Still not looking good!

It's snowing again. Damn!

Starting to worry

I'm due to fly to Prague on Friday and with more bad weather forecast I have no idea whether or not I'll be able to. Pictures of stranded tourists at Heathrow are doing little to lift my spirits. Official statements that BA may not be operating services until Thursday, or even later, are just downright depressing. The biggest problem is that they keep saying that you shouldn't start out for the airport unless you have a confirmed seat on a plane that is operating. My journey to Heathrow takes over six hours. I have a confirmed seat but how can I possibly know before I set out that the service is operating? By the time they know I'll be on a coach halfway down the motorway. It's not possible for me to confirm at a time that would still allow me sufficient time to get to the airport if they say it is flying. All I can possibly do is cross my fingers and go and if I have to come back then I have to come back. It's going to be one hell of a Christmas if that happens followed by having to try to get my money back from the insurance company. I suppose a crumb of comfort is that I have an open dated return ticket on the coach so if I have to come back it won't cost me any extra.

If I manage to get out of the country then I should have a good Christmas, but it's a big "if". If I don't get out of the country I'll be coming back to a cold, empty, undecorated house where I will have to spend my first ever Christmas on my own. This could well turn out to be the most miserable Christmas of my life. Right now my mood could not be described as buoyant!

To Put Away Childish Things #13

Ambrose Bierce, a man whose cynicism outweighs even my own, defined nostalgia as "fond remembrance of imaginary times past". By that definition this entry fails twice. It isn't really fond and the times weren't imaginary. I'd like to consider Rhyll.

Rhyll was a very popular seaside destination for the Midland working classes going on holiday and my family was keener on it than most. Of course when I say "my family" what I really mean is "my parents".  No one ever asked either my opinion or my brother's opinion. With or without our approval we went year after year to the same holiday camp - in Rhyll - at the same time of year - in September - and had what amounted to the same holiday.

So what were those holidays like?

First of all you need to know something about the place and, for those who live in warmer climes, something about September. Rhyll is a seaside town in North Wales. It's not a big place - though it is bigger than my family's second choice, Borth - and although it was once a popular and elegant Victorian resort it was pretty shabby by the 1960s when we were going. I can't vouch for what it's like now, I haven't been back since I was about twelve. Post-traumatic stress, probably.

Of course September might have something to do with my lifelong antipathy. In September the weather is already turning cold and the Irish Sea is not something you want to be swimming in. We went at that time of year, as did many others, because it was cheaper.

It was also cheaper, and the done thing, to go self-catering. This meant spending the week in a caravan or, when we went to Rhyll, a chalet. The chalets were two-roomed wooden buildings: a bedroom for the parents and a room with a table and a couple of bench seats that metemorphosised into beds for the kids at night. They were draughty, cold and very basic.
Our holiday camp, which may well still be there so I won't name it, was at the cheaper end even of the holiday camp spectrum. There was an open air swimming pool that was, to be kind, of a dubious hygiene standard and that somehow managed to maintain a temperature even lower than that of the sea. There was a scrubby beach that was reached by walking through a row of rusty and disused caravans. There was a club where entertainers who would be rejected nowadays before the televised stages of Britain's Got Talent entertained inebriated adults while the kids sat in a wooden hut watching cartoon films that were so old that the least discerning five-year-old would be bored after two minutes. The same set of cartoons every year in fact.

What else was there in Rhyll at the time?

Well there was the fairground. This consisted of half a dozen dilapidated attractions and a bingo hall where a bored caller shouted out numbers and a lot of equally bored punters slid little plastic covers over the numbers in front of them for hours at a time.
There was the model village were we had an annual visit. Every year it got a little more run down and a few more of the unconvincing model villagers fell over as if some ghastly creeping sleeping sickness was gradually overcoming toytown.
There was a news stand on the camp which had a rack improbably stocked with American DC comics - Superman, the Flash, Justice League and so on.

And there was the rain- and wind-swept promenade where the endless (and I mean that in the eternal damnation sense) days were spent walking from one end of the town to the other and back.

And the only other significant entertainment I remember was Woolworths, where I bought the cheap sci-fi paperbacks that, along with a selection of those comics,  kept me occupied during the tedious hours of the holiday.

When my brother returns from his current holiday in Borneo (he too has never returned to Rhyll) I shall consult him and ask him for further reminiscences and, if I can find them, I shall also post here a remarkable pair of photographs taken on one of those holidays - me and my brother each posing with a parrot on our shoulder. In Ray's, he is leaning away from the parrot looking very wary of the creature. In mine the parrot is leaning away from me.
I'm not sure what that means but it must mean something.

Where do we go from here...

Well, I don't know where we go from here but I do know where I go. I've just booked my first proper holiday for some time. I am a little concerned that the relevant stamps in my passport may cause me some problems if I try to visit my friends in America for future wordcraft conventions but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
It's a chance I'll have to take, after all, how many of my friends are likely to be able to say they have visited North Korea? Well, that's where I'm going. There are some quite drastic restrictions on travelling around within the country - for example you can't leave the hotels except as a group with the North Korean guides present so my habit of early morning wandering around the streets is a no-no, and you can't take mobile phones into the country so I'll have to just hope that no emergencies arise at home.

I'll post more about the itinerary later but for now I'll just start counting down the days to next Easter which is when the trip takes place and try very hard not to think how much it's going to cost me.