Accommodation: small apartment in a neighbourhood of pubs and vape stores. The pub next door has a Wikipedia page. Apartment is accessed by tapping 7-digit numbers into well-hidden keypads.
Arrival experience: search building exterior like a prowler while customers at the pub next door look on thinking, must be vapes in there. The keypad reacts to failed attempts by sounding an embarrassed little siren for a few seconds. No response team screeches up, so keep looking and finally locate correct keypad.
Quite a nice place, except the lights are on motion detectors. If you lie still and read for fifteen minutes, the lights go out. They also turn out if you're in the shower for more than six minutes. There's no window in the bathroom; you shower in total darkness until you find a spot covered by the motion detector. This is very interesting.
The building is separated from the rest of the city by a complicated traffic circle where locals go to dice with death. Pedestrians cross in four stages, and every wait comes with tempting pauses. A cyclist shoots across like a panicked deer, and then a light changes somewhere and another pulse of traffic comes screaming around the curve.
Castle Park: A beautiful park that once held a Norman castle and was a thriving neighbourhood until the Blitz, after which it was turned into a park. A bombed-out 18th century church remains. It's a bit sketchy in the evening; but if I were going to play loud music and get drunk in public, I'd choose Castle Park, too. It's just so evocative. In the morning, it belongs to gulls, one of which screams in triumph from the apex of an arch in the ruined church, and sightseers, one of whom approaches and starts a long and strange conversation. "When was your father born? Mine was 1917. It's not a contest." He was with someone else, who ran off like a freed hostage when I took over.
Cheese Lane Shot Tower: the last shot tower built to date (yes, so, you pour molten lead through a screen at the top and collect spherical shot in a pool of water at the bottom). It's so ugly that it won a design award in 1969, but it's been the only industrial tower to look at ever since they tore down the Shot Lane Cheese tower following improvements in bocconcini technology.
The harbour: gives the sense that an overexcited 1997 civic planning committee got everything it wanted. There's an open-air theatre where a woman is learning to roller skate, sheds redeveloped into long rows of restaurants, an aquarium, an audacious modern lift-bridge that broke last month, and We The Curious, a quirky science-arts centre that broadcasts audio out over a big, empty square. It's like a Soviet city where scientific curiosity is supposed to be compulsory, but no one cares.
We The Curious (which might be marvellous, I didn't go in) seems to have been given a list of late 20th century buzzwords and no further instructions and has been groping for purpose ever since. A museum of, say, ceramics has an easy life by comparison.
Then: I took a train to Fishguard via Newport. Bristol has a lovely Victorian train station with fascinating acoustics. They make announcements completely indecipherable, and a stopping train of steel ingots is avant garde music. A lovely older Welsh woman gives me tips for that coastal trail that I really should have written down.
