100. 19.04.2012 Rainbow behind the dunes

100. 19.04.2012 Rainbow behind the dunes.

San Francisco is famous for quite a few things including fog, screaming queens, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and dreadful earthquakes that don’t seem to have put people off wanting to live on the constantly warping and bending streets. It’s also famed for the 1970s Quinn Martin production of the  gritty police series “The Streets of San Francisco” with its prologue, epilogue and predictable middle bit.  It  starred  Michael Douglas in the days before he  turned into a lecherous old man with a dribbling colostomy bag and an eye for ladies an eighth of his age.  The series was filmed in Technibeige, and went on to spawn The Police Squad starring Leslie Nielson

 It’s also famed for it’s rows of colourful – (that’s  colorful to all my US friends) -  Victorian and Edwardian houses, the most recognisable and famous  being just off Alamo Square known and collectively known  as the Painted Ladies.

Anyhow. San Francisco has her  painted ladies and over on this side of the pond we also have equally stunning architecture.
Pwllheli. Not quite the Painted Ladies, more your  Pastel  Slags. In 1890 Solomon Andrews, (no relation to the pinafore clad, mountain spinning,  hills are alive with the sound of music Julie by the way)    had a vision of the town with cartoon dollars in his eyes and developed the former dune ares  of the West End of the town with a promenade, large houses and a tramline to Llanbedrog just down the coast.  It didn’t make him a rich man though and 20 years after his death, the tramline was ripped up by a storm and that was the end of that. 

Anyhow, the Pastel Slags are still there, all brightly coloured and well maintained but oddly out on a limb and disjointed from the rest of the town.
One of my facebook friends lives further down the prom where she runs a highly successful spa and resthome for the aged and befuddled. If she’s reading this, I’m sure she would be more than delighted to share her brochure with us all. One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on Facebook to be brutally frank.

Oh, and before the complaints come flooding in from Americans with supposedly Welsh origins with initials between their Christian and surnames, Solomon Andrews was a native  Welshman and not an Anglo Saxon and the houses aren’t really called the Pastel Slags. I made that up purely for comedy value. It’s called an attempt at a  sense of humour – sorry humor.  It’s also just a load of bullshit too.