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Mission Visits the UK - England & Wales, May 2013
Chapter 7th Portmeirion 3
Chapter 7th: Monday afternoon
Mission as As No. 2
and evening at Portmeirion. You may have noticed there aren't many photos of the author in the previous two chapters. That is about to be remedied. In fact, you are about to be awash in them, something for which I apologize in advance. Featuring Mission toughening up and playing Prisoner No. 5-3/4; Talking of Jean, Amanda and Leri and some thoughts on how reenacting makes the shy brave. Or at least willing to be photographed. A lot.
Deciding that was enough mountaineering about the grounds for the day, I headed back to the Village. The front desk girl informed me that my room was now ready, so I got myself installed there by the most cantankerous doorman I've seen to date. Our conversation went sort of like this. "Where's your car parked?"
The Wonderfully Helpful Porter from Sunday
"I don't know the room number. It's parked in front of my old room." "Yeah, but where's your car parked?" "In front of my old room. I don't know the number." "No, where's..." Etc. We literally did this four times in different ways, like an old Vaudevillian stand-up comedy duo. Finally he looked at me with disgust and went behind the desk and talked with the desk girl in Welsh. Then he ordered me to get in the Portmeirion van and drove me to my car so I could trail him to the new room. What a treasure of a guy. He offered to help with my luggage in a way that suggested this would be a giant pain in the arse, yet he seemed vaguely to expect a tip after I told him I could manage. Sorry about your luck, friend. (Contrast this with the gentleman who had acted as porter yesterday - seen at left - who had been absolutely charming and genuinely helpful and interested.)
My new place was very neat and
The Neptune 1 Bedroom
located smack in the middle of everything – it was called Neptune 1. It was in a building located between the Central Piazza and the Town Hall directly above several of the Village shops. The floors creaked marvelously when you trod upon them. I later asked one of the shop clerks below me if she could hear the squeaky floors. She said that she could, but she only paid attention to it in the winter when things were slow in the shop. "Then it's a bit creepy, you know?"
I collapsed in a chair after checking the room out and thought about taking a nap. Then the sun reemerged for it's second Monday show.
Now, my primary reason for coming here was to get a jacket with cream piping like the one Patrick McGoohan wore on the Prisoner and have some photos taken of me in it on the grounds. They sold these coats in the Prisoner gift ship, along with the pin he wore throughout the series. I had brought all the rest of the clothing that would be required to complete the look. The sun was shining. I was somewhat rested by this point... 
The Stuff That Crazy
Decisions are Made Of
and yet here I was hesitating.
What if I looked totally stupid? It's one thing to dress as a pirate surgeon when a whole bunch of other people are dressed as pirates, but it's another to be the only person dressed in costume in a place crawling with bus loads of tourists. (Literally. They brought bus loads of tourists into Portmeirion every day.)
It occurred to me that to come all this way to do this and then chicken out at the last possible moment was also pretty stupid. So which version of stupid did I want to subscribe to today? To aid in the decision-making process, the hotel had provided a fresh decanter of sherry. Actually, there was a refreshed bottle of sherry every day, so I took several deep draughts. Feeling the edge ebb away, I donned the slacks, the navy mock turtleneck and the stiff Vans Chukka shoes, shoved my wallet purposefully into my pocket (because we were definitely going to need that) and headed for the Prisoner shop.
There was
Jean Pinning the Number 6 Button on My Shiny New Jacket
a woman in the shop being waited on. I stood self-consciously aside and eyed the jacket meaningfully. The clerk noticed me while she was finishing with the customer. (Thank God it was a different person today.) She turned her full attention to me and I explained her what I wanted to do. She was delighted. So was the customer she had just been waiting on, who stood aside to watch the proceedings..
The customer (whose name was Jean as we'll learn shortly) even agreed to take a photo of me in front of the place (since it served as number 6's cottage in the series.) She took several other photos and my confidence in this goofy whim was restored.
I set off into the Village and scouted for places to snap photos of myself as Prisoner No. 5-3/4. I'd ask whomever was nearby to take them. This was another potential flaw in my plan; it depended on the good graces of my fellow tourists, most of whom were Welsh and British and probably thought I sounded funny. Fortunately everyone I asked proved to be more than willing to pitch in. Most of them actually seemed delighted by the whole idea.
 5-3/4 Leaving No. 6's Door |
 No. 5-3/4 At a Pavilion Table |
 No. 5-3/4 Walking Past the Hercules Statue |
 No. 6's Window |
No. 5-3/4 Manning the Stone Boat. (It's a bit piratey. Not much, but a bit.)
I left the main area of the Village and went off towards the hotel (which was down the hill from the Village) to get some photos by the stone boat, a location used significantly in several of The Prisoner episodes including Arrival, Free for All and Hammer Into Anvil, among others.
The stone boat is sort of interesting in its own right. Portmeirion architect Clough William-Ellis had refurbished an old ketch and anchored it in front of Portmeirion in the late 1920s to indicate to the local residents that the place was a going concern. His ketch wrecked a few years later during a sudden storm. Noticing that the upended shape of the wrecked ketch would fit nicely into the shape of the quay he was building at Portmeirion, William-Ellis decided to salvage what he could from it and build a new boat by the hotel out of concrete. That one couldn't possibly be wrecked.
Photo: 'Borrowed'
"You're hurting me. Put me down, please." (Unrecognizability Rating: 2%.
Turn in your
Mission Officious Pop-Culture Recognition Card if you can't instantly identify this.)
