Book review: Every Other Hour: Travelling Wales without a car by Alice Hughes

Desmond Clifford

The literary conceit is named on the tin. General travel books on Wales are not especially uncommon so a conceit, arguably, helps identify a niche.

For the most part the author, Alice Hughes, gets around by train, bus and on foot. There’s the odd car journey and she records meetings here and there with her boyfriend who has driven to a rendezvous with supplies, so not exactly an SAS-style spirit of adventure.

She owns up to a fondness for Bill Bryson and his once ubiquitous Notes from a Small Island.  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we’re tipped off from the start.

She writes in a style reduced from Bill Bryson. In fairness, she’s pretty good at it. She writes well and is frequently witty; you could easily imagine her writing a fun column for a weekly magazine (sadly there aren’t many such magazines left, so columnist gigs are scarce).

This points to a feature of the book. It reads like a series of articles but follows no recognisable structure, even a geographical one. Each chapter is self-contained and there’s no “narrative arc” or threads. The chapters can be read in any order without loss or gain of sense. This marks it out as a book to dip into rather than a book with a start, middle and ending.

Her focus is on everyday pleasures: the pub, the coffee shop, bakeries and the precise properties of soft bread. I sense a cultured voice but an odd reticence to share her sensibilities.

At Swansea’s Glynn Vivian – “everything I want from an art gallery” – she observes “plenty of my kind of art”. What kind of art is that and why does she like it, and any tips for her readers?

A little further down the road in Mumbles she shares her real passion – for ice-cream. She eats ice creams from three separate parlours one after the other: Forte’s, Joe’s and Verdi’s. I take my hat off to her. I like ice cream but couldn’t eat that much even when I was 25 and running 40 miles a week. She may be reticent about sharing her art taste but has no such coyness in her delight for raspberry ripple and orange stracciatella.

I’ve noted the lack of a geographical structure. The western half of Wales does well: Gower, Pembrokeshire, Cardigan, Ceredigion and the Llŷn peninsula. She catches the Heart of Wales train but passes through mostly in a blur; she dismisses Llandrindod Wells so could never stand for election there.

She does a day trip to Hay-on-Wye, ludicrously tricky to get to from Cardiff and she has no choice but to go to Hereford first.

Most of Wales’ historic transport links created routes traversing east to west; journeys north and south are, relatively, a pain in comparison.

Hit and miss

Even within the confines of the conceit she has set herself – places reachable by public transport – the offering is hit and miss.

The whole of the north-east of Wales is missing. No Newtown, no Welshpool, nothing of the new Wrexham vibe, and nothing at all along the north Wales coast. No Caernarfon or Bala, two of the country’s most atmospheric towns – and in Bala’s case, the hardest to get to by any mode of transport.

She’s resistant to the Valleys beyond Pontypridd – no Merthyr, Treorchy, Pontypool or Ebbw Vale. With just a couple of exceptions, this book confines itself to the western half of Wales.

The book is a pleasant and gentle read, all cardinal virtues in my book. There are interesting bits and pieces, but it wouldn’t be too much use as a primer for learning about Wales, either geographically, historically or culturally.

She says she’s a “huge proponent of hanging travel on the hook of an author, a painter…”, but the practical evidence of such motive is slim. We learn little about anyone. Even Dylan Thomas, who can’t be ignored, in Laugharne; was he any good, is he over-hyped, what did Laugharne contribute to his writing?

The sense of Wales emerging from these pages is incomplete. There’s no mention, virtually, of Wales’ mining or industrial past – you’d think the country was all ice-cream parlours and bijou bakeries.

‘Pop in’

Built heritage doesn’t seem to make an enormous impact. Churches, castles and town halls are noted but not much dwelt upon. There’s a detour to Llandaff in Cardiff.  The cathedral, “is in front of us so we decide that we might as well pop in”! The exclamation mark is mine.

This is a candidate for Wales’ greatest building and yet it makes zero impact. She’s more impressed by The Heathcock pub down the road (which is a nice pub, to be fair).

It may be honest reportage of the writer’s interests but hardly marks this out as a travel classic. The whole visit to Llandaff felt like a slightly clumsy add-on. She’d have been better, perhaps, doing a full chapter on Cardiff or leaving it out completely.

The book has no real natural conclusion, it just ends. Maybe some reflections on the very variable state of Welsh public transport would have been instructive – reflections Alice Hughes would be extremely well-placed to offer.

The truth is that public transport around Wales is deeply unsatisfactory. For both residents and tourists there’s a patchwork of rare, ill-timed, limited and too-often unreliable services. The train operator Transport for Wales represents an improving trajectory, but the world of buses is chaotic and incomplete. We need a significantly bigger investment in basic transport systems.

Alice Hughes writes well and this is the kind of undemanding book that would pass the time on one those long bus journeys.

She doesn’t conjure up much atmosphere of history or a strong sense of place. What she conveys is a strong sense of herself and agreeable companionability.

Her authorial voice is positive; she writes well and creates easy reading.

Every Other Hour by Alice Hughes is published by Seren Books and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops

---

Get more trusted Welsh news

Choose Nation.Cymru as a preferred source in Google News to see more of our journalism.