Well the last couple of days has been frantic what with prime ministers and presidents banning some people but not others from visiting or leaving their countries and multiple airlines pulling flights and here’s the CB and I in the jolly UK. We cancelled our trip to Ireland and have been looking for a way to get home early before ScoMo slams the door. Fortunately, despite Qantas cancelling 90% of their flights, there were a few international seats available and we got two of them. The rest will be gone by the end of the month when the whole airline is grounded. Rather severe restrictions on movement are being imposed it seems.

I am hopeful I don’t encounter another problem because I caught a cold – understandable when considering the weather in Wales. It’s definitely a cold – I’ve had one or two before so am familiar with the signs. However I feel like I shall have to try to disguise the occasional cough and sniffle because I am sure there are members of the public out there taking it upon themselves to out those with devil signs – to the ducking stool with them. So my own version of 1984 (the book not the year) is underway as I try to avoid being revealed as a potential subversive or worse, mass murderer (the chief protagonist in 1984 wasn’t a mass murderer by the way – read the book).

We have a family wedding tomorrow – a cousin’s daughter – and the poor girl is watching as guests bail out and waiting for the dreaded call from the venue and/or the registrar, either of which could derail the whole thing. She’s holding up admirably (in public) so let’s hope we can make it to 2.00pm tomorrow after which the knot will be tied and all that remains is for the remaining guests to do their best with the pre-paid bar tab. Hopefully the pre-ceremony drinks will result in no one noticing my occasional cough into my coat.

But they have chosen an excellent venue – a brewery in a picturesque little town called Clitheroe in the north Lancashire countryside. The CB and I are staying at a local pub – The Swan and Royal. Great spot with a nice (and deserted) bar and big rooms looking out over a narrow main street. The owner was so pleased to see us last night that he gave us a tasty glass of coffee liqueur each. An 800 year old Norman castle in the centre of town dominates the scenery.

We’ve done a lot of castles on this trip, mostly in Wales. I love them and when you consider the engineering that went into them many centuries ago you have to wonder why a pile of cubed rocks arranged on top of one another in ever decreasing square layers until there is only one on the top is considered a wonder of the world and Conwy Castle isn’t.

Occasionally normal programming has to be suspended and this is one of those times. We’ll be visiting Cuz 1’s mother and father, my mum’s sister and brother-in-law and my aunt and uncle today. I haven’t seen them for many years and as they now reside in the cemetery, the last time I saw them will have to suffice as the enduring memory.

They were the most wonderful people who’d do anything for you. They had their foibles – amusing and occasionally annoying like everyone, but as time moves on and memories fade those idiosyncrasies become more endearing.

As parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles they revelled in the joy that their family provided. They lived the life they wanted to lead (with occasional diversions to accommodate cantankerous parents and accident-prone offspring) and apart from the very last phase when they didn’t have a lot of choice, carried it off with aplomb.

So RIP Mildred and Stan. Thanks for the memories (and the beer and the occasional scotch and the cooked breakfasts and the warm bed and the lifts to various places and for letting my old mates know when I was in town and for scolding me for not wearing a suit to a David Bowie concert when he was in his Ziggy Stardust phase and wore more make-up than clothing).

The CB and I lived on the west coast of Tasmania many years ago. Heading west from there the first landfall is Argentina so the weather was pretty wild. It had nothing on Aberystwyth. We were stupid enough to walk along the sea-front promenade from our hotel at one end to the castle at the other end. Copacabana it was not.

We may as well have been walking on the beach because a major proportion of the grit which made up the beach had been deposited by the wind onto the footpath and onto the road. Consequently we expected Cuz 2’s BMW to be paintless on the upwind side. Being parked a few metres from the seawall meant it was also being washed by the waves crashing over the wall when the tide was in.

Moving on, we went to a place which epitomises the saying “verbal diarrhea”. The name of this place is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. How the hell do you pronounce a word with four consecutive L’s in it let alone 14 consecutive consonants. If you are the slightest bit interested, this place name means “The church of Mary in the hollow of the white hazel near the fierce whirlpool and the church of Tysilio by the red cave”. I suspect I have missed some capital letters there but frankly, I lost interest about a quarter of the way through.

After the South Pole-like conditions of Aberystwyth, surprise, surprise, it’s blue sky over Conwy (that’s not a typo – there’s no “a” after the “w”) today but the weather is as random as daffodils which incidentally grow anywhere and are as ubiquitous as sheep.

