The road system in Swansea is something like visiting a dysfunctional family. Every turn you make is in some awful way mysteriously wrong. Graham said “Turn right.” I turned left.
“Whaddya do that for?”
“Well sometimes when you say ‘right’ you actually mean ‘left’.”
“Oh. Fair enough. Where does this take us, then?”
“I dunno. Some place called Llanffiddlewaddell, I expect.”
“The way you said that sounded almost like Welsh. Where are you going now?”
“Right.”
“Why?”
“Well, it feels like the right thing to do.”
We got to a stretch of road that both I and my internal autopilot recognised.
“Where are we going now?”
“Home. I know the way home, and this is it.”
“Good. Shopping in Swansea on a Saturday is a bad idea.”
“You said it, sugar-plum.”
And so we got home, bearing a tray of jewel-bright polyanthus, a lamp-shade deemed suitable for Graham’s mother’s newly decorated bedroom, and a small pack of goodies from the too big for its own good Swansea Morrison’s.
“That was fun,” I said.
“No it wasn’t.”
“Oh well, I’m not going to argue. Tea?”
Dear John,
Internal autopilots oftentimes take us toward a shoreline we’ve long been hoping to find. I wish for you uncharted territory yet to visit, there to meet your Llanffiddlewaddell.
AVT
As someone who has recently had occasion to holler out, “No, not that left, the other left,” to someone who sometimes has trouble with the difference, that conversation makes perfect sense to me.
I can remember when I knew my way around back home. Doubt that now.
This is hilarious and reminds me strongly of when I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. I remaked that the streets seemed to have been determined by following cowpaths wherever they might lead. True! They actually were, not to my surprse, but for the thrill of patting my own back, even if I HAD just said it as a joke. You might be driving due north on Blank Street and suddenly, surprise! it would b\off without warning and be heading northeast, but I wanted to go north! Never mind a few seconds later it would veer again and once more I’d be tracking correctly again. Didn’t do much for the nerves until I go the hang of it! But, if a straight line is truly the shortest distance, I want money back for all those extra miles traveled.
You know, if you Google “Llanffiddlewaddell,” the only entry is this post.
I’m still laughing. Tea here too, thank you.
Whenever I hear/read Swansea I think of the one in Massachusetts (which is a small town, but it is just across the border from Rhode Island, so it’s a location that would be mentioned on local TV and radio much more often than your Swansea). However, there is no Llanffiddlewaddell around here.