Took a walk down Sam Gori Park last weekend. It's the venue of my 1st wedding to Jeongju (there have been 3!) and it hasn't changed much at all, they've spent some money on it adding ultra safe stepping stones over the lake and building a huge concert venue stage behind the pagoda in which we held our ceremony. Essentially though the park itself is as was and we had a nice family stroll round, me and JJ re living that famous day, from the ceremony, the priest and the speeches, to watermelon man (i still can't believe i saw that; a man came running out of the woods, painted purple and blue (nice colour scheme) screeching and bellowing in animalistic revelry and proceeded to smash watermelons over his head!! He finished his 'act' by getting a volunteer to take a run up and smash the biggest watermelon over the top of his cranium... It was exiting but much more, it was bizarre! who hired him by the way??), through 88 MPH's epic debut gig and off through memoryville past the chickens and back to town! It got me thinking though, thinking about parks and my history and if you just wanted an update don't read any further as it's been a pretty dull week and we're heading back into the history archives of Royston. We did go out last Friday with the visiting Matt Manchester-Stoneham (i think that's his name, it's definitely double barrelled!)but that's the only thing of note that's happened all week!. Anyhow parks....
I'm in a tree, it's my tree and it's in my park. Why is it my park? Well that's because i live here. My tree overlooks a path that runs through the park and if you follow that path you go past a gate and can walk about a half mile further to the other side of my park. If you don't go past the gate and go through it then you enter an old ramshackle farm with 3 fields. One field is on a hill and has a couple of precariously placed caravans, one has two horses and the reamaing field has 3 more caravans overlooked by the old and impressively held together farmhouse.
Imagine if you will an Orwellian hero, turn of the century British (no not this one, 1890's), building a farmhouse in some far flung colonial outpost. Brick by brick, stone by stone, and then standing with his pipe smouldering and appreciating his workmanship in his stiff upper lipped way, whilst being fully aware that if it rains, he's fucked! This was the farmhouse and the old Colonel who ran the place only needed a big blunderous musket and one of those safari hats to transport him back the 100 years to where he belonged.
The bottom caravan is ours, mine and my father. It's 30 foot long and it used to be blue before the sun drained it of all its colour, probably 10 years or so back. It's the shape they made caravans before they invented rectangle and has the impression of a soaking wet sponge held up gently in the middle! If you look under the 'van it's still got some bright and happy blueness but as you work your eyes upward the colour fades duller and duller to the roof which is a sun bleached almost white.
This is home, inside there's all you'd need for a weeks holiday in Rhyl! It does have a wood burning stove which heats the whole thing in about 3 seconds when it gets going and a gas cooker too. This was the first place i cooked french fries, the reason being that we never had that much food and a potato made into french fries is a plate full of french fries and when you add salt and eat them one at a time, you can believe you've had a meal, whereas a potato made into chips is about 8 chips! ahh the lessons we learn so young. How old am I, well i think i was 12 now and as i was saying, i am in a tree.
I'm waiting for someone, i know she's coming 'cos she said she would, and they don't lie. My Dad should know that but he's down the pub. He was also there last time, when she caught me at home. That was my mistake, i popped home to raid the ashtray and replenish my tobacco pouch and there she was: 'Knock knock open'. Not 'knock knock wait' like you're supposed to do but 'knock knock open', cheeky bitch! I guess she must of seen me through the front window, as she walked up the path.
"Hi Roy, why aren't you at school?", 'oh shit', I remember thinking, I'm usually so ahead of the game but she's got me banged to rights. "Sick" doesn't cover it and there's more, "and where's your father"? I lie and I lie again, he's off studying at University or he's got a job, anything but the truth. "Why were you ripping up the contents of the ashtray"? So she was watching through the window, damn! "I'm just bored... playing?" but she knows. You can see the look of pity, and there really is nothing worse than someone pitying you so I inwardly cringe whilst outwardly trying to look as innocent as possible.
