Well, it looks like here on the St. David's Peninsula we've finally killed the golden goose - by which I mean that the very thing that people used to come here for is now dead.

The quiet beaches and coves, sea cliffs and dunes, hills and estuaries and undisturbed wildlife that are the reason the region was given National Park status sixty years ago are largely now a thing of the past - at least through July and August.

Whatever word you want to use - packed, crowed, jammed, crammed - is the only way to describe the roads, car parks, campsites, beaches, waves, bars, shops and restaurants of the area, which makes it impossible to enjoy the quiet solitude that, surely, national parks are all about.

Locals tend to go into hiding at this time of year - I haven't visited the most popular beach, Whitesands, since the first week of July - because the crowds can drive you mad, and we wonder why the hell anyone would want to visit the shitfight that is Whitesands or Newgale on a sunny day in August? At the same time you can't blame people for wanting to discover such a potentially lovely corner of the world for themselves.

But hell, they don't have make a mess of it all - litter all over the beach and, even worse, youthful cretins who get back to nature by camping in the dunes, lighting a fire and then leaving the next day without troubling themselves to remove their empty beer cans and bottles, food wrappers and the like. There's no excuse for this kind of behaviour - any half-educated 18-year-old who has the wherewithal to want to go wild camping should also have the intelligence to leave their campsite as they found it - those who don't deserve their arses kicked until they can't sit in front of their computer screen for a week.

The irony of all this, however, is the very architects of all this overcrowding and general unpleasantness are me and my peers. Amongst my friends are surf shop and surf school owners, outdoor centre owners, café, B&B and gallery owners, all of whom make a good living out of tourism.

And then there's people like me who write about the place, or photograph it, or paint it, which encourages yet more people to come, so who are we to moan about St. David's no longer being like it was when we rolled up here in the 70s or 80s?

Indeed, we're the ones who have killed the golden goose. Those golden eggs are now made of fool's gold and I dread to think what the place will be like in another twenty years or so.

Maybe it's time to move on to somewhere quieter - and screw that up too. After all, it's what humans do best.

The insidious and hideous march of Health & Safety continues like an unstoppable swarm of army ants - I see that Freshwater West, a beach I surf from time to time, is now patrolled by lifeguards.

One of the great joys of surfing at 'Fresh West' in the past was its wildness - totally undeveloped and with no commercialisation bar an ice cream van, just a lovely environmentof waves, sand and dunes (with the occasional bang! from the nearby Army firing range - a pointless blot on the landscape best left for another rant).

This meant of course that it was up to the individual to look after him or herself when surfing here, but in this limp wristed nation that will never do, will it?

We must ensure everyone is wrapped in cotton woool, protected from themselves and never allowed to get anywhere near the slightest whiff of danger or excitement.

So now we have lifeguards strutting up and down the beach telling us where we can and can't go.

My advice would be to tell them and the RNLI where they can go. Why can't the powers that be just leave a few bits of this increasingly crowded and paranoid nation alone, to be enjoyed as nature intended?

We don't need to have our hands held every step of the way through life - bloody hell, at this rate in another twenty years we'll have a nation of wimpy milkfops who daren't cross the road without getting written permission, let alone hit a surf beach without full lifeguard cover.

Pathetic... 

P.S. It has come to my attention that my sentiments have been echoed recently by somoe dude at the Daily Telegraph called Harry Mount. Much as it pains me to agree with some braying middle class twerp (he's a cousin of David Cameron so can he be anything else?) in this instance I must tug my working class forelock in his direction.

There again it is a bit rich foor some interloper from London to be whining on about our beaches when its London types like him who are usually the useless prats who need rescuing and thus give the RNLI a goood excuse to start needlessly patrolling the beach.

I say let the London types drown, the locals enjoy the surf unmolested and the RNLI remain in Tenby and everybody will be well served.

 

In recent years it's become the norm to charge or fine the ‘great' British public for just about everything that a human being can be charged or fined for - we get hammered by excessive taxes on fuel, shafted whenever we try to park anywhere and nailed if we creep a few miles above the speed limit or inadvertently drop litter thanks to - get this - being the third most surveillanceobsessed nation on Earth, after only China and Russia I believe.

But much as I think every CCTV camera in Britain should be smashed into tiny pieces and returned to its owner, especially since there is no proof that they even reduce crime (but plenty of proof that they truly piss people off) that's not what this rant is about.

