Road Trip

A couple of weeks ago I started to watch an American science fiction show called Supernatural. I decided to look into it because a lot of Doctor Who/Sherlock fans on Tumblr are also really big fans of the show - it often appears in crossover work (pieces of art or fiction that combine two or more fictional worlds together) with those other two shows. The story of Supernatural follows two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who are both hunters; they track down and destroy evil spirits, demons, curses, anything and everything paranormal or mythical. After their father, also a hunter, goes missing on a solo hunting trip, Sam and Dean team up and go on a road trip across America in the hopes of finding him. I've already finished the first series. There's a lot to like about it.

First off is the relationship between the two lead characters. Sam and Dean (played by Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles respectively) are brilliant counterparts to one another; their personalities are similar enough for the brother relationship to work, but different enough for them to both have their own strengths and weaknesses, and feel like unique, individual characters. Dean is more confident and straightforward, more willing to jump head-first into action without thinking things through, whereas Sam is more cautious and inquisitive. The actors have great chemistry and, even when the stories are subpar, the two protagonists keep the show entertaining.

Another thing I really like about the show is the meld of different myths and legends from different cultures. Rather than let itself be pinned down by following a rigid system, the show dabbles in many various kinds of folklore - some episodes feature contemporary villains like Bloody Mary or the Hook Man, while others draw from the more traditional mythologies of Buddhism (the Tulpa) or Native American lore (the Wendigo). And of course, classic paranormal bad guys such as ghosts, demons and vampires all put in an appearance. This blend of cultures keeps the show's Monsters-Of-The-Week™ fresh and interesting, whereas a set system that followed a consistent thread of logic may have caused the show's many one-off villains to become repetitive and tiresome.

Then there is the overarching plot thread that runs throughout the full series. There's a very interesting division between British and American TV shows when it comes to plot threads; in British TV shows, the number of episodes in a series is usually drastically shorter, and as a result the overarching story line is often much more prominent, because it has to be told over a much shorter span of time. On shows like Being Human, for example, it is very difficult to understand an episode without first watching its predecessors, because strands of the plot from previous episodes play a vital part in the stories of current ones. In American shows like The Mentalist, however, the underlying plot is often left neglected for much of the series, as the writers have a lot more space to pad over the season (American shows tend to have series of 20-plus episodes). The plot line running through the entire series will only really make an appearance in a handful of the stories, with the rest of the episodes being mostly filler. This makes it a lot easier to watch an episode off-handedly without having caught up on all the previous stories; however, it can be frustrating for the viewers who are eager to see loose plot threads resolved.

Supernatural (to digress from a long-winded tangent) manages to strike a fairly efficient balance between these two. While the plot threads still unravel quite slowly over the course of the twenty-two episode series, there is enough forward momentum in the story that you never feel too bogged down in padded out material. At the start point of the series, Sam and Dean are going off to look for their father; and while it takes them most of the season to solve the mystery behind his disappearance, the plot still manages to move forward and stay interesting despite the lack of new information. I don't really want to discuss it in detail too much for fear of spoilers, so I'll just say that every couple of episodes contains a reveal or twist of some sort, regarding the central plot. It's not quite a continuous, ongoing story, but it's definitely a much more satisfying alternative to the many TV series that consist of predominantly filler.

The stories of the individual episodes, meanwhile, are always interesting if a little formulaic. The guys get a tip off that something strange might be happening, either from trawling through newspapers/the internet or getting a phone call from an old friend/client of theirs or their father's. They go to investigate, and find signs of something strange happening. Then members of the episode's supporting cast start to drop like flies as the Monsters-Of-The-Week™ ups it's game, striking again and again as Sam and Dean rush to figure out what they are dealing with and how they can stop it. Then, just as the Monsters-Of-The-Week™ is about to kill a particularly prominent guest character, usually the story's third protagonist in conjunction with the brothers, a solution to the problem presents itself and the villain is vanquished in the nick of time. Then Sam and Dean, happy with another day's work, get into their car and drive off onto another adventure. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but by and large the majority of the episodes follow this simple pattern. Fortunately the stories are usually entertaining, and the lead characters and enemies (as I've mentioned earlier) are what really makes the episodes worthwhile.

Thank you for reading this, and I'll see you again soon.

A Short Trip to Wales

For the last few days I've been on holiday to the uncharted and mysterious land that is Wales. Being the intrepid adventurer that I am, I took a camera with me to document the strange phenomena that I would surely encounter there. I also kept a log of my expeditions, so that - in the event of a wild predatory sheep attack - a document of my discoveries would still exist.


