Monday and Tuesday – 22nd./23rd. March 1976

Swansea field trip day 1

Now, this is typical of me: I would be away from home for over a week so what did I do? Clean and tidy my room of course! No really – that is what I did. Not out of the flat until 11:30 then on the 106 bus to the nearest tube station that would get me to Paddington.

No, I wasn’t on my way home to Devon, but instead on the 13:00 to Swansea, armed with the £10.21 return train ticket I picked up last week. This was a fast train; no stops in England and only a few in Wales. Do we have trains like that now?

The Joint School of Geography were guests of the University of Swansea for the next week. Their students were away home for Easter so we camped out in their rooms in Halls of Residence. I wonder if they knew a bunch of noisy Londoners would be sleeping in their beds while they were away…

The rooms were good – at least as good if not better than ours at LSE – and I was lucky enough to have a single room. For some reason my diary records that we ‘collected our maps’ before getting to the nearest pub for the night. Perhaps we might need one to find our way home later? We were geographer’s after all.

Anyway, my diary tails off a bit at this point…

Swansea field trip day 2

I suppose technically this is day 1 of the actual field trip; yesterday was just getting here and finding a good pub. My diary is honest – and a bit of a hoot:

“Didn’t get much sleep and was feeling pretty dizzy; got up early and desperate for a piss. Enjoyed a good full breakfast at 8am.”

So, I have to assume that we not only found a good pub but it would seem likely that I sampled a rather large selection of local beers. That is something of a recurring event for me at this time. Well, all times really.

Anyway, we were on the road at 09:15 and my diary gets a bit weird here. It would seem that it was a “pretty uninspiring trip” but in the next sentence “I quite enjoyed it”. I find it difficult to reconcile those two coterminous statements. The beer must have been really quite good.

I also recorded that there was rather a lot of snow about, so I have to assume that our coach took us up into The Valleys. And that is all it was on that first day – a coach trip. South Wales from a charabanc window. Not really geography is it!

I suspect that our lecturers may have planned this deliberately. Letting a bunch of pissed geographers loose in the Welsh countryside on day one was probably thought to be a bit unwise. Smart buggers.

From our windows we were able to get a good view of open-cast mining and steel works, but my diary says very little about that. I was more concerned with getting back in time for dinner, the Old Grey Whistle Test and more beer – and mingling. A lot of mingling it would appear.

My diary faithfully records my bedtime as 02:50. I am usually quite fastidious about such things so, despite the purple haze that seemed to follow me everywhere I suspect that this was about right. And I had to be up and about at 07:30 in the morning…