Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

My brother used to work as a cartographic draughtsman for a number of public bodies. In fact, we used to joke that if anyone was ever digging up the ground anywhere in Wales (and a fair chunk of Western England), there was a good chance that he'd drawn up the plans beforehand. One useful piece of jargon I picked up from his career was 'desire line.' You've probably all come across desire lines, but I expect very few of you ever realised that they had a name. According to Wikipedia (because I'm at home, and I haven't got access to any textbooks on Town and Country Planning): desire path (also known as a desire line , social trail , goat track or bootleg trail ) can be a path created as a consequence of foot or bicycle traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width of the path and its erosion are indicators of the amount of use the path receives. Desire paths emerge as shortcuts where...

I've never been a 'city' person as such, in spite of living, studying and/or working within fairly easy reach of Cardiff and London during my life. When I was growing up, getting to Cardiff was a long and very complicated expedition by bus (there were no trains from Aberdare until 1988.) Mother always hated the drive into the city centre, so we used to visit Swansea out of preference. That was where we did our Xmas shopping every year. Cardiff was an occasional necessary evil, best avoided if we had the choice. Now, in 2013, the train to Cardiff takes about an hour. On the other hand, you can get to Swansea from Aberdare, but it takes ages, involves two different companies and at least one change of buses. There's no possibility of getting there by public transport if you're working normal office hours, and you can forget any idea of getting home after the shops close. (See A Letter to the Editor 6 .) So it goes… Even when I was at university only an hour away from...

I'm in Cardiff at the moment, using a remarkably slow wifi, even by Wetherspoon standards. I needed to get online as I had an email from Andy Tillison via Facebook yesterday (see Our Friends in the North .) By way of thanks for my support from (almost) the beginning of Gold, Frankincense and Disk Drive's career, he'd sent me the entire CD of Where Do We Draw The Line? and the accompanying booklet as a zip file. I didn't fancy using up all my bandwidth trying to download it using Myfi, so I decided to wait until I got to the pub instead. Shanara the Dippy Bint phoned me yesterday, to see what time I anticipated being in town. We must have some sort of weird psychic link, as we always seem to know when one of us is thinking about the other. We're going to have coffee in the restaurant of House of Fraser (which was formerly Howell's, and also played the part of Henrik's Department Store in a few episodes of Doctor Who ), as we can take the baby in there. After...

I've been planning a break away from Aberdare for the past few weeks. The stifling, small-minded, and claustrophobic ( polyphobic , in fact) nature of the place has really been getting me down lately. I'm bored to tears with seeing the same bloody faces and having the same mind-numbing conversations day in and day out (see A Brief Interlude .) Last weekend I decided to do something about it. I've had a tent for a number of years, but I've never actually used it myself. Mother bought it for me as a Xmas present after I went to Cropredy with the boys one year, and it seemed as through I might be doing festivals more often. In the event, that was my one and only festival. For various reasons I never bothered going again. Leafy borrowed the tent one weekend when he went camping, ages ago. Other than that, it's lived in the cupboard under the stairs for its entire life. I decided that it, and I, could do with some fresh air. I had a bit of money from a proofreading job I...

In just under two weeks' time, Trecynon (and the wider area of the Valleys, in fact) will resound to the relentless drone of motorcycles. The National Road Races have taken place in the Park, only a tyre's throw from my house, since I was in my early teens. When I lived in my old house, it wasn't too bad. I was too young to go to the pubs anyway, and if the Park was out of bounds for one Saturday a year, it wasn't any great loss. When I lived in Llwydcoed, we were more or less within earshot, but we still didn't get the full effects. I was working in Pontypridd, and later on in Cardiff, so I generally managed to be out of the house before the first wave of bikers arrived in the village. When I got back to Aberdare in the evenings, the pubs would be full of people winding down after the day's event (see Motorcycle Emptiness .) My young friend Cath P., was in Cardiff one day and called into the shop on her way to the station. We made our way home on the train, and...