Dragons

 This blogpost is intended for the even more limited than usual audience of a select few I went to college with. But read on if you want. It's an apology, a confession, a prayer, a fuck knows.

This is a story about finding your voice in the land of song….

Ha, ha. Imagine that.

That’s something from a fucking shit 90s trailer for a fucking shit 90s Disney movie. A low budget Disney movie. A movie about a dragon, yes, a dragon, obviously because what else is there? Yes, it’s about a dragon. A baby dragon. And he’s like got this weedy voice and he can’t sing in the choir because he’s shit and weak. And all the other dragons are going to an Eisteddfod and they need to win this competition because I don’t know, reasons. And suddenly, through some errant piece of luck precipitating a montage sequence, the dragon finds his voice. What shall we call the dragon? We’ll call him something Welsh, but something the kids in Baton Rouge and Ottawa can pronounce. We’ll call him Jenkins. Ha ha. Fucking hell. The 80s video trailer guy walks to the microphone. He looks out onto a projection of a Disneyfied version of what some Californian executive thinks Snowdonia looks like. He begins.

“This is a story about finding your voice in the land of song….”

(cut to shot of newborn dragon)…

They make the movie and it has probably got a Phil Collins song to sell it. The song is called “No Smoke Without Fire.” It’s terrible. Really, even by Phil’s standards¹. In the movie Phil voices the dragon’s best friend, a sheepdog called Huw Bark (geddit). To this day, it’s widely regarded as a cinematic low point of the decade. And, in the decade they chose to make Sliding Doors and Medicine Man, that’s some low point.

I am already regretting opening this piece with a story about a film that doesn’t exist yet alone comparing myself to a baby dragon in said film.

Where were we?

This is a story about finding your voice in the land of song and it begins at the bottom of a tower block in Carmarthen. The only one in town, thank you nice²

Carmarthen is only an hour west of Swansea but it isn’t South Wales. It’s only half hour from Llanelli but there’s no industrial scarring, no backdrop to the town of men doing unimaginable things in heat and darkness. It’s a rural town, a crossroads, a place where all the other versions of Wales meet before deciding to go their separate ways. Little England fucking off with its hipster beaches and blue flag bakers in one direction, Sheepy Rural Mountainy Wales getting on a tractor and heading north. Coal-flecked, Rugby Flavoured, Close Harmony Singing Wales downing it’s pint and trudging east into the dark wet night. Carmarthen, ancient and mysterious, dull and sexy and drunk, once the largest settlement in Wales, has been dumped. It sits alone, brooding like Burton.

I got wrecked on Saturday because I wanted to and I was walking the hills around Carmarthen whilst very drunk/stoned. And I made a video and I deleted it before I could view it but not before I sent it to some old pals that I had previously made in Carmarthen. I think I said everything I wanted to say which was something like “I was young and foolish and happy here and I miss everyone who was part of that young, foolish happiness and I miss the young, foolish happy me. Oh yes and sorry about getting people pregnant and failing my degree.”

And these lanes I’m a strolling down in a nice space cake and lager fug well they might have been built by Romans. Fuck knows. I’m not a historian. I could have been a historian but the Elephant was open and I was 19 and unimpressed by everything except Garry Lumb’s way around a slotty. But the Romans left, like everyone leaves.

In the end, towns are like people. They get dumped, they fall in love, they get old, they fall apart. The only thing that really sets them apart from us is that, unlike people, they don’t often die.

I associate Carmarthen with love. With all the ways you can fall in love, and all the ways you can fall out of it. Unrequited love, passionate love, intense, stupid, deep and lasting, transient, fleeting, toxic love. Dirty rotten love. The love of women, music, life and love itself. All of it.

Soon as I’m over that little bridge before Glangwili, the moment I set eyes on Tower from the train, the moment it appears out of the trees from the dual carriageway, I’m in love again.

I wish I could forget it all but it’s the curse of being whatever the fuck level of autism I am that I can’t.

Every street, every raindrop, every pint, every vomit, every song, every word.

I exaggerate of course, I’m no Funes³, but I dream in SA31 colours and still wake up sad to be in the present and happy to not be in the past.

So what did I want to get out of going to college?

I wanted to stop being me. And it’s been a battle my whole life not to be me.

Some people want to change gender, others want more money, fame, whatever. I just don’t like being me. I love my family, my friends but I wake up and it’s still me, it’s still that and that’s inescapable. So, back in 1989 I tried on different versions of me to see what might happen. It started the day I went to Trinity and then I couldn’t stop.

