper and ink book in this new era. It is easier to download it from the British Museum. For a college that looks like it would never bid Mr. Chips goodbye, the technological infrastructure numbs the mind. The college administration made the decision to embrace technology as a cheap way of bootstrapping Wales/Bangor into the front rank of British educational institutions, and it has succeeded admirably. Most of the departments are in the UK's top ten, and the School of Psychology is rated on a par with Oxford and Cambridge in research excellence. On the other hand, the two hundred year old buildings are crumbling and need a good face lift.

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Letter 24

Dec. 14, 1998

Arnold Toynbee was right. Civilizations grow, they reach maturity, and then come apart like the rotting carcass of a dead animal. Britain seems to be in the last stage now. It reached a glorious peak in the late 1700s, when everything seemed to be going its way and the sun never set on the British Empire. It has been downhill ever since. Losing the American Colonies was just the start. Little by little the Empire dropped away from the motherland, Canada, Australia, Ireland, India, and the Bahamas until nothing was left except that tenuous relationship called the Commonwealth. Now the home island seems to be about to disassemble. Britain's current crisis started when the Labor party ousted Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives a few years ago. To court the votes of nationalistic groups, Tony Blair promised that he would introduce a bill offering a vote on devolution, allowing home rule in Scotland and Wales. He never anticipated that both countries would overwhelmingly vote in favor of casting adrift from Westminster. As a result, Scotland has its own Parliament and Wales is about to get a Welsh Assembly. Scotland's first national election was last week and the Scottish Nationalist Party won a clear majority. This would be only minor cause for alarm in London, except that the SNP's first and widest political platform plank is total separation from England. It's as if Jimmy Carter's US government supervised free elections in Georgia and the Confederate Party won in a landslide. In Wales it is almost the same story. The Assembly is cranking up for its first election. The heir apparent for the position of President of the assembly was forced to resign a month ago because of a gay sex scandal. Blair's handpicked successor is seen as a London party "yes" man. The early polls show that he has only 25% of the popular vote and his presumptive opponent, an independent, bushy haired Welsh nationalist firebrand named Morgan has over 40% of the vote. Blair stumped for his own candidate last week and Morgan's popularity rose 10%. One finds it hard to underestimate the mutual antipathy between the English Anglo-Saxons and the Celtic Welsh, Scots, and Irish. To a foreigner, all Brits seem alike, but that's not the way they see it here. The

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English regard the Scots as clannish dour folk, living in a cold forbidding country, who spend all their time fighting, drinking, doing sports that involve throwing heavy objects, and inventing practical things like steam engines, television, and penicillin. Whatever language they speak, it certainly isn't English. The Scots view the English as lazy wimps who cheated their way to the Scottish throne and are incapable of running their own country. They regard helping the English manage their affairs as a form of missionary outreach work. Scots point to the fact that if the British Cabinet were not 2/3 Scottish, England would slip slowly into the sea. The other third of the cabinet, by the way, is homosexual. "Outing" gay Cabinet members has become the tabloid news media's favorite game. The Welsh are almost beneath notice by the English who believe that singing coal miners and drunken poets are the only good things to come out of Wales in centuries. The Welsh reciprocate by regarding the English as jackbooted thugs who delight in oppressing hardworking poor folk and appropriating miner's pension funds for London based welfare grifters. To add injury to insult, the English dominated supermarket chains import New Zealand lamb and mutton when the hills are alive with the sound of wooly Welsh sheep. Welshmen are also upset by the thought that the English kidnapped King Arthur and forced him to live in Cornwall, or perhaps Wessex. According to Celtic legend, and some real historians, the historical Arthur was probably a local Romano-Welsh chieftain who fought the Saxons in the 6th century. The name “Arthur” means bearlike or strong as a bear in old Celtic. The first printed mention of Arthur appeared in a history of the kings of Britain published in 1139, about 500 years after Arthur’s brief reign. Little is known of the real Arthur. In fact he may have been a composite of many chieftains who held power in the confusion following the end of the Roman occupation. The very ambiguity of Arthur’s real story served as a magnet to attract all the free floating fanciful tales of early British history. Any incident that could not be attributed to a real person became part of the Arthurian legend. After Mallory’s “Lady in the Lake” credited Arthur with withdrawing a sword from a stone, fantasy gates opened wide. Merlyn, Modred, Camelot, Lancelot and the Knights of the Round Table sprung from the imagination of Alfred Lord Tennyson and his contemporaries. Arthur’s Round Table, said to have been built by

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Merlyn, and shaped so that no knight could claim precedence, was found in a castle in Wessex. Actually it was built in the 13th century, 600 years after Arthur’s death. This fact is inconvenient but easy to overlook. Naturally the Brits could not tolerate the idea that their legendary hero was a Welshman so Camelot and all its inhabitants were moved about 400 miles south to nestle smack in the center of England. It’s a bit like claiming that Abner Doubleday was really a Mexican and that baseball was invented in Acapulco. The current betting line is 3 to 2 that the first acts of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly will be to further loosen ties with England, perhaps even opting for Commonwealth status. Commonwealth status apparently means that you still recognize the Queen as head of State but don't have to pay any attention to her. The situation was summed up by a Welsh politician who was asked if he approved of a proposed visit by Charles, Prince of Wales, to Cardiff to cement ties between Wales and England. "I approve," said the politician, "but only if he gets a proper visa first." Letter 25

Dec. 16, 1998

Christmas is the big holiday of the year in Britain, combining elements of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Labor Day in one. Sure there are the religious overtones involving ritual pronouncements by clerics to concentrate on the spiritual rather than the mercantile aspects of the holiday, but, as in the States, they are routinely ignored. In fact the whole emphasis is on excess. Excess in eating, excess in spending, excess in celebration. We have been told that the Christmas festivities continue for the traditional 12 nights - and then everyone spends the next month sobering up and detoxifying. I have no idea if there are more drunks here than at home, but the sale and consumption of alcohol is far more obvious. Beer, wine, and harder liquor are available in every grocery store and are widely advertised in the papers and TV. There is no temperance nonsense here. Booze is promoted and heavily taxed. Every week there are several wine appreciation programs on television and the tasting lists are published a week in advance. Every viewer can buy the bottles and drink along with

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the wine critics and celebrities. Our local supermarket featured a Scotch whisky tasting and offered 20% discounts on single malt scotch. We staggered out with two bottles. Maggie and I do a lot of our miscellaneous shopping on the Bangor High Street. “High Street” is the rough British parallel to Main Street in the US. It’s just a shorthand way of referring to the main shopping district. Bangor’s High Street is at the foot of Roman Camp hill, about a three block walk from the college. We park near my office then walk down the narrow winding lane to central Bangor. The High Street is a two lane cobblestone road, restricted to pedestrian traffic from 9 am until 6 PM. It stretches from just above the Bangor Cathedral down to the waterfront, about a mile and a half. The upper portion is lined with branches of London department stores and specialty shops. The prices get lower and the shops get seedier the further down the street you go. We bought a few household items and some souvenir gifts in the pricier end of the street. Then Maggie discovered a goldmine, a shop midway between the high and low priced ends. Everything in the shop was one pound, about $1.60 US. Most items were junk but there were real bargains to be had if you pawed through the merchandise. Maggie bought beautiful laminated serving trays, ceramic wall ornaments, Christmas decorations and cast iron trivets, each for a pound or less. At times I had to grab her by the arm and forcibly lead her from the store. High Street strolling is fun and the Bangor equivalent of promenading around the town square. An hour or so on the street and you will see most of the people you know. Mince pie is the seasonal staple food. Every meal in any restaurant or pub ends with mince pie. You get your regular dessert, and then the pie. True these are not the triangular wedges of US style pie, but rather little individual tarts of shortbread crust with a gaggingly sweet mince filling. Indeed all the desserts are excessively sweet. The Brits consume more sugar per capita than any other nation on earth. This dates back to the early days of the Empire. Sugar was such a rare and costly import that only the rich could afford it and then only on special occasions. At the height of its power Britain made a point of conquering as many sugar producing countries as it could to supply the taste buds of the nation. Sugar became an affordable luxury and the populace responded by using as much of it as possible. This practical demonstration of price elasticity would gladden an economist's heart. The typical British family consumes 20 tons of sugar a year. At least it seems like it.

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The rest of the Christmas meal is at each individual cook's discretion as long as it contains either a roasted turkey or ham glazed with a marmalade sauce. The snowy Dickensian celebration with a Yule log and a roast pig choking on an apple is a fantasy of bygone years. It hasn't snowed for Christmas in Wales since 1957 and, given global warming, is unlikely to snow ever again. Rain, yes. Of the side dishes, one must be brussels sprouts and another carrots and parsnips (called "Swedes" here). Both must be overcooked in a quarter pound of butter. For airplane pilots, radio announcers and other people who have to work on the holiday, an enterprising firm has just introduced Christmas dinner in a box. For a couple of quid you get a Crackerjack box sized package containing four wrapped poptart lookalikes. One contains a paste like filling of turkey and stuffing, laced with streaks of cranberry sauce. The next is filled with a blend of sweet potatoes and apples. The third tastes like plum pudding with brandy sauce. The final one is, of course, mince pie. Ironically the local Tesco supermarket has a wider variety of quality foodstuffs than any in the Peekskill area. They have French cheeses in infinite variety, fruits from Chile, Israel, and South Africa, dairy products from Denmark and sausages from Germany. European delicacies are cheap because there are no import duties. We have both gained weight and developed new tastes for exotic foodstuffs. Tastes which will be expensive to gratify at home. Too bad the British cooks can't break with tradition. Many Brits decide to opt out of Christmas entirely and travel to warmer climes. But since we will be doing a lot of traveling in a few weeks we decided to go native by drinking, eating and listening to carols. Our tree is nicely decorated, if a little plastic, and we have strings of twinkling bulbs scattered throughout the house. Good thing we didn't go to Majorca or Ibiza since son Mike just e-mailed us to say he is coming to Wales on Dec. 20 and will stay a week.

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Letter 26

Jan. 1, 1999

Mike arrived for the Christmas break. A mix-up at the Manchester airport involving a cancelled train required a hurried rescue mission in our creaky car. On the trip back to Bangor the sun awakened from its dormancy and illuminated the landscape in an unearthly but extremely beautiful way. The Welsh sun in winter has an unusual characteristic. Because of the high latitude it never gets more than 14 degrees above the horizon and that only at high noon. Everything is illuminated from the side all the time. The grazing light throws textures into high relief and magnifies the three dimensional aspect of every scene. Shadows, even in the middle of the day, are many times longer than the object that casts them. Had the Welsh been painters instead of singers we would be speaking of the mystical light of Menai the way that the French speak of the Province. The downside, of course is that driving East in the morning and West in the evening puts the sun right over the hood ornament of your car. No visor can be low enough to block it out. In winter it is only safe to drive North or South. With Mike in tow we made the obligatory sightseeing tour of castles and seascapes and strolled the beachfront at Llandudno. The following day we took the high speed catamaran ferry to Dublin to experience the festive season in a city bigger than an average cocktail party. International ferries in the UK are combination floating shopping malls and gambling casinos. Once the three mile offshore line is crossed, the duty free shops open and the slots are unlocked. Beer, wine and whiskey are half the price on the ferry as in stores ashore. Some passengers board with supermarket shopping carts or hand trucks to load up. The newspapers tell us that the ferry companies make over half their profits from duty free sales, which, unfortunately, are due to end in June. Since you can buy on both the outbound and the return trip, the Dublin terminal rents convenient storage lockers to stash the loot until evening. The Stena Line catamaran itself is a sight to awe even the most blase boater. Big as a football field, it blasts through the water at 40 knots, over 50 miles per hour, powered by gas turbine engines more powerful than those on a 747. The trip across the Irish Sea from Holyhead to Dublin takes 90 minutes, just about enough time to change a few British pounds into Irish punts, drink a beer and plan your sightseeing with the aid of a tourist brochure.

