Wild Wales II

An old Roman bridge, the near-death brain — and unreasonable decision-making

Sturdy.

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The road devolves.

We’ve definitely never gone this way before. It’s a single lane with a strip of grass down the middle.

It feels now as if we’ve strayed far from Mordor back to the Shire. The lane loops up and through hedges, over little hills, past barns and horses.

There’s a tree in a field we pass, an oak. It’s 800 years old, at least. It would take tens of seconds to walk around its bole, so massive is it.

I venture that maybe we’ve gone the wrong way. Joel is insistent that this route came courtesy of Apple Maps.

“It’s nice! I like it.”

“I do too, but it’s definitely a new route. It feels like we’re trying to sneak into Wales without being spotted.”

The roads are slick with rain and the sky is a navy corduroy — but I have to squint because the sun is so bright. Up ahead over the mountains, sunlight spills on a few white pillows of cloud. The rest is dark.

“What is with this fucking weather? Fifteen minutes of rain, then fifteen minutes of sun in an infinite loop. I think this would be the worst weather ever. Way worse than endless rain. You could never get cosy inside while it’s raining without the sun coming out and ruining it. And if you were outside you’d be running for cover all the time.”

“Plants would love it though.”

“Yeah but like also imagine: you’re hiking. It starts raining. You put your waterproofs on and the sun comes out. So you take your waterproofs off. Repeat, ad infinitum.”

He’s not listening.

“That turn felt familiar. I think I’ve been here before.”

I pout because he’s unmoved by my insights about variable weather.

“Maybe you’re just having flashbacks down your ancestral line.”

“No, seriously, we came this way once.”

“No, seriously, it’s just because you know this place in your bones.”

I’m teasing him because this is the kind of shit he doesn’t buy at all. Past lives, memories imbued in a place, voices in the earth. He doesn’t believe any of it. When we go, we go.

Me, I’m not so sure.

I hear it like a concatenation of voices: not angry, just untold. All the unrecorded stories. Sometimes it seems they hang about and limpet on if you’re paying attention, begging to be told.

There is a tendency to become greedy — acquisitive for perspective. What stories can I soak up from this place, like a sponge? Like an Anchorite, drinking souls like wine, in The Bone Clocks. Like Yevtushenko making his lament against destruction, the loss of untold tales.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.

Not people die but worlds die in them.

Last week, The Guardian Long Reads section ran a piece on what happens in your brain after clinical death: The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’ .

The piece tells how the study of “what happens to our brains when we die” was long-maligned. Spiritualists and Christian fundamentalists hijacked the near-death reports of out-of-body experiences as proof of the existence of a separate soul. The out-of-body anecdotes range from eerie to impossible: one woman awoke saying there was a shoe on a far-off window ledge of the hospital, which turned out to actually be there. Hardly a peer-reviewed finding, but weird af nonetheless.

Serious scientific funding turned up its nose at this perceived pseudo-science and research stagnated.

Now, a small group of “physicalists” are dedicated to examining, from a strictly biological perspective, what happens in your brain amidst “a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine” when your heart stops and brain loses oxygen.

It seems there are long stretches, up to many several minutes after clinical death, when the brain is flooded with chemicals. Electrical activity fires frantically in areas related to memory, empathy and physical sensation.

Then, oxygen-starved, it slows and fades.

And we’re done.

Why then do all those untold, unheard stories still haunt me?

We passed a boarded up church. I had a good look. It struck me as the last word in forlorn.

“You don’t see that everyday. A boarded-up church.”

“I don’t know. I’ve always been pretty bored at church.”

A slow sideways look, then the guffaw. He’s so proud of his puns.

“Have you? What about when you were still religious?”

I’ve mentioned this before, haven’t I. Joel was homeschooled in a Christian fundamentalist family but is now one of the most dedicated atheists on the planet. He hasn’t a drop of spiritualism, is convinced we are nowt but nuts and bolts, programmable just like the software he designs.

He shrugs at my question. “I liked meeting people. That’s why church is so successful, because for some people it’s the only time of the week when they’re going to meet people not at work.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is community, babe.” I think about my closed village pub. I think about the lonely performative wasteland of “social” media.

I wonder if there’ll be a resurgence of interest in attending church if all the pubs shut.

Back when we were still on the motorway, near Birmingham, we passed a turn off for Wednesbury. Hang onto your boots, this gets a bit niche. Did you know there was a famous English legal case in Wednesbury — which gave birth to the absolutely brilliant concept in English law called “Wednesbury unreasonableness”? Unless you are also a lawyer (in which case: commiserations), you probably didn’t.

[Side note: Did you also know that “case spotting” — akin to trainspotting but with famous cases in English law — is a recognised leisure pursuit, amongst certain lawyers in England (not me)? It’s true. Inspired by the wacky facts in some of the groundbreaking cases, they spend their free time quietly travelling to the spot where Donoghue found that snail in her soda bottle or where the trespassers fell through the broken skylight or wherever and basking in a quiet glow, thinking of the timeless judgment of Lord Denning or whomever. Dozens, if not scores of them, will furiously outbid each other online for an original Carbolic Smoke Ball Company poster. To be very clear, this is not me. I am not one such Stockholm Syndrome prisoner fan, I just saw a sign for Wednesbury and it triggered some (violently unpleasant) memories of Finals. Anyway, I digress.]

Back to Wednesbury unreasonableness. It was, for a long time, the main test of whether a decision taken by a public body could be overturned by the courts: was that decision unreasonable?

A decision was unreasonable if it:

• gave undue relevance to irrelevant facts

• failed to give relevance to facts worthy of being considered

• was so completely absurd that no reasonable decision-maker could possibly have made it.

Pay attention to that last one, if you please.

Despite the salted caramel sugar-coated pretzel things, Joel is hungry again. It’s getting late and we are close but, near Dolwyddelan Castle, there are signs for a Roman bridge. It calls out to me, as these kind of things always do. I insist we turn off.

It isn’t around the first bend, or the second, or even the third.

I’m ready to give up but Joel is resolute. Hunger has blunted his decision-making. “Let’s just keep going, we’ll find it.”

Eventually:

“That might be it.”

A small bridge — and a sign that announces:

Weak bridge: maximum 1.8 tonnes.

“Um Joel.”

“It’s fine! This car doesn’t weigh 1.8 tonnes.”

Doesn’t it? Who ever fucking weighed it? “Um, I really don’t think we should.”

“I’m doing it.”

By what measure is this a reasonable decision? By no measure, Wednesbury be damned. He has failed to give relevance to facts worthy of being considered (the bridge is old, the car is heavy) and this is a decision so completely absurd that no reasonable decision-maker could possibly have made it.

I shut my eyes.

“Look, you’re on a 2,000 year old bridge.”

I look down. The river is low and flat. The track down to the bridge switchbacks up ahead off to the main road.

Somewhere below the churn of the river, I hear the thud of feet in leather, the soft rattle of spear and shield. Centurions marched here with nowt but killing on their brains. Like orcs.

Then we’re across it. The hungry bastard. He was right.

I turned around to look back. From this side, the sign stands out more clearly.

Maximum 18 tonnes.

Out in the hills, it is oxygen-rich. My brain floods with a heady mix of neurotransmitters. I feel slow in the city, often barely-sentient, brain dulled and depleted by lack of oxygen. Near death. Not out here in the Wild. We are skirting Weathertop and the Troll Shaws. We are in wild Wales and it’s bloody marvellous.

It’s late by the time we arrive.