The Imagined Village

In 1925, Clough Williams-Ellis borrowed "a modest amount" from the Midland Bank, and bought the estate of Aber Iâ on the coast of North Wales. The name means 'glacial estuary', but the first thing he did was change it to Portmeirion: 'port' for the coastal location and 'meirion' because it was in the county of Merioneth. On this site he set about building his village - his very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar village. It isn't fake, exactly, because there's no pretence that it's anything other than one man's dream, take it or leave it:

If you take it - if you step through those inviting gates - you accept the sense of unreality as part of the deal. For those who (like three of our foursome) had first met Portmeirion through The Prisoner, there's something sinister about this: just enough to add spice to all that prettiness. We discussed something that hadn't occurred to me before, whether some genius came up with Portmeirion as a location when The Prisoner was being planned, or whether it was Portmeirion that shaped The Prisoner; and on no evidence other than what seemed more likely, inclined to the latter. Back home, the internet provides evidence for this several episodes of Danger Man, the precursor to The Prisoner, were filmed here.

( Shall we explore...? )

Because it is only too easy to escape from the Village; the car park lies through that tunnel...

Reinventing the wheel

Last week in the Guardian Zoe Williams tested celebrity drinks brands. I'm interested in drinks (if not celebrities) and anyway, I'll read anything Zoe Williams writes. This is what she had to say about Emma Watson's Renais gin:

Watson is the closest you'll come to a celebrity with an authentic purpose and hinterland in this market. With her brother, she's created a gin from salvaged grape skins, on the Burgundy estate where their father has been making wine for 30 years. Watson senior has an award for his chablis, which they almost never give anyone who isn't French...

She goes on to say nice things about it. But I was distracted by the way she presents the source as a creative, new idea: distilling the must that remains when the grapes have been pressed for wine, how clever, who would have thought of that?

...The photographer was Italian and raised the inconvenient objection that a spirit made of grape skins is a grappa. That just wouldn’t sound very Watson, though.

Also, while a spirit made of Italian grape skins is a grappa, a spirit made of grape skins from Chablis is a marc de Bourgogne. Which I think of as a product with much higher prestige than gin: but I'm probably out of touch.