About Me — JM Hemingway
Part I: Growing up in the middle of nowhere
My name is Jeremy and I am technically Welsh. I was born in the sleepy coastal market town of Aberystwyth right in the middle of Wales. England was a two-hour drive away via the narrow winding roads of the Cambrian Mountains and Cardiff was a two-and-a-half-hour drive along similar roads. The nearest habitation with a Tescos (probably the most common chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom) was a similar distance away. Buses, coaches and trains were not a feasible option in mid-Wales when I was young.
If you are familiar with mid-Wales, or you spent the first 18 years of your life in a similar sleepy, relatively isolated rural community, then you will already have the beginnings of the flavor of my childhood and adolescent years. More accurately, I grew up in a small village situated in one of the many valleys surrounding Aberystwyth: Penrhyncoch. Many people told me that my childhood was idyllic. As a child, I never understood this sentiment. I visited relatives living in the Cardiff suburbs and realized they had a life I never knew nor even understood. They had every amenity they needed at their doorstep plus infinite sources of entertainment. That said, as an adult, I do look back on my childhood fondly (for the most part).
Welsh drizzle and your first macintosh anorak
When you live in a small village in relative isolation you go through four distinct phases during your childhood. You are at the daily whims of the weather, with drizzle the perpetual weather forecast in mid-Wales. Clouds rise high above the Irish Sea and sweep inland across the Welsh hilltops towards the English border. As the moisture meets the hills it rises and condenses into a light rain that travels silently across the land, gently wetting everything in its path. This process never ceases in mid-Wales and generally in Wales as well.
At a young age, you will be presented with a macintosh raincoat as a birthday present. You quickly learn to don your yellow mac whenever you venture out, regardless of the forecast or the appearance of the world outside, for you will need it. You also learn at a young age a unique quality only known to Welsh people and perhaps our Irish cousins across the sea. The quality is this: when faced with rain of any kind, you simply unscrew your face muscles and submit to the deluge. In doing so you are released from all agitation brought on by the weather. People who fail to acquire this trait at a young age are destined to be grumpy for their entire lives (unless they move to Spain or a similar sunbaked destination).
Phase one: rural childhood play
The first phase you go through as a Welsh child is play. Play is different in the rural valleys of mid-Wales. Growing up in the 80s and 90s (although I remember very little of the 80s) meant going round to visit your friend’s house in the village using your trusty bicycle. Playing was always conducted outside either in your respective gardens or in certain locations in the village. Venues included the playing fields, the park, or simply the street.
Playing (notably as a boy) always involved at least one project on the go at any given time. A homemade treehouse in need of nails and wood, a bicycle jump made from the earth that a builder left in the street, or rapidly escaping from the clutches of an older bully child were common projects (admittedly, on occasion we were indeed the bully children). Play was fun, play was seemingly never-ending. But as I grew older, play had already laid the groundwork for the next phase of growing up mid-Wales.
Phase two: facing boredom or the outdoors
As a teenager, living in a rural community is either a gift or a curse. If you want shopping centers, clothes shops, major coffee chains and similar places to occupy time with your friends and spend your money, you will be destined to be frustrated for your entire teenage years in mid-Wales. The nearest (good) shopping center was about 150km away. If, on the other hand, you enjoy outdoor activities then you will be in your element. Cross-country cycling, canoeing, fishing, caving, hiking, sailing and sea rowing abounded for those keen to seek out ways to spend their time outside and were not afraid of mud, wet, shivering or perpetual dampness.
I took to cycling in a big way during my teenage years. Riding a bike is not easy in a village in a deep v-shaped valley. To get out of the village you have two options. You could either ride out on the main road which consists of a long, straight, narrow road without a verge where motorists often approach British motorway speeds. The other option was a sidetrack that inevitably crossed one of the hilltops dotted along the three sides of the village below. I almost always opted for the latter and my fitness must have been impressive in my mid-teens, not that I noticed it at the time.