She plays along with my tales and tells me to make sure that my Dad is home next time. She writes a note, seals it and stands it on the 'kitchen' table and then she's gone, off to do good to someone elses' life. Her moral high ground obvious to anyone or anything she'll pass on the way out of my park and back to the safe middle class, 3 bedroom, semi detached neighbourhood she's undoubtedly from. I use the old kettle on the burner and manage to get the letter open without any damage, it's contents though are pretty straightforward:
Mr Freer, I am very concerned, you seemed to have ignored all warnings. I'm coming next Monday at 1pm, you NEED (big letters to emphasise!) to be here, signed Ms busybody!
He's not there though and she's coming now, over the bridge with that self important swagger. My tree is in the midst of a long row that create a tunnel like path, shielding the sun during the day and creating an eerie moonless dark at night. I can follow her down the path for about 6 trees before I even have to think of breaking cover or climbing down. I let her pass then I ease myself down, circumnavigate the path and sneak though the horse field. If she knew anything about the real world the horses would tell her where i was, the big white one stares at me as i invade his patch and watches me all the way up the field!
She's too busy though, busy contemplating, and I'm sure I catch a glimpse of sadness in her face as she tries her knock knock open technique only to find the door locked! No one's home. I'm a safe distance away but now she looks round, has she sensed me or caught my scent on the wind?! It's strange how we, as people can do this. I'm sure our senses are more than capable of knowing we are being watched but we've forgotten how they work many moons ago and although she looks straight towards the mound of rocks that I'm lurking behind she doesn't trust her instincts and quickly looks back to the door.
She has a letter and doesn't know where to leave it, we have no letterbox and she's struggling with the whole concept of this before finally deciding to squeeze the letter under the door! She self consciously readjusts her too big face covering glasses, hunches her shoulders and shakes out her permed head before starting her journey back to civilisation. I follow her back for a bit, but the game's run its course and something else grabs my attention, I even forget about the letter as another day in my kingdom of the park unfolds.
My park ends, or begins, with a bridge over the river. The bridge is a solid steel construction, very metal and square and boring. The river though is a fascinating beast, some days after a heavy rain it rages and standing on the bridge with just a touch of imagination it's pretty easy to transport yourself onto a speedboat racing through the waves. The river runs right through my park, in places it's serene and pooled to create ideal swimming conditions, in others fast and dangerous slapping rocks and racing off to continue its journey to the sea 5 miles away. Within my territory, so to speak, the river has created two islands, one a small and boring little step across a quiet and shallow stretch of river but the other one is an adventure just to get to. Impossible after even a half decent rain, and how it rains in Bethesda, but negotiable if you know the way on a calm and dry day. I have a 'base' here, a safe place with a few keepsakes that no one will ever see, my island, in my park, not many 12 year olds have that!
Across the bridge is Bethesda, a town that flourished in the late 19th century and early 20th due to its resourceful slate mine, roofing half of Wales and beyond in its long and industrious life. Sadly Bethesda has now got to be one of the most depressing places on earth, sitting in a valley and enclosed on three sides by big imposing mountains. The mountains dwarf the town and the mined mountain (what's left of it) is surrounded by huge piles of blue grey slag. These set the tone of the landscape, miserable and grey, cold and unforgiving. The other mountains encircle with a little more colour and a lot more atheistic quality and 5 miles further inland is the Ogwen mountain range, very popular with mad hiking types!
The mine's closed now and it is basically just a huge hole in the mountain, fascinating to look at if you took the trouble to climb up there. A huge hole dug with it's levels of mining running down and down like cliff edges all the way to the bottom, each level representing about 10 years work until they could go no lower. They've filled it with with water recently and it's a popular suicide spot. It is truly a miserable place but this is solely because of the weather, it rains for about 320 days of the year. On the days when the sun shines and it's warm the place transforms, it's a whole new world of bright sunny mountains, blue shiny heaps of slate and the lake that was the mine is a perfect aqua marine colour that any sea would give it's right ear for!
part 2 coming soon!!
Wednesday 17 March 2010
Saturday 6 March 2010
Halcyon days
Well a week's gone by already since my duck was broken, my blog virginity taken. A week used to be such a long time and now i just blink and another one has gone by. What happened this week? Well not much but eventful enough. I didn't work till Tuesday as there was a national holiday last Monday so apart from the wife not talking to me till Friday (a regular occurrence, she has a temper that usually rages for 2-3 days depending on the offence!) it was a standard fare week.