Nope, this is all about the biggest rip off of them all - 0870 phone numbers. It amazes me that so little is done to prevent this total con by business and the phone companies - a system that allows you to be charged up to 50p per minute for what was once charged at local call rates is a feckin disgrace.

It's not like you get a better service after all is it? The average 0870 number results in the poor sap on the paying end being first given an array of numbers to push depending on what their call is about (and if your call isn't about anything on the list then you're stuffed) and then, having pressed the appropriate number going through the same process again, and perhaps again - and maybe even again...

All the time, of course, you are paying 50p per minute to the company, a company that you may even be ringing to spend money with (what a peculiarly British form of capitalism - charge the dolts for doing business with us) as well as the phone company who are in cahoots with the bastards.

Once you've negotiated your way through this maze of numbers you will, without any shadow of a doubt, be put on hold - as of course you should be. Well, think about it - by putting you on hold the bastards make a bit more money out of you and even better they can employ fewer workers in their call centre somewhere east of Mumbai.

With luck though, you may eventually get through to someone who can help you with your query - assuming, that is, you can understand them. I used to get annoyed at these fruitless conversations with Asian call centre workers who I can't understand but increasingly these days I feel sorry for them, for they too are being shafted in that they'll be working long hours in a crappy environment on relatively low pay and no doubt receiving flack from people like me who struggle to decipher their accents, as no doubt they do in their turn with me.

But let's just assume you do after some minutes get an understandable and acceptable answer to your query, which may well have been something as simple as trying to find the time of a train service.

This could quite easily have taken you ten minutes and have cost you up to £5! Five quid!!

It's not just a blatant rip-off, it's immoral and unethical and it even leaves the USA for dead in terms of avarice and unbridled capitalism. And it's a sign of what a succession of Labour and Conservative governments have done to this country and I hope that in two days time when the votes for the 2010 election are counted they both get the kind of shafting they've been giving us for decades.

But I know they won't because the ‘great' British public haven't got the wit or intelligence kick the buggers out, so I guess we get what we deserve.

But that's another story. In the meantime you can fight back in a small way. Just log on to the estimable http://www.saynoto0870.com/ where you'll find easy access to a whole host of alternative, standard rate numbers instead of the premium rate crap we're fed these days.

Go on, it's worth the few seconds it takes to get one over on the bastards...

 

I note that Gillian Duffy, the pensioner who Gordon Brown last week called ‘bigoted', has recently pocketed £80,000 from upstanding organ the Mail on Sunday for, one presumes, the full low down on how Mr Brown's remarks so devastated her that only eighty grand from the scummiest newspaper in Britain would help her overcome the associated trauma.

(I say ‘one presumes' by the way because, to coin a phrase, I wouldn't even wipe my arse on the Mail on Sunday let alone read it. And before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy for writing for said publication in the past, no, no - that's simply a case of nabbing a few quid from the enemy as the opportunity arises).

In fact it's Mrs Duffy who is the hypocrite - after having understandably been offended by Mr Brown's pathetic remarks, and despite having been a Labour supporter all her life she then chucks away her principles for eighty grand of Tory blood money.

The least she could have done is to have taken the money from a left-of-centre newspaper rather than the Fascist on Sunday. There again, can one really blame a working class pensioner for abandoning her ethics when almost four times the annual average wage is thrust in front of her like that?

It's the way of the world these days - have the misfortune/good fortune to say something controversial to a leading politician and there's every chance you may make a few quid out of it.

And if that seems a tad venal, well, guess where the inspiration for grabbing every penny you can and bugger everyone else comes from?

If only David Cameron or Lord Mandelson would visit St David's. There again, punching the buggers may land you with a lot more than a few quid from a newspaper...

I was watching the estimable Ray Mears on TV recently, tracking wolves in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, a place I know quite well having worked there for several months a few years ago.

At the time Ray was there wolves were just about to be removed from the endangered species list after being successfully reintroduced to the region in the 90s, although during filming some cretin hadjumped the gun and already poisoned a young bitch a few days before the ban on wolf hunting and killing was due to be lifted.

It's a good bet that said cretin was either a rancher or in some way involved with ranching, for as anyone who has visited this spectacular part of the world will know, it is ranchers and landowners who have lobbied to be allowed to massacre wolves once again as their forebears did in the last century.

Their justification for this was eloquently put by some moustached rancher who, had he been in New York, would have been mistaken for the gayest shirtlifter since Liberace - "They [wolves] ain't meant to be here".

