Somewhere in the world of writing there’s an academic study of the connection between writers and drink. Something which explains how great works rise from the sprawl of beer mats, the fog of talk and the slumping numbness of mind that alcohol induces. Why is it that the greatest minds of our generation can be those creased by fug and flattened by hangover? The poets whose verse only trips, sparks and rattles when powered by Brains or allowed to marinade in a sea of red wine.
The Dylan Thomas legend is something that follows Welsh writers everywhere. Sets us up in the minds of outsiders as alcoholic mumblers and Rabelaisian verse weavers content only to stumble from bar to boozer flashing the tropes and images of our musical poetry as we go. The problem with this myth, naturally, is that, for many, it’s actually the truth. Writers do spend time in bars, many of them, most of them even. A number have beaten the same path as Dylan. Loosing their manuscripts down the back of hotels’ plush upholstery, insulting barmaids in back bars and being forever long on hope and short on cash.
It’s almost always men too. Welsh writing is rich with male heroes who are golden at six but incoherent by ten. Some of the most respected among us have done their time sprawled in doorways and lying down quietly on front lawns. Are our women writers in this league just yet? Not quite, but coming soon.
Could this be a Welsh thing? Hugh MacDiarmid, the great Scots poet, reckoned that his drinkers (and he was referring here to the morose boozers of Glasgow) preferred “the hard-bitten, the recalcitrant, the sarcastic, the saturnine, the cross-grained and the cankered” to the sort of confiding, intimate, ingratiating, hail-fellow-well-met drinkers found in the rest of the British Isles. By the rest of the British Isles he meant, I guess, the English. Although there is certainly an element of secret-society, intimate wahoo about the drinkers of Gwynedd and a quantity of all right skip have one with me about some of those found in Cardiff.
Welsh writers also love drink related causes. There is huge support for the establishment of a pub in the grounds of St Fagans. Someone has come up with a name – Tafarn yr Iorwerth Peate. But it isn’t there yet. The Save the Vulcan campaign, to keep the Victorian south of Cardiff Prison in shape for the twentieth first century is led by authors. John Williams, Charlotte Greig, Ifor Thomas, Des Barry, Sean Burke and others have consumed beer in quantity in pursuit of that cause (and have got a result too - which is a really unexpected bonus - The Vulcan goes on - for now).
And when there are campaigns to put poems in public places where do these new verses end up? On the back of beer mats. Where else?
A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 25th July, 2009
Showing posts with label Vulcan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vulcan. Show all posts
Saturday, 25 July 2009
Saturday, 13 June 2009
How Tea Can Improve Your Writing
I’m drinking tea. Around me is a disparate crowd of writers, artists, students, accountants, gardeners and housepersons. We are listening to a performance of Tracing Flight, the output of a local writers group presented by actors from the College of Music and Drama. The small crowd applaud enthusiastically. This is at the brand new Waterloo Gardens Teahouse, a stylish outpost of calm in Cardiff east. Next door is a hairdressers, the other side a sub-Post Office. Opposite are the gardens, home of dog walkers, smokers, sitters, kids on tricycles, old ladies with bags, men reading newspapers, and the occasional disaffected youth. South Wales suburbia. You can put on literature and get it to work where you like, it seems.
In the days of Ray Handy and Harri Webb poetry became synonymous with pints. You heard it chanted in pubs, between beers, surrounded by cigarette smoke and veneration. Today in Cardiff there are regular performances at Chapter Arts Centre and at the WMC. In Swansea they tend to happen at the purpose-built Dylan Thomas Centre – a home for literature in Wales’s second city. Bookshop, theatre, cafe, a regular literary programme put on in a set of dedicated performance spaces.
The Dylan Thomas Centre is a legacy of the 1995 UK Year of Literature, a status Swansea won against absolutely no competition at all from any other Welsh conurbation. The position was offered to Cardiff but the capital turned up its philistine nose. Dylan won again and with surprisingly successful and long-lived results.
Can we really put lit on anywhere? One-time media darling, Fiona Pitt-Kethley, editor of the much sought after Literary Companion to Sex, read her stuff to rush hour crowds arriving at Waterloo Station in London. Her publisher sold copies of her book hand to hand from a crate. They got rid of hundreds.