We have been rather lucky with the weather in respect of rain. It’s been ear-snappingly cold and the wind has been rapier-like but the rain has held off most of the time – that’s a small blessing. It’s been pretty bleak as well and that’s been a good thing, for me anyway. Those of you who have read all of this blog will have noted my occasional  ambivalence…..no that’s the wrong word…..hatred of “power generating” (ha!) windmills. Bleakness has limited visibility meaning the hundreds of these monstrosities parked a mile or so offshore are largely invisible which is as they should be considering how useless they are in the overall scheme of things.

Llandudno is a very pretty place with an interesting coastline (for the geologically / geomorphologically inclined) but shift your gaze to the open sea and it encounters a veritable forest of those things. Way to stuff up a nice view.

Notwithstanding the windmills, the major consideration at the moment is whether we are stuck here in the UK or whether we’ll be eventually allowed to go home. I expect the boffins will come up with a cure for the coronavirus before long (long before they find one for the Welsh language) but I suspect that won’t be in time to have any impact on our personal situation. So with life as we know it being cancelled in great swathes, for us – Cuz 1, Cuz 2, the CB and me, the intrepid travellers – life goes on. But for Liverpool supporters whose football team is on the cusp of winning their first EPL title in the 30 years existence of the Premier League, the suspension (or quelle horreur, the cancellation) of the competition would be like the cancellation of lunch for Mr Creosote (a Monty Python’s Meaning of Life character, if you were wondering).

At some point in the dim distant past, someone was given the job of converting the various noises that comprise the Welsh language into written English. The selected person obviously had a very wicked sense of humour. How do you take a sound like CLAN and decide it should be spelled LL. And just to make things even more interesting this linguistic genius decided to halve the usage of vowels and double the usage of consonants while at the same time eliminating a goodly proportion of said consonants namely K, Q, V, X and Z. Maybe that’s why L’s are doubled up so often. Those of you who were educated relatively recently may not know what vowels and consonants are (or commas and apostrophes for that matter). You’ll have to look them up. Is it any wonder Welsh is only considered a legitimate means of communication by Prince Charles and a few dozen stoic leek herders.

Fortunately most signs in this country are written in English as well as in English as a second language so finding your way around is as easyish (ha!) as described in Part 2 of this emerging epic. In fact the four of us – Cuz 1, Cuz 2, the CB and me – managed to get lost while walking through Cardigan today. Cuz 2 is Welsh and Cardigan is as big as a few rugby fields which is probably why, as the CB eventually concluded that the sign pointing to “Tourist Information” was in fact, pointing to a pole a few hundred metres down the road which had arrows on it indicating the approximate location of various points of interest.

And the satnav lady was not at all pleased with us at one point when we were trying to get somewhere with lots of L’s, Y’s and M’s in its name. We were heading south when we should have been heading north. To be fair, we rarely saw the sun but to be doubly fair, occasionally we did, but not for long enough to take our bearings. I used to be able to work out which direction I was going in using a conventional watch and the sun. Impossible to do with an iPhone (because it doesn’t have minute and hour hands) unless you can make it tell you. And the car we are travelling in is sufficiently sophisticated to do all of that stuff but we forgot to consult it.

The absence of sun and the presence of wind that would freeze the Yellowstone National Park geysers, limited today’s activities somewhat. Before embarking on this epic journey to parts of the UK the child bride and I hadn’t visited before, one thing we debated was which coats to bring. In both cases we opted for the warmest we have which is just as well. At one point after visiting Aberystwyth Castle we found a bar which was a converted church (previously called St Paul’s and bearing no similarity at all to the school of the same name I attended somewhere back in the mists of time). It was a sanctuary from the elements in more ways that it was when it was a church, obviously.

I can hear the wind whistling and the waves crashing as I type this, sitting adjacent to the radiator in our room. It’s March which is spring in this part of the world but no one told Zeus. The elements have a much greater chance of keeping us indoors than any flu virus.

My experiences of Wales are somewhat limited but I am reliably informed that the Welsh are as accommodating as the Swiss only less affluent. Our barman last night were perfectly fine so it seems Welsh Waiter syndrome is yet to kick in.

If they are anything like their road system however, we are in for a miserable time. What with countless malls, bus lanes, one way streets and no left turns, navigating around Cardiff is like navigating the Hampton Court Maze. Blindfolded. We reached the deliveries entrance of the Marriott Hotel but then had to backtrack via about four blocks to get to the main entrance which, as the dragon flies was about 30m away and just round a (no entrance) corner. Finding the entrance to the Pyramid of Giza would have been easier.

