why oh wye?

Afon Gwy, long ago known as Guoy, was later named Vaga (“wandering”). Like a fluvial flâneur. The fourth longest river in Britain flows from its shared source on Pumlumon down to Cas-Gwent (Chepstow) where it reacquaints itself with Afon Hafren (Severn). The Latin epithet Vaga cognates with vague and vagabond. Fittingly, the river meanders even more than my blogs in its crooks and loops twixt Cymru and Lloegr. En route, history seeps from the pointing of buildings in places I pass, along the oft-contested borderlands, hinterlands and no-man’s lands.

We stopped at what I now call “The Old Town”: town of The Old. Arriving in time for a traditional Poets’ Day (a.k.a. late Friday afternoon; acronym explained on request), the pavement culture was in full flow, patrons enjoying the warm autumn sun. It wasn't long before we noticed something else: something eerie. There were no young people. None. Later, inside a busy cavernous branch of a well known corporate boozer, formerly a postal sorting office, it was the same. There was a healthy cosmopolitan cross cultural vibe. But age-wise, everyone was of similar vintage to me. 

I’ve written previously about becoming invisible in later life, but here it was the young who had faded from view. A few, but maybe in their forties, appeared on the street outside a “destination” restaurant, enjoying the blue smoke that accompanied them. I wondered if my ramblings here had been influenced by inadvertently inhaling their stuff second-hand, and was reminded of the streets of Kathmandu some years before.

Had the others migrated in search of work, or was there a curfew created by the town council’s likely demographic? Were they in self-imposed curfew, saving their pennies hopefully for tickets to an upcoming and eye-wateringly extortionate stadium performance by “those”, or by “her”? Was something more ominous at work, as in the dystopian future predicted sixty years previously by Brian Aldiss? His novel Greybeard was located by another long river, Afon Tafwys (Thames) at Rhydychen (Oxford) [my use of the old Cymraeg names: not his]. People had become sterile post-apocalypse. There were no more young.

I followed a guided-walks leaflet that meandered and floated around the back lanes, former railway tracks and business parks on the outskirts. Whether by accident or design, the perimeter housed estates of bungalows ripe for retirement. Ripe for social isolation too, being so far from the town's infrastructure. The centre saw large fancy period houses for the affluent middle aged. There was yet hope in this topsy-turvy version of town planning, if planning it ever was. Like the green shoots of recovery appearing at the end of Greybeard, modern estates for young families were being developed, in the middle ground, brownfield plots, between the centre and the edge. 

This still didn't answer the question of where the youngsters were on a Friday night; or any other night. The day before our departure, they seemed to slowly reappear, as if released from somewhere in the town's history by the river spirits.  At 69 going on 19, it was good to see their return. As I will soon. It's a hauntingly beautiful and characterful town. Full of characters, on the edge of the Forest of Dean.

LINKS

https://cambriancrumbs.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-invisible-man.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Wye
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greybeard