Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

Me outside a Cardiff church (photo: Simon Sellars).

I’ve always been fascinated by Wales. It’s something to do with my interest in ‘edge culture’, with distorted cultural mirrors sharding mainline nationalism into fragments. I used to hear English people put down the Welsh, mocking their accents and their tradition, and it fascinated me. Not the racism, but the existence of a culture that seemingly had the power to undermine, or threaten in some way, the monolithic Britishness of those insecure people. Such regions, such dichotomies, always hold up a dirty mirror to the dominant culture, and it’s for that reason I’m always drawn to them: places like Tasmania (considered by mainland Aussies to be full of inbred bestiality merchants) and Tohoku in northern Japan (a largely agricultural region sneered at by southern city slickers as a no-go zone full of witches, superstition and general farmhand stupidity).

So, as a kid growing up in an expat English family, I always wondered about Wales, this little territory to the west of wherever it was we came from. Living in Australia, I couldn’t get my hands on a lot of info about Wales, which meant that random bursts of popular culture filled in the gap. This is what I associated with the place: big rugby blokes with mutton-chop sideburns; the world’s longest place name, as satirised in The Goodies; Monty Python and the ancient Welsh martial art of LLAP-Goch; leeks; Welsh rarebit; those tall, funny black hats; cottage burners; Shirley Bassey; Tom Jones; Griff Rhys-Jones; Terry Jones…

Thinking of all the places I’ve since travelled to as an adult, that’s as bizarre a set of cultural associations as I can muster up for any country. Totally exotic to a 10-year-old.

Then there’s the language, with its soft hissing and guttural clucking. I tried learning it from a book when I was young, then when I first started using the internet I tried an online course. Too hard. Can’t remember any of it, but I do remember being terribly disappointed on my first trip to Wales in 1996 and not hearing it spoken at all. Granted, I was in a town (name escapes me) just over the border from England, but still…

On this trip I had a few days to kill and my embedded Welsh memories surfaced so I found myself in Cardiff. Again, it’s not the most Welsh of places but I had the vague idea of visiting all the British capital cities this time around.

Surprisingly, on the walk from the train station to the hostel I heard almost nothing but the Welsh language, mainly yelled and screamed by youngsters. Welsh pride has clearly picked up in recent times, as confirmed by the hostel receptionist who told me it’s now taught as the first language in schools.

LEFT: Welsh rugby bloke with mutton chops (Gareth Edwards, I presume?) outside Millennium Stadium (photo: Simon Sellars).

My room overlooked the Millennium Stadium, where the FA Cup final was held over the last few years; it’s also the new home of Welsh rugby. The weather was completely grey and miserable. Rubbish was being shovelled by the driving wind into the River Taff. The street outside was blocked off by two police vans and the coppers seemed to be conducting a door-to-door search. I went to a pub, had some of the local Brains beer — what an awesome name for a beer — and went to bed.

The next day I went for a walk and found Cardiff Castle just down the road. I’m told they don’t like the castle much here except as a source of tourist revenue. Given it’s a symbol of English oppression, I can see the point: it’s not really much to be proud of. I passed through the tiny city centre and walked down Bute Rd through the area known as Bute Town. In the heady days of the coal-mining industry, Bute Town was where all the immigrant workers were dumped and housed. It became a little micronation, a zone where city people would never go; Bute people would never go into the city, either. Instead they developed their own lifestyle and their own polyglot culture, some kind of multicultural nirvana according to the little Bute Town Museum I visited. I suppose the area was quite groundbreaking in terms of social engineering in the 1940s and 50s, although as poor and rundown as you’d expect.

Millennium Arts Centre (photo: Simon Sellars).

Bute Town is still multicultural today and still looks a bit shabby, although right at the end is the once-infamous docks. Now, we all know what happens to waterside areas in a time of rampant late-capitalism and accordingly Cardiff Bay has been redeveloped as a ‘waterside precinct’ complete with a new, Armadillo-shaped Millennium Arts Centre and bars and restaurants lining the wharf. In the tourist literature I was promised a buzzing, vibrant hub of opportunity and fun and frivolity — ‘Europe’s most exciting waterfront’, no less!

Abandoned Bute Town building (photo: Simon Sellars).

Maybe it was the weather, but there was hardly anyone around. I had lunch in a Thai restaurant and was fairly underwhelmed by a runny noodle dish and a flavourless Tom Yum. Then I went outside and marvelled at the strange arts centre. It seems that all recent arts centres I’ve seen have to look like armadillos or Giger skeletons. The Dutch are like that, too… There were a number of old buildings nearby, but they were completely deserted, abandoned. Does it make sense to waste these shells in favour of wasting millions on po-mo monstrosities? Maybe, like all governments, this one insists on investing every new architectural line with ‘forward-thinking’ design that they hope will take the place of forward-thinking action in day-to-day policy.

