The Road to Little Dribbling (38 page)

As I sat nibbling my crudwich and worrying about the deterioration of the modern human mind, I pulled from my rucksack a document titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” This is the famous study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in New York mentioned a few chapters ago that launched the new science of what we might call Stupidology.

It is an academic paper, so it comes with some impenetrable jargon—“metacognitive skills,” “interrater correlation analysis,” and so on—but its basic premise appears to be that if you are truly stupid you not only do things stupidly but are in all likelihood too stupid to realize how stupidly you are doing them. I can’t pretend that I understood it all, which is worrying in a paper on stupidity, but some of it was a little technical. Consider this sentence: “Top-quartile participants did not, however, underestimate their raw score on the test, M = 16.9 (perceived) versus 16.4 (actual), t(18) = 1.37, ns.” I read that eight or ten times, and all the sentences just before and after it, and I still cannot understand any of it beyond about the fourth word. However, I am at least aware that I don’t understand it, which I gather indicates that I am just averagely stupid and not dangerously stupid.

Dunning and Kruger have unquestionably done groundbreaking work, but their paper was written in 1999 and world stupidity has raced ahead in the years since, as we have just seen in Texas. One clear shortcoming of the Dunning-Kruger study is that it gives no guidance on how to assess one’s own mental acuity. This troubled me greatly, so as I returned to the open road and headed west into Wales, in a spirit of public service I constructed a checklist of ways to tell if you are becoming dangerously stupid yourself. This list isn’t comprehensive by any means, but it should help you to decide whether your own situation is worrisome. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

In a Thai restaurant when your plate comes garnished with a decorative flower carved from a carrot, do you believe that yours is the only plate that flower has been on this week?

Do you think that if you pat your pockets enough times it will make a missing object reappear?

If someone wearing oven mitts brings food to the table and says, “Careful, the dish is very hot,” do you touch it anyway, just to see if it is?

If you have been to a tanning parlor, do you think that because you cannot see that your eyelids are white no one else can?

If you are at a sporting event and you think a camera is trained on you, do you wave excitedly and call someone on your cell phone?

If you are waiting for an elevator that’s slow to come, do you push the button again and again in the belief that that will speed things up?

In hotels, do you think you can operate the shower without experiencing the full range of temperature possibilities?

Do you sometimes spend $90 on a shirt with a little polo pony on it in the belief that that will somehow bring you a more rewarding sex life? (The people who sold you the shirt for $90 are having the rewarding sex life.)

Do you think that you can feed five or six coins into a vending machine without the last one always being rejected? Do you keep putting the rejected coin back in anyway?

Do you think you can write down a list of questions in a notebook balanced on your thigh while driving on a busy four-lane highway without drifting dangerously across one or sometimes two other lanes?

That’s as far as I got, but I hope it is some help. We shall return to this subject when we get to Tenby, but for the moment let’s leave all these angry motorists and turn onto the quiet and winding A4066 and follow it through the valley of the River Taf to the comely village of Laugharne.

The poet Dylan Thomas lived in Laugharne (pronounced
larn
) from 1949 to 1953 in a cottage called the Boathouse and did some of his best, and ultimately final, work there. I parked beneath the stately ruins of Laugharne Castle, and followed a helpful directional sign to a paved path along the broad, tidal estuary of the Taf and up onto a wooded hill. Here I came upon Thomas’s famous writing hut, perched on the cliff edge. The hut is permanently locked, but you can look through the window. Inside, it is as if Thomas has just toddled off to Brown’s Hotel in the village for a lunchtime refresher but will be back soon. It has a couple of wooden chairs, a table strewn with work, some shelves of books, wadded paper balls on the floor. The hut doesn’t look very comfortable, but the setting is sublime. It was here, according to the Boathouse website, that Thomas wrote
Under Milk Wood
and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (though actually I think he wrote the poem earlier).

A short way beyond and no less beautifully situated is the Boathouse, where Thomas lived with his wife, Caitlin, and children after his friend and patron Margaret Taylor (wife of the historian A. J. P. Taylor) bought it for them, an act of startling generosity. Today it is a museum with lots of interesting Thomas memorabilia. It is very small, but snug and cheery. I thought it would be busy—2014 was the centenary of Thomas’s birth—but I was one of just three visitors.

On a wall upstairs was a front page from the
South Wales Argus
for November 10, 1953, reporting the death of Thomas in New York after a spectacular bender (though actually his whole life was a spectacular bender). The main story, however, concerned the mysterious disappearance of a farm couple, John and Phoebe Harries, from their eleven-acre holding just down the road in Pendine. Their bodies were found a week or so later in a shallow grave. They had been bludgeoned to death. A young but distant relative named Ronald Harries was subsequently tried and found guilty, and hanged the following spring, one of the last criminals to be executed in Wales. I thought it was interesting that all this got much more play in the
Argus
than the death of a drunken poet.

—

Seventeen miles around Carmarthen Bay from Laugharne is the old resort of Tenby. I had heard that it is a charming place, but in fact it is exquisite—full of pastel-colored houses, sweet-looking hotels and guesthouses, characterful pubs and cafés, glorious beaches and gorgeous views. It is everything you could want in a coastal retreat. How had this escaped me for so long?

Tenby stands on a steep-sided promontory high above its many beaches, which are reached by fetching zigzag paths, and seems bounded everywhere by water. The beaches are long and broad and, at the time of my visit, quite empty. I am not a beach person, as I think we have established, but these beckoned even for me.

