Down Down Deeper And Down

We purchased an enormous great tent on the Mayday bank holiday; it then proceeded to piss it down just about every day for the next three months. Finally, last week the weather turned and, like rats up a drainpipe, we shot off to Cardigan Bay, where the seals and the dolphins play. We have had a couple of short camping trips in a borrowed tent before but this was our first trip in our own tent and our first attempt at putting the thing up without the aid of an online instructional video, so it was an opportunity to learn and to exercise our tired old brains. And boy, did we learn.

I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say that the farmer upon whose we field we camped pointed out to us after our first night that our tent appeared to be falling down. He was exaggerating, but the thing did require endless tweaks for about the first 24 hours. Once we got it right though, it was the mutts nuts of tents, rigid, immoveable and despite the howling gales whipping in off the sea (I said the weather had improved, but it’s all relative) silent.

We were about two hours and a whole other world away from home. It never ceases to amaze me how close we are to such beauty and tranquility. The pace of life genuinely seems to be gentler, and slower. I am sure the area has its share of problems but I think you would have to actually search them out if you wanted to find them.

I shall resist the temptation to get all lyrical, but I will recommend that if the weather stays nice and you want to truly, truly get the sense that you are away from it all, and you want to see dolphins, and seals and all manner of sea bird, and you want to be surrounded by unutterable beauty every way you turn, and travel on near empty roads, and eat fish and chips on enormous beaches, or relax in perfect bays, or walk for miles along what must be the finest coastal path in Europe, you should get yourself over to West Wales. Don’t tell any other bugger about it though.

We stayed at Nant Y Croi farm, which is something else really. Very rural, very rustic, a bit rough around the edges, but just about the perfect place to camp, whatever your age. Our our three nippers were just about in paradise. The farmer is not exactly effusive in his welcome, but what he is, is genuinely friendly and genuinely helpful; he even hosed me down when I fell into an enormous pile of cowshit, much to the amusement of the family.

It is very remote. I couldn’t get radio 5 and I couldn’t get a mobile signal, so the transfer window closed with me not realising that Fuckin Luccin had led us up the garden path and we had instead signed some other genius of whom none of us had previously heard. I also missed all reports of our performance against Middlesboro, which, apparently, was abject even by our standards.

No one else seems to worried but I am, we have to win some games and we don’t seem capable of doing it, even though we have only played one of the top teams. History tells us that you cannot give the others a head start and expect to catch them up; history also tells us that we are incapable of stringing a run of wins together, we are going down, mark my words.

It is all a bit glum and gloomy at the moment being a Blues fan; there is no joie de vivre and very little hope. Everyone seems a bit hangdog and there is no spark. There is a torpor about the place and the board no longer seem bothered about us and cannot wait to offload us; unfortunately, Yeung sees to be as skint as me. I think we are in for some desperate times; it’s a good job that we have all become inured to it.