Needless to say this situation generated a modicum of tension and relations between the front seat drivers (Cuz 1 and me) and the back seat drivers (Cuz 2 and the CB) were somewhat strained by the time we parked the car then removed it from the reserved Tabernacle Choir parking bay (£50 fine and tow away) and into a less belligerent parking spot.

So it was Welsh faggots (see my Facebook page if you have access) last night and it’s Cardiff Castle and various other Welsh rare bits today.

Incidentally, one thing I have noticed, and it is quite obvious, is that no one here is wearing a mask. Now Wales is somewhat insular but I’m pretty sure they get international news – I can see a BBC building from the hotel window – so they must know about the corona virus. But they obviously don’t know how serious it is and that’s not down to the paucity of masks. You can still buy toilet paper in the shops.

We are now at about the end of the daylight hours and it hasn’t rained once today. This is most unusual for this time of year. I’m surprised those whackos from Extinction Rebellion aren’t gluing themselves to the road protesting that this is because the end of the planet is nigh and Wales is at the forefront of climate action and must lead the world in ……. leadership or something. That’s what they say in Australia anyway. But if they are still stuck to Lloyd George Street on Saturday when Wales plays Scotland in 6 Nations rugby, they should expect to feel the full weight of coach loads of boyos from the valleys.

Well here we are, in the immortal words of Willie Nelson “on the road again”. Specifically, we are in Hong Kong Airport at the height (actually, that depends on who you talk to because it may have more legs yet) of the coronavirus pandemic or as the more technically inclined call it COVID-19 which I believe is the disease you get from the virus. There are more people here in the airport than I had been led to believe. I’ve seen pictures of it nearly deserted but maybe the not-so-timid are venturing outdoors and taking off again.

The best part of being out and about during a medical panic, especially in this part of the world, is that 90% of the people here are wearing masks. We have recently learned that the masks stop people with the virus from spreading it rather than prevent the wearer from catching it from someone else. So thanks everyone. I couldn’t be bothered buying one of those things but you have all made that consideration redundant anyway.

The coronavirus supposedly causes flu-like symptoms. Fair enough, but it seems to me that the thought of it causes insanity also. It must be like sitting behind your castle wall in Samarkand in 1219 thinking about and waiting for Genghis Khan and his 100,000 strong Mongol horde to come barrelling through the gates. That thought would be enough to send you on a completely unhinged toilet paper buying frenzy which is precisely what is happening world-wide at the moment. I can understand this happening if there is a real prospect of a nuclear holocaust and the bunker in the back yard needs stocking up with life’s essentials like baked beans, bullets and toilet paper. But a virus that causes flu symptoms? Sorry but you bum-wad hoarders have lost me there.

Our flight from Hong Kong to Manchester is the last one out – 1.35am. Beer has kept me awake so far but I may have to pour the next one over my head to stay awake.

On the plane now and all of the flight attendants are wearing masks – like extremely polite outlaws except they are offering us stuff rather than taking it off us.

Apologies for the paucity of posts but I’ve been rather busy. When I think about that statement I’m reminded of the great P.J.O’Rourke’s statement about healthcare – “If you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free”. Various wannabe socialist politicians in the US (and elsewhere) should take note. No, my take on that quote is “If you think you’re busy now, think how busy you’ll be when you have nothing to do”.

So I’m supposed to be sliding out of semi-retirement after having fought the good fight for the mining industry for many years. But people keep giving me things to do. The best part of that is that I can choose to do the job in question, or not, as the case may be – back off lawyers with expert witness work; I’ve hung up my spurs. Working for myself affords certain other privileges also. One is to travel whenever the CB wants to travel.

Anyway, there will be a flurry of website activity in coming weeks. You see the CB and I are off to the UK to board our Celtic Caravan (comprising one cousin’s car and two hire cars). Incidentally, the CB doesn’t “do” caravans, as such, other than those kitted out like a house (as is the case with my cousin’s place at Conwy). Caravans in the conventional sense, as in those you tow behind a car, are too much like camping and that has been off the agenda since we almost desiccated to death in a tent on the Gold Coast in heat that would have qualified as a “climate emergency” if I was a Green or a Swedish teenager or an idiot. So it’ll be the aforementioned house-like caravan, hotels and B&B’s.

So a pub crawl round Wales with Cuz1 and Cuz2 will be the first order of business followed by a family wedding at which there will be no respite from doing the Swansea Swig. To finish off, the CB and I will take a leisurely drive round the top half of Ireland where I am reliably informed (by a used car salesman friend) there are no pubs. So get ready for Tales from the Celtic Caravan, coming to a website near you – this website actually.