Tywyn Solstice is dedicated to the summer camping and caravan holidays that my family took in the 1970s. Tywyn is the correct Welsh spelling of the town usually known as Towyn in Conwy on the North Wales coast. Not to be confused with Tywyn formerly Towyn, another town by the sea in Cardigan Bay. Tywyn means dune in Welsh, hence its obvious popularity as a seaside village name.

The village in Coney is the one known for being flooded in 1990 when the sea walls were breached by high tides and gale force winds. Marion and Kristoph are visiting in 1994, when it had been fixed.

I remember it from the 1970s because my dad’s car was so rubbish and it had taken all day to drive from Lancshire via Liverpool, the Mersey Tunnel, the Wirral, Chester, Flint, that we pronounced it “Tow-in”. That was very nearly the only way we were going to get there.

How My Dad Drove To Wales

But having got there, and pitched the tent or taken up residence in a rented static caravan we were in another world. The caravan site I most vividly remember was huge. It stretched along the side of the railway line. There was a footbridge over it and then sand dunes to climb over, and beyond that was a beautiful beach, far cleaner than the ones I was used to in polluted Blackpool and Southport. It was so clean that it DID have jellyfish, which I never saw in either of the other places - and really fantastic sunsets. Obviously I never watched the sunset in a romantic situation with a man. I was about eight, nine or ten when these holidays happened. But I always remembered those sunsets.

I don’t think we were ever there for a summer solstice. School holidays would be mid-July to September 1st, and we would have gone on any ‘big’ holiday during ‘Preston Fortnight’ – the last two weeks of July – which was the traditional time that the factories of Preston shut and everyone went on holiday. In the mid-1970s, that tradition still more or less held. There weren’t as many big supermarkets and superstores as there are now, and even the likes of Woolworths and Marks and Spensers would be closed for ‘Preston Fortnight’. Since my dad worked in Leyland and their ‘week’ was in September, we sometimes got two holidays in the year and it might well have been one of those second holidays that I remember the most vividly.

The picnic in the weightless futuristic picnic hamper, is my idea of a perfect picnic supper. I always brought wine and stilton when I went camping as an adult, while crusty bread and butter and ham and egg salad are good filling picnic food. The picnics back in the 1970s never had stilton or wine. But they usually had hard boiled eggs and pork pies. And sometimes we would have hot pot in a big thermos flask or instant mashed potato and gravy made up on the spot with hot water in another thermos. They were nice, nourishing meals, but on the whole I prefer Marion and Kristoph’s picnic.

The TARDIS being towed as a caravan through the Mersey tunnel and along that same route that my dad so often brought us was wishful thinking, remembering how uncomfortable those journeys could get after a few hours. It would have been nice to go back home by TARDIS.

As well as giving Marion and Kristoph one more romantic location on Earth, this story also introduces some Gallifreyan traditions like the solstice ball. I haven’t actually done a Solstice Ball story, but I will get around to it some time. Of course, when I wrote this, the idea of the Untempered Schism and the ritual involving the eight year olds hadn’t come into play on TV, so the solstice dedication of young Time Lord candidates was my own rite of passage for Gallifreyan children.

Kristoph admiring the sunset that reminds him of Gallifrey, of course presages his own son, in Theta Sigma, and in the Nine and Ten stories watching sunsets on many other planets. The latter, of course, look with sadness, knowing that Gallifrey’s burnt orange skies are no more. These are happier times.

Marion, looking up at the blue sky and knowing she will miss that when she is under the Gallifreyan sky, is the beginning of her coming to terms with leaving Earth to be – as Kristoph points out – the first of her kind to travel beyond her solar system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towyn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tywyn