Pier Pressure

Ben Wildsmith

There’s no best way to arrive in Aberystwyth. Whichever road you take, the last hour will leave you breathless as you crest each summit before leading you down to the grandest curving bay in Europe.

You’ll park somewhere, still for free if you know where, and wonder how one street connects to the next, higgledy-piggling your way through the sea town’s cafes and art shops, as the world’s accents call out to friends on their way to lectures or the pub.

You’ll pass Inkwells, in its Art Deco splendour, and wish you had a PhD thesis for them to bind, or an easel in need of replacement from overuse. Because you’d do that here, wouldn’t you? You’d wake up in that western light and salty air to fulfil your days as you should, urged by gulls to swoop at life’s chips and hang the consequences.

You’ll climb up to the castle and stare out towards Ireland, New York, the end of the world and mimic Rutelli’s war memorial, willing your lost souls to appear over the horizon and join you in the sunshine.

You’ll look over to the Cliff Railway and ponder the funicular nature of life: as wisdom accrues, lifespan diminishes to compensate.

You’ll walk up to the station to smile at the sign – Aberystwyth/Aberystwyth – and wonder which is Cymraeg.

You’ll go down the pier past a stomping toddler who has been refused pennies for the amusements.

‘You’ve had £20 spent on yer!’ his dad will exclaim, grinning with the ease of a Birmingham escapee.

You’ll sit in the glass-walled pub at the pier’s end and debate whether it’s time for chips. You’ll check the news and find Paris ablaze as the warm glow of sunset begins to wrap you up.

Rushing out so as not to miss the show, you’ll smile at strangers as if you’ve conspired to avoid the cruelties and mundanities inland.

The starlings start to limber up, swooping in little groups before arrivals from the mountains swell their ranks and the wild, coordinated veering begins.

You’ll feel the unreal, orange clarity of October intensify on your chilling skin as the murmuration defies explanation. Wings keen down to graze the sea, twisting and righting as the whole seems to fold and open up, before shooting upwards again like glitter from a circus cannon.

This time, maybe they’ll take a breather on the sea, all of them for no reason you can discern, before resuming the acrobatics and finally rushing under the pier, leaving the town to darken.

That’s no sadness, though, because you’ll wander into the Bank Vault for a fiddle, a banjo, and a Catalan guitarist describing how her parents’ generation saved a language in twenty years.

Scruffy

The ale means you need those chips, so you’ll follow the students and wonder why only this university town seems to have retained the scruffy make-do aesthetic that used to rule before everything was ironed out into student living centres and MBAs.

You’ll climb up the stairs of the Pier Hotel, grateful they’ve saved on paint and spent on heating. All those steps, all that dreaming and smiling will take you soon enough.

You’ll go home after Sunday breakfast and a last look at the sea. With your back to it, driving towards Monday morning against all instincts, you’ll nurture a pleasurable ache at the certainty you’ll return again.

---

Get more trusted Welsh news

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