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Dublin is a concentrated, almost pocket sized city, oozing history from every pore. Anyone who has read James Joyce, followed the reports of the Irish "troubles", or drinks warm dark beer can spot the relevant landmarks. These are good times in Ireland with industry booming and real estate prices skyrocketing. Ireland's participation in the European common market makes prices much cheaper than in Britain and many Welsh come here to shop and return with their duty free goods. Maggie, Mike and I wandered Grafton Street, the main shopping area, now a pedestrian only thoroughfare, popping in and out of the lavishly Christmas decorated stores and kiosks. The moist Irish weather means that most people shop indoors. Some streets adjacent to Grafton Street have been roofed over, converting them to huge malls. The shops on either side, relieved of the necessity to provide weather protection, have removed their front porticos to let more browsers in. Every two or three hundred feet, a brass band played carols and energetic young men and women passed among the audience collecting for their sponsoring charity. Strings of bright lights covered almost every square foot of available public facade. We had been transported to a damp, slightly fey Christmas wonderland. Wandering around Dublin in a zig zag pattern, we crossed the Ha'penny Bridge over the River Liffey, featured in Finnegan's Wake, strolled around Trinity College, lunched on Irish stew in Gallagher's Boxty House pub in the middle of the neo-hippy Temple Bar district, and relaxed over pints of Guinness Stout at the company brewery. Just as our complexion turned a shade of green it was time for the return ferry. Most of our outgoing shipmates were on the late evening return trip to Wales. Many had sampled their liquid purchases. The voyage across the Irish Sea was uneventful other than the fact that the entire ambience was that of the tail end of a fraternity drinking bash. At Holyhead all staggered off the boat, loaded either internally or externally. Customs waved everyone through, probably not wanting to get vomited on. The following night the Simpsons threw their annual holiday party, the first social event we have attended that did not have a purely university connection. This was our chance to get acquainted with the real Welsh. Unfortunately no Welsh seem to live on our street. The only Welsh natives are the dead in the cemetery. There were English and Scots and Canadians

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and even a few South Africans. Despite the lack of the Welsh connection we had a good time and even allowed ourselves to get a bit tipsy since the walk home was only about 30 feet. Well, there is one Welsh family that lives near us. A couple of old dotty ladies and their brother live next door. One lady is almost a recluse and the other has Alzheimer’s disease. She is very friendly and Maggie talks to her every time they meet when hanging out laundry. Every sunny day is laundry drying day so they talk about once a week. Maggie has to reintroduce herself every time. Mike's birthday is on December 23. What a cruel joke. Because everyone is caught up in the holiday rush, his birthday does not quite receive the attention accorded to children whose parents were more thoughtful about family planning. To celebrate we made reservations at the Bull’s Head Inn in Beaumaris. This inn dates back to the 1400s and from the appearance of the tap room on the ground floor hasn’t been redecorated since. Beaumaris used to be the big town in these parts. It was the only place where the Menai Strait could be crossed in reasonable safety. At low tide a broad expanse of sea bottom is exposed, the Lavan Sands, reaching almost to the mainland. Travelers could walk most of the way across and would be rowed the last half mile by boatmen for a shilling each. That was an exorbitant fee at the time but there was no alternative. Cattle raised on Anglesey and being driven to market on the mainland had to swim the last distance and, if the drover misjudged the tide, often were swept out to sea. The rumor is that sharks waited in Conwy Bay for the occasional beef feast. This story was probably spread by the boatmen to discourage human swimmers from avoiding paying for their crossing. The Bull’s Head Inn was where the affluent travelers waited for a propitious tide. It was always considered a good place to eat and now has the reputation of being the finest restaurant in North Wales We arrived about half an hour early and waited with other diners in a plush furnished reception room, then were shepherded up to the dining room proper. The decor was that of a slightly run down manor house with warped floors and wobbly tables and chairs. The food was very good but we concluded that the reputation as the best in Northern Wales stems from lack of competition rather than the inherent excellence of the cuisine.

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Our two other favorite restaurants are also in Beaumaris. One is an ordinary pub that serves a good Sunday dinner of roast beef or broiled salmon at a special price for senior citizens. We generally make this a weekend routine, eating a meal and then strolling along the harbor walk to settle the calories. The other restaurant is the Cockleshell Inn, also a pub but with a small attached seafood dining room. It was recommended by one of the expatriate Californians at the college. Despite the fact that some of the best fishing grounds in the Irish Sea are close by, the typical Welshman prefers a good slab of beef or lamb. We tend to lean the other way. Mussels and oysters are dredged from Menai Strait on an hourly basis. The constant flow of tides brings them fresh nutrients twice a day. Finny fish, cod, sole and the like are landed at a fishing port on the other side of the island, about 20 minutes truck ride away. The seafood is some of the best we have eaten - but a bit of a lottery. We often have a big bowl of seafood stew for lunch. No matter what you order, you can never be sure what you will get. The stuff that goes into the pot is what is in the market that day. The chef is a creative genius. He can make cod taste like tuna or salmon taste like cod. The only thing you are sure of is that it will not taste like chicken. Sometimes the stew is fantastic, other times only excellent. Unfortunately Mike is not a great fish lover so we gave the Cockleshell a bye. Mike’s stay has been a mini vacation for Maggie too. I have to work once in a while and, since Maggie refuses to drive our backward handling car, she is often housebound. She and Mike have gone for long walks around Menai Bridge and along the waterfront. Given that the winter wind can often hit gale force it might be better said that they sail across the landscape, beating into headwinds and having an easy run when the wind is at their backs. They especially enjoy walking over the Telford Bridge with the entire Menai Strait exposed below them. When I join them we make an obligatory stop at the Antelope Pub at the far side of the bridge for dinner and refreshments. Maggie, Mike and I celebrated Christmas Eve by going to a midnight mass and concert at the Bangor Cathedral. Again the ambience of the millennium and a half old building was magical. Those medieval architects really knew what they were about in designing an auditorium for choral performance. Larger cathedrals overpower the senses but the

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scale of the Bangor Cathedral was just right for the human voice. It was crowded but we found seats in the back of the nave. Unlike the formal ceremonies from Rome and Canterbury shown on TV, this mass seemed more like a gathering of friendly folk in a local theater. We were treated to a thankfully short homily and a nice assortment of religious Christmas carols by the college chorale, a fitting coda to Mike’s visit. Letter 27

Feb. 22, 1998

In January Maggie and I returned to the States to collect the mail, pay income taxes, and rake the leaves off what remained of our deer ravaged lawn. The rationale for the trip was the paper to be delivered at the cross cultural research conference in Santa Fe. A few hours of hobnobbing with my fellow wizards were enough to convince me that no one, least of all me, knew what we were really doing. Santa Fe is an adobe colored town on New Mexico's high plateau. It features Pueblo/Mexican architecture and over 200 art galleries. Some city boosters say it is the largest art market in the US outside of New York City. I believe it. We spent a day bouncing from gallery to gallery. Tourists were scarce in the winter so we had private viewings in most places and the bored curators were eager to talk to us. I can tell you from personal experience that art treks are more fatiguing than mountain climbing. Naturally Maggie disagrees. The next day we drove to Taos, a couple of thousand feet higher, to see more galleries. Maggie wanted to see the work of an expatriate Norwegian artist named Inger something or other who painted in a style similar to her own. Inger lived in a very tastefully decorated apartment studio with a companion (sex indeterminate) and rented out two guest houses to supplement her artistic income. She seemed to be doing OK financially though, although from art or family income is hard to say. The art competition in Taos must be fierce. Of the 6000 full time residents, 2000 are artists. It began to snow and a blizzard was predicted so we escaped to lower altitudes.

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Letter 28

Mar. 12, 1999

Our flight back to Wales was noteworthy only for the fact that customs was curious about why we wanted to come back so soon. We are still considered tourists and no one ever comes to visit Wales in the winter. That alone is cause for suspicion. Still, the inspector could find no legal reason for rejecting us and reluctantly stamped our visa for another six months - although we are barred from going on the public dole. Neighbors tell us this winter has been very unWelsh-like. I've mowed the grass three times since our return and Maggie's 50 daffodil plants are flowering nicely. Why in one period we even had eight uninterrupted days of sunshine. People vacation in this part of Wales for two reasons, water sports and hill hiking. Even in the sun it is still too chilly for windsurfing so Maggie suggested we settle on a hill hike. Actually we decided on a gentle stroll and, naive about the nature of the Welsh mountains, drove the 10 miles to the Ogwen Valley, our nearest entry point to the Snowdonia park. Llyn Ogwen is a glacial lake that sits in a valley carved out by the retreating ice. The only settlement near by is Idwal Cottage, a hamlet so small it isn't even on the map. In fact all it consists of is a YMCA hostel, a snack bar, and a mountain rescue center complete with ambulance, helicopter, and all terrain vehicles. That should have given us our first clue. We learned only too late that the main reason people come here is to take some of Wales' most difficult and demanding, but magnificently scenic walks. We followed a gentle path that promised an easy ramble around a classically formed glacial bowl named Cwm Idwal. Joining us were families with children skipping along next to their parents, old men walking dogs, and young marrieds with babies perched on their backpacks. This should be a piece of cake. At the center of Cwm Idwal there was a small lake. Which way to go? By this time most of the family folk had disappeared. A couple of hikers walked purposefully by us. "Follow them" suggested Maggie. "They seem to know the way." That was the second mistake of the day. The path grew narrower, then became just a series of rocks that had to be stepped on precisely to avoid the muddy plots between them. The upward

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slope turned into a rocky staircase. Far ahead we could see climbers on the rockface of the cwm looking like little gecko lizards working their way up a vertical wall. In about half an hour of hard breathing we were up to their base camp. Extending straight up from the camp was a sheer rock wall about 1000 feet high, locally called the Idwal Slab. At the base a bevy of climbers were laying out rope, checking equipment and organizing all of the esoterica necessary for flouting the laws of gravity. A couple of young men came over to us armed with a video camera and asked if we would mind being interviewed. They were from the Snowdonia Tourist Board and were gathering material to promote the joys of climbing in the Welsh Alps. I guess they decided if geezers such as we could make it this far then anyone could. Modest Maggie declined but I am to be immortalized on their Web site. Where does the trail go from here? The cameramen pointed up the rockface but then took pity on us and suggested a more gradually sloping route to the top. Ahead was the jointed cleft of Twill Du which splits the peak into two points. In Welsh this means Devil's Kitchen. The gradually sloping route turned into a series of rock scrambles that took us above the snow line. The warm weather was melting the snow which soaked the rocks and ran into the channel between the twin peaks. We found ourselves fording shallow streams of melt water. These eventually combined into a narrow but very high waterfall breaking the trail into two parts. The gap was too far to jump although there is a local tradition that says jumping the gap brings good luck. That must be the case since missing the jump certainly brings bad luck. In dry weather, if I was feeling particularly brave, with my insurance paid up, I might have tried it but today everything was wet, moss or mud covered and I felt like a coward. Maggie suggested that we work our way uphill until we found a better spot and I certainly agreed. After a series of wet, slippery stumbling attempts we crossed the gap a few hundred yards upstream then found our way back to the minimal trail. A steep climb later we stood below the peak. As promised, the view was magnificent. Perhaps not as impressive as Edmund Hillary's from Mt. Everest, but far greener. The evidence of glacial activity is so clear that you wonder why it took geologists so long to work out the mechanism that created these hollowed hill faces and scoured rocks. For years people thought the Welsh mountains were the remains of extinct

