Bank Manager and the Holy Grail

Book excerpt: Byron Rogers’ Wales is not the stereotypical nation of rugby heroes, eisteddfods and coal mining. His travels take him to an altogether stranger and more magical country. He pieces together the story of Kaiser Wilhelm’ s sojourn in a Welsh spa town before the Great War, and tours the Welsh waxwork museum largely populated with effigies of Prince Philip discarded by Madame Tussaud’ s. He also tells the true story of how a project to ensure the survival of the Welsh language came to involve the translation of pornographic novels, how Kurt Cobain proposed to Courtney Love in a nightclub in Newport, and above all how the Holy Grail came to be in the safe keeping of the manager of Lloyd’ s Bank in Aberystwyth. Byron Rogers’ collections of travel pieces have become reliable sales and critical success, attracting acclaim from Miles Kington to Jeremy Paxman, and each volume reprinting several times. The Bank Manager and the Holy Grail – a Waterstone’ s ‘ Best of Welsh’ promotion choice in hardback in early 2005 – continues that tradition.