Showing posts with label Cwmbran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cwmbran. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Thursday, 15 January 2009
Flying home for Christmas
Christmas has came and gone and 2009 has began in earnest. After having returned from Korea for what feels like an age ago ten, I can safely say I am ready to go again. Back to Korea, back to ….anywhere actually.
As you can tell I have mixed feelings about coming home. Of course there is the reason I came back at all, my mother and her failing health and without this reason I surely wouldn’t have returned at all. As it is I am back and aside from the things I despise about this country I am finding some things that are rekindling my faith in the Great British public.
First, the things I hate, have hated, still hate and will always loathe. British rail, Network rail, Midland, Arriva, GWR or whoever charges 47 pounds for a single ticket from Liverpool to Cwmbran are probably top of the list. I love trains, they on the ground, up close and personal, passing through life and not 30,000 feet above it.
I resent paying 47 pounds and so upon returning I booked a 26 pound train for the following day. Another expensive thing I encountered was the cost of a healthy lifestyle. Over 50 pounds a month at a gym I refuse to name just so I can do my bit not to add to the burden the NHS is under from all the fat people that seem to have appeared in the last few years. I have noticed on this return that there seem to be more lardy, even grotesquely over weight people. We truly are overtaking the US as the fattest nation on Earth.
Coming back toward the end of December dropped me right in the middle of the Christmas shopping rush and what a rush it was. For all the news I read in the various rags coupled with panicky journalists flapping on TV, the credit crunch seemed as mythical as, maybe more so than Father Christmas. There were signs of the credit crunch but it is hard to believe it is as serious as the media and politicians make out when people are spending with such reckless abandonment. I really don’t like the disgusting commercialisation of Christmas and with a bit of luck this credit crunch will make people re-evaluate how much they really need all the cheap, expensive, superfluous trappings of what is often called modern life.
There are some things I do like of have been happy to witness since I’ve been back aside from seeing my friends and family which is nice…for a while, I hadn’t imagined there would be much else to balance out the perceived boredom I was absolutely sure would be waiting for me.
I often talk critically of the public here and if you watch the news and read the papers you may well agree but I have to say that a lot of the people I have interacted with have been nice, usually charmless but polite and pleasant enough. The conductor on the train, a man and his young son at Chester train station, a few fellow shoppers in Cwmbran have all made me smile to myself. Another incident in a supermarket reminded me of exactly where I am and I’m sure could only have happened in Wales. A TV, being displayed was playing a DVD of Wales’ ’08 grand slam win and a crowd of men were gathered around it, reliving glorious victories over the five other nations as their wives and girlfriends filled their trolleys and maxed out their credit cards.
Smoke free nights are another positive thing to have changed since my last visit and now clothes and hair do not have to be washed as a matter of course after a few drinks. Somewhat ironically I do have to wash my clothes after spending a little while in my mother’s living room in the company of my oldest sister who smokes like they’re free.
Overall being back home hasn’t been a wholly bad experience. I have enjoyed it up to now but it is from mid January that Cwmbran will start to chip away at me and so whilst I enjoyed the first couple of weeks back, I do feel like anything longer than a holiday here feels like a step backward.
As you can tell I have mixed feelings about coming home. Of course there is the reason I came back at all, my mother and her failing health and without this reason I surely wouldn’t have returned at all. As it is I am back and aside from the things I despise about this country I am finding some things that are rekindling my faith in the Great British public.
First, the things I hate, have hated, still hate and will always loathe. British rail, Network rail, Midland, Arriva, GWR or whoever charges 47 pounds for a single ticket from Liverpool to Cwmbran are probably top of the list. I love trains, they on the ground, up close and personal, passing through life and not 30,000 feet above it.
I resent paying 47 pounds and so upon returning I booked a 26 pound train for the following day. Another expensive thing I encountered was the cost of a healthy lifestyle. Over 50 pounds a month at a gym I refuse to name just so I can do my bit not to add to the burden the NHS is under from all the fat people that seem to have appeared in the last few years. I have noticed on this return that there seem to be more lardy, even grotesquely over weight people. We truly are overtaking the US as the fattest nation on Earth.