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volcano cones. Even Charles Darwin was fooled. When geologists finally did figure out that ice, not fire, carved out the mountains, they gave the layers of rock Welsh names. The pre-Cambrian and Cambrian epochs were named after Cambria, the ancient name for Wales. Both the Ordovician and the Silurian epochs were named after Welsh tribes, the Ordovices and the Silures. Llyn Idwal, a long way below, reflected the gray cliffs but ripples in the water suggested that a wind was rising and it might be prudent to descend. The downhill trek was physically harder than the uphill part. Maggie claims it easier to climb than descend and the strain on the joints is a lot less. I certainly agree. We nodded to other hikers coming up the path secure in the knowledge that we had completed, albeit inadvertently, one of the more demanding passages in Snowdonia. By the time we reached the car we decided it was time for a cuppa tea. We are acculturating fast. Letter 29

Mar. 20, 1999

There is another interesting spot in the Snowdonia range called the Electric Mountain. Every time we passed by the tourist kiosk in Pringle’s we saw brochures for the Electric Mountain and on a typically rainy Welsh weekend we decided to pay it a visit. The mountain is near the town of Llanberis, about 20 miles from our house. It really is a giant stored water electric generating station but that simple description hardly does it justice. About 20 years ago the Welsh Power Authority realized that they needed to provide a lot of additional generating capacity. They didn’t need the power all the time, just for peak periods. The half times of soccer games were particularly demanding when a million households would turn on their electric tea kettles for some quick refreshment. The power people solved the problem in an imaginative way. At the base of a 2000 ft. mountain in the Snowdonia range slate miners had excavated a large quarry. Glacial activity in the ice age had formed a fair sized pond near the peak. The mountain was hollowed out and in a huge internal cavern turbines and generators were installed. Tunnels connected the pond at the top to the quarry below. During periods when there was surplus power the generators served as motors and pumped water from the quarry at the base to the pond at the peak. When electrical demand increased, say during the half times, the flow reversed driving the generators and

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supplying power to the national electric grid. There was enough stored power to supply all of North Wales for nearly an hour, enough time to get steam or gas turbine generators on line and brew a couple of million cups of tea. So much for the technical details. The real wonder was the mountain itself. There is a classical sci-fi movie named “Forbidden Planet” which has a scene in which the leading characters explore the hollowed out interior of a planet formerly occupied by the Krell, an extinct race of technological geniuses. In the film the camera draws back to let you see an enormous space crammed with mysterious machines. That’s what this place looked like. Miles of roadway sized tunnels connected large chambers filled with equipment. The main generating room was over a quarter of a mile long and half as wide. The ceiling was way overhead. Three or four football games could be played in the generating room simultaneously if the colorfully painted generators and turbines were not in the way. Apparently the place was a regular stop on tours of Wales, probably as an antidote to the backward look of the surrounding hill villages. Full sized tourist busses traversed the tunnels, everyone, including us, wearing hard hats in case a rock should decide to break loose from its surroundings and fall several hundred feet to the floor, bouncing off a head on the way. The reception area contained the ubiquitous gift shop, a good snack bar, and an art museum that featured the work of local artists. The lower pond area was surrounded by gardens and walks. Con Edison could take lessons on redecorating its generating stations from Welsh Power. Whenever we visit Llanberis from now on, we will park in the Electric Mountain lot, have a cuppa at the snack shop, and peek at the paintings on display. Incidentally, the real owner of our house, Mr. Kincade, was a civil engineer responsible for many aspects of the generating plant. He has my respect. Letter 30

Apr. 4, 1999

This is lambing time in Wales. Hardly anyone in Europe eats British meat anymore because of Mad Cow Disease, and its relatives Silly Sheep Syndrome and CooCoo Chicken Condition. Still, farmers go through the ritual of breeding animals so that the young are born a week or two before April Fool's day. I suppose there is some justification for dairy cows and chickens since no one has blamed any fatal illness on milk and

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eggs, except for high cholesterol. As long as people eat big English breakfasts there will be a call for both products. But since the invention of polyester fleece the market for itchy wool is shrinking as fast as a sweater in a Turkish bath. I guess the reason why so many wooly animals are produced must lie in what a long ago professor of mine called "functional autonomy." He used as an example the retired postman who went on extended walks. (Or the college professor emeritus who took up a research position in Wales.) I guess if you do something long enough, it becomes its own justification for being. Besides, as Maggie pointed out, raising sheep is a lot easier than farming. Anyway, the fields are dotted with little lambs, eating, playing, and having fun just being alive unaware that most of them will be garnished with mint before the summer is over. Farmers put a few rams in with the ewes the last week in October and everyone has a merry fortnight. By the middle of November the lovers are separated, probably to the relief of the exhausted rams. Then the sheep are turned out to fend for themselves in the Welsh hills and fields. No feed is provided for them unless the winter is really bad. The Welsh hill sheep are tough little creatures and wander up and down the mountain sides eating everything that isn't hard enough to cut glass. They are low maintenance animals. That also explains why the best restaurants feature New Zealand lamb. Any sheep hardy enough to climb up and down the hills all winter long would have to be served with a chain saw in place of a knife and fork. Sheep have a five month gestation period so the (Paschal) lambs are all born in the two or three weeks before Easter. On the first day they are little puff balls, barely able to stand. By the second they follow their mother as she mows the grass. By the end of their first week they are running from one end of the field to the other, jumping little streams and butting heads in mock fights. The farmers identify the sheep by blue and orange spray painted numbers on their backs. The lambs have the same number as their mammas in case they wander off and get lost. We don't see many sheepdogs in the fields around here but we see plenty of extremely well behaved border collies as pets. This part of Wales uses stone fences and thick hedges to keep the sheep where they belong. Shepherds do their shepherding on motorbikes and little Honda ATVs. Sheepdogs are used for competitions. Remember the movie “Babe” where a pig wanted to be a sheep dog and entered the herding competition. The

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dogs really do sheep herding but now it is a TV sport with national championships and some fairly high cash prizes. A little herd of sheep is put in the middle of a large field and the dog, guided only by the shepherd's commands, must round them up and maneuver them through series of gates into a circle. Then the dog must separate four sheep wearing collars from the herd and put them in a pen, at the same time keeping the other sheep in the circle. Finally the dog must convince all the sheep to go into in a corral and the shepherd closes the gate. The dogs are clearly smarter than the average professor. I couldn't do that and I have a degree. Letter 31

April 10, 1999

The megabuck TV quiz show is alive and well and is living in Great Britain. Forty years after the scandals in the US that killed off "The $64,000 Question" that show's illegitimate child emerged on TV here. It is called, with great imagination "Do You Want to Be a Millionaire!" Contestants from all over the UK compete to be on the show by answering a silly telephone quiz question, usually about sports, and of a difficulty level which would not challenge the average pub frequenting 6 year old. The last one was "how many pockets in a pool table?" In a TV studio with a live, possibly half soused audience and spooky music worthy of a Hitchcock film, the lucky contestants compete for ever increasing prizes. The requisite smarmy master of ceremonies presents each fairly simple question. There are four possible answers to each, all neatly printed out on a board. The contestants have the option to go home with the money they have already won or telephone a friend for help with the answer. Surprisingly very few have won big money even through the odds are 25% of winning by a random guess. The producers make no bones about the fact that they are choosing "average" people. Average clearly must mean people who have to count their shoes before they put them on to be sure they have the right number. It is the most popular show on British TV and has the BBC running for cover. At the polar extreme is a British version of the US show "College Quiz Bowl." This is real tough competition. For no money at all, four swots from prestigious UK colleges battle intellectually for the honor of their ivy covered campuses. It's now down to the semi-finals and four

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schools remain. One of them is Wales/Bangor University. We have sort of a marginal loyalty to the old college and watch the show whenever it doesn't compete with a Manchester United soccer game. Oxford and Cambridge and the London School of Economics have already been defeated. I am told that the victor gets a surge of applications the following year, like the winner of the Final Four. The competitive fever has really taken hold of the younger set. There is a race on to see who can produce the first baby of the Millennium. Newspapers and TV shows give fertility advice. Cooks publish passion raising recipes. Restaurants menus feature oysters, raw eggs, and other culinary aphrodisiacs. Tonight, April 10, is the big night for conception for a birth on 1/1/2000. Welsh radio is offering a whole night of romantic music to stoke the ardor of reluctant couples. The National Health Service has tried to discourage the race because they fear overloading their facilities on New Year's day. They say they can't cope with the babies and the drunks at the same time. Also the taxi drivers threaten that they won't pick up any pregnant woman on New Year's Eve unless she pays a £25 surcharge. That will make up for the tips they will lose if she gives birth in the cab. Maggie and I figure that this is one race we won't enter. Letter 32

April 12, 1999

The fault lines across the UK are widening even faster than a natural born cynic such as I would have expected. The BBC has decided that the word "British" is offensive and must be expurgated from all newscasts. The London Times has reported that the politically correct "suits" at BBC headquarters have instructed all writers and correspondents that "British" can no longer be used to describe the generality of people living in the UK. It might cause offense to the Scots and Welsh and would drive the Irish into an absolute state of fury. The term "national" can't be used either, especially when talking about the weather or the economy. So - no more nubile ladies pointing to a map and saying that the "national" weather is rainy, even though it almost certainly is. The silver lining is that we won't have pundits talking about the imminent failure of the "national" economy.

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Regional sensitivity has reached extreme proportions. In a last minute attempt to stave off Scottish independence a ban has been placed on all ethnic jokes. This will deprive the "British" comedians of half of their most fertile source of humor. Imagine the despair among stand up comics who can no longer joke about what the Scots wear under their kilts or about the composition of haggis. The other half of their routine is safe enough. Cross dressing is protected by law. In Britain, no one can "welsh" on an agreement anymore, although there is a move to substitute the word "bangladesh" in the appropriate phrases. The Welsh are also sensitive about the image of the average Welshman as a simpleton. One comic here started his routine by shouting "oggi, oggi, oggi." When it didn't get laughs he complained, "That's funny - when I said that in Wales the audience roared. Obviously it doesn't take much to amuse the Welsh." Then the English audience roared. The BBC has also ruled that subtitles for Scots when speaking English should never be used even if the accent is unintelligible. This is a balm for ethnic pride but is a real loss to communication. The natives of the UK labor under the curse of Henry Higgins. The moment anyone begins to speak, he or she is instantly labeled by class, education, economic status and place of origin. It might as well be tattooed on one's forehead. Regions perversely pride themselves on the thickness of their accent and make no effort whatever to encourage comprehension beyond the local precinct. Scottish television just fired a native Scots newscaster because she was educated at Cambridge and could be understood outside of Glasgow. The Welsh are going the Scots one better. An official language of the new Welsh Assembly will probably be Welsh, even though only a fifth of the people in the country are fluent in the tongue. The Welsh Language act of 1953 made Welsh co-equal to English as an official language and all government documents and road signs are in both Welsh and English. Now it appears that some languages are more equal than others. Of course since Labor won the last election by the margin of Scottish and Welsh votes, the situation must be handled with great delicacy. If it resists self rule in Scotland and Wales, Labor runs the chance of being turned out at the next election. On the other hand if it supports the nationalistic ambitions of those two countries then it runs the risk of subjecting the English, who after all are 90% of the UK's

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population, to the indignity of being controlled by swing votes of the MPs from the provinces. Naturally the English aren't going to kindly take disenfranchisement. The Tories, eager to split the Labor party from the Scottish and Welsh factions, have just authored a bill that will strip Scottish MPs of the right to vote on any legislation in Parliament which will affect England. All of this regional strife is being carried on against a background of national pride about Britain's reemergence as a world power. The Brits point to two recent events which confirm their climb back to the front rank. British military might is exemplified by the 6 Harrier jets that are detailed to the Kosovo front. The daily exploits of the pilots are reported in the press and newscasts, although there is a tendency to gloss over the fact that most of their missions were aborted by the weather. Tony Blair talks tough every night on TV. Full page battle maps spread across the Sunday papers. Everyone is amused that the British Air Force and the German Luftwaffe are fighting on the same side. This kind of cooperation hasn't happened since the Celts and Visigoths battled the Roman legions nearly 2000 years ago. Of course there is always the risk that the Germans might lose their direction and bomb Coventry instead. You might even think this war is as big as the one in the Falklands. The ascendancy of British culture can be seen in the success of our favorite soccer team, Manchester United. All eyes have been glued to the TV as the team defeated all its rivals in the English Premier League. Every city, town, and village in the UK and in Europe has its local soccer club. It is truly the world sport. The Premier League consists of the best 20 teams in Britain who play a grueling two game a week schedule against each other. The top finisher, of course, wins all the honors as well as all the beer endorsements. The last three teams in the league get relegated to a lower league, and the three leading teams in the lower league get promoted to the Premier League. Manchester United has won the top spot for the last three years. It is the New York Yankees of soccer. In addition to league play, there are a number of championship cups to be won. These are knock out tournaments similar to the March Madness of basketball. One loss and you are relegated to spectator status. The most prestigious of these is the Football Association Cup, a contest open to all professional soccer teams in the UK regardless of league. It takes a lot of guts to enter this tournament since there is always the chance

