One Day in Bristol
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci Thee hath in thrall!’ - Keats
The last time I was in Bristol I saw nothing much outside of the inside of a pub. I went there to meet a cousin and a friend for that exact purpose. I stayed in a hostel which cost me about 20 pounds a night and had me share a room with around five other strangers, for whose benefit I grappled at night to suppress booze and takeaway induced farts. Farts are not something I like to admit to, and something which I seldom hear people talking about, but the average person apparently does it around 20 times per day. Add a little booze, a few chips and a bit of curry sauce, and the daily average can quickly become significantly higher. Even without booze, with 6 people in a room for 8 hours, at a rough average of 1 fart per person, per hour, one can expect 8 farts per person over the night, which would mean that there would be an average of 48 farts in a room with 6 people. And if those 6 people were to drink lots of alcohol and eat a few takeaways, then perhaps lighting a match in such a room could ignite the collective gas, and kill everyone in the room, or at least leave them with severe burns. I wonder if insurance companies consider these things in the fire safety reports for these establishments. While I’m being a little daft here in my musings, there comes a certain time in everyone’s life where they shouldn’t have to suppress their farts. To do so, could cause a gas buildup that could be so perilous it might rupture a body’s intestines, and the health services are busy enough without having to deal with the fallout of people forced to suppress their farts out of mere politeness. And so, on this visit I decide to book a room in a hotel, which in reality costs less than the booze I chugged last time I was over some 7 or 8 years ago. I actually forget what year it was, and couldn’t really be bothered looking it up.
I arrive in Bristol airport at about 8am in the morning, and my brain is a little bit frazzled from lack of sleep. I get on a bus called the Airport Flyer, which costs 9 pounds, one way, into town, and it occurs to me that it’s almost the same price as the Ryanair flight over. It also takes as long to get from Bristol airport into town as it does for the flight to get from Dublin to Bristol. Fascinating. I start a conversation with a young woman on the bus by saying something like “lovely weather here in Bristol” and we have a natter about this and that and I find myself thinking that British people are quite friendly, in spite of what some people say. But then this lady that I’ve been talking to says “British people aren’t as friendly as Irish people” and I spontaneously realise she has an Irish accent. Not only that, she’s also from Galway, the same as myself. She was even on the same flight over. It’s funny how making assumptions, and being a little asleep, can make one a little oblivious to reality. After a bit of general banter, we say our goodbyes, and I alight in the centre of Bristol and head to an Italian café to recalibrate my brain a little bit.
The coffee is about a pound cheaper than it was at the airport, and so I have three. It was actually quite good coffee with a very satisfying flavour. Authentically Italian, apparently. I can’t check into my hotel until 3pm and it’s only, as yet, about 10, and so I wander up the road to go and check out the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, which, I realise quite by accident, is within a mere few hundred metres of where I’m staying for the night.
I wander in and to the left of me are exhibits about sea life, and to the right there is an exhibition about ancient Egypt. I must have looked a bit discombobulated (that’s a fancy new word I learned for saying confused and this is my first ever time using it in a sentence) because the lady on the door asked me if I was okay. I explained to her that I was trying to figure out the best way to navigate the museum and she advised starting with ancient Egypt as there were two schools of kids due in any minute. I wasn’t sure of the logic of this, but I started towards the section on Egypt and then two schools of little kids came charging in, full of chatter and that giddy youthful energy that little kids tend to have. “I’m sorry,” said their teacher, in her charming Bristolian accent, and I thought “How lovely”. Somehow, I find some British accents can make people seem more intellectual and charming. “You’ve your hands full,” I remark, and she replies, “Oh, I enjoy it,” and I thought that it was quite delightful that she said so, I don’t really know why.
In the Egyptian exhibition, I learn a little bit about mummies that I did not know before. Apparently, ancient Egyptians believed that their bodies needed to survive after death as a home for their ka (spirit) and this was why they were mummified. Also, for this reason, they would bury food with their bodies so that their ka could be fed when it returned to the body on occasion. If the body was not preserved, the ancient Egyptians believed that the eternal spirit of the dead person might not survive forever.
The above painting caught my eye. It is called La Belle sans Merci (the beautiful woman without mercy) and was painted by one Frank Dicksee. It was inspired by a John Keats poem that was written in 1819, and references these specific lines.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
However, the poem itself concludes with the ruination of the knight, and apparently this beautiful woman ruins all men that find themselves captivated by her beauty.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
The painting chooses to focus solely on the moment of the knights intoxication, rather than his downfall, however.
In the museum are lots of interesting exhibits from all around the world including sections on natural history (including dinosaurs), porcelain, and the modern environment and modern-day seabirds that live on the coasts. There is too much to possibly write about in one post and I wouldn’t wish to write too many spoilers anyway. After over three hours wandering around it, I head back towards the centre of town for a burger, chips, onion rings, and a fizzy water, which cost me £23. Twenty quid seems a common price for a burger everywhere nowadays and I’m not sure when exactly that happened. Just yesterday it seemed like you could expect to get a burger and chips for around a tenner and suddenly, it seems sudden to me anyway, everything seems to cost double what it did just a couple of years ago. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my feed and shortly thereafter checked into my hotel and chilled out for a couple of hours before heading to the event which triggered my attendance in Bristol in the first place. On the way, I take this photo, which I thought looked kind of interesting.
The reason I spontaneously decided to go to Bristol is partly because of a writing event/book launch by a man named Chris Fielden, who has recently released an anthology of funny and quirky stories, called To Hull and Back, which were selected as winners from a competition he was running. I met Chris over the internet around 12 years ago when I had the bright idea to start a short story website and populate it with stories from people around the world. The way I did that was by running a competition. I typed “short story competition lists” into Google and came across his website where he lists various writing competitions. I asked him to list mine and we somehow became the email equivalent of pen pals over a two- or three-year period. One thing led to another and we eventually met in real life and drank some beers, which was the occasion of my last visit to Bristol, which I mentioned earlier in this post. The event is called Talking Tales, and is on a couple of times per year.