Coming back toward the end of December dropped me right in the middle of the Christmas shopping rush and what a rush it was. For all the news I read in the various rags coupled with panicky journalists flapping on TV, the credit crunch seemed as mythical as, maybe more so than Father Christmas. There were signs of the credit crunch but it is hard to believe it is as serious as the media and politicians make out when people are spending with such reckless abandonment. I really don’t like the disgusting commercialisation of Christmas and with a bit of luck this credit crunch will make people re-evaluate how much they really need all the cheap, expensive, superfluous trappings of what is often called modern life.
There are some things I do like of have been happy to witness since I’ve been back aside from seeing my friends and family which is nice…for a while, I hadn’t imagined there would be much else to balance out the perceived boredom I was absolutely sure would be waiting for me.
I often talk critically of the public here and if you watch the news and read the papers you may well agree but I have to say that a lot of the people I have interacted with have been nice, usually charmless but polite and pleasant enough. The conductor on the train, a man and his young son at Chester train station, a few fellow shoppers in Cwmbran have all made me smile to myself. Another incident in a supermarket reminded me of exactly where I am and I’m sure could only have happened in Wales. A TV, being displayed was playing a DVD of Wales’ ’08 grand slam win and a crowd of men were gathered around it, reliving glorious victories over the five other nations as their wives and girlfriends filled their trolleys and maxed out their credit cards.
Smoke free nights are another positive thing to have changed since my last visit and now clothes and hair do not have to be washed as a matter of course after a few drinks. Somewhat ironically I do have to wash my clothes after spending a little while in my mother’s living room in the company of my oldest sister who smokes like they’re free.
Overall being back home hasn’t been a wholly bad experience. I have enjoyed it up to now but it is from mid January that Cwmbran will start to chip away at me and so whilst I enjoyed the first couple of weeks back, I do feel like anything longer than a holiday here feels like a step backward.
Monday, 7 January 2008
Tell Me Why I Don't Like The 2nd Of February?
As some of you may know the 2nd of February is Groundhog day. The day when Bill Murray's character wakes up in Punxatawny PA to find out his is living the same day over and over again in a monotonous cycle of pure hell, trapped in a small town filled with simpletons. Phil Conners finds his own hell on earth. I have a great fondness for the film and after watching it for the umpteenth time I realised why it seems so familiar to me.
I come from Punxsutawney. Punxsutawney S.Wales.
Of course my version isn't called Punxsutawney, it doesn't have the friendliness, the snow or of course the groundhog.
Phil Connors wakes up everyday to find he is living the same day over and over again and eventually does what any sane person would do and kills himself. Unfortunately for Phil he wakes up again and again and again to the sound of Sonny and Cher's 'Babe' and the cycle starts over again. My hometown has the same curse in that the residents are confronted by the same things every day, the same people, the same routine and the same outcomes. At least Punxsutawney had the groundhog!
Punxsutawny PA "The original weather capital of the world since 1887" is the bold and somewhat oxymoronic proclamation in the film for a place that has a real Christmas card feel to it, a place that does seem to represent the juvenile nature of the USA, after all the country is not yet 250 years old. My hometown, which is a lot younger seems a lot more cynical and by comparison could be said to have a 'sorry your terminally ill' card feel to it.
The willful suspension of disbelief is an essential tool that is employed and relied on by film makers in order for their films to work and be enjoyed, I sometimes lose the ability to willfully suspend my disbelief and end up looking too much into things, but bear with me.
With such eternal time on his hands Murray's character turns his hand to all kinds of things, from sculpting ice to playing the piano and eventually finds love and therefore breaks the cycle of monotony. In my town however we don't have eternal time, it just feels like it.
We also have Parkinson's Law.
This law states that "Work expands to fill the time for its completion", or in layman's terms, the longer you have to do something, the longer it takes to do it. If Conner's lived in my town and had an eternity to do all these things he would be wandering around for eternity deciding which pursuit to master first and get nothing done, ever.