I’ve seen Peter Stead talking about his books in a cinema with a giant back-drop projection of his face in close-up on the screen behind. The Academi mounted a poetry stomp in the centre of Caernarfon Castle where the Investiture plaque had been swathed in bubble-wrap to protect it against anarchists. There have been literary performances in the lounges of cross channel ferries and standing on the decks of light ships and Campbell steamers. In poetry anything is possible.
But it’s also true that dedicated spaces are best. Such centres exist in Dublin, in London and in Edinburgh. But not in Cardiff. For the capital we add literature on, squeeze it between plays at the Sherman, perform it in the foyer of the Millennium Centre, listen to it at the Norwegian Church. Maybe users should start agitating. When they move the Vulcan to St Fagans, if they do, how about building a Literature Centre on the vacant site?
A stop press here: Vulcan saved for three more years. New lease signed by Liz the Landlady. A victory which for a while looked as if it just wouldn't come.
A version of the above appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 13th June, 2009.
In the days of Ray Handy and Harri Webb poetry became synonymous with pints. You heard it chanted in pubs, between beers, surrounded by cigarette smoke and veneration. Today in Cardiff there are regular performances at Chapter Arts Centre and at the WMC. In Swansea they tend to happen at the purpose-built Dylan Thomas Centre – a home for literature in Wales’s second city. Bookshop, theatre, cafe, a regular literary programme put on in a set of dedicated performance spaces.
The Dylan Thomas Centre is a legacy of the 1995 UK Year of Literature, a status Swansea won against absolutely no competition at all from any other Welsh conurbation. The position was offered to Cardiff but the capital turned up its philistine nose. Dylan won again and with surprisingly successful and long-lived results.
Can we really put lit on anywhere? One-time media darling, Fiona Pitt-Kethley, editor of the much sought after Literary Companion to Sex, read her stuff to rush hour crowds arriving at Waterloo Station in London. Her publisher sold copies of her book hand to hand from a crate. They got rid of hundreds.
I’ve seen Peter Stead talking about his books in a cinema with a giant back-drop projection of his face in close-up on the screen behind. The Academi mounted a poetry stomp in the centre of Caernarfon Castle where the Investiture plaque had been swathed in bubble-wrap to protect it against anarchists. There have been literary performances in the lounges of cross channel ferries and standing on the decks of light ships and Campbell steamers. In poetry anything is possible.
But it’s also true that dedicated spaces are best. Such centres exist in Dublin, in London and in Edinburgh. But not in Cardiff. For the capital we add literature on, squeeze it between plays at the Sherman, perform it in the foyer of the Millennium Centre, listen to it at the Norwegian Church. Maybe users should start agitating. When they move the Vulcan to St Fagans, if they do, how about building a Literature Centre on the vacant site?
A stop press here: Vulcan saved for three more years. New lease signed by Liz the Landlady. A victory which for a while looked as if it just wouldn't come.
A version of the above appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 13th June, 2009.
Saturday, 29 November 2008
Vulcanised
The much-faded and painted advert for Guinness on the side of the Vulcan has been there since at least the 1960s. Back then this typically Cardiffian tavern was on the edge of a neck of tight working-class tenements, just the other side of the rail track from the recently slum-cleared district of Newtown. Cardiff was a dirty place, full of smog and dust. The sprawling steelworks of East Moors and the docks to their south provided a stream of men seeking sustenance and oblivion. In the Vulcan you sat on wooden benches in working boots and working clothes. There was sawdust on the floor.
Today, fifty years on, Newtown is a memory – replaced by industrial units and a corporate hotel. The docks have been anodised, reduced to a safety-conscious ghost of their former selves. East Moors is the Ocean Way Industrial Park, full of warehouses and articulated lorries. Even the terraces that once surrounded the Vulcan like ivy have been flattened and turned into a clean, black-topped car park.
When I first discovered this 1853 pub it still had the legendary sawdust and was still a home for working men. Railway workers, engineers from BT opposite, prison guards, locals from Duffryn Street, Taff Street and Pellet Street. I sat there with John Williams, the author whose anthology of short fiction Wales Half-Welsh (Bloomsbury) almost got titled Vulcanised. We were joined by a bunch of other writers who felt more at home here than in the aluminium and glass vertical drinkeries of Cardiff’s town centre. (If you’d like to follow this up then you can read more about the writers and the Vulcan in my Real Wales, published December 2008 by Seren).
The beer was good, there was a dart board, the juke wasn’t intrusive. Liz, the landlady, offered regulars bowls of chips and complimentary sausages.