Pool night was Thursday and i won despite not really feeling too good. Why was i rough? Well Weds night Korea played the Ivory Coast and beat them 2-0, the game was Played in England though and didn't kick off till 11:30 local time, so i went down to the local to watch and to cut a fairly long and not too exiting story short ended up being refused entry to a night club at 4am... good job really!! Why did we get refused? well not because of any naughtiness (this time!) and purely on the colour of our skin! Yes, even after 20 minutes of negotiation and banter the manager made it clear that we were not getting in because we were white and not Korean. I accepted this pretty well but Keith (Canadian, pretty drunk and unused to blatant discrimination) was pretty livid, let's just say that Kofi Anan got his fair share of mentions... Ah, it all adds to spice of life and it's not my first time being on the recieving end of racism, i spent a few years as the only English lad in an all Welsh school! So, after the fun died down, we headed home and had a swift pint in the 'Jap bar' as Keith wasn't talking to Korea!
Anyhow, to diverge a little or to return to the original theme of weeks flying by, the year was 1983, British summer time and school holidays that lasted for ever and ever and i lived on a road called Beach road. It was a half mile straight stretch of road that led to, yes you guessed it, a beach. Not just any beach but 7 miles of beautiful white sands hidden behind a mountainous range of sand dunes. The town was, and is Harlech, North Wales and is probably the place i would most consider my home, it's an amazingly picturesque and spectacular part of the world, the beach is looked over by an ominous and looming sandstone Castle and a mile further inland the mountains and Valleys conjour images of Lords of the rings. The castle overlooks everything, including an 18 hole golf course and was constructed on a great outcrop of rock by the English in the 1500's i think. Look away from the mountains and out to sea and there's a peninsula across the bay, all in all i can't think of anywhere else as beautiful in the world when the sun is shining and the temperature creeps up over 25c. It has in fact been used in a few movies, from Carry on up the Kaiber in the 70's to Richard Gere's White Knight in the 90's.
1983 was a particularly hot and hazy summer and i was all of 9, going on 10! Somehow we had (the we being me and a friend called Jason Jones, not the last JJ to get me in trouble!) a huge inflatable tractor tyre inner tube. The thing was monstrous in size, probably more than twice my height and took up a fair bit of road in width. We used to roll it down the long straight road, holding up traffic and startling bewildered tourists along the way. As the road ends it becomes a path that runs through the dunes and the tractor innertube took a fair bit of maneuvering but i think we spent at least a week doing this every day and never tired of rolling it all the way to the sea, getting in and on, playing for hours, drifting way too far out to sea to be safe and generally inventing fun as we went along, as you do at that age!
The days would last forever, don't ask me what we ate, drank or even how it was afforded. Long long days from when i opened my eyes all full of excitement of what the new day might bring and what new games we could invent for the gargantuan inner tube (It's downfall finally coming after we heaved it up to the top of the highest sand dune we could find and launched it down the hill only for it to veer off course bouncing and bounding spectacularly and bounce straight onto a fence post catching a nail and whooshing, losing life all the way until it limped onto the 11th green of the golf course, RIP!). After all the fun of the day, every day, i would drift home tired and fulfilled with the days excesses... ah youth eh! I was by this stage pretty much independent of parentage, my mother was in Saudi Arabia divorced from my father who was down the pub from opening till kicked out. I could always find him and always manage to con a few pennies for a snack or junk. Anyhow, that's a whole different topic. I just amazes me now that one week can fly by in the blink of an eye and i'll have done nothing.
Back on the topic of luck, Me and JJ (no, not Jason, pay attention!) were shopping in E-mart yesterday and she needed a new umbrella. I'm wincing just at the memory as she must have opened every single umbrella on the display! I had to walk away in the end before lightning struck me or some other natural disaster scythed us down in our prime. It didn't but i'd already counted 8 umbrellas opened as i sidled away to a safe distance. I wondered if we were gonna head over to the mirror section and smash a few but thankfully we got out alive. Weird how different things are considered unlucky in different cultures, we have the ladders, black cats, broken mirrors and the umbrellas indoors. Then there's new boots on a table, and numbers 13 bad, 7 good. Asia in general fears the number 4 as it represents death and unlucky is cutting your nails at night, eating seaweed soup or shaving before an exam. Sitting on the threshold of a door is particularly bad apparently!