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that a major big city team will be knocked out by a minor league team that regularly plays in a cow pasture. Imagine the loss in product endorsements that will follow. After a number of close calls, Manchester United won the FA Cup too. The last and most important of these tournaments is the European Champions Cup. True to its name, this contest is only open to teams that have finished first or second in their respective national professional leagues. Now British soccer is pretty good but European soccer is better. After all British athletes have to compete with snooker for airtime. Beating the odds, Manchester United clawed its way into the finals of the European Cup only to face the favorite, Germany’s top team Bayern Munich. The older, more experienced German team, playing on their home field, scored two quick goals then settled back into a defensive formation and waited for time to run out. Manchester managed a goal in the second half. The game clock ran out with the score 2 to 1 in Germany’s favor. The fans started leaving the stands to beat the rush in the parking lot. In soccer, unlike most sports, the game is not quite over when the time runs out. The referee keeps track of all the moments the clock was stopped to assist an injured player and adds the time necessary to carry the player off the field or stanch the flow of blood to the end of the game. In this game, “injury time” was a bit over 2 minutes. With the end in sight Manchester substituted two players, a very experienced midfielder who had not seen much action, and a young forward, recently acquired from a Norwegian team. The fresh legs paid off. In a flurry of confused non-stop action, Manchester scored twice within 90 seconds, both goals from the substitute players. Then the game was really over. The British fans went ballistic. The German players froze into catatonic bewilderment as victory vanished. Fans descending in the elevator from the top tiers of the grandstand entered the car with Germany uber alles, only to find that the British had won the war again. In the UK newspaper headline writers had their own triumph. The conservative London Times flashed “GOD IS BRITISH” across its front page. The equally staid Manchester Guardian countered with “SUBS SINK GERMANS.”

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All Britain, despite factional differences, were united in believing that the victory proved the ultimate superiority of British culture over those frog eating Europeans, despite the fact that half the Manchester United team was made up of Scandinavians, Irishmen, Jamaicans, and Dutchmen. It even justified staying out of the European Monetary Union. News flash: the University of Wales/Bangor just defeated Edinburgh and is now in the finals of the College Quiz Bowl. It will be competing for top intellectual honors against the Open University, basically a bunch of aged college students who take courses broadcast on the TV at early hours in the morning. Letter 33

Apr. 19, 1999

Wonder of wonders, we just got a call from Mike to tell us he is coming back to Wales. Actually he is sort of passing through to go on a golfing vacation with some of his buddies from business school. One of them is an Irish Laird, or at least has some family in Ireland and has arranged to host the group. The Indiana University business school fosters closeness among graduates on the grounds that people do business with people they like. Mike enthusiastically supports this networking idea since it gives him a justification for partying with friends whenever the opportunity arises. At any rate, we are a familial waystop. He arrives at the Manchester airport, spends a couple of days with us, then hops the ferry to Dublin. This time we met him at the Manchester airport without the panic stricken missed connection calls. The weather was much balmier than at Christmas and we wanted to show Mike some of the Welsh sights that we missed earlier. Maggie and I agreed that the most unusual sight was Portmerion so that was our first stop. By this time we had an almost proprietary familiarity with the highlights of the village so we served as the guides. Mike then took us on a long walk through the countryside around the village where he served as the guide using his orienteering skills. Thank God for that. I figured we were lost after the first 15 minutes off the paved walkways. And, of course, because we had to travel to Porthmadog to get home, we took Mike on the Ffestiniog narrow gauge railway. Again a repeat trip for us but still enjoyable.

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Dinner at the Menai Bridge Indian restaurant and off to bed. We put Mike on the ferry for Dublin the next day. I understand his combined golfing vacation and business school networking session was a great success. It didn’t even rain. The next day Karen called and told us she was planning to visit for almost two weeks. Maggie started on a new period in her art. Picasso had his blue period. Maggie has her collage period. Forget the paint and brushes, now its scissors and paste. For the last couple of months she has been cutting out fanciful snowflakes out of the colored pages from every magazine that comes over the threshold. She carefully arranges these cutouts into imaginative designs and pastes them to large sheets of cardboard with a thick water based varnish. Every horizontal surface in the house is knee deep in cutouts. We haunt hardware stores seeking varnish, glue, and mounting boards. Maggie pounces on magazine pages as soon as I finish reading them hunting that elusive shade of puce necessary to complete a collage. It all started as an assignment in her art class but the project has taken on a life of its own. Her collages are admired in her class and the teacher is jealous. Next month the group starts on sculpture. I can hardly wait. Letter 34

Apr. 21, 1999

I'm having a bit of wet weather trouble at work. A heavy wind driven rain last week worked its way through the slate roof of my office building and started dripping on my desk. The next day some of the ceiling tiles gave way and collapsed in a sodden mound over my computer terminal. Nothing was seriously damaged but CRT voltages and Welsh rain make an effervescent cocktail. In due time I was moved to another office in a different building which, unfortunately didn't have the right types of computer outlets. These things never happened when we used yellow legal pads and #2 pencils. Today, if the electrons decide to go on strike in the damp, everything stops. Apart from not having the right connections, the new office is one of the nicest I've ever had at a university. It is on the top floor of an old Victorian house on the main college street. I have windows on three sides of a small, irregularly shaped room in what must have been the upstairs maid's quarters a century ago. The room is freshly painted in white and is very light and airy. There are breathtaking views of Menai Strait out one

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window and the Snowdonia mountain range out the other. Vardit has a desk with a big cabinet attached to store all our paperwork. I have a desk with an executive easy chair in which I can contemplate or sleep. Once we get the right wires installed it will be a pleasant place to work. The only real disadvantage is that Vardit has to go down three floors to get coffee. That and the fact that I have to park my car a block away and brave the near constant rain. Since the electrons took a vacation and nature was giving us such an obvious sign, we declared a holiday too and decided to explore Mount Snowdon. This is the tallest peak in England and Wales. We took the easy way up - by train. The Mt. Snowdon railway is only slightly bigger than a large FAO Schwartz toy. It is a narrow gauge cog railway that runs from the old slate mining town of Llanberis up to the top of the mountain. The Mt. Snowden railroad is nothing like the restored Ffestiniog narrow gauge line that we took last Fall. It is a commercial venture that never hauled a slab of slate. On a visit to New England an English railroader was fascinated with the cog railway that ran up New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington. He figured that if the Yankees could do it, a Brit could do it better, and make money in the bargain. The Mt. Snowdon railroad was built from scratch in 1896 to transport Victorian ladies in elegant Sunday dresses to the top of the mountain in a luxurious manner. At the peak, they could sip tea and look all the way over to Ireland while they waited for their menfolk to prove their British ruggedness by hiking the hilly five miles to the top. The slopes are severe for a railroad. The mountain is nearly a mile high and the track is five miles long. This makes the average slope almost 20%, as steep in some places as a flight of stairs. To keep the little trains from sliding back down the hill in wet weather, a cog runs up the middle of the track. It looks like a five mile long comb with very short stubby teeth. A power driven gear wheel engages the cog and pushes the train by brute force up the track. The engine is behind the single passenger carriage so that the carriage's weight adds to the force pressing the gear wheel into the cog. Nothing is left to the vicissitudes of friction. The engines are given imaginative names, carefully engraved on brass plaques mounted on the side of the cab. Ours was named Yeti, which, as you recall, is the name for the Himalaya's abominable snowman.

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The train runs on an irregular schedule. When the single carriage is filled, the train goes. The ride is particularly bumpy. You feel each tooth of the cog as the gear wheel transfers the push from one to the next. The track parallels the hiking trail for a large part of the trip. We felt a bit embarrassed being mechanically assisted by our abominable snowman up the mountain while eight year old kids ran alongside the train waving at us. The next time we decided to go up on our own power. The train does climb the hill fairly fast, at least five miles an hour, about two or three times a hiker's pace. As the countryside dropped away we could see lakes and villages in the distance. Our carriage was packed with vacationers, young and old. The school Spring holidays are on now and everyone is trying to forget the wet winter in the occasionally sunny Welsh countryside. After about an hour of chugging we reached our upper station, 300 meters below Snowdon's peak. The track did go all the way up but some repair of winter damage was going on ahead. Maggie and I strolled around marveling at the view. We noted how nicely the land had been kept, particularly how well the grass was mowed even between the rocks at the highest elevations, until we realized that hill sheep were the gardeners. Wherever you looked, you could see little dots of white fur. The sheep roam to the peaks of all the mountains hereabouts, climbing to ledges that would take a mere human $1000 worth of mountain climbing equipment. Just as the trainman whistled for us to reboard for the trip down, the clouds started to move in. Snowdon has very unpredictable weather and 4 or 5 people die every year on the trails in freak snowstorms or rain loosened rockfalls. We figured our timing was pretty good. When we got home we found that the gardener (human) hired by Mr. Kincade had cut the grass and trimmed the hedges. Indeed, our timing was perfect. Letter 35

April 23, 1999

A cold wind blew in from the Arctic last night and we woke to find the yard covered with snow. The sun broke through the clouds, but before it could melt more than half an inch of white cover, it began to hail. The hail stones started as small as BBs then reached the size of large peas or small marbles before the storm was over. Maggie's daffodils looked a little

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battered, The horses grazing in the field just in back of our house continued their munching without pause. This kind of weather is the norm for them. Now, a day later, the sun is shining again. The Snowdonia mountains are completely white with snow with towering clouds hovering over the peaks. If you squint your eyes a bit and use a little imagination, you can imagine you are in the Alps. If you use much more imagination, the Himalayas are within reach. Within one day we had snow, rain, hail, gale force winds and sunshine. It is hard to decide what to wear since whatever you choose will certainly be unsuitable at some point during the day. Nature has other tricks to play too. Maggie has a friend, Roseanne, with whom she takes walks. It's not so much for the exercise as simply to have another person to talk to when I'm at work. Roseanne has a large, bumbling, Golden Retriever puppy that weighs at least ten stone. I'm not sure what ten stone is in real pounds but it sounds like a lot. The walks serve as an outing for the dog too. Today's stroll took them down to the Menai Strait toward Church Island - that medieval chapel and cemetery that is one of the oldest holy spots in this church speckled country. The island is in the middle of the strait and is reachable only by the Belgian Walk. This is a causeway that runs along the shore, then cuts over a shallow portion of the strait to the island. It was built as a "thank you" gift to the local community by the Belgian refugees who were sheltered here during WW1. There is little amusement in Menai Bridge today, except watching sheep graze, and it must have been even more boring 80 years ago. Work on the walk was probably the high point of the refugees' stay. Anyway, today the Belgian Walk was under water. The Spring tide in the Menai Strait swings up to 30 feet and an on shore wind pushed the water level even higher. Ever curious Maggie wanted to see how far the underwater portion of the walk extended so she hopped up on the stone wall separating the path from the water of the strait. Roseanne, falling under Maggie's bad influence, followed her. If you had been there you would have seen two sprightly middle aged women balancing their way down a foot wide stone wall and a large tan dog galumphing its way along the water covered walk, bounding up on the wall and then back to the path. Suddenly the dog overshot. It jumped for the stones, cleared them, and went tumbling into the strait.