The artist Augustus John was born in Tenby and spent a miserable childhood in a house on Victoria Street, just off the cliff-top Esplanade. John’s mother died of rheumatic gout when he was just six (I have gout; nobody ever told me it was lethal) and he grew up in a house that was silent and gloomy, presided over by a grieving and unfeeling father. It is said that the young Augustus never showed any talent for art until at the age of seventeen while diving off some rocks at Tenby he smashed his head and emerged from the water “a bloody genius.” That seems a little improbable—I have hit my head a lot and it has never improved anything—but in any case he cultivated drawing from that point and became so skilled that John Singer Sargent declared him the best draftsman since the Renaissance.

I walked up and down practically every street in Tenby and I don’t think I passed a house or cottage that I wouldn’t have been happy to own. I strolled the beaches and admired the boats in the harbor and the views to Caldey Island, two miles offshore.

Speaking of islands, here is an interesting fact. Nobody knows how many islands there are in the British Isles (an interesting vagueness given the name). The numbers have been variously put at anywhere between one thousand and four thousand or so. Partly it is a question of deciding where to draw the line between a large rock and a small island, and partly it is a question of tides (depending on when you look, you can find fifteen Farne Islands or twenty-six Farne Islands), and partly there is the problem that quite a number of islands are only kind of British. The Channel Islands, for instance, have a measure of autonomy that makes them quite separate from the rest of Britain. They have their own courts and postage stamps and set their own tax rates (at about the same level you or I would choose if we set our own tax rates). The citizens carry British passports but have no representation in Parliament and are not officially part of the United Kingdom. They are a “Peculiar of the British Crown.” The same is true of the Isle of Man.

Once, for a magazine article, I asked the chief information officer at Ordnance Survey, the government department responsible for whatever geographical certainty Britain can muster, for a definitive figure for the number of British islands and he disappeared for several days. Eventually, after much hunting around, he told me that the closest he could find to an official figure was 1,330, but he frankly doubted that that was anywhere near right. I think it’s rather charming that Britain doesn’t quite know how much of itself there is.

Just after I was in Tenby, incidentally, Caldey Island made a rare appearance in the news when two visitors from my own dear native land decided to visit the island, and asked the satellite navigation system in their rental car to give them directions from Tenby. The sat-nav guided them down a boat ramp, onto the beach, and thence into the great zone of blue that lay beyond, and it seems they dutifully followed. I’d love to have heard the conversation inside the car as they made their way toward two miles of open sea. As it turned out, their car got bogged down in sand halfway across the beach, robbing them of the opportunity to become the first motorists in history to reach Caldey Island from underwater. The visitors declined to give their name to the local paper, though they did say they were from Illinois.

I trust you see what I’m saying. Matters are getting worse and they have spread beyond Texas.

—

In the morning, I drove on to St. David’s, on the westernmost point of the Welsh mainland, above the rolling surf and crashing waves of St. Brides Bay. St. David’s boast is that it is Britain’s smallest city, which is really just another way of saying that it is the smallest place that has a cathedral. By any other measure, it’s a village, but an adorable one, on a hill a little inland from the sea. It is very pretty and prosperous, with a butcher’s, a National Trust shop, a tiny bookshop, several cafés.

The town and cathedral are named for the patron saint of Wales who was resident here a very long time ago. I knew nothing about him, so I looked him up in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
before leaving home. I defy anyone to read the
Oxford DNB
entry on St. David and not lose consciousness by about a third of the way through. Here is a typical sentence: “Yet the declaration that David was predestined to sanctity was also designed to confirm the Augustinian orthodoxy of the hagiographer, Rhigyfarch, and to foreshadow the culmination of David’s career at the Synod of Llanddewibrefi (second 7), when he preached against the Pelaginian heresy.” What I was able to gather is that David lived in the sixth century and that the only interesting things about him were that he liked to stand up to his neck in cold water and that he was said to live to 147.

The cathedral is terrific and interesting. I was one of only two people there. The most striking thing to me was that the floor slopes quite conspicuously. If you put a marble down near the altar, it would roll pretty quickly into the northwest corner. I asked a steward, a genial and impressively well-informed gentleman named Philip Brenan, about this. “Yes, it is quite a slope,” he agreed with enthusiasm, “and the interesting thing is that it must have been built that way intentionally because all the lintels and windowsills and so on are still perfectly horizontal. If the slope was from subsidence, they would have tilted too. So happily the slope doesn’t indicate structural problems. But it is indeed strange.”

He showed me some other oddities. The nave is bounded on both sides by arches, which are rounded and neatly symmetrical in the Romanesque style until you get to the very end when the last arch on either side abruptly takes on a pointed but clumsily asymmetrical gothic shape. He also indicated how the outer walls, when looked at closely, seem to be falling outward. “All this was done on purpose but no one knows why,” he said.

The greatest curiosity of all is where the cathedral is built. It’s at the bottom of a steep hill, in a depression, so that it is almost invisible till you get right upon it. The village, which came later, stands on the hillside above. It is as if the builders didn’t want anyone to find them.

I spent a very happy morning exploring St. David’s and the bewitching peninsula on which it stands. Nearly everywhere in Pembrokeshire the land ends in rounded cliffs, like the backs of whales, which provide the most striking and memorable views. It is about as lovely as a coast can get.

In the afternoon, I drove on to Fishguard, the place that I was most eager to see. I have a very fond memory of Fishguard, which is a little strange because I was only there for eight or nine hours forty years ago and I spent most of that time asleep. In the summer of 1973 when I was hitchhiking around Europe and was on my way to Ireland, some kindly truck driver dropped me in the town very late at night. I remember that I was by a little park opposite a row of shops, all with awnings. The streetlamp cast a stark light distinctly reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting. It seemed a little corner of perfection. I looked around the upper town, but, finding nowhere better, I returned to the compact park, spread my sleeping bag, and slept on the dewy grass. In the morning, I woke very early, with Fishguard still asleep, and walked down a steep curving road to the harbor and caught the first ferry to Rosslare, in Ireland.