Other ways to pass the time outdoors while growing up in a rural community included hiking (although in mid-Wales, rambling is a more fitting description), camping in the forest and the sand dunes as well as finding and venturing into abandoned lead and slate mines. Naturally, camping almost always involved large groups of school friends setting up camp before drinking quantities of various alcohols around some kind of campfire. Sooner than we communally realised, we would be moving out festivities away from the wild and into the town.
Phase three: coming of age in a market town
The third phase was a coming-of-age of sorts and discovering that Aberystwyth has a notably vast number of public houses for the size of the settlement. I heard a rumour that the town has the most pubs per capita in the United Kingdom, but I do not know if this is true. Many of the town’s pubs were indeed excellent, while many others served certain purposes, namely playing fast and loose with IDs and opening times.
Even now, I still consider several of the pubs in Aberystwyth to be excellent drinking venues, although I have not returned to them for at least a decade. Pubs were (and I assume still are) the lifeblood of the town. The high-street had seen better days when I was a teenager (the main town shop was a Woolworths until it closed in the mid-noughties). The Victorian promenade, while lovely and stunning, had far less entertainment and visitors than I had read it once attracted to the region. The pubs, by contrast, were where locals, young folk, students, farmers, townspeople and those who lived so high up in the hills that their settlement had no name all melted together into a communal ooze of rural solidarity and camaraderie.
Being born and raised in the vicinity, I and my compatriots possessed the special ability to enter any venue of the night we wished to regardless of social conventions or even the notoriety of certain drinking holes. We passed as students in the student bars and we (almost) passed as children of farmers in the local pubs. I preferred frequenting the local bars although altercations were more commonplace inside and outside these establishments. However, when every bar, pub and so-called nightclub has been visited more times than you can count, the excitement and novelty soon wears off and inevitably opens to the fourth and final stage of life in a rural community: that of wishing to depart its womb-like embrace once and for all.
Phase four: there is a wider world and a life out there
Family holidays to the Mediterranean, a visit to London and subsequent the discovery of an “Underground” labyrinth coupled with trips to the Welsh capital teach you that there is a world outside of rural life and that it is closer than you once thought. Eventually, the need to explore and the urge to depart grew so strong that it became an inevitability to venture out of mid-Wales and explore a potential life elsewhere.
Of my childhood friends, I know very few who still live in or around Aberystwyth to this day. In many ways though, I respect them. My life thus far has been one of wandering. Travelling leads to discovery and excitement, yet it also suggests a subtle and innate lack of something. That missing something is substantial but you just can’t quite place it. Consequently, your adventures in new destinations always seem to lead to comfort, which in turn brings about familiarity. Familiarity is the bane of the traveler; once its flavor has been tasted, it always leads to the irresistible desire to once again move on.
Staying in one place your entire life, I believe, takes strength and discipline. It shows others that you have stood up to the urge to escape your lot and leave in the hope of finding a better one. By staying put, you are accepting your lot and making the best of what you have, and this is courage. I may stay in my current location in England for the rest of my life, or I may not. I haven’t decided nor do I want to just yet. The prospect of moving and the daydream of escape is so often more piquant than the experience itself.
Mid-Wales was an unforgettable place to grow up. It has acutely stamped the memory of my younger years, so much so that sometimes I wish I had never left. However, I would almost certainly not feel this way unless I had indeed departed its sleepy rural charm.
Changing energy states
The weather has followed me my entire life. In Wales, it rained. Living abroad, it rained in the tropical heat of southern China and the rain froze for six months of the year in the continental interior of Russia. Now, the weather seems to be changing all around us and it is becoming less and less predictable. Chaos theory teaches us of the changing energy state that takes place when a net input is introduced into a closed system. I hazard a guess that this seems to be what we are collectively experiencing at this present time. We shall just have to wait and see what our world looks like when the system resettles into its new energy state.
What will the weather do next and where will it take me? Most days I do not want to know, but occasionally I need the reassurance that only knowing in advance can give. Mid-Wales was an unforgettable place to grow up. It has acutely stamped my memory of younger years, so much so that sometimes I wish I had never left. However, I would almost certainly not feel this way unless I had indeed departed its sleepy rural charm.