Now despite my derogatory  description of Mr Gaylord I can quite see what he means - if you choose to raise cattle and sheep in rugged mountains and forests of course wolves "ain't meant to be there" as they'll do what's natural to them and hunt the dumb, methane emitting critters that you make your living from.

Two points come to mind though: perhaps if, Mr Gaylord, you looked after your animals more responsibly the wolves wouldn't get them? What, your ranch is too big for that to be feasible?

Well, that's perhaps because neither the cattle nor sheep which require vast tracts of land across which to shit and fart are not native to the Rockies, which rather makes your moronic comment about wolves not being meant to be there all the more ridiculous.

It's the wolves that are meant to be there and you and your animals that ain't.

But despite this being the natural order of things we all know who will be allowed to remain and exploit the land and who and what will be persecuted for having the gall to be native to the region.

As Ray Mears said at the end of the programme, it's surely a sign of how far humans have progressed when they're able to live alongside their fellow creatures rather than kill them (or words to that effect).

In which case it would seem many of the ranchers of the Rocky Mountains haven't actually progressed as far as apes yet...

Yesterday was a 'five-star' day on the Severn Bore, meaning the biggest and longest wave(s) of the year would be beetling up said river thanks to the larger tides of the equinoctial period.

 These days such things attract hordes of 'surfers' for the bore is no longer the bizarre surf experience it once was - as you can tell from the newspaper pics of literally dozensof people riding it.

 Loads of longboards, crockfuls of canoes and kayaks, barrel loads of boogie boards - and a positive rash of 'surfers' who couldn't or weren't prepared to stand up on their boards.

So many people were on the bore that there wasn't room for everyone, and whilst I'm not suggesting that those who can't or won't stand up and surf properly shouldn't be allowed to surf it, perhaps real surfers should be given priority and allowed the first wave of the bore, and all the pseudo-surfers could take the next one.

Why? Well, apart from the understandable contempt of proper surfers for all those inferior breeds who choose not to stand up and be counted, there's the practical fact that maneouvering whilst standing on a board is harder and more likely to result in a wipeout than when you're sitting or lying down, so those who surf properly should get priority for having taken the time and effort to master the harder activity.

 Of course there's not a hope in hell that this will ever happen and the wannabe surfers who probably come here in coaches on organised trips (not having the nouse to work out things like tides and access points themselves) will continue to clog up the bore in years to come.

Just like they do on real waves in the summer...

The worrying times for freelancers continue. Last year I made the mistake of contributing a few articles and pics to a new website, Simonseeks.com (which rather disturbingly has just won some website of the year award - presumably awarded by an organisation that considers it perfectly legitimate for freelance travel writers to be paid next to nothing for their work).

The way the site worksis that you contribute material, for free, go through a tedious and time consuming editorial process to which no-one responds at Simonseeks, and eventually receive payment based on the number of hits your articles get.

Having some time to spare I thought I might as well give it a go - now I realise that was a waste of said spare time, having recently received £3.49 for my three features (well, I've requested it, haven't actually had it yet).

To be fair Simonseeks do advise quite clearly of their policy, but what it effectively amounts to is a situation where idiots like me populate their website for virtually nothing, they then get advertisers on board, and go on to win awards and no doubt develop a healthy bank balance on the back of the suckers who provide the material.

 And they clearly see nothing exploitative in this arrangement, actually boasting in a recent newsletter that some contributors are receiving as much as £40 a month. Whoop-de-doo!

I guess people like me only have ourselves to blame though. If we professionals simply left it to the amateurs and wannabes to provide copy for these sites they probaby wouldn't last too long; but in our continual desperation to make a living from writing we grasp at straws like this only to actually make things worse for everyone since the Internet now seems to be a happy hunting ground for websites keen to post material provided free or for next to nothing.

And what's worse, they seem to think there's nothing wrong in this whole situation. Well, I don't care how Simonseeks tries to justify its policies, in my opinion they're simply exploiting people and from now on they can go and feckin seek somewhere else for work as far as I'm concerned.

Seriously, if you're a fellow writer, give these websites short shrift - in the long run they'll kill off the profession of real travel writing - and quite possibly many other types of writing too.

 

Last Saturday saw Hollywood come to West Wales - well, that's a lie actually, it was far better than Hollywood.