So where did i get to on the week, drunk Weds, won the pool Thurs, Fri night we hosted and a friendly game of poker at home which JJ was winning until my workmate Tony took a dodgy re buy when we were all far too drunk and took down most of the pot! Then it was Saturday and i did as little as possible and that's it, my week done, flown by, gone in a blink. Wasn't it great when the days lasted for ever and the sun shone and .......
Pool night was Thursday and i won despite not really feeling too good. Why was i rough? Well Weds night Korea played the Ivory Coast and beat them 2-0, the game was Played in England though and didn't kick off till 11:30 local time, so i went down to the local to watch and to cut a fairly long and not too exiting story short ended up being refused entry to a night club at 4am... good job really!! Why did we get refused? well not because of any naughtiness (this time!) and purely on the colour of our skin! Yes, even after 20 minutes of negotiation and banter the manager made it clear that we were not getting in because we were white and not Korean. I accepted this pretty well but Keith (Canadian, pretty drunk and unused to blatant discrimination) was pretty livid, let's just say that Kofi Anan got his fair share of mentions... Ah, it all adds to spice of life and it's not my first time being on the recieving end of racism, i spent a few years as the only English lad in an all Welsh school! So, after the fun died down, we headed home and had a swift pint in the 'Jap bar' as Keith wasn't talking to Korea!
Anyhow, to diverge a little or to return to the original theme of weeks flying by, the year was 1983, British summer time and school holidays that lasted for ever and ever and i lived on a road called Beach road. It was a half mile straight stretch of road that led to, yes you guessed it, a beach. Not just any beach but 7 miles of beautiful white sands hidden behind a mountainous range of sand dunes. The town was, and is Harlech, North Wales and is probably the place i would most consider my home, it's an amazingly picturesque and spectacular part of the world, the beach is looked over by an ominous and looming sandstone Castle and a mile further inland the mountains and Valleys conjour images of Lords of the rings. The castle overlooks everything, including an 18 hole golf course and was constructed on a great outcrop of rock by the English in the 1500's i think. Look away from the mountains and out to sea and there's a peninsula across the bay, all in all i can't think of anywhere else as beautiful in the world when the sun is shining and the temperature creeps up over 25c. It has in fact been used in a few movies, from Carry on up the Kaiber in the 70's to Richard Gere's White Knight in the 90's.
1983 was a particularly hot and hazy summer and i was all of 9, going on 10! Somehow we had (the we being me and a friend called Jason Jones, not the last JJ to get me in trouble!) a huge inflatable tractor tyre inner tube. The thing was monstrous in size, probably more than twice my height and took up a fair bit of road in width. We used to roll it down the long straight road, holding up traffic and startling bewildered tourists along the way. As the road ends it becomes a path that runs through the dunes and the tractor innertube took a fair bit of maneuvering but i think we spent at least a week doing this every day and never tired of rolling it all the way to the sea, getting in and on, playing for hours, drifting way too far out to sea to be safe and generally inventing fun as we went along, as you do at that age!
The days would last forever, don't ask me what we ate, drank or even how it was afforded. Long long days from when i opened my eyes all full of excitement of what the new day might bring and what new games we could invent for the gargantuan inner tube (It's downfall finally coming after we heaved it up to the top of the highest sand dune we could find and launched it down the hill only for it to veer off course bouncing and bounding spectacularly and bounce straight onto a fence post catching a nail and whooshing, losing life all the way until it limped onto the 11th green of the golf course, RIP!). After all the fun of the day, every day, i would drift home tired and fulfilled with the days excesses... ah youth eh! I was by this stage pretty much independent of parentage, my mother was in Saudi Arabia divorced from my father who was down the pub from opening till kicked out. I could always find him and always manage to con a few pennies for a snack or junk. Anyhow, that's a whole different topic. I just amazes me now that one week can fly by in the blink of an eye and i'll have done nothing.
