I'm writing this post in Bangor. I'm staying here overnight because I was at the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel today playing the piano for a wedding.

Top hotel, top piano. Vyrnwy's lovely, but it's one of the most remote spots in Wales. The main road into the valley is about ten feet wide and as greasy as hell. I nearly put Maisie in a ditch twice.

The hotel sits two or three hundred feet up the side of the valley's eastern rim, commanding views of the length of the lake, which recedes into the misty, mountainous distance as if it were an inland sea. It's not a real lake, but a reservoir built in the mid-nineteenth century to provide Liverpool with water, which it continues to do to this day. The gothic Straining Tower - which is not actually a grand Victorian privy but a device for making sure that Scousers don't get algae and dead voles in their tap water - is like a miniature Gormenghast sticking out of the lake. The Hotel continues the Victorian theme of gloriously unnecessary decoration; it was originally a hunting lodge, and you can see the influence of colonial architecture. The interior is a beautiful mess of stripped oak beams, staircases, pillars and parquet.

The piano was a fourteen foot Bechstein and just about the best hotel joanna I've ever played. A lot of hotels, even really top ones, have shit pianos. But this was beautiful - they obviously take care of it, and it was a pleasure to play. Even the people at the do were lovely. Obviously they were pretty rich, but pleasingly down to earth with it. As well as getting paid I got effusive thanks, which isn't something that happens every time.

I suppose it's the whole spirit of Wales rubbing off on people. As I was driving back through the dim forests, northward toward Bangor, I recalled some words of wisdom I once heard a very, very old Welshman utter as he sat on a boulder of slate in old Dorothea Quarry, above Bethesda. Ffordd ddeuol un milltir o'ch blaen, he said, his rheumy eyes seeming to stare into the far distance.

He was right, too.