For reasons both complex and uninteresting, I found myself living for a time in North Wales: near Bangor, to be precise.

Bangor is a university town, situated on the Menai Straits, the narrow stretch of water that separates the mainland from Anglesey and that was (and still is) spanned by the first suspension bridge in the world, built by the great engineer Thomas Telford.

It must be admitted that the twentieth century has not been kind to Bangor, at least architecturally. It is not so much that the architects and builders have constructed in deliberately bad taste; it is more that aesthetic considerations have simply not entered their minds at all. A kind of raw functionalism, which has spread like a fast-growing fungus, now overwhelms evidence of an earlier and more refined sensibility.

In the town, Welsh mingles on the streets with the unmistakable and increasingly nasal tones of modern middle-class English as spoken by the students. Their haunts express in full their downward cultural aspiration, and they are careful to appear scruffier than anyone would who put on normal clothes, while being also careful to distinguish themselves socially from the packs of lower-class youths who roam the streets in the tribal costume of the American ghetto underclass.

North Wales has changed since I visited in the final days of the Nonconformist chapel culture, which regarded sensuous pleasures such as eating well, or even eating at all on Sundays, as of the devil. Now there