While there, I also grabbed some photos from the lawn restaurant in front of the hotel since it had a nice backdrop of the Village. This served as the Old Peoples Home (no apostrophe) in The Prisoner and was featured in Arrival and some other episodes.
I also discovered a rabbit going about his business while doing this. Regular Journal readers will know I can't resist taking photos of small wild creatures and incorporating them into the narrative, so here you go. (Just what I always wanted! My own little bunny rabbit! I will name him No. 434, and I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him and force him to tell me why he resigned. Or else I will let Rover squash him.)
 The Rabbit (Bottom center) |
 Close-up of the Portmeirion Rabbit |
 No. 5-3/4 on the Old Peoples Home Lawn |
The Photo Jean Liked of No. 5-3/4 and the
Green Grey Dome
Climbing back up the path from the hotel and stone boat to the Village, I ran into the the customer from the Prisoner shop who had pinned the number badge on me when I bought the jacket. She approached and told me her name was Jean and said that she and her friend Margaret had some time before their bus left and they wondered if there were some more photos I'd like for them to take. Well! God works in mysterious ways, doesn't He just?
So Jean helped me figure out how to get the photos of Number 5-3/4 coming from Number 2's house, called the Green Dome in the series and called The Pantheon at Portmeirion. I learned some potentially interesting factiods about the Pantheon dome - It was
originally made of plywood or something like that,
Jean and Mission aka No. 5-3/4
but was rebuilt in the 80s or 90s out of metal, which I suppose is when it went from being greenish to it's current darker grey tone. So it is now the Green Grey Dome. On the tour, I also learned that Village architect Clough-Williams added it because
Photo: The Bagleys
Lob, Having Other Plans
he felt every village needed a dome.
Now, I could make up some interesting new facts about the dome, like it was inhabited by rabid monkeys during the Carter administration or something like that, but I think that's enough poorly-recalled comments I heard about the Portmeirion Pantheon dome.
Jean took several photos before she got one that she felt looked good.. (She kept telling me I was too small in the photos.) I thanked her profusely to which she explained that she was happy to help with such an interesting project. I said, "Don't you mean daft?" (Daft is my new favorite word.) She said, "Well, they're almost the same thing sometimes, aren't they?" All my love to Jean, my new friend.
No. 5-3/4 and Helpful Tour Guide Amanda at
No. 6's House (The Round House's) Entrance
I also ran into the tour guide from this morning– whose name was Amanda. We chatted for a bit. Although she had been so knowledgeable and well-versed on the tour, she informed me that she had only been here since March of this year. I commented on she seemed to know the patter quite well and had answered questions from the many-headed with the best of them. "When you're a Scottish tour guide bringing people around a Welsh attraction, you had better know your stuff."
Amanda also
No. 5-3/4 at the Portmeirion Gothic Pavilion
told me I must get a photo coming through one of the transplanted arches – the Gothic Pavilion "That's where Number 6 came onto the chessboard in the episode Checkmate," she explained with due seriousness. You can see the result at right.
Amanda also suggested I go see Sandra in the Number 6 gift shop tomorrow since she was the resident Prisoner expert. Sandra didn't work on Sunday or Monday, so I vowed to don my garb tomorrow and do just as she suggested. I was sure Sandra knew far more about the series than I do. I'm just an amateur fan who wanted to see the lovely setting where it was filmed.
A Portmeirion Dessert - It's Like Fine Art
Dinner was delicious again, although I picked rather badly for my diet and wound up with an entrée containing meat. Fortunately it wasn't baked in and I was able to pick around it. I did a much better job choosing dessert, however, so I suppose it all balanced in the end.
I noticed something interesting about the hotel. Some of the staff are very friendly and willing to chat and some are not so much. (Some even gave me the impression they didn't approve of me at all.)
There were two people that I found particularly helpful – 
Photo: Leri, used with permission
Leri, A Friendly Portmeirion Waitress
a blonde girl and a red-haired woman. From them I learned that most of the staff spoke Welsh to each other and found out a little about my surroundings. .
I had several opportunities to chat with Leri, the blonde. She told me that she is currently going to university where she studies Performance and Media so that she can become a singer. She had only been working in Portmeirion since Friday, although she also noted that she had worked here a few years before. This was a summer job between semesters; I believe she either came from or was going to school in or had once visited Cornwall. (As you can tell, I didn't write that bit down.) One of her goals was to travel; she was particularly keen on seeing America. She actually put her hand over her heart when I mentioned New York. (I didn't want to disillusion her, but I was not very impressed with New York myself. The people seemed very haughty and self-absorbed when I was there.)
After dinner, I went wandering about the grounds in the twilight,
No. 5-3/4 on the Bristol Colonnade
where I ran into a photographer with one of those serious-looking cameras festooned with an enormous lens, who was taking advantage of the twilight with his camera. I was still in my Prisoner get-up, so he stopped me and asked, "Why did you resign?" I laughed and wandered off, snapping a few more shots of the grounds myself to add to the dozens I'd already taken.
Climbing up onto one of many charming structures here – the Bristol Colonnade - I spotted the photog and realized he was (stealthily) watching me. So I went to the center to provide the best background for him and posed without posing for him. (He had no idea what I was doing, but I saw him shooting photographs of me out of the corner of my eye.)
What's funny about that is I used to HATE having my photo taken at ALL, let alone dressed in a costume. Thanks to pirate re-enacting, here I was posing for some guy whom I don't know and whose photos I will never see. Crazy. In a good way, I suppose. I then toddled back to my room to write, looking forward to tomorrow, meeting Sandra the expert. I hoped I was as brave as I was today in dressing up and wandering about.