Back on the topic of luck, Me and JJ (no, not Jason, pay attention!) were shopping in E-mart yesterday and she needed a new umbrella. I'm wincing just at the memory as she must have opened every single umbrella on the display! I had to walk away in the end before lightning struck me or some other natural disaster scythed us down in our prime. It didn't but i'd already counted 8 umbrellas opened as i sidled away to a safe distance. I wondered if we were gonna head over to the mirror section and smash a few but thankfully we got out alive. Weird how different things are considered unlucky in different cultures, we have the ladders, black cats, broken mirrors and the umbrellas indoors. Then there's new boots on a table, and numbers 13 bad, 7 good. Asia in general fears the number 4 as it represents death and unlucky is cutting your nails at night, eating seaweed soup or shaving before an exam. Sitting on the threshold of a door is particularly bad apparently!
So where did i get to on the week, drunk Weds, won the pool Thurs, Fri night we hosted and a friendly game of poker at home which JJ was winning until my workmate Tony took a dodgy re buy when we were all far too drunk and took down most of the pot! Then it was Saturday and i did as little as possible and that's it, my week done, flown by, gone in a blink. Wasn't it great when the days lasted for ever and the sun shone and .......
Monday 1 March 2010
First blog!
Well hi,
I've seen a few of these over the years and kept up with my friend Sam in Korea and also my good friend Bill who regularly blogs away from Gwangju South Korea so i thought i'd give it a go. Sure, it can't be that hard to keep an update of what's going on in Freerville... The only hard part will be the getting to how i am and where i am, in story terms that's an epic!!
Who am I? well i'd have to take a long hard look in the mirror to answer that... I'm 36, I've got 5 wonderful kids, a beautiful wife and many would say that makes me a lucky man! Luck, lucky, unlucky... the old fates of luck have certainly paid a huge part in shaping my life so far and since being born dead in Rugby England 1973 (my dad had left the hospital ward thinking i was a gonner before i choked into life!) it's been a roller coaster ride. I had a restaurant of my own with a 3 bedroom flat, wife and 3 kids at the age of 24... i had nothing at the age of 28 and was lying comatose with a broken back and ruptured internal organs, dead again! The story in between and since will take a few of these old blogs to cover but i'll give it a go if you'll bear with me.
I'll start off gently though and introduce you to life in Korea, we've just had a bank holiday and went down to Gwangju to visit Bill and Crystal. They're long time friends now, we've known each other since my first time in Korea back starting in 2002. Bill's a yank, but a nice one! The first nice American i can remember meeting as it happens, of which i regularly remind him! We both have Korean wives and they love to get together to slag us off in tandem... i swear they can chat non-stop for 3-4 hours without taking a breath!! I'm sure it's not all about being married to us 'foreigners' but some of it must be!!
So that was the story this weekend just gone, we headed down in pretty good time and only got lost after arriving in Gwangju (this is better than getting lost before we get there!). Bill had to come out and rescue is and we ended up in a restaurant that was owned by a relative of Crystal. The whole point of the weekend was to catch the Carling cup final and enjoy it in good company in a bar with a big screen and english commentary (a neccessity for premier league games as i'm sure i will explain at some stage). The weekend progressed nicely, me and Bill even managing to get out for a few jars on Saturday and take in a Korean rockabilly band! Yep, there is such a thing and they were actually pretty good. I mean i'd had a lot of beer by the time they started but i think i remeber them being loud and raucus with real toe tapping tunes.
Sunday arrived and the nerves set in for me, i knew this game was probably too important for us (Aston Villa) and didn't matter enough to Manchester United for them to be under any pressure. The babysitter arrived (thanks Hillary) and we headed to a bar named Speakeasy in Gwangju (Half irish owned and half huge American bloke who could probably look down on Peter Crouch!). A crowd of friends and aquaintences arrived, the game kicked off and the mighty Villa went and scored, the adrenaline pumped, the belief surged and then Manchester United did what they invariably do and kicked or asses! Matt, another 2002-2004 Korea vet and genuine good guy made the trip to visit and gloat!! He's a Man utd fan unfortunately and with half of South Korea also supporting them (the Korean national captain plays for Man Utd) the little band of me and Bill and (half heartedly as Park was playing) my wife were in the minority from the kick off! Wembley 2010 was not to be happy day after all... did i really expect it to, well in a word yes, i thought that we would win this cup and my analytical expertise was again found wanting! Anyway... it wasn't to be and as someone somewhere once said (i don't believe a word of it but) "It's only a game". And so a hangover later and a goodbye to our gracious hosts and we head home to Cheonan. The we is me my wife Jeongju, son Cade and baby (2 and a half now, still calling her baby!) Lillianna.
