Parallel ship...

A picture of the A55 and if you look closely you’ll just see the mast of a ship sticking up above the sea wall. Not the best picture I grant you, but the best I could get as we crawled past the shipwreck yesterday afternoon.

The A55, such a great road until it isn’t and it doesn’t take too much to make it isn’t. Wide loads and overturned caravans have cost us hours, breakdowns are frequent, last year there was a threatening suicidal jumper on a pedestrian bridge (he didn’t though) and of course there was that time it flooded and we never made it to the cottage and had to detour and stay at my mum’s on Anglesey. It was closed again last week. A ship, MV Carrier, got into trouble in the storm and was washed parallel against the sea wall at Llanddulas last Tuesday just by the jetty where they load the ships with stone taken from the quarry on the other side of the road.

Since we started coming to Wales we’ve played a game based around the boats that fill up at the jetty. It’s simple enough; we predict whether there are any boats loading at the jetty, whether any are waiting for the tide to turn so that they can come into the jetty and how many lights are going to be out in the three long tunnels after the jetty.

For a while we also tried to guess whether the man at the roundabout would be cooking his tea… but then he put nets up at the window, so that stopped that (killjoy).

We play the same game on the way back along the A55, but with a slight variation as there aren’t the tunnels so we guess how many seagulls will be standing on the walls along the curvy bit which now has a 30 mile an hour speed limit.

Yes, I know that road very well having travelled it thousands of times.

Sometimes, by the tunnels, the wind is so strong off the Irish Sea that it can sweep you across the road in a gust. Once a deer sprang out of the darkness and bounded over our bonnet missing us by millimetres. We know every short cut, every alternative route, but by and large the A55 is a good road.

The ship that was flung onto the rocks last week was so badly holed that it is going to have to be broken up to move it, a spectacle to slow the traffic for as long as it takes; about 10 weeks estimated. It proves the power of the sea, making me realise that behind the sea wall on the A55 is a monster that we will never control. Broken and holed, that once proud ship is now just a pile of scrap beaten by a force it couldn’t control or even avoid.

Draw your own parallels.