I was shy so I decided not to be. I was quiet so I spoke up. I had never had a sexual thought in my life so I thought I might try some. I did not want to be cool. Being cool looks like a lot of hard work and that leads me to the next problem.

Lazy. Slapdash. Disinterested. Words that ran through my school reports with regularity. I’m not lazy. I just only do things when they’re necessary or interesting. Trinity sent me a list of novels I should read before coming along. The first two were Catch-22 and 1984. I bought them from WHSmith in Aberystwyth the next day.

That’s the most education I got from the place. Those books fired something in me. Suddenly I wanted to go. Suddenly I was interested, could picture a version of me sitting by a river with a scarf round my neck. Maybe a nice girl close by. A bottle of wine certainly.

Then it came to lectures. And I just couldn’t have been less interested. I had pictured academics fired up with a burning sense of injustice on behalf of neglected poets, abandoned philosophers and crazed, dangerous texts. I got Gareth Hughes and The Waste Land. So I jacked that in. Once you realise that the college aren’t going to chase you to attend, it’s hard for someone lacking in motivation to do so.

I wished I had heroes. Something to aspire to. But I didn’t. I was content to be the clown, to make people laugh, make myself into a story. It’s all bollocks. But at least I wasn’t me. Somehow I became for the first time in my life the centre of attention. And boy is that addictive.

Get off the bus from Lampeter in the first of several thousand Carmarthen downpours you will encounter. Wait for the promised minibus to pick you up. Realise no one is coming. Walk through Albion Arcade, past a flat you don’t know will be part of your story very soon. Get wet. Get wetter every step. Up past the Boars Head, closed for years. All your belongings in a set of plastic bags. A tramp already. Make your way down Lammas Street past pubs that you haven’t set foot in. Past Picton where your friends you haven’t met yet may already be settling in. Down the hill, soaked through now. Up Job’s Well Road. The rain picks up now. It's saved itself for you, you pathetic fucking wreck.

The optimism that Yossarian’s humanity and fear has instilled in your college dreams is being replaced by the fear, a real fear, that whatever promises you have made to yourself will last as soon as someone, someone hard, someone cool, someone cleverer than you realises you are just a cunt. Someone worth hurting.

And you are back at square 1. You are you again.

So you double down. You steel yourself as you walk down past the block you don’t know yet is an art block, past the library they haven’t built yet, through a car park, down through that little gap, following people with parents because they must be new, new and scared and weak like you are and you join a queue that lasts for hours only to be told that there’s no room set aside for you.

Because that’s what happened. That guy from the Bursar’s Office asked me where I would be living. I had filled in the slip that said “Please can I live on campus as I am barely out of childhood.” But they’d fucked up and there was a look on my face that said “I will die of stupidity tonight if you don’t house me.”

So they gave me a room in Tower. It looked like something from a BBC news item smuggled out of behind the iron curtain. Which made it better than going home.

And I went to the Union. And I met Garry. And I was horrible to him in a way I thought would sound funny and somehow I got away with it and I made a friend who is one of The Great Loves of My Life. And I found Newcastle Brown. And I found dancing. And I found smiling.

The rest you know.

In a stoned hedge-flanked walk at the weekend, I remembered who I wanted not to be and who I tried to become. I loved those days because I met you all. I got something better than a degree. I worked out a path from childhood to adulthood that was a little bit different to how I imagined it. I read the books I wanted to and got the culture I needed slowly, at my own pace. I made the friends I needed and that has made all the difference.

I had my heart broken a few times. But it was okay. I didn’t imagine I could live life without that happening. Now I just break my own heart. It’s better in a way. The glow in my cheeks sat in a Llansteffan pub on Saturday came from 30 years of memories suddenly visible all at once. I was in the Morris, the Elephant, the Union, playing pool, rowing with rugby boys, swinging upside down from the Union balcony, watching my son being born, watching him leave me, watching my friends become incredible, seeing them leave, walking the streets with them all, walking them alone, withdrawing money in Spanish from the HSBC and dancing alone to Ride On Time, to Transmission, to Orange Crush, eating a pastie, throwing up a kebab, watching Spencer climb the Tower, falling in love, falling out again, rowing, laughing, crying, being me and not being me.

All at once and never again.

Anyway, I’d love to see you all back there one day. Come on in, the past is lovely as you want it to be.

 

1: Phil Collins can be forgiven nearly everything just for “Against All Odds.” The kind of tune I could never have admitted loving back in the day. It’s fucking solid.

2: One of the Monk’s many bizarre Carmarthenshire Welsh colloquialisms.

3: Funes the Memorious is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a man cursed by an ability to recall the minutest detail of every single thing he’d ever witnessed.