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Now this type of dog should know how to swim instinctively but it was only nine months old and had led a very sheltered life. It had never been fully immersed in water before. The dog paddled around, yelping in fear, while pleading with its big eyes to be saved. Maggie and Roseanne had to stretch out full length on the wall to grab the dog's collar, hair, ears, and any other appendages to drag it out of the deep water and dump it into the shallow water on the path. Maggie suggested that on their next walk they bring a rope ladder and a fish landing net just in case. The dog agreed. Letter 36

Apr. 25, 1999

Maggie's doggy adventure prompts me to write a few words about the dogs in North Wales. For the most part, they are descendents of working dogs, usually Border Collies, but also a few Australian or German Shepherds, and Retrievers. They are honest folk. No yapping little terriers or frenchy miniatures here. Most of them come up to mid thigh and are strong enough to pull a cart loaded with lead ingots. Their most endearing characteristic is that they are extremely patient and well behaved. I don't know what finishing school the Welsh send their dogs to but it seems to be a lot better than the one to which they send their children. Dogs will wait outside the supermarket for their shopping owners, sitting quietly on the concrete plaza until their masters return. They don't chase cars or growl at passers-by. The most notice we get is a slight turn of the head before Bowzer returns to its contemplation of tonight's dinner or whatever else dogs think about. Even dogs in cars are well behaved. True, they fill up the back seat of the tiny cars that most Brits drive, but lie with their paws folded and view the passing scenery. When guarding the car in the parking lot, they don't tear up the seat or defecate on the floor, just sit quietly and read the Manchester Guardian. We were told that the reason that most of the family pets were Border Collies or similar working dogs was the economics of dog breeding. These breeds are known for their remarkable intelligence and sheep herding ability. Intelligence seems to be characteristic of most of the

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black and white collies, but a superior instinct for sheep herding is not. Only one or two puppies out of a litter of five or six have an overpowering urge to round up every moving thing they see. Every spring, after the breeding season, the sheep farmers visit the kennels to pick out the natural herders. The price of the puppy reflects its estimated sheep herding ability. We have seen prices posted on community billboards for good sheep herding Border Collie puppies at about £100. The breeding kennel seconds go for as little as £20. If the puppy is a descendent of a sheepherding competition champion, the price can get as high as a good midfielder on an upper division soccer team. The selected dogs make very good farm dogs but terrible pets. If, by chance, one of the herding naturals is let loose in a city, it will try to corral all the autos on the street with usually disastrous results. Once the best herding puppies are sold to the hill farmers, the rest of the litter must be disposed of. Brits, and especially Welsh, are so fond of their dogs that killing the unwanted puppies is unthinkable. A Brit would no more kill a dog than a Hindu would eat a cow. Letters to the London Times still brim with indignation over the fact that Norwegian Amundsen ate his surplus sled dogs when beating British Scott to the South Pole. That fact alone was enough for the Royal Exploration Society to deny Amundsen's claim. The race to the Pole was in 1912. The letters are still coming in. So instead of eating the unemployable Border Collies, as any respectable Indonesian would do, they are sold or given away as pets. They play Frisbee with the kids, fetch the slippers and newspaper for their masters, and keep the grouse from eating the tulips. They are nanny, downstairs maid and gardener's helper in one. In this day of vanishing household help, the Border Collie has found a new role. Lassie, come home! Letter 37

May 3, 1999

If you read the glossy travel brochures you might think that Britain is an island overflowing with peace and tranquility. How untrue. The newspapers and TV newscasts are fond of derogating the USA but they seem to be stuck in a vision of Prohibition era Chicago with junior league

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Al Capones shooting up the neighborhood and the Mafia running the corner pizza parlor. The Columbine school shooting is a case in point. Rather than treating the problem as an outbreak of uncontrolled high school angst that needed a lot of parental attention and some hands on school supervision, it was all blamed on the US Constitution and the National Rifle Association. Britain has the moral high ground here. They banned hand guns after a similar shooting a few years ago. What the papers didn't mention was that the murder rate in some parts of Britain is almost as high as that in the US except that the weapons of choice are cricket bats, broken Guinness bottles and assorted blunt objects. Last week Britain's most popular female TV host, Jill Dando, was murdered in front of her London home by an, as yet, unidentified hit man. It was as if Katie Couric had been bumped off leaving the beauty parlor. The nation involved itself in an orgy of mourning. It was Princess Diana’s demise revisited. BBC flags flew at half staff. Parliament declared a day off. Flower sellers rejoiced. The best guess is that the killer was a spurned former lover, a local Serbian cocaine dealer, or a TV addict revenging the bombing of Belgrade's TV stations. All they know is that he was very neatly dressed and lurched away in a gray metallic BMW sports car. There were also three bombings in London's minority districts last week. A neo-Nazi group claimed credit for the nail bombs which exploded in Black, Bangladeshi, and gay neighborhoods, killing three members of a wedding party and wounding dozens. While the papers couldn't blame this on the lack of US gun control laws, they pointed the accusing finger at the Internet. It seems that survival fanatics living in Montana have posted plans for bomb making. To prove their point, the papers reprinted detailed instructions on how to make the terrorist bombs. All it takes is the powder from a box of shotgun shells poured into a pipe, a cheap alarm clock as a timer, and a bag of hardware store nails. Easy. Any child can do it. And given the detailed information in the papers, one probably will. Even without the Internet. The British don’t need guns or bombs to kill people. Syringes will do just fine. Dr. Harold Shipman, a general practitioner, was just indicted for killing three hundred of his patients. Not through malpractice but through cupidity. Dr. Shipman had his elderly patients sign over their property to him for safekeeping. Soon after, the patients took a turn for the worse and died in their beds with Dr. Shipman in attendance at the final

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moments. A journalist took the time to calculate that Dr. Shipman was singlehandedly responsible for more deaths than all of Britain’s serial killers combined. England (not Wales) has twice the rate of property crime as the US and four times the rate of auto theft. In central London the probability of finding your car radio still in the car after a night parked on the street is roughly the same as winning the lottery. That is if you are lucky enough to find the car. Most cars are sold with "immobilizers", little devices which enable you to disable a vital portion of the ignition circuitry when you park. Armored steering wheel covers are a big seller. These are jimmy proof steel pie plates that cover the entire wheel and prevent it from being turned. We don't have either an immobilizer or a steering wheel since our car wouldn't tempt even the hungriest crook. Actually we have taken to leaving it in the seedier parts of town with the windows open and the ignition keys in the lock. The gray BMW sports car used in the Dando murder was obviously stolen though, since eyewitnesses said the driver didn't know how to operate the gear shift. The only statement not blaming the US for Britain's wave of violent crime was an editorial in the London Times which suggested that if tough gun laws were the only answer, then Washington D.C. would be the safest place in the US. In fact, they pointed out, the safest places are Vermont and New Hampshire, both states with the highest percentage of gun ownership in the country. Perhaps, the editorial suggested, the stratospheric crime rate in Britain is because there are too few guns. If home owners felt that they had a moral obligation to shoot housebreakers and thieves it might convince a few bad guys to think twice. Then Britons too could leave doors and cars unlocked - just like in Vermont. The NRA would have rejoiced. Letter 38

May 10, 1999

Oh yes, the Open University beat the University of Wales/Bangor by a lopsided margin in the College Quiz Bowl. It just goes to show than you CAN teach an old dog new tricks. On one of our exploratory drives around Anglesey, we came across the small town of Almwych, on the north shore of the island. Almwych,

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once a thriving fishing port, has become a seaside resort with small pubs and souvenir shops. There is a harbor with private boats and a Lifeboat Rescue station. The day was beautiful with a warm spring sun and a balmy breeze. We found a fortunate parking place, fortunate because there were only about a dozen marked places in town and at least ten times that many cars were looking for a place to park. Many of the visitors seemed to be setting out on a walk over the high cliffs overlooking the beach so Maggie urged that we follow. She chose well. This was one of the favorite walker’s treks in all Wales. The trail led over green hills with a sharp drop to the sea on the right hand side. The grass was about ankle high and soft underfoot. At home Maggie would be worried about this kind of terrain because it is the preferred haunt of lyme disease bearing deer ticks. Here it was OK because no one had yet raised the alarm about sheep ticks. Many of our fellow walkers were strolling around with their dogs, most of which, by a strange coincidence, turned out to be miniature French poodles. We strolled at least three miles along the shoreline, waves on one side, sheep on the other, poodles straining at their leashes to get at the sheep. Eventually the path ended at a holiday trailer park perched over the beach. That’s another UK vacation phenomenon. Families hitch tiny travel trailers to their miniscule cars, load six kids and the dog in the back seat, and fan out over the countryside. The escape their densely populated cities and converge on equally densely populated camp grounds, usually along the seashore. It’s the change that matters. On the return trip we spotted a monument on a hillock in the middle of a sheep pasture. We had plenty of time so we made our way to see what was being memorialized. It was a small obelisk on a square pedestal. Engraved along the sides were hundreds of names of persons who perished when a passenger ship enroute from Ireland crashed into the rocks along the shore in the 1800s. Along with the names of the dead was a tribute to the bravery of the men at the Almwych Lifeboat Station who rescued hundreds more. We passed the lifeboat station on the way up and now we had the incentive to visit it on our return to town. The British Lifeboat Service is a unique and altruistic institution. The coastal areas of the UK are not kind to shipping, yet the economy of the islands depends upon it. Weather conditions are often severe, with waves, gale force winds, high tides and storms being the norm. Naturally

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ships get into trouble. Before the days of modern navigational aids, making port in bad weather was often a case of by guess and by God. Often the mariner guessed wrong and at that moment God was paying attention to the fall of a sparrow. Lifeboat Stations were scattered around the coasts at particularly hazardous locations. Each station had one or two lifeboats and a volunteer crew of extremely brave men. When a ship went aground an alarm bell alerted the crew who left their day jobs and manned the boats. In the early days these were simply oar powered lifeboats that tried to reach the wreck and save lives. In storm conditions, being a crewman on a lifeboat was almost as dangerous as being a passenger on the sinking boat. Unlike the wreckers of the Carolinas and the Florida Keys, cargo salvage was secondary. By the 1900s the wooden lifeboats were larger, about 30 ft. and powered by rudimentary gasoline engines. They still kept the oars just in case. The boats were perched on small wheeled carts on a marine railway that ran into the water. When the alarm came the crew clambered in, someone released the restraining line, and the lifeboat splashed into the surf, like a log ride in an amusement park. As time went on the rescue craft became more sophisticated, by the 1960s they were made of metal with more powerful engines. At the lifeboat station in Almwych, both wood and metal boats were on display although neither type is used much today. The modern lifeguards prefer large outboard powered inflated rubber speedboats. These are both safer and faster. Rescue work today usually involves smaller fishing and pleasure boats that get in trouble in unexpected storms and the rubber speedboats can get to the site sooner. Most seaside towns, including both Beaumaris and Menai Bridge have their own Lifeboat Stations with these rubber craft mounted on their little wheeled carts. Membership in the Lifeboat Service is voluntary, sort of like the volunteer fire departments back home. Support is by local contribution, although I think that there is a national fund raising organization as well. We contributed a few pounds, and received some pretty cloisonné pins in return. A round of drinks at the pub, seated outside in the evening sun, was a fitting conclusion to our walk. Through casual conversation with our table mates we learned that today was the annual meeting of the Miniature Poodle Fanciers Club of North Wales. Another mystery solved. If every walk is as nice as this one I may have to change my mind about walking.

