This stay in Llandudno was a good break from the city’s hustle and bustle, and some of you may already have checked my Flickr albums. Richard over at the BBC Manchester Blog was wondering what I would be doing in Llandudno for quite a long period of time. Indeed, I arrived on December 28th and was planning to leave on January 6th, which I did, only instead of taking a train to Manchester I went to Deganwy and stayed for another two nights at Deganwy Castle Hotel. I did a plenty of sightseeing in Llandudno but, being a peregrinating type, I did day trips to Conwy, Caernarfon, and Beaumaris. In case if Richard and all of you are wondering further, I don’t have a car, so my pilgrimages were assisted to a degree by buses, which means, I suppose, that on occasion my eye has caught something I would’ve overlooked, if sitting in the car. On the other hand, not having a car restricts your freedom, so hopefully next time I go to Wales either I’ll be driving myself or I’ll have a car and a driver.
Flickr sets:
I finally made it to Manchester on January 8th, but if I am totally honest with myself and with you, I didn’t want to leave. I had to return to Manchester, not least because I accepted the invitation to a friend’s housewarming party. Richard is absolutely right that there isn’t much to do in Llandudno, but it’s what outside Llandudno that makes the whole journey purposeful. And I don’t even have to mention castles – I can only mention Llandudno Bay and the Great Orme, which look different every time you see them. The houses on the slopes of the Great Orme, when lit up in the evening, reminded me of one image Henry Miller evoked in The Colossus of Maroussi: a Greek valley where stood houses in which windows the lights were coming up was like a bowl with cherries. And it was this bowl that I was thinking of every evening when I looked at the Great Orme from my hotel lounge where I sat uploading photographs to Flickr.
I still haven’t explained why I chose Llandudno. Back in October, I visualised some of the scenes and was convinced that the story would take place somewhere at the seaside. The choice had more to do with how much I actually knew the British seaside towns and cities. The fact is that I know them very poorly. If I am to be very honest, I think my knowledge is currently divided between two “pools”: Blackpool and Liverpool. From either “pool” I couldn’t think of a spot to pull out where I’d want my characters to find themselves. Suddenly I remembered about my short walk along Llandudno Promenade, and then I vividly imagined the wintery bay and the winds. I looked up some photos on Flickr and was convinced that this was the place to set up the story.
But then I began to research further, and I realised that there may have been another reason for why I chose Llandudno for my story, although it only came up during research. It’s been years since I watched a Russian cartoon after Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and read both books. It was in Llandudno that the Liddell family used to stay, and there are still speculations about whether or not Carroll himself visited the Liddells in Llandudno. There are also speculations on the nature of his relationship with Alice Liddell who was the inspiration for both stories. My view on this occasion is that it probably doesn’t matter much whether or not Carroll went to Llandudno. If he did, his imagination would be assisted by personal experience. If he didn’t, his genius, as it dazzles us in two books about Alice, shines even brighter. What cannot be denied is that both books are, as one often calls it, the labour of love. And it is significant for me that both these books are fairy tales. They could be love poems, of course, and then we might have had something of a Victorian equivalent of The Divine Comedy. They could be novellas or a novel. But they are fairy tales. Without going too much in depth about my story, I can say that it explores this connection between love and a fairy tale, childhood and adulthood and the possibility to move between the two. There are other examples, of course, of similar kind of writing for children, and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan may be the first to come to mind. Ultimately, one of the questions the story is asking is why fairy tales may be so important even when one seems old enough to get by without them; and what it takes to be able to tell a fairy tale.
To be continued…