Friday

We got into the car at 5pm on the dot (ish), and as per usual we literally couldn’t move for all of the unnecessary stuff we were bringing; my mum, for example, packed a box of candles to ‘give the cottage a cosy atmosphere’. Ridiculous. Anyway, I spent the journey alternating between the latest episode of Travelling the Vortex and listening to Carry On My Wayward Son by Kansas on a loop. I suspect the latter may have been a subconscious attempt to make the journey feel like a road trip, because ever since I started watching Supernatural, I’ve been obsessed with going on a road trip. The journey was mostly uneventful; we didn’t so much travel to Wales as we did shuffle vaguely in its direction. I only realised we had arrived when I looked up at a traffic light to see a sign for a school, with the word ‘ysgol’ underneath it (google translate assures me that this is the Welsh word for school, though I am still half-certain that Ysgol is in fact a creature from a H.P Lovecraft story).

When we arrived at the cottage, it was already dark, making it practically impossible to see where we were going. A nice man named Alan (who owned the cottage) showed us inside and gave us the full tour. Now, cottage is a very generic word; it can mean anything from a tiny bungalow to a massive stone hall. I’ve been to a lot of cottages, and I’m never sure of what to expect. Whatever my expectations were, this cottage exceeded them. It is absolutely amazing. I’ve taken some pictures and I'll put them into this blog post so you can see it for yourself, but aside from that just take my word for it. It has a cosy atmosphere already, no candles required.

We dropped our stuff off at the cottage and immediately set out to find somewhere to eat for the evening, because we were all starving. We stopped at the second pub we saw (the first one had a big sign out front with ‘Biker’s Meeting Every Tuesday’, which for some reason put my mum off). The place we did eat at, the Plough, was lovely; I had cod and chips (because, upon arriving in a new area, eating cod and chips is a good way to get the lay of the land, food-wise). The bartender was a cool guy with black hair who wasn’t as Welsh as you would expect a Welsh bartender to be, and while the fire wasn’t roaring as much as smouldering half-heartedly we still had a great time.

We returned to the cottage to find it significantly darker and colder than we had left it. My dad then made the strategically unsound move of parking his car at the top of a flight of stone steps that led from the top of a small hill to our cottage. Due to the cold, the steps were icy. I’m talking Boom Town-esque, decapitation-inducing, it-was-a-very-icy-patch level of icy here. We very carefully fell down the stairs and rolled through the back door in a heap of limbs and minor injuries, or rather we didn’t because the back door was locked and we didn’t have the key. Instead, we went round to the front and walked through the front door, invalidating the whole ‘let’s park round the back to save time’ ordeal that had gotten us into this situation in the first place.

Once we were back inside the cottage, me and Lucy decided to have a movie night. We watched the entirety of I Am Legend (which Lucy ruined by laughing at all the sad bits, glancing down at her phone every five seconds and falling asleep during the flashback sequences). We then started on School of Rock, but it soon became apparent that we were both too tired to finish the thing, so we enthusiastically gave up and went to bed.

Saturday

I was woken up by Lucy at about 8:30, who had gotten up and was eager to carry on watching School of Rock. I stayed in bed, which she took to mean as ‘go ahead, watch it without me’, so she went downstairs and did that. I vaguely remember checking my phone at something like 9:45, so I must have gotten up some time after that. I had a shower, got dressed, and went down to see what everyone else was doing.

What they were doing was making complete numpties of themselves. My mum and dad, independently of each other, had both managed to pull down the blinds off of one of the windows. We hadn't even been there for a full day and already they’d started breaking things. Alan would not be happy. Then we had breakfast (bacon, sausage, scrambled egg, it was delicious) and discussed in vague terms what we planned on doing for the rest of the day. We ended up deciding to go for a walk – I like walking in the countryside. It’s relaxing, and gives you a lot of time to think. I think best when I’m on the move, so country walks are good places to run things over in my head. 

Almost immediately after breakfast we were out of the cottage and away down the narrow Welsh roads, which look lovely in daylight. We saw some sheep in a field on the way down, confirming that it is literally impossible to be in Wales for more than twenty-four hours without seeing at least one sheep. We passed a sign telling us that we were entering the ‘highest town in Wales’ (not that I’ve ever imagined Wales as being a particularly mountainous area in general), and stopped at the top of a hill to begin our walk.

From our high vantage point we could see a lot of the surrounding area, and this being Wales the surrounding area mostly consisted of trees. Within minutes we were off the road and in amongst the forests, hopping down some extremely narrow paths in the woods. They weren’t just narrow, they were also steep, and icy. Remember the icy steps from yesterday? These paths were icier. It was very icy, is what I’m saying. The leaves and branches of some trees were literally encased inside suits of ice-armour, so thoroughly frozen was the area. We continued down the paths until we found a bridge overlooking a stream, which somehow was miraculously still running in the cold. From there the paths started to turn back up again, which made the entire walk downwards seem rather unnecessary.