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The art class is now in its sculpture mode. There are two projects. The first requires the student to make a model in cardboard of some aspect of a previous drawing or design. The second requires the student to sculpt something out of a porous, easily carved, building block. The cardboard model was quickly completed. Maggie has had years of experience making kid’s school projects. Sure, the kids thought it was their own work. Mom was merely lending maternal advice. But then again how many third grade kids can sculpt a three dimensional model of the Swiss Alps in papier mache or prepare Brazilian Devil Dance masks worthy of hanging in an art gallery? Maggie’s real genius was guiding the kids so gently that they believed they could have done it all by themselves. Maggie needed a block of the porous building stone that her instructor recommended. It’s a type of air expanded cinder block commonly used in Britain for foundations and insulated walls, sort of like a concrete sponge. It is easily carved by woodworking tools. The only place in town that carried these blocks was in an industrial area near the harbor. When we went to buy the block the counter man asked how many hundred did we want. He was amused when Maggie asked for only one. She picked up a hacksaw and a scraper at a more traditional hardware store, a file at a junk store, and started creating. With the carving under control, Maggie decided to continue with the cardboard model. Why not, she thought, cast it in concrete? As luck would have it, Mr. Kincade had hired a carpenter to replace the crumbling brick wall with a wooden fence. The fence posts were set in concrete and the carpenter had just mixed up a big batch. Maggie simply walked over to him and asked for a bucket of wet concrete, which he was happy to supply. She poured the concrete into the cardboard form, and had a few nervous moments as the form began to buckle under the unexpected load. The sagging edges were shored up with strategically placed bricks from the disassembled wall. After a couple of days wait she had an attractive rough surfaced concrete abstract sculpture. We placed the sculpture on a tree stump pedestal in the back yard. I thought it was complete but Maggie was still not satisfied. When the carpenter showed up to put a smooth topping coat on his own concrete work, Maggie got him to contribute enough smoothing mortar to fill all the rough parts of the sculpture. The two worked on it like cooperating

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artists, Maggie thankful for the donation of materials, the carpenter happy for the break in his daily routine. Maggie’s art work will be exhibited in a group show in Beaumaris in June and the sculpture will have a featured place. Letter 39

May 15, 1999

This portion of 'Weekly Wales Tales' is being filed by guest correspondent - Karen Zeitlin. When I was asked to write this addition of WWT I thought, "Oh, what big shoes to fill." But then I realized that with a thick pair of socks, Dad’s shoes won't know the difference. I flew in yesterday, and boy, was I tired. No, not because I flapped my arms the whole way over, but because I sat next to a very talkative Englishman, who was very excited to be going home. He was returning from a two week business trip - his first time ever in the United States. Unfortunately, he spent the entire time on Long Island. I rolled my eyes and begged him not to be scared off by the experience. My seat mate kept telling me that the United States was much different "in person" than on TV. He said he was shocked because people were so friendly... He was also very impressed with the size of the cars and the roads. "There are so many lanes," he kept repeating. And he was impressed by the variety of food. Apparently everyone in the UK thinks Americans survive on hamburgers and pizza. As the flight went on, he tried to teach me the rules of rugby and I tried to explain baseball. At the end, both throughly frustrated (on my part, because I had to work so hard to understand him) and confused (again, the accent) we both drank our complimentary mini-bottles of wine and fell asleep. Upon waking, I learned the wind had pushed so hard to get us out of the sky, that we had actually landed an hour early. After customs, I waited for Mom and Dad's arrival. Eventually I started out to find them... which lead to a whole series of sit-com like near misses in the airport. At one point, I believe the only thing standing between us was a potted palm. The rest of the day was kind of a blur. I know there was a castle, a pubstyle lunch, a walk through fields of sheep, and at least one nap.

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The cars that line the streets here look like they should be stuffed with clowns... I'm still waiting for 20 people to spill out of one of those impossibly small vehicles... And the roads.... well they're just terrifying. Driving out to lunch yesterday reminded me of runaway train ride I just took at Disney World - high speeds, small curved roads, places where I covered my eyes and screamed..... It's kind of silly to scream on the rides at Disney World. After all, only good things can happen in the Magic Kingdom. Chris and I just spent a week there acting like little kids, but did one very adult thing... we got engaged. No - no Disney Characters were involved. Although Chris toyed with involving Goofy or Tigger.. But he said he had a nightmarish image of Tigger running off with the ring to propose to Snow White... The walls of this house are covered with artwork. "I thought you'd like some color," Mom said... The decorations outside were covered by Mother Nature... I've never seen green look so green. Tomorrow morning we are off to Ireland. The weather reports say it will be sunny. But, I think I might like it if it rained a little bit -- it would increase my odds of seeing a rainbow and finding the pot of gold at the end. Letter 40

May 15, 1999

Back to the professor again. We visited some different places in Dublin with Karen than with Mike. Karen wanted to see the Book of Kells in Trinity College. Mike wanted to visit the Guinness Brewery. To each his own. Trinity College was our first point of call because it was right next to the train stop from the ferry terminal. The college is the oldest in Ireland and one of the older ones in Europe. It is on a four block triangular campus in downtown Dublin. Once through the iron gates you have the feeling of stepping back a couple of centuries in time. The buildings are well weathered early 18 th century look alikes. Some may actually be that old. The only touches of modernity are the clusters of students using laptops and listening to Walkmen. We followed the tourist route to the famed Trinity library, a block long room lined with books, punctuated by ornate tables peopled by clusters of cramming students. At the end of the

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library was Trinity’s prized possession, the lavishly illustrated Book of Kells. This is an early hand written vellum palmistry, preserved through the centuries by generations of monks. It is one of the real treasures of Christendom in Ireland and is accorded far more veneration than its appearance would indicate. From Trinity College we walked to the Temple Bar district and experienced Irish counter cultural hippie life. Karen insisted that we visit the world’s largest soccer memorabilia shop to buy a soccer shirt for Chris. The soccer teams in Europe make almost as much money selling team shirts and flags as they do selling tickets. And the shirts are expensive, $50 dollars or so in hard US currency. As luck would have it Karen saved her money because the store was sold out of the type of shirt she wanted to buy. The highlight of our trip, at least from Maggie’s viewpoint, was a show called the Dublina Viking Experience. Maggie’s distant ancestors were the people who actually founded Dublin about 1200 years ago. They used the River Liffy as a convenient base for raids on the affluent monasteries up and down the coast. After the pickings got slim they decided to settle down. The comparison between Norwegian and Irish winters makes that decision easy to understand. A millennium ago the Vikings farmed, built houses, kept Celtic slaves and congregated in a small village named Dublina. Recent digs have found many of their artifacts. The Viking Experience exhibit sits atop one of the archeological sites. Actors play roles of Vikings and the small audience is treated as if they were honored guests in a make believe early Viking village. The show is impressive. With a brief suspension of disbelief it is easy to imagine being transported back in time. Following our Viking visit we strolled through a large park in the center of town, browsed one of the famed Irish bookstores trying to imagine that James Joyce was looking over our shoulders, ate an Irish snack at a late opening cafe and caught the last ferry home, dodging the usual drunks.

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Letter 41

May 20, 1999

Because Karen would be with us for much longer than Mike, we had a chance to sightsee in a more leisurely fashion. Again we made the tour of Portmerion and the Ffestiniog railroad. The visits are different each time, probably because of the changing season. Maggie says we should have bought season passes to both attractions and in retrospect she was certainly right. Our Portmerion trip featured the hike through the surrounding pathways but thanks to Mike’s orientation we strolled the convoluted paths with some confidence. Interestingly, Karen picked out the same places to explore in Portmerion as Mike. It’s quite possibly some genetic curiosity reflex. After the Ffestiniog train ride we went underground in the abandoned slate mine in the old slate mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. The small company town at the entrance to the mine had been restored as a museum. Buildings were tiny and tawdry in those days. Certainly all would be condemned today. But a century ago they were homes for the miners that were the backbone of the Welsh economy and people lived and loved probably much as they do today - except that everything was covered with slate dust. Slate is river mud that was compressed and petrified over the last half billion years. It has the utilitarian property that it can be split into thin plates by a skilled worker. Once it was discovered that thinly split slate made an ideal roofing shingle the economy of North Wales boomed since mountains of slate covered the landscape. Miners, usually employed by English companies, blasted huge slabs of slate off the hills, sawed it into blocks, and carefully split it into thin shingles. These were shipped around the world to replace flammable cedar, wood, and thatched roofs. The work was dangerous and dirty but as steady as any job could be. As long as the rain continued to fall and buildings were heated by spark spewing open fireplaces, slate was the roof covering of choice. True, it was heavy and costly but there were few alternatives. When the surface veins of slate were exhausted, the miners dug deep into the hillside. Enormous below ground chambers were excavated, some extending for miles beneath the surface. Man made hills of slate rubble and broken slate tiles littered the landscape reaching hundreds of feet high.

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But with the invention of cheaper asphalt/asbestos shingles the slate market dried up and with it the livelihood of many of the communities in this part of Wales. Quarries and mines were abandoned. The last closed about 10 years ago. All that remains are memories and rubble heaps. A few old ex-miners make slate souvenirs. We visited one of the largest of the abandoned mines, now run as a tourist attraction. The mine entrance was at the edge of the restored village. Maggie, Karen, and I took seats in a roller coaster like car. The rest of the seats were taken by a crowd of school kids ostensibly being introduced to the occupation of their ancestors but enjoying a release from books and lessons. Amid squeals and screams, the car descended into the mine along a 45 degree cog railway track. The ride lasted several minutes in an absolutely black tunnel. A few hundred feet below the surface the car stopped and all of us were fitted with miner’s helmets and lights. I thought that this was pure hype but the helmets proved absolutely essential. Passages extended from the lift terminal for hundreds of yards to vast excavated caverns. It was humbling to imagine that miners spent all their working lives chopping away at the dark rock to get roof shingling for the houses of rich folks. People were shorter then. I’m not tall but I kept hitting my head on the low overhead of the passages. The school kids scampered around, running freely along the dimly illuminated tunnels, few realizing that had they been born 100 years ago they probably would have been working in these very mines. Just as we entered one huge chamber, all lights were turned out. Eerie music started and the school kids became apprehensive and clung to their teachers. It was scary even though we knew what to expect from having read the tourist brochure. Of course we had been set up for a sound and light show about slate mining. Dimly illuminated animatronic figures went through the motions of a day in a miner’s life. Very impressive. I’m glad I’m in a different line of work. The guide told us that people obviously get turned on by this sort of thing. The slate mine is a popular venue for weddings. After we left the mine we retired to the small pub in the museum village for a restorative drink. I’m sure that the miners did the same thing.

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I actually had to do some work for a change. We drove to Port Sunlight and Maggie and Karen caught the local train across the Mersey to Liverpool. The Liverpool waterfront, once the most dangerous of harbor haunts (remember Mack the Knife and his close kin) has been gentrified with shops, art galleries and museums of all sorts. Even the Tate Museum has opened a large branch to bring culture to the Liverpudlians. I suspect that Maggie wanted to show Karen the home office of the Royal Liverpool Insurance Company, a firm she worked for many, many, many years ago. I probably have two too many manys in the previous sentence to keep domestic peace. The building is surmounted with two enormous stone birds that look like vultures but may well have some mythological significance. Later that evening Karen, Maggie and I had a stroll around the Roman Wall in Chester. We never learned in school that Britain had a sophisticated Mediterranean civilization prior to King Arthur and his round table. The residue of the Romans is everywhere. Even some Britons have given up painting themselves blue in favor of donning Roman togas or centurion’s armor on historical holidays. One warm day we went to climb Mount Snowdon. It seemed like a piece of cake, a brief stroll to the peak and then home for an early dinner. A child could do it. We found a parking place at the base of the mountain and started confidently up the path. The three of us passed sheep pastures, old buildings, crossed and recrossed the cog railway track. Children and dogs gamboled alongside us. About halfway up the five mile trek I began to get the first signs of warning from my feet. In honor of the climb I wore my new hiking boots - a big, big mistake. Everyone knows, including me, that you don’t break in new shoes on a hike. The shoes, comfortable on the level, allowed my feet to slide back on the upward slopes. As the climb steepened, blisters began to grow on each foot. About a mile from the top every step became agony. Karen went on ahead to tell me how far we had to go while Maggie stayed behind to lend moral support. The view, breathtaking at lower levels, became fuzzy as clouds moved in and the temperature dropped. After what seemed to be 48 hours of climbing, I was becoming as fuzzy as the view. When we reached the small cafe and train terminal at the top it was clear that if we walked back, I would have to do it on my hands. Luckily Karen managed to get three of the last tickets available for the train ride down and we luxuriated in the comfort of the Snowdonia cog railway parlor car. When we walked back to the car on level ground my feet felt much better.

