Weston-super-Mare | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Weston-super-Mare is a ghost town with tracksuits.

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You could be a trainee astronaut – if there is such a vocation – or have a Gary Kasparov-level IQ, but if you’re blessed with a thick West Country accent you just sound … profoundly thick to me. The dialect is essentially someone throwing up all over their vowels. Horror show.

Home of John Cleese, a.k.a. the lankiest goose-stepping mustachioed Python in history, Jeffrey Archer (cunt), and … Jill Dando, the highlight is the pier, scene of quite the transcendental moment in The Remains of the Day (1993) when Anthony Hopkins’ loyal butler realises his life was a waste of oxygen. He could have married Emma Thompson but nah, he instead opted to polish ornaments for James Fox. A truly tragic movie in the most understated way. The pier aside, the town is a shithole that makes Edinburgh look like Athens in the age of Aristotle.

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I am reminded of that Rust Cohl quote in True Detective when he rocks up to a hick village: “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading.”

But it was still better than Blackpool.

Dry January in Weston-super-Mare.

Weston-super-Mare appears as a West Country seaside relic from the 1950s, a chapter long before Ryanair and easyJet established themselves, apparently, as the conduit for poor people to see things other than factories. They seem simpler times, its agents unencumbered with the fatal liberality and accompanying ontological crises bequeathed to our generation. The birthplace of John Cleese and none other than Jeffrey Archer, the renowned borderline-midget Isambard Kingdom Brunel ‘chillaxed’ here when he wasn’t building the Bristol & Exeter Railway. I’d like to think he would have sat on that beach and taken a selfie were an iPhone readily available.

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The town is Blackpool sans the tower. There are shops and several pubs; I venture in a few for Beck’s Blue non-alcoholic concoctions that produce aghast stares from puzzled bartenders. The Tesco houses a security guard decked out in jackboots. It rains in the winter and, presumably, the other seasons. The pier looks nice, but it was nicer before a fire engulfed the pavilion in 2008. A crucial part of a quietly devastating motion picture, the Merchant Ivory-produced The Remains of the Day (1993), takes place on the pier.