decline accelerates into prejudice

‘Sometimes, countries cannot choose the manner of their deaths.’

My literary guide through Wales was Grits by Niall Griffiths.

A novel of disintegration in the name of pleasure starring a group of people huddled together at the edge of the land.

Many of my expectations have been met - and turned on their head. Misery has been handed back a hundred fold. The mountains and the valleys are paralleled in the chemical and emotional highs and lows that the characters slide through. The music of the country is techno as the land of song becomes the ‘land-a screams’.

The Welsh dragon is ever-present, chased off tin-foil in the name of fun and forgetfulness - and stag becomes hallucinated dragon and is killed in the name of driving out the English.

The leek puts in an appearance when it is given in place of flowers to an overdose recovering in hospital.

Sheep are scattered throughout the novel as soft mute witnesses to the bruising antics that surround them.

‘The mountainsides around me are dotted with white blobs of sheep - which ones are dead and which are alive I cant tell like - and several people - a different kind of sheep I suppose - are on all fours’

Sheep mirror humans - appearing to enjoy their freedom, but ultimately falling and rotting away at their last.

Drifters from the four corners of the British Isles are swept to Aberystwyth, where they linger, squeezing whatever pleasure they can find from their surroundings - until one by one they depart, dead or alive, to the next place on their list.

And so it goes that Wales cannot hold me any longer. My journey calls, I must move on.

the circumnavigator