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Letter 42

May 23, 1999

For Karen’s last week we planned a grand tour of reachable sights. Our car has begun to show its age. While it can still get us where we want to go, any long climb leads to a sputtering protest. A full hood ornament to tail light tune-up would probably fix the problem but we don’t want to pour money into a car that we will keep for only two more months. Our tour would take us down the length of Wales, through the picturesque Brecon Beacons hills, across the Severn River to Bath. After touring the town we would go on to Salisbury Plain and genuflect to Druid Gods at Stonehenge. Finally we would return along the Welsh coast, skirting Cardiff, pausing for the men of Harlech, and thread our way through the Snowdonia range to home. It was an ambitious schedule and we cautioned each other to pack lightly in case we had to take the bus back. So we all piled into our little red car, I patted it gently on the hood and said a silent prayer, the car wagged its tail pipe, and we headed south on the A5 to England. The A5 is the major North/South highway in Wales and cuts right through the Snowdonia range to the flatter portion land in the central part of the country. To call this road a highway is an exaggeration. Most of it consists of a two lane road carved into the sides of rocky hills, winding its way past villages too small to even support a pub. The reason the English had such a hard time conquering Wales is that there is no easy way through the mountains, a fact that we have come to appreciate. In the middle of the range is the village of Betws-y-Coed. Maggie and I gave up trying to master the Welsh pronunciation of this name and simply called it Betsy Coed, a name more suited to the heroine of a 1930’s college movie. At one time the village was a key way station for wagon trains crossing the mountains but it has long been bypassed by more modern forms of transportation. It exists now as a quaint tourist destination in the hills and a starting point for mountain bound hikers. The busy main street is a constricted portion of the main highway. It is lined with grand old houses converted to hotels and guest houses, hiking and mountain bike supply stores, souvenir shops and restaurants. The locals have a good thing here. There is no way to widen the highway

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without destroying the town and the surrounding hills prevent constructing a bypass. Plenty of parking makes this a good place to stop. A pretty little park in the center of town is always active with pickup soccer games and Frisbee throwers. We interrupted our headlong dash south for a leisurely stroll along the main drag and a big helping of delicious Welsh ice cream. Ice cream seems to have become our usual celebratory refreshment when we sightsee. The next stops on our southward journey were Llangollen and Llandrindod Wells. I have nothing really special to say about those towns but I like hitting the “L” key on the keyboard. We walked around Llangollen on this sunny day and explored a few hundred yards of the canal that bisected the central business district. In the days before the railroad was invented, canals crisscrossed the British Isles and horse drawn boats hauled most of the coal, food, and lumber from one city to the next. Every ten miles or so a canal passed by a way station, usually a combination pub, freight depot, and stable. Both the boatmen and horses could be refreshed for the next leg of the journey. Abandoned for a hundred years, the canals have been rediscovered as a laid back vacation venue. Many of the canals have been lovingly restored and the freight barges have been replaced by private and rental canal boats. The stations have been converted to full service pubs and restaurants, some quite lavish.. The canals are really narrow ditches about fourteen or fifteen feet across with a horse path alongside. Canal boats are long and narrow, just wide enough to slide by each other, and powered by a small diesel engine. The boats are usually painted in bright colors with comfortable, if cramped, interiors. If you stand in the middle of one and extend your arms, you can touch each side. Cruising in one is sort of like camping in a moving hallway. A canal boat vacation is a leisurely drift from pub to pub through pastoral scenery. You either love it or hate it. A recent TV special on vacation sites interviewed canal boaters and found, to no one’s surprise, that retirees loved it and teens were bored out of their skulls. The British countryside is relatively flat and only a few locks are needed to cross most of the small hills. Llangollen is an exception. The beautiful River Dee runs in a gorge near the town. To keep the Llangollen canal relatively level, the builders hired Thomas Telford to build a 1007 foot long, 121 foot high

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aqueduct to cross the river. The canal boats simply float over the river at the height of a 10 story building. Telford, you remember, was the genius who built the Menai Bridge. The Pontcysyllte aqueduct, perched on 19 stone arches, is another one of those engineering marvels that boggles the contemporary imagination. How could country stone masons, without the benefit of steam shovels, bulldozers, and power tools build a structure, literally a stone sculpture, that has stood for 200 years when more modern bridges have crumbled into piles of rust? I would have had a great deal more to say about Llangollen had we come in the middle of the summer. This is where the Welsh hold the Eisteddfod, a mammoth musical festival. It started a century ago as a competition between local choral groups singing in Welsh as part of a cultural revival. As the reputation grew, other singing groups from Britain, Europe and the US wrangled invitations, eager to match their talents against Welsh coal miners. Now it attracts thousands of performers and tens of thousands of visitors every summer. Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland have performed, as well as the South Carolina Bluegrass Stompers. But as usual, we were out of season. On a less musical note, Llangollen was the 19 th century home of the notorious Ladies of Llangollen, a pair of middle aged gentlewomen, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who set up a (lesbian) household on the outskirts of town. The idea that two ladies could live alone without a man so outraged and intrigued the Victorians that denizens of morality and society beat a path to their door. Their visitors list included most of the famous of the time including the Duke of Wellington and William Wordsworth. How times have changed. Today they could have actually gotten married in Vermont. All I can remember about Llandrindod Wells is the name and a row of beautiful rose bushes fronting some canopied buildings. I was told that it had been a favored inland resort known for its sulfured mineral spring waters. No wonder the coffee at the bed and breakfast was so bad. We cranked up our car at the earliest light and continued toward the English border trying to beat the traffic.

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Perhaps we should have waited until the fog burned off. It was difficult to see more than a hundred yards ahead. We passed a sign pointing to the town of Monmouth and as we passed I mentioned to Maggie and Karen that Tintern Abbey should be somewhere around here. At least that’s what I remembered from a high school history class. Just as I uttered the words, Tintern Abbey emerged from the mist. It was a magical moment. The ruins of the most awesome and majestic of the old Catholic Welsh monastic centers appeared on cue. Soaring arches graced the sky. The size and beauty of the ruins bore witness to its onetime wealth and to the care lavished on it by the Cistercian Monks who built it. We were the only ones in the area. Fog masked the surrounding countryside as we strolled the periphery of the grounds. I’m not often impressed by a building but I was by this one. But why was it in ruins? Many older churches survived, even our little cathedral in Bangor. Blame it on Henry VIII. Letter 43

May 25, 1999

Bath was as unWelsh as can be imagined. Of course Bath is in England. Wales, or at least North Wales, is what I would call a blue collar country. Unpretentious, unsophisticated, and, on the surface, relatively uncomplicated. Bath was stylish, sophisticated, and, I suspect, pretty pretentious. The site where Bath is located has been occupied since the Stone Age. Its attraction is the hot springs that bubble from an underground reservoir of water heated by thermal faults in the earth’s mantel. By the time the water percolates to the surface it is about ten degrees above body temperature, nicely warm but not hot enough to scald. Through all of England’s recorded history it has been regarded as a sacred site, and probably the only place where cavemen could get a warm bath. Celtic legends speak of the hot springs as the place where both men and swine could get cured of skin disease by swimming in the waters. The Romans regarded Bath so highly that they built England’s first spa on the site, erecting grand public buildings, the ruins of which remain. During the Elizabethan era Bath became the place to see and be seen. The royal household set up a branch office in the town. But all things come to an end. Washing and cleanliness became unpopular - French perfume was so cheap - and the spa fell into disuse.

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Nevertheless, Bath stayed fashionable for the rich and powerful. A semi circular street of magnificent Georgian style buildings called the Royal Crescent was commissioned by Queen Anne in 1702. Anyone who was anyone in England tried to rent or buy an apartment. Early in the Victorian era a few householders in the center of town complained of water seeping into their basements. The town engineer was sent to investigate and discovered that the houses had been built on the ruins of the ancient Roman baths. Excavations, continuing to this day, showed that the Roman baths were far larger than had been imagined. There was the bathhouse, of course, but it was only one part of a large recreational complex which included gymnasia, saunas, restaurants, a stadium, and, naturally, a brothel. The Victorians restored the bathhouse with its swimming pool and sauna. They erected statues in what they imagined to be the Roman style around the site. They also built a Victorian spa called the Pump Room for the rich folk to take the waters. We arrived in Bath on a sunny, balmy day. It was the best weather in months. We, and apparently half of Britain, walked the streets and ogled the sights. There were at least three street fairs operating simultaneously, each with jugglers, fire eaters, and unicycle acrobats. In one fair, the same performer did all three, juggling tomahawks and blowing spumes of fire while riding a ten foot tall unicycle. After this show of virtuosity we relaxed by touring the restored Roman baths. In the middle of a warehouse sized building was a large rectangular pool, say about the size of a tennis court. A marble patio surrounded the pool and above ceiling level stood statues of Roman dignitaries. These were the ones added by the Victorians. The pool water itself was a slight shade of green and signs warned that it was not fit for human consumption and that immersion in the water was banned. No guards were watching so despite the signs, I stuck my finger in. The water was bathtub warm but smelled quite earthy. Exhibit rooms surrounded the pool area containing excavated artifacts of both Roman and Celtic eras. Still further on were the remains of saunas where Roman aristocrats were oiled and rubbed down by their slaves before plunging into the warm pool. Curiously, despite their love of bathing, the Romans had not discovered or invented soap. Dirt was

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removed by oily rubdowns and scraping off the residue with curved sticks. I suppose using cold cream to take off makeup is a similar technique. Moving a millennium forward in time we visited the Pump Room to take the waters. When I was a kid in Chicago the swankiest dining place in town was the Pump Room at the Ambassador Hotel and I always wondered where it had gotten its name. The Pump Room in Bath was large and airy, surrounded by windows. Small linen covered tables packed the space. One could well imagine Victorian spa visitors chatting idly while eating watercress sandwiches and sipping the curative waters - good for both swine and man. At one end of the room was a raised dais with an actual pump, from whence the room got its name. For a slight fee, I think 30 pence, a young girl pumped you a small tumbler full of water. We joined the line and soon Maggie, Karen and I were clutching our little glasses of restorative fluid. I hesitate to call it water since it resembled no water I’ve ever voluntarily tasted. The closest I’ve ever come to drinking a similar fluid was in Indiana where the water contains so much iron ore and minerals that the ground under every faucet is stained red with rust. Bath water didn’t have the same metallic taste but surely contained enough sulfurs and dissolved geology to make you want to chew it if you could get it past your nose. I didn’t finish mine but I guess Maggie and Karen did. Around the room Victorian wannabes were resolutely downing the contents of their little tumblers, working on the premise that if it tastes bad, it must be good for you. The weather was back to normal the next day. It dawned cloudy and got progressively worse as we journeyed to Salisbury Plain, our most southerly destination. Salisbury Plain is an undistinguished farming area that spouts an unusual crop, a field of rocks known as Stonehenge. The first time Maggie and I saw Stonehenge was on our honeymoon in 1965, a long time ago. It was new then. From all the movies and TV specials featuring robed Druids sacrificing near naked virgins to appease the Gods we expected to find a dramatic collection of monoliths perched on the edge of a towering cliff with furious waves venting their fury below. In fact, we drove over a small hummock on a narrow farm road and there it was - in the middle of a cow pasture.