Cardiff Barrage: I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in all my life… (photo: Simon Sellars)

When I visited the Netherlands in 2006, I spent a lot of time exploring its astonishing system of locks and sluices — gigantic gates and computer-controlled flood systems that seemed to have been designed by a race of giant robots and then abandoned like discarded playthings. Similarly, here on the Cardiff waterfront there was the Cardiff Bay Barrage, among Europe’s largest civil-engineering undertakings, essentially a system of locks that have a created a freshwater lake that has in turn enabled all sorts of developments around the disused docks.

I caught a water taxi there. The nice Welsh lady crewmember told me that she had recently visited the north of Wales and was ridiculed for her Cardiff background — the purely Welsh-speaking locals mocked her as ‘English Welsh’. But I still couldn’t understand everything she said to me; although she spoke no Welsh, her accent was as thick as the bilge pumping from the boat.

The boat dropped me off at the Barrage and the captain told me he’d be back in an hour to pick me up. The complex looked high tech and I could feel a million CCTV eyes on me. I saw a sign that amused me, aimed at the boats entering the lock: ‘Speed limit: dead slow’. Beautiful: such imprecise, old-fashioned language in among precision-tooled weights and pulleys.

Yellow lines: nothing yet (photo: Simon Sellars).

Men fished. There were no women here. I was on island of pumping industrial hardware. The sky was steel grey but that only seemed to enhance the surroundings. I picked out accents against the sky, against the steel and concrete. A pink hut; yellow hazard markings. They seemed like codes to consciousness, signalling to me as if I was an airline pilot travelling through inner space looking for a place to land. I wandered around and noted that the yellow lines were vaguely semi-circular, yet frustratingly disjointed; they seemed to be straining to resolve themselves into some coherent shape or pattern. But I couldn’t see what kind of shape exactly, other than their intended function as beacons of distress and danger.

Still nothing… (photo: Simon Sellars)

After almost an hour I walked back to where the boat had landed; I could see it chugging away in the distance. Idly, I looked back over my shoulder and it struck me: the yellow markings had finally resolved themselves into an op-art, bumblebee hive of concentric circles, as beautiful and as glorious as the shimmering brushwork of the greatest art. I felt delirious with joy that finally this terminal zone of quietly thrumming machinery, designed for man’s absence, had in fact — like a tacky 3D poster — revealed its greatest secret to me at the very last moment. In fact, this *was* art, all of this landscape, every bit of it — much more so than any flashy arts centre dome could ever hope to signify.

(’These are our poems,’ Carlyle exclaimed in 1849, looking at a departing steam train. Well said, that man!)

Ah, all is revealed (photo: Simon Sellars).

When I got back on the boat, the captain said, ‘Did you see them? The lines? Work of art, that is.’

Indeed it is. But that was my gut feeling the moment I laid eyes on the Barrage, even before those mysterious ley lines had resolved themselves… On the boat there was a very large group of drunken senior citizens on their way to Cardiff. My God, they were loud. I wanted them to shut up! I needed to reflect…

LEFT: This is a multistorey carpark; park your car here, you may never leave (photo: Simon Sellars).

…and to consider the rest of this lovely city, with its cathedrals and steeples and atmospheric old streets and pubs. Indeed, it’s a nice old place but it was constantly raining and there was no one around, in contrast to the Lonely Planet, which had promised a buzzing hub. And I wasn’t doing ‘touristy’ things this time around, as I outlined in my first post for this Brit Blog. Instead, I preferred to remember my time alone on the lock and the moment when, in isolation, my deepest fascination was revealed to me in a micro-dose of crystal-clear reality.

In the evening I walked back through the town and I still had Children of Men on the brain. At that moment, Britain seemed really photogenic — if you wanted to make a film about a prisoner of war camp in a totalitarian near future. Brutalist architecture, and its descendants, scares me — the message it sends today, divorced from whatever context it may have had to begin with, is threatening and oppressive. Look at the complex below: it’s a shopping centre. I could have sworn I was outside Cardiff prison. Now, I know Brutalism is not the fault of the Welsh, but still…

Cardiff Prison (photo: Simon Sellars).

That night, at about 2am on the street below my window, a young guy with severe acne in a tracksuit with a hood pulled down menacingly over his head was arguing with the hostel’s security guard, who had asked him to move along. The hoodie kept yelling, ‘You don’t fucking own the road, cunt’ and something glinted in his hand. I couldn’t tell whether it was a beer can or a knife, or a hallucinogenic trick of the street light.

And that pretty much sums up, for me, the strange mystery — and the indescribable appeal — of the United Kingdom.

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