I'll be back with some fresh updates and some more in depth historical Royness any day now!
I've seen a few of these over the years and kept up with my friend Sam in Korea and also my good friend Bill who regularly blogs away from Gwangju South Korea so i thought i'd give it a go. Sure, it can't be that hard to keep an update of what's going on in Freerville... The only hard part will be the getting to how i am and where i am, in story terms that's an epic!!
Who am I? well i'd have to take a long hard look in the mirror to answer that... I'm 36, I've got 5 wonderful kids, a beautiful wife and many would say that makes me a lucky man! Luck, lucky, unlucky... the old fates of luck have certainly paid a huge part in shaping my life so far and since being born dead in Rugby England 1973 (my dad had left the hospital ward thinking i was a gonner before i choked into life!) it's been a roller coaster ride. I had a restaurant of my own with a 3 bedroom flat, wife and 3 kids at the age of 24... i had nothing at the age of 28 and was lying comatose with a broken back and ruptured internal organs, dead again! The story in between and since will take a few of these old blogs to cover but i'll give it a go if you'll bear with me.
I'll start off gently though and introduce you to life in Korea, we've just had a bank holiday and went down to Gwangju to visit Bill and Crystal. They're long time friends now, we've known each other since my first time in Korea back starting in 2002. Bill's a yank, but a nice one! The first nice American i can remember meeting as it happens, of which i regularly remind him! We both have Korean wives and they love to get together to slag us off in tandem... i swear they can chat non-stop for 3-4 hours without taking a breath!! I'm sure it's not all about being married to us 'foreigners' but some of it must be!!
So that was the story this weekend just gone, we headed down in pretty good time and only got lost after arriving in Gwangju (this is better than getting lost before we get there!). Bill had to come out and rescue is and we ended up in a restaurant that was owned by a relative of Crystal. The whole point of the weekend was to catch the Carling cup final and enjoy it in good company in a bar with a big screen and english commentary (a neccessity for premier league games as i'm sure i will explain at some stage). The weekend progressed nicely, me and Bill even managing to get out for a few jars on Saturday and take in a Korean rockabilly band! Yep, there is such a thing and they were actually pretty good. I mean i'd had a lot of beer by the time they started but i think i remeber them being loud and raucus with real toe tapping tunes.
Sunday arrived and the nerves set in for me, i knew this game was probably too important for us (Aston Villa) and didn't matter enough to Manchester United for them to be under any pressure. The babysitter arrived (thanks Hillary) and we headed to a bar named Speakeasy in Gwangju (Half irish owned and half huge American bloke who could probably look down on Peter Crouch!). A crowd of friends and aquaintences arrived, the game kicked off and the mighty Villa went and scored, the adrenaline pumped, the belief surged and then Manchester United did what they invariably do and kicked or asses! Matt, another 2002-2004 Korea vet and genuine good guy made the trip to visit and gloat!! He's a Man utd fan unfortunately and with half of South Korea also supporting them (the Korean national captain plays for Man Utd) the little band of me and Bill and (half heartedly as Park was playing) my wife were in the minority from the kick off! Wembley 2010 was not to be happy day after all... did i really expect it to, well in a word yes, i thought that we would win this cup and my analytical expertise was again found wanting! Anyway... it wasn't to be and as someone somewhere once said (i don't believe a word of it but) "It's only a game". And so a hangover later and a goodbye to our gracious hosts and we head home to Cheonan. The we is me my wife Jeongju, son Cade and baby (2 and a half now, still calling her baby!) Lillianna.
I'll be back with some fresh updates and some more in depth historical Royness any day now!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)