Blue Moon's trip around the UK

Aberystwyth has also been on my must-visit list (why is it called a bucket list? Mine isn’t.) for completely different reasons from New Quay, but reading the pilot doesn’t really sell the place, going on as it does about the dangers of a shallow rock-strewn entrance in Westerly winds. Jan recounted surfing into the harbour running before a big storm and it sounded as if he wasn’t too keen to repeat the experience.

Going in on Sunday night I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Yes, it’s quite a narrow entrance with big piers; yes, you do have to do a handbrake turn while lining up a cardinal mark and a lamp post; yes there was quite a swell even though there wasn’t much breeze and yes, there were some disarmingly cross-looking waves crashing onto the beach next door, but it was quickly over and the marina was cosy and welcoming. Surprisingly expensive, but they do have the best showers I’ve seen after Berthon in Lymington.

Mindful of the rather stronger wind forecast this morning I asked in reception about the sort of conditions in which leaving could be dicey, and she said “Oh, some of our customers never leave, they’re too scared. You’ll be all right though.” I’m not sure what she was basing her assessment of my seamanship on, since I had only met her two minutes before and all she knew about me was my name, address and (most importantly) credit card details, so it didn’t fill me with confidence. Two days of looking at the fearsome rocks and listening to the waves breaking on the ominously-named Trap didn’t help either, but with enough throttle it was again quickly over and once I had picked up all the crockery off the floor I bore away for Pwhelli at high speed and said goodbye to Aberystwyth.

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I’d wanted to go there because one of my reasons for this jaunt is that I have visited and usually worked in pretty much every town of any size in the country, with the strange exception of those on the coast. No idea why, perhaps the market research industry has something against seagulls or fish and chips. Aberystwyth falls squarely into this camp: it felt like a terrible omission since for some reason I had it marked down as Wales’ most important place after Cardiff and Swansea. That, I now know, was a mistake. It is very nice, but also very small. 10,000 residents and 10,000 students.

That makes for a strange combination of small-town shops and beach tat combined with things students need, which seems to be mainly coffee lounges, grungey ‘cocktail’ bars and vegan cafes-cum-clothes shops. In fact Aberystwyth has a complete retail imbalance: it has 20 barbers but not a single restaurant for grown-ups. Where do parents take their kids for graduation lunch? I know about the barbers because I went to one, but only after trying five that were fully booked on a wet Tuesday. By my calculation the male population of Aberystwyth (including students) must have their hair cut once a fortnight. On the visual evidence this seems unlikely.

I did know about the university, and its role in Welsh language and culture, largely because of the episode in The Crown where Charles is banished there to learn Welsh and it’s even worse than Gordonstoun, but then he’s invited to have supper with some real Welsh people and it turns out they’re OK after all. That scene made me so cross with Netflix: that’s such a lazy film trope that’s usually reserved for meeting aliens or lost tribes of the Amazon, not the Welsh. What I wasn’t prepared for was going into Tesco and finding that everyone apart from the students and the holidaymakers (both easily identified) was speaking Welsh all the time. I’ve been in plenty of Welsh supermarkets and rather like the novelty of having all the usual Tesco phrases in Welsh and English (Popty is consequently the favourite of my dozen Welsh words – Bakery) but I have never heard so much Welsh spoken anywhere. They should have sent the now King to stack shelves in Aberystwyth Tesco, he’d have killed two cultural experience birds with one stone.

Another interesting thing about Aberystwyth is that everyone just calls it Aber. It’s Aber Marina, Aber Insurance, Aber Pets, Aber Vintage Clothing, Aber New Age Crystals and so on. What do all the other Abers in Wales think of this? You don’t get that down the road in Aberporth or Aberdovey, or in Abersoch or Aberdaron or Aberaeron or Aberarth or even in Abertawe, which is 30 (yes, thirty) times the size (without students). Having written this far, I suspect it’s because Aberystwyth is an absolute pain to write, so the others just let them have the Aber bit.

Anyway, having devoted two days to Aber on the misconception that it was Wales’ third most important metropolis, I ran out of things to do or even look at after about an hour. Hence the haircut, but they had so many customers waiting they’d done the whole thing in 10 minutes (I know, don’t clutter up the comments with cheap jibes, but Alex in Kidderminster lavishes half an hour of skill for the same £10). Luckily it rained a lot which reduced possible sightseeing time, but I did take some pictures.

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So when it stopped raining I pulled on my walking boots and knocked off a dozen miles of the very lovely Ceredigion Coast Path. Oh yes, there are Munroes coming and I want to be ready.

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