Bill Murray seems to revel in these cynical, sarcastic characters. He plays them so well it seems certain that he is indeed one himself. I sympathise with Phil Connors and the other characters he plays, I really feel for them, I'm one of them. I'm bored and cynical and sarcastic and critical and I am seemingly never satisfied. That, in a stupid old useless nutshell seems to be the curse of Cwmbran.
The only way to break the curse is to leave. Go, run away and seek other things, other places, find a better life elsewhere and for God's sake don't go back. The ambition can be sucked out of you within minutes of crossing that imaginary line between the real world and the purgatory inspired, soul draining world that for so long was my home.
I did just that in August of 2006. I moved to South Korea for a year and absolutely loved it. I came back to the UK, back to Cwmbran for Christmas 2007 and quickly remembered why I had left.
I have already sorted out my return to Korea and have thought about where I want to travel when I finish my second year, where I want to live and what I want to do and Cwmbran doesn't feature heavily.
I want to live a budget flight away from home, somewhere in Europe probably. I am considering Dublin as the only English speaking capital city outside the UK, but we will see.
Time will tell what happens but the next time I watch Groundhog day I want to look back on it as if looking at how my life used to be, tedious, boring and predictable.
I come from Punxsutawney. Punxsutawney S.Wales.
Of course my version isn't called Punxsutawney, it doesn't have the friendliness, the snow or of course the groundhog.
Phil Connors wakes up everyday to find he is living the same day over and over again and eventually does what any sane person would do and kills himself. Unfortunately for Phil he wakes up again and again and again to the sound of Sonny and Cher's 'Babe' and the cycle starts over again. My hometown has the same curse in that the residents are confronted by the same things every day, the same people, the same routine and the same outcomes. At least Punxsutawney had the groundhog!
Punxsutawny PA "The original weather capital of the world since 1887" is the bold and somewhat oxymoronic proclamation in the film for a place that has a real Christmas card feel to it, a place that does seem to represent the juvenile nature of the USA, after all the country is not yet 250 years old. My hometown, which is a lot younger seems a lot more cynical and by comparison could be said to have a 'sorry your terminally ill' card feel to it.
The willful suspension of disbelief is an essential tool that is employed and relied on by film makers in order for their films to work and be enjoyed, I sometimes lose the ability to willfully suspend my disbelief and end up looking too much into things, but bear with me.
With such eternal time on his hands Murray's character turns his hand to all kinds of things, from sculpting ice to playing the piano and eventually finds love and therefore breaks the cycle of monotony. In my town however we don't have eternal time, it just feels like it.
We also have Parkinson's Law.
This law states that "Work expands to fill the time for its completion", or in layman's terms, the longer you have to do something, the longer it takes to do it. If Conner's lived in my town and had an eternity to do all these things he would be wandering around for eternity deciding which pursuit to master first and get nothing done, ever.
Bill Murray seems to revel in these cynical, sarcastic characters. He plays them so well it seems certain that he is indeed one himself. I sympathise with Phil Connors and the other characters he plays, I really feel for them, I'm one of them. I'm bored and cynical and sarcastic and critical and I am seemingly never satisfied. That, in a stupid old useless nutshell seems to be the curse of Cwmbran.
The only way to break the curse is to leave. Go, run away and seek other things, other places, find a better life elsewhere and for God's sake don't go back. The ambition can be sucked out of you within minutes of crossing that imaginary line between the real world and the purgatory inspired, soul draining world that for so long was my home.
I did just that in August of 2006. I moved to South Korea for a year and absolutely loved it. I came back to the UK, back to Cwmbran for Christmas 2007 and quickly remembered why I had left.
I have already sorted out my return to Korea and have thought about where I want to travel when I finish my second year, where I want to live and what I want to do and Cwmbran doesn't feature heavily.
I want to live a budget flight away from home, somewhere in Europe probably. I am considering Dublin as the only English speaking capital city outside the UK, but we will see.
Time will tell what happens but the next time I watch Groundhog day I want to look back on it as if looking at how my life used to be, tedious, boring and predictable.
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