Theatr Mwldan in Cardigan saw the penultimate stop of the Banff Mountain Film Festival's UK tour, and a fine night of outdoor film action it was.

From free climbing to kayaking, powder skiing to mountain biking, we saw a collection of award winning films from the 2009Banff Mountain Film Festival that were variously inspirational, amusing and heartbreaking.

It also made me realise what a load of tinsel town dross comes out of Hollywood compared to the real lives of the people featured in these films - give me a shot of a man on a board or skis anyday as opposed to overpaid whiners like Mel Gibson (and even worse he's an Aussie....!).

Talking of film festivals, this is perhaps a pertinent point to bring to the attention of the two readers of this blog (and I'm one of them) news of the First St. David's Surf Film Festival, due to be held Oct 22-24 2010.

I'm one of the organisers of what we believe will be the first festival of its kind in the UK, and these are very early days as yet, but a full programme of events will appear in the fullness of time at www.surffilmfestival.co.uk

Book early to avoid disappointment!

I'm realistic enough to know that this blog receives about the same number of visits as Ian Brady, but for those of you who might be contemplating a career in freelance journalism, here's a tip - DON'T WRITE FOR NOWT!

Whilst rates for articles in the print media stagnate or even drop, there's an increasing tendency of the editors of many websites to offer payment based onlyon the number of hits your article receives (if any) - this effectively means you let them have a thousand words and several hours of your time and skill and receive what are never less than paltry returns months - maybe even years - after you've written your piece, based on the amount of traffic its generated and the honesty of the website owners in letting you know (cos there's no way you'll ever be able to find out for yourself).

Here's an example of what I mean:

The editor of the website Travel Intelligence wanted me to write a blog over the winter based on my forthcoming travels. Once it had all been agreed back came a message saying they wouldn't be able to pay altho I would receive royalties based on the amount of traffic my work generated.

I wrote back:

Hi Isabel,

At the risk of sounding like a money grabbing git I think I'll pass on it for now. I've made a decision not to work in future without receiving direct payment, as much on principle as anything else since it seems to be turning into a common feature of writing for websites these days.

I appreciate that I may make a little money in the long term but I would have to get a massive number of hits on my stuff to receive anything like the payment such an article/s would normally expect to receive in the print media, and to be honest I really don't have the time to work for what will probably be very little.

It's a peculiar aspect of web journalism isn't it? I can't think of any other profession that would operate on the same basis - it's a bit like telling a plumber "I can't pay you for the job but I'll let you have royalties based on the number of showers I have"!!

Best wishes

Alf

I really don't understand where these people are coming from in expecting experienced and professional writers to work on this basis. Sure, if you're making a start in the business its a chance to get your work published but even then why work for next to nothing?

Your writing would have to be something very, very special to get noticed out there in the infinite universe of the interweb and it's highly unlikely to generate much more work for you, and even less so any real income.

I'm probably swimming against the current but bollocks to the lot of them, I ain't working for free and from now in every time I'm asked the bugger who did the questioning will be getting a two word response.

 

I recently sent a feature proposal to the editor of a Swiss based internet mag that goes by the awful title of 'Gatsby Magazine'. It's aimed at the kind of high flyers who wear too much jewellery and appear to have bodies made of soft matte plastic so I thought there might be some money in writing for it - mistakenly it seems as readingbetween the lines it seems it may be going under.

Should this be the case I dare say the world of internet publishing will survive its demise...

Anyway, I asked if they'd be interested in a piece on surfing in the Maldives, to which I received the reply '...crisis has hit and the Maldives are going under, so it's not of interest to us. We are not currently commissioning anyone.'

My incredibly witty response was 'Thanks Stefan - I think it will be a few years yet before the Maldives sink mate! You're the first editor I've come across who has turned down a travel story because the place in question is about to sink. Excellent! Cheers. Alf'.

Back came the polite but stinging response 'If you read my email again you may get the irony... As I said, we are not currently in a position to commission anyone. There is no reason to get snappy. Please don't contact us again. Best regards etc.'

Imagine my horror at discovering I could no longer detect irony when it spat in my face. And even worse, my puerile response, to the effect that a lack of a sense of humour was only to be expected from someone of Swiss background was met with the terse remark 'I'm Brazilian. Goodbye'.

So, that's me put in my place.

Don't bother reading the mag tho', it's full of pretentious tosh - when you can actually access it. Oh, go on then, find out for yourself - www.gatsbymagazine.com