I look at getting a bus to the event, which is roughly 3 miles away, and it involves a little bit of walking and two buses and so will take at least 40 minutes to get there. On the other hand, I can walk in and be there in under 50 minutes. I vaguely consider getting a taxi, but after spending about £15 on coffees, and £23 for a burger, I decide I need to rein my spending in a little bit, and so I walk. It’s a nice night for a walk anyways and I take the picture in the header of this post along the way. It’s compiled of four pictures that I shot with a 50mm lens and stuck together in Photoshop.
When I got the email for the event, I booked flights and accommodation as I thought it would be a fun thing to do to go and explore Bristol, visit some museums, and take some street photos all in the space of a day or two. The only problem was, I hadn’t read the event email properly and so had nothing to read that was within the word limit specified in the email – 300 words, and so I thoughtlessly knocked up a short piece the day before. Since I was going, I thought it would be a shame not to read something.
The event was starting at around 7, so on the way it was quite dark out. At times along the way the air seemed to be perfumed with marijuana, which seems a common thing in all cities these days. Oddly, even though I can distinctly smell it, I’m never entirely sure from where it is wafting.
Google maps tries to bring me through some secluded looking tunnels, through which I think it may not be safe for my pretty little ass, and so I try to avoid them, but I end up at the side of a busy road with railings either side, and decide to head back down to where the tunnels are.
Along the way, I decide I might as well take a picture of these eerie looking tunnels, and as I’m about to, a young woman walks into my frame and I ask if she minds being in my picture to give it some perspective and she smiles and says no.
After my quick paced walk through this unfamiliar city at night, I arrive at the bookshop where the event is being held, called The Small City Bookshop. The first few readers read their stories, which are quite amusing. They all seem so relaxed up there in front of an audience, and I suddenly feel terrified. I start to think about what I wrote the day before and wish that I had written something a little more sensible, a little less weird. I start to worry that somebody will make a video of me reading it and the disgrace of it will follow me around for the rest of my life and I will live under a cloud of permanent shame. I’m probably used to writing worse on line to be fair. I wrote the opening to this blog while heavily under the influence of caffeine and when I opened it again today felt like it was an absolutely terrible idea to put something so ridiculous out on my Substack. However, life in itself is a bit ridiculous when you stop to think for a second.
Chris calls out my name as the next reader, and I feel my heart pounding in my chest. For one hot second I seriously consider running for the door. But I can’t. That would be pretty embarrassing too. So, I go up on stage, and read my short story. I’m a bit apologetic and assure the audience that while the story is pretty much true, I don’t drink any more because it never really suited me. The following is the story:
Unchartered Waters
There are differences between Irish and English women, as I found out one night when I was on the lash in London a few years ago. For some reason, I don’t know why, but every time I have gotten a little more drunk than I should, I have been inclined to tell random women that I think look beautiful, that I think they look beautiful. Invariably, in Ireland, that has always resulted in being told to “fuck off” or some sort of variation of same. It was a response I received in the pub so many times, that I had come to expect it, and I daresay even enjoy it a little bit. And if a particular lady didn’t respond badly to the first statement, I would often follow it up with “Will you marry me?” and that would definitely be the end of that conversation.
One night, a few years ago, I was out in Camden town in London with a few relations, and I saw a young lady whom I thought the most beautiful lady in the bar and I decided to tell her as much, just in case she did not know. I turned up my collar, ran my fingers through my hair, and threw back a Jager bomb, before marching over and declaring that I thought she was, beyond doubt, the most beautiful woman in the bar, and she turned to me with a smile as wide as I have ever seen and said, “Aww, that’s a lovely thing to say, thank you very much.”
At this point, in spite of being somewhat intoxicated, I suddenly became conscious of my heart beating in my chest, and my face flushing red with embarrassment. There was no cause for delivering the “Will you marry me?” line, as she might well be of the persuasion to say “yes” and then I’d be in real trouble. And so, I simply blurted out something stupid like “okay, bye” and walked off, feeling like a complete and utter idiot.
“What kind of woman actually enjoys a compliment from a random stranger in a pub?” I asked myself, as bewildered as a bag of coconuts. It occurred to me that British women are uncharted waters, and I resolved to not talk to any more of them for the rest of the night, lest I end up getting married, or something.
There was a bit of laughter at different points in my story and several people told me that I should perform at more events, and perhaps I will. After a time, I buy a copy of the anthology (the stories are quite funny and easy to read and you can buy it by clicking here: To Hull and Back) and head on my merry way back to my hotel, and it takes a few hours for my nerves to settle.
Afterword
I had a tutor years ago that said the fear of public speaking is comparable to the fear of death, which is kind of stupid when you think about it. If any of us died tomorrow we’d be forgotten by most people in the blink of an eye. If we ended up paralyzed from the neck down in a care home, pooping our pants in grownup sized nappies, the vast majority of people we know and have considered friends and lovers wouldn’t even come and visit us, or even pick up the phone to call us. I’ve seen as much with multiple people that I have known over the years. One’s closest family, and maybe, if you are lucky, a handful of very good friends will touch base, but sadly, oftentimes, when you’re down, you’re out – hence the phrase “down and out”. And so, if most people wouldn’t care to maintain contact with one when one is about as low as a body can actually go, then why would one waste time worrying about what they think when one is relatively able bodied? It doesn’t really make any sense. The fact is that life is a bit like the beautiful woman of Keats’ poem. And life, like the woman in his poem, has no mercy on knights that are not imbued with the courage to live her to the full.
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