The trail leading upwards eventually deposited us around the back of a small farm, with sheep (unsurprisingly) and chickens wandering about, and rock music quietly playing from somewhere behind one of the houses on the property. We ended up staying there for some time, while Lucy looked at a small group of Shetland ponies grazing in one field, and my mum and dad stopping to chat with a not-very-Welsh-sounding cyclist. I decided to move on ahead from them, because standing still was just going to a) make me freezing cold and b) become boring very quickly. I came across a very spooky looking stone shack in my travels, something right out of a Marble Hornets video, all charred wood and overgrown brambles. I stayed there until everyone else caught up (the idea of hiding in the shack and jumping out at them only occurred to me later) and then we moved on to find yet another remote home in the Welsh countryside. This one had a massive, rusted boat out front, presumably from the olden days when Wales was completely underwater (like a rural Atlantis, filled with wandering mersheep).

We found ourselves back in civilisation, relatively speaking, when we came across a massive bridge that acted as a gate to a small village, known as Ffrith (complete with an obsolete second F because that’s how language rolls in Wales). The bridge’s underside provided a brilliant echo, a really solid, audible one, the kind you hear in movies when kids go exploring in mysterious caves. The village itself was mostly a hodgepodge of modern and old-fashioned buildings, and one pub called the Poacher’s Cottage which had burned down in 2008, and now looked very much like a haunted house. We moved on from Ffrith, and headed up a path that was more muddy than icy (a refreshing change) until things levelled out and we found ourselves between two wide open fields. Grassy fields in winter are, I think, underrated; they looked stunning, especially with the omnipresent Welsh fog lying low on them.

We moved on down the now-level road, stopping only to thoughtfully consider some cone-shaped pieces of ice that were lying down the side of the path (we eventually figured out that these were from the electricity wires running overhead, where the wires had frozen over and were now slowly defrosting). We also walked right past our own cottage, because my dad hadn’t considered the route we were taking very carefully. Lucy wanted to stay there and wait for us to return in the car, but eventually we decided to just carry on. For a few minutes, we were walking on the same road we had driven up some hours before; however, we eventually split off from the main road, crossing over a small stream and into a field. The field was edged with a low wire fence, to stop sheep from getting out (it didn’t work – as we walked up, two sheep sitting on the wrong side of the wire saw us and bolted through a gap in the fence), and the wire made tripping up a very real hazard. Fortunately, we managed to cross the field without breaking too many of our limbs, and – after taking advice from a farmer – we ended up walking through yet another forest (the farmer, incidentally, owned an Australian Kelpie, a species of sheep dog that was absolutely gorgeous).

This forest was even more frozen up than the ones we had seen previously. Tree branches were weighed down by the sheer amount of ice that had congealed on them.  It looked incredible. One tree was even hanging low enough over the path for us to run through the branches, with chunks of ice dropping down all around us. I ended up with a lot of bits of ice stuck in the hood of my jacket. We carried on out of the forest, and passed another farm, this one guarded by two unusually angry dogs. Interestingly, both had patches of fur over one eye; black fur on one dog and brown on another. The village we had started in (the highest town in Wales, no less) was only a few minutes’ walk away, and while we were passing through it we noticed an old red phone box that looked a little out of place. We got back to the car, tired but refreshed, and came home to relax in front of the TV and watch Come Dine With Me.

Being able to come on holiday and do absolutely nothing of note is wonderful. Not that I hadn't done anything – earlier on in the day, for example, I was writing a book review for this very blog, which I’ll be posting sometime soonish – but the lack of rushing about, the freedom to just sit down and have a nap, is lovely. I’m a ninety year old man, I know.

Speaking of things that are lovely, that Indian takeaway we ordered was delicious! I had a chicken pathia, which was quite spicy, but whatever my dad ordered was about fifty times spicier. I could only manage three mouthfuls, and we have plenty left over. After the Indian, Lucy and I decided that the best thing to do was, you guessed it, to have another movie night. The first film we watched was Slumdog Millionaire, which unlike the films we watched yesterday I had never seen before. It’s a great movie, and very cleverly done. Then we moved on to Casino Royale, which Lucy refused to enjoy, and which we eventually turned off (grrrr) in favour of Run Fatboy Run, though I have to say I’m glad we did. Run Fatboy Run is one of the funniest films I’ve ever watched. Simon Pegg and Dylan Moran are both fantastic comedians and actors, and they’re both top-notch in this. After the films, we gave up and retired to bed.