But then came the University of Glamorgan putting a tank on Cardiff University’s lawn by converting the old BT building into its splendid new Atrium over the road. The School of Cultural Studies. Library, students, light. The Pellet Street tower block of student flats (Ty Pont Haearn) went up at incredible speed. After that came St David’s 2 and the need for car parking. The surrounding streets were systematically flattened yet the Vulcan survived. A pub in splendid isolation. A Victorian gem for fans or a planning difficulty for developers. How you viewed it depended on where you stood.
Currently rumours abound. The pub will be pulled down next spring. Brains have sold out. In its place will be a multi storey car park, social housing, another student tower block, bars, restaurants, even Atrium 2, symbol of Glamorgan’s unstoppable sweep to domination. There’s also a half-credible tale that St Fagans will purchase the bricks and rebuilt the pub, restoring it to its Victorian splendour in the heart of the museum. Iorwerth Peate would spin.
It is a function of developers to sweep all before them. Cardiff has seen generations come and go, each cleaning the slate of everything. The city today has almost nothing with a past. If you exclude the Castle and St John’s Church almost everything standing is recent. We should preserve the pub by building round it and incorporating it into the overall plan. It has happened before. Check the retained Victorian frontage of the Altolusso block a few hundred yards on up the road. We should retain the Vulcan’s charm, its tourist attractability (it’s in the top fifty best UK pubs, according to Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale) and its delight. Removing it even to the secure and beerless pastures of St Fagans would be a crime.
Possibly the only good thing to come out of the present economic breaking halt is that new construction is almost universally on hold. Which should mean a reprieve for the Vulcan. For a time. Let’s hope.
Photo by John Briggs. An earlier version of this blog appeared at the IWA
Today, fifty years on, Newtown is a memory – replaced by industrial units and a corporate hotel. The docks have been anodised, reduced to a safety-conscious ghost of their former selves. East Moors is the Ocean Way Industrial Park, full of warehouses and articulated lorries. Even the terraces that once surrounded the Vulcan like ivy have been flattened and turned into a clean, black-topped car park.
When I first discovered this 1853 pub it still had the legendary sawdust and was still a home for working men. Railway workers, engineers from BT opposite, prison guards, locals from Duffryn Street, Taff Street and Pellet Street. I sat there with John Williams, the author whose anthology of short fiction Wales Half-Welsh (Bloomsbury) almost got titled Vulcanised. We were joined by a bunch of other writers who felt more at home here than in the aluminium and glass vertical drinkeries of Cardiff’s town centre. (If you’d like to follow this up then you can read more about the writers and the Vulcan in my Real Wales, published December 2008 by Seren).
The beer was good, there was a dart board, the juke wasn’t intrusive. Liz, the landlady, offered regulars bowls of chips and complimentary sausages.
But then came the University of Glamorgan putting a tank on Cardiff University’s lawn by converting the old BT building into its splendid new Atrium over the road. The School of Cultural Studies. Library, students, light. The Pellet Street tower block of student flats (Ty Pont Haearn) went up at incredible speed. After that came St David’s 2 and the need for car parking. The surrounding streets were systematically flattened yet the Vulcan survived. A pub in splendid isolation. A Victorian gem for fans or a planning difficulty for developers. How you viewed it depended on where you stood.
Currently rumours abound. The pub will be pulled down next spring. Brains have sold out. In its place will be a multi storey car park, social housing, another student tower block, bars, restaurants, even Atrium 2, symbol of Glamorgan’s unstoppable sweep to domination. There’s also a half-credible tale that St Fagans will purchase the bricks and rebuilt the pub, restoring it to its Victorian splendour in the heart of the museum. Iorwerth Peate would spin.
It is a function of developers to sweep all before them. Cardiff has seen generations come and go, each cleaning the slate of everything. The city today has almost nothing with a past. If you exclude the Castle and St John’s Church almost everything standing is recent. We should preserve the pub by building round it and incorporating it into the overall plan. It has happened before. Check the retained Victorian frontage of the Altolusso block a few hundred yards on up the road. We should retain the Vulcan’s charm, its tourist attractability (it’s in the top fifty best UK pubs, according to Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale) and its delight. Removing it even to the secure and beerless pastures of St Fagans would be a crime.
Possibly the only good thing to come out of the present economic breaking halt is that new construction is almost universally on hold. Which should mean a reprieve for the Vulcan. For a time. Let’s hope.
Photo by John Briggs. An earlier version of this blog appeared at the IWA
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