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On our first visit we roamed Stonehenge freely, with one or two passers by as company. We climbed the rocks as far as we could get and photographed each other in absurd poses. In spite of it’s placid surroundings. The monument was impressive. Those rock pillars were BIG, about three stories tall with equally huge stones bridging the gaps between adjacent columns. No one knows the reason Stonehenge was built. There are always theories. It could have been a Druid temple, just as in the movies, except for the inconvenient fact that Stonehenge was built 1000 years before the Druids preached in England. For a while it was thought that Stonehenge was a very large and very solid astronomical calculator for predicting the vernal and autumnal equinox and marking the summer solstice. Current thinking is that it was just a form of one upsmanship among local tribes, a type of conspicuous consumption analogous to the building of Versailles by the kings of France or the Parthenon in Athens. The local tribal chief wanted to show how great and powerful his tribe was in this very fertile portion of prehistoric England. One must admire prehistoric stonecrafters for hand building Stonehenge for whatever purpose they had in mind, although one wishes they had invented television or discovered America instead. This visit was far different. The Stonehenge site had been turned into a mini theme park with admission fees, parking lots and souvenir shops. We arrived in the midst of a howling rainstorm. Stonehenge proper was cordoned off and we visitors walked in a single file around the monument. As part of the admission fee we received small radio receivers keyed to the stations of the walk and could tune in to the history and significance of each portion of the site. The dark and foreboding climate, the whistle of the wind, and the sting of the raindrops gave the place the ominous quality that was so lacking on our first visit. This was the Stonehenge of our fantasies. We could actually imagine the sacrifice of virgins to heathen Gods amidst the sound of ancient chants. Later we found that a cult of modern day Druids, claiming religious prerogatives, occupied Stonehenge, camping on the highest stones. The politically correct Parliament was hesitant in ordering the British police to shoo them away. Who knows how many votes the Druids control?

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We would have liked to shed our clothes and dance naked in the rain - but reason prevailed. Karen’s visit was drawing short and we had to hightail it back to Wales. Our little red car was now possessed of a terminal sputter but we piled back in and coaxed it into starting. After a night at a large motel in Cardiff we aimed its hood ornament at Harlech Castle, the final sight on the journey. Harlech was one of the first of the ring of castles that Edward I built to contain the Welsh. It was originally on a steep sided hill next to the water so that it could resist attack from land and could be resupplied by sea. Now the land has risen so much that the sea is 1/2 mile away. The hill and castle are still there though. I knew nothing about Harlech Castle except that it is said to have inspired the song “Men of Harlech” which Welsh law decrees must be sung in every film about Wales. Actually the song has nothing to do with the castle but refers to a rowdy gang that used to hang at Harlech Pub on the other side of town. History is being rewritten every day. You can’t believe anything any more. By this time Maggie and I were getting a little tired of castle crawling but Karen was so full of enthusiasm that she infected us both. Harlech is a vertical castle in contrast to the horizontal layout of Beaumaris and Conwy. It is small in area but has tall towers and walls which accentuate the high rise of the cliff. I think we must have climbed the equivalent of the Empire State building working our way up the narrow circular staircases on every spire. I more than made up for my aborted mountaineering attempt on Snowdon’s peak. The day was sunny, the weather balmy. Spring had come to Wales. And the children were everywhere. Kids in castle country are not awed by the mystery and romance associated with these medieval forts. No dashing knights, flaming dragons, and lovelorn princesses haunt these walls. The castles are convenient rocky playgrounds with passages to explore, stairs to climb and birds to chase. While we grownups were educating ourselves the children were enjoying themselves with games of tag and hide and seek on this ancient rockpile.

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And that’s just about the end of our sightseeing mission with Karen. We put her on a plane and sent some of our excess baggage home with her. Maggie and I were overjoyed at her engagement. Think of all the fun we will have planning a wedding. As an aside, Maggie and Francis now have planning a daughter’s wedding in common. This gives them a lot to talk about. Of course Francis is almost at the end of her task while we have not even started. It always helps to get advice from someone who has made the mistakes before you make them. Maggie even assisted Francis’ wedding preparations by helping repaint her garden shed. Letter 44

May 30, 1999

Lest you think all we have been doing is sightseeing and drinking in pubs, we have been actively pursuing what we laughingly call work. Maggie is preparing for the big Spring art show held in Beaumaris. She has readied several papier mache sculptures, one carved sculpture and one concrete sculpture and innumerable paintings and collages. They have been all over the house for the last couple of months and collected together make an impressive body of work. Maggie was so undecided about what works to exhibit that she asked Helen Lopez, her art teacher to come over and take a look. The teacher was so impressed by our domestic art museum that she invited the rest of the class to see it. For the last few days we have had assorted groups of Maggie’s art friends trooping through the house examining the paintings and collages. There is a real social problem in her art group. Ms. Lopez, after having told the group that the show would be mounted for several weeks, just informed them that it would be cut short because of scheduling conflicts. The group found out that the teacher herself had truncated the show because she wanted to appropriate the final weekend for a show of her own. Naturally there is a lot of muttering and resentment. Maggie has had offers for her art work by fellow artists who are barely getting by on the dole. She is a bit conflicted since the offers are flattering but she cannot, in good conscience, set a price consistent with what her paintings have sold for in the US. On the other hand, it would be tough to carry all the completed works back home. She compromised by

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setting a nominal price - really a gift. Her teacher, on the other hand, offered to buy the concrete sculpture, first for cash, then reneged and offered to trade one of her own paintings. When Maggie tried to take her up on the offer the Ms. Lopez stalled, claiming she needed the painting for her own show. Finally it dawned on us that the she had the inexorable laws of gravity on her side. We would never be able to take such a weighty object on the airplane without paying an enormous excess baggage fee. Maggie would probably abandon it. Finally Maggie simply admitted defeat in this psychological game and gave her the 60 lb. sculpture. If Ms. Lopez owned it the sculpture would be on display. We benefited too. Our luggage will be a lot lighter. The group art show opened with a gala reception and closed to rave reviews. My own work has moved along more quietly. The final product has been a book on cross cultural research in business, named appropriately enough “Cross Cultural Research in Business”. I have been gathering material from a variety of sources with Vardit’s assistance. We now have over 12,000 references, thanks to the magic of the Internet. It was fortuitous that I hired Vardit. One of her professors in Israel, Shalom Shwartz, is the world’s foremost expert on national cultural value systems. He didn’t really remember Vardit since she was one of hundreds of undergraduate students, but the introduction was of value. Schwartz and I carried out a frequent correspondence on the Internet and he had actually read some of my papers. I hadn’t read any of his. Until we got to Wales, cross cultural research wasn’t one of my areas of expertise, but Vardit and I got most of his relevant studies from the library and made up for lost time. Anyway the agreements and disagreements with Schwartz, conducted over the Internet, started me on the path for the book. Over the last year I have written about 200 pages of text with twice as many pages of annotated bibliography. It explores research in human values and their practical application in commerce and management. I’ve used my own work and anyone else’s research I can find. Unilever and the University are both pleased. The college wants to adopt it as a sourcebook for graduate students and Unilever will be distributing copies to its research labs. Both declare it a valuable work. I, however, am constantly aware of the aphorism that creativity is not a sign of individual genius but of how well you conceal your sources.

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Letter 45

June 5, 1999

Well, we are on the last lap. We will be packing up and going home in the next few days. Maggie and I have been busy getting closure. We gave our cheap coffee maker to Vardit along with a pound of leftover coffee. After the first few tries at making coffee we became teetotalers in the real sense of the word. We took the Simpsons out to dinner at the Menai Bridge Indian restaurant since Francie Simpson, as a vegetarian, would find very few items to her liking at meat crazed Welsh restaurants. The weather has remained lovely and the Welsh valleys are truly green. Maggie convinced me to take a long walk around the neighborhood and we found ourselves headed for Llanfair PG. Not to buy sweaters since by this time our sweater appetite had been sated. We were going to climb the Marquis of Anglesey tower. In case you don’t remember your British historical trivia, the Marquis of Anglesey was the Duke of Wellington’s second in command at the battle of Waterloo. He and Wellington didn’t get along too well but he was an effective officer at the time when Britain’s military fortunes were not too favorable. At the battle of Waterloo a cannon ball blew off the Marquis’ leg. He is reputed to have looked down and said, “Blimey! Me leg’s gone.” The Duke replied, “So it is.” With that expression of consideration and concern, the battle continued. When the Marquis returned to his home in Anglesey, the grateful Welsh built a tower in his honor right near the Menai Strait. It is about half as high as the Washington Monument but seems taller. Anglesey’s tower is much thinner and perched on the peak of a small hill. The apparent height is a clever optical illusion. There is a winding stairwell inside that lets you gasp your way up to the top. From the balustrade at the peak you have a wonderful view of the island of Anglesey, the Snowdonia Mountains, Menai Bridge and all the surrounding countryside. Anglesey is quite flat and the visibility stretches for miles. We stayed at the top for some time, braving the Welsh wind and picking out landmarks we had seen. To recall the visit, I made a lot of shaky panoramas with the camcorder which will induce instant motion sickness when viewed. I’ve heard that sailors nearing the end of a long ocean

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voyage are reluctant to contemplate going ashore fearing the return to the complexities of urban life. In a similar sense I find that I am really going to miss this enchanting green country with its beautiful distant mountains and glimpses of the sea. Life seems so much simpler in North Wales. We were greeted on our return to ground level by the tower caretaker who collected the 50 pence fee that we had not paid on the way up. He had been relaxing over a pint at the pub and didn’t see us enter. The real problem was getting rid of the little red SEAT car that had served us well. First I tried to give it away to a local charity but this is not common practice in Britain. Most were suspicious. “Is it hot?” I was asked. We waited around for an acceptance, and waited, and waited. Finally Francis came to our rescue as she had so many other times. Our neighbor, Chris Richardson, John Simpson’s colleague at the Ocean Science school, was looking around for a low priced car for his teen aged son to drive. I hadn’t thought of asking him about the car although he had expressed an interest in it a few months ago. To tell the truth, I was a little reluctant to sell the car to anyone I knew because of all the minor problems we had been having with it in the last few days. I had to fiddle with it constantly with the set of tools I had been prudent enough to buy when we got it. “Don’t worry,” said Francis. “He wants to teach his son how to repair cars and yours will be just the thing.” That eased my conscience. I would throw the tools in with the deal. The teenager came over to look at it. The bright red paint job, working radio, and sun roof sealed the deal. It would attract the babes. Who cares if it ran like a cement mixer. Father and son took a test drive and came back with a list of all the car’s inadequacies. Each little fault knocked a bit off the price. We finally agreed on £350. Richardson thought he got a great deal. So did I. Yesterday I was trying to give it away for free. When Chris went to get the checkbook, his son confided in me that they had gotten it over 85 mph on the highway and with a little tweaking and a new set of plugs they might hit 90. The light glowed in his eyes. Another Sterling Moss in the making.

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We kept the car for another two days tidying up loose ends, visiting places on the island we had missed, and generally looking around. I was a little nervous with each drive, hoping the car would remain intact until we delivered it to the waiting Richardsons. Finally the afternoon before we were scheduled to leave for home I turned over our faithful SEAT to father and son. Two hours later I got a frantic call - “THE CAR WON’T START!” It would be melodramatic to say that like the fabled “One Horse Shay” the car self destructed all at once in grief over being separated from our protective ownership. The truth is I had neglected to show Chris the key wiggling technique for turning on the ignition. After he mastered the trick of not quite putting the key in all the way and wiggling it up and down a few times, he could get it to start reliably and peace reigned in the neighborhood. At 4 AM the next morning, the ever prompt John Owen, the retired policeman turned airport limousine mogul, arrived to transport us to our waiting plane at Manchester airport. Our year in Wales was over.

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