Sunday

 After waking up late (again), I very quickly discovered that Sunday would be the obligatory 'squeeze as much worth as possible out of our National Trust membership' day. So we drove to a very large, very old house, the name of which is typically Welsh (Erddig House, for those interested). It was an absolutely huge estate; setting aside the gargantuan house for just a minute, the grounds surrounding it were pretty impressive as well. There were several buildings for things like boilers, and the garage was pretty cool to, because it had a couple of period cars inside it (including one which looked like it had been set on fire about fifty years back and then just left to melt/rust, though to be fair the others were all in good condition). One of the outer buildings also had a bookshop in it, with the usually odd collection that you get from second-hand bookshops. The only book of any real interest in there was a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I already own that one (I actually did a review of it back in October). The two old ladies running the bookshop were strange to say the least; when we walked in they were arguing about whether soup is better hot or cold, and then one of them went off on a rant about knitting scarves.

In front of the house were the gardens, which were pretty damn extensive as well. There was a fountain (turned off, sadly, though it probably didn't work after all this time anyway), and there was this row of trees that had been grown in perfect sequence, which looked really cool. It's sort of hard to describe, but they looked almost unreal, like someone had photoshopped them so that they repeated in sync all the way down the garden. It wasn't just that they were in line with each other, the branches had been grown outwards so that each of the trees sort of linked to the next one along, so both rows were like continuous walls of tree. I took a photo of Lucy jumping off of a slightly raised ledge into the trees, so I'll put that on here so you can see for yourself what I mean. The garden also had a couple of small statues that looked slightly unnerving, and a half-frozen lake with several ducks wandering about on the banks. The surface layer of ice on the lake was very thin, and had broken through in several places, but when I tossed some gravel over the surface it didn't crack.

After the long walk around the gardens, we decided we had seen all that there was to see of the house - the insides were a little underwhelming, as most of it was closed up over the winter season for some reason and would only be re-opened in March. On the bottom floor there wasn't much to see, as it was mostly taken up by small studies and the like. The one thing I did find absolutely fascinating was the poetry written by some of the house's previous inhabitants. Three generations of the family who lived on the estate had been poets, and each of them had written several poems about the people who lived and worked in the house. These poems, along with photographs or portraits of the staff member concerned, were hung in the entrance hall of the house (that had originally been the dairy before the National Trust converted it). Apart from that, the only really interesting things in the house were the rings of swords above the dining room table - the exact story escapes me, but basically one of the house's occupants had been a member of a branch of law enforcement, and when that branch closed down he offered to keep the swords safe on behalf of the government. Hence, all of the swords are hanging in these big, circular racks on the dining room ceiling. Pretty cool. But after we had seen all of that, we ran out of cool things to look at, and called it a day.

Following a quick stop at a local shop to buy some essentials, mostly pizza and chips for our evening meal, we returned home to the cottage to begin the epic not-doing-anything-a-thon that evenings in Wales are now known to be. Since it was Lucy's choice this time round, we ended up watching Hairspray (I chose to sit upstairs through most of that one and reread the novel Retribution Falls instead) followed by St. Trinians. Shudder. To make up for the bad films, I heated up some of the Indian food from the day before that we had left over and ate some of that. Cue several hours of me doing very few productive things (though I did start to work on two other blog posts that will hopefully be up quite soon. See how hardworking I am? See?!), followed by me collapsing into bed at some late hour.


Monday

We needed to get out of the cottage quite early, I think we had to be out before 9am, so it's a good thing I got a nice early night on Sunday. Er, or not. I was pretty much a walking corpse for much of the morning, stumbling around trying to pack everything up at the last minute because being organised is overrated. We had a surprising amount of stuff packed for just three nights, as I've mentioned before, so this took quite a lot of time. However, eventually we had everything back in the suitcases (or in my rucksack in my case) and we bundled everything into the car. I wish I could tell you that this is the part where the story becomes interesting, as we were suddenly attacked by Welsh cannibals (like in that one episode of Torchwood) but unfortunately, that isn't what happened. We just drove home, our journey completely undisturbed, and arrived at home with all of our limbs and other appendages firmly connected to our bodies. Dull, I know.

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And that is the end of what is quite possibly the longest and most tedious blog post I have ever written! To those of you who have actually read this far, your reading endurance is a feat to be admired. Unless you just skipped all of that text so you could read the final paragraph and spoil the ending for yourself (SPOILERS: I got home from Wales at the end). Anyway, thank you for reading this dreary and ultimately pointless blog post. I promise that something more informative is coming relatively soon... Perhaps a review of some sort? You'll have to wait and see, but I promise I'll post it soon (I know the last few weeks have been quite sparse and barren in terms of new posts). But until then, thanks for reading - and happy Valentine's day! <3