The Train from Aberystwyth to Wolverhampton, 19.30
I think that I have been travelling today almost non-stop for seven hours. Now I face another seven hours back. I have been curling and snaking along rail tracks – a passage eased by drizzling rain and a sky smeared with green mist. I have bypassed a border into Wales, leaving a landscape crisscrossed by electricity pylons and half-empty canals behind me; it was the post-industrial landscape of the English Midlands. Now I have entered another kind of geography, what the property agent I met in Aberystwyth described as an accredited Unesco ‘Biosphere’ region. I do not know exactly what Unesco means by ‘biosphere’ in this context – but I understand the urge to protect this area; to delimit it as somehow special, and to attempt to give it a label. That’s because there is a quality about the stretch of coastline scrolling along the edge of the Irish Sea with its backdrop of low mountain summits that is very unique indeed. It is special: a ‘sphere’ or aura of beauty clings to it. Do you know how to say ‘beauty’ in Welsh? I read the word on the right hand side of a bilingual Boots pharmacy. It’s Hardffych.
There is something ‘hard’ about beauty. It is difficult to resist. And so, in a word, has it all been. It is difficult to resist the prospect of living in this area, difficult to resist the prospect of that cosy two-bedroom apartment high in the loft of a former Victorian holiday guesthouse with bay windows overlooking the sea. As I stood on the Aberystwyth town pier I watched a vast congress of migratory birds swirling about in the twilit sky. There were like a swarm of black bees: contracting, expanding and bending into the most incredible shapes imaginable. At one point the cluster of house martins split off into two scintillating black blobs that flattened into hemispheres and turned about each other in perfect disc-shaped formations like two rings spinning about on an invisible axis that only they could see. Behind them the lights of the Aberystywth pier arcade winked at me. The horizon line stained pastel blue into pink. It was sundown.
It is also the existence of the nearby Barmouth sea estuary that has turned this area into a famous beauty spot. The estuary – a mighty sea-limb creeping inland – is so glorious a natural landmark that it has inspired the imagination of great writers like Sebald, who normally tread in far different climes. Since that momentous spring cycling trip last year I felt an urge, almost incomparable to what I felt anywhere else, to rest here. It was more than tranquillity that drew me to the environs of Barmouth Bay or the North Sea Estuary, so wild and troublesome to locals. It could have been the lure of distant mountains or the words of that kind English camper we met by Snowdon, speaking of the nearby Mt Cader Idris as one of the last real wildernesses left in the UK, but I think it was the beauty of the estuary itself – so savage and undefinable, yet so serene and peaceful. There were moments cycling beside it that I felt I wanted to spend all the years of my life living beside it. Never in my life before – except perhaps in one part of the Annapurnas, have I seen nature express itself so harmoniously, formally, so well in each part. It was the vastness and profundity of nature I experienced there that struck me – that took my breath away.
Now it is dark and the apparitions of that late afternoon are shielded from my sight – rebuffed by the strange reflection of train windows.
I can only see myself.
A number of huge decisions rest on me now – their implications are so numerous and impossible to guess at that I feel that I am looking out to sea. I am a bubble, light as air, exhilarated, scared.
Underlying it all, I realise, underlying all the logistical and formal cause and effect relationships – the dilemma is a humorously human one. Love. It is strange to think, but also somehow inevitable, that the tallest mountain I must cross before I can decide the shape of the next three years is a romantic one. It is a mountain that has grown – for mountains grow – almost without me seeing it or meaning it to. Our defences erode like coastline – it is part of the universal human condition. The broken, tattered membrane of my heart, so damaged by the despoliation of last year was healed. Now things are once more unravelling, and I have to ask myself whether I arrived in Ghent with a broken heart and will also leave with one.
Love is also a responsibility. I realise that now. The one who is immune to the repsonisbility that life bears, must also be immune to love. To love is to bequeath, to ‘troth’, and that is an exchange. The responsibility of someone else’s heart is actually one of the most profound responsibilities human nature can know.
I know a very difficult and sad conversation must come – but funnily enough, my lack of battery charger is preventing this. Are the gods laughing at me? I must ask him. If the answer is no then I will go to Iceland, and disappear once more across another sea.
833 words a day 