Harvest Festival
I'm about a month late writing this up, but never mind. Harvest Festival: a church phrase very meaningful when I was very young, and (for a while) obliged to attend church on Sundays, and not (as I do...
View ArticleCadfael
After a gap of many years, I've started to read all the Cadfael books again. I bought them all in the mid to late 1990s. This followed the TV series starring David Jacobi as Cadfael, but I hadn't seen...
View ArticleRugby club men
I must make it clear from the outset that I'm going to be talking only about Welsh men of a certain type. It happens to be a type seen everywhere, and they may make up a significant proportion of the...
View ArticleFear of flying
Yet another passenger aircraft falls out of the sky - I'm talking about the latest example to hit the news, the Russia-bound Airbus that flew out of Sharm el-Sheikh and disintegrated over Sinai. The...
View ArticleOne year in the Bingo Club
I have just passed the first anniversary of my State Pension beginning. My entitlement ran from 6th November 2014. I was then sixty-two years and four months old, and I felt very lucky to be getting an...
View ArticleIn search of Banksy
Last weekend, I was in Weston-super-Mare, the seaside resort on the Somerset coast. Weston was major in Victorian times, with great pretensions. 'Super mare' was added to give the place some class....
View ArticleCardiff Castle
Guess what - this is my 1,500th post since the start of blogging in February 2009. And I'm still going strong. Just now I'm finding it hard to keep up the cracking pace I set a while back, because the...
View ArticleA tin for my pocket money
I have very, very few original relics of my childhood. I dare say I'm not alone in that. The little things that once seemed so important gradually get discarded as you grow older. Or it becomes...
View ArticleA transplant is needed
Not for me, I hasten to say! It's for Fiona, my car. She needs a new automatic gearbox. I mentioned the humming noise that began a few months ago, which still hadn't been traced and fixed. We'd been...
View ArticleTrade offs
The decision on whether to get my car repaired for £5,000-odd is a big one! As discussed in the last post, I have Plan A in hand - going ahead with the new gearbox, assisted by a bank loan that will...
View ArticleTrue to my feelings
Having written that last post - a very sensible screed, I thought - I promptly burst into tears. What, not repair Fiona? Cast her aside for some nameless substitute? Over my dead body! I will not give...
View ArticleTreorchy
I referred to my early-November visit to Treorchy in my post Rugby club men. Now I can show some pictures. Treorchy used to be a Rhondda mining town, but it had more than just mining, and did not die...
View ArticleGower
I didn't only wish to see Treorchy in the Valleys. Gower beckoned. Gower is that thumb of land that sticks out westward, into the sunset, beyond Swansea. It has a mysterious interior, full of heaths...
View ArticleGod bless George Osborne!
No, I don't mean 'bless him unreservedly' - for hasn't his decision some years back to upgrade Civil Service Pensions in line with the Consumer Prices Index rather than the more generous Retail Prices...
View ArticleNew boots for the winter
Yesterday, I bought some boots for the winter. It hadn't been my intention. Frankly, I hadn't thought I could afford any this year. By 'boots' I'd had in mind proper women's leather boots, covering all...
View ArticleWhen I'm sixty-four - what about the Isle of Wight?
One of the tracks on The Beatles' rather druggy and psychedelic 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is called When I'm Sixty-four, and two of the lines in that go: Every summer...
View ArticleA lesson learned
Tomorrow Fiona, my Volvo XC60 car, has her auto gearbox transplant surgery. She'll be in the workshop for two days. She'll have a transfusion of new gearbox fluid. The computerised transmission...
View ArticleSocial studies in Swansea
My goodness, it's very nearly a month ago that I was in Swansea! It was a fine day for 1 November, so late in the year. I rather like Swansea, or at least those parts of it that lie near the sea front....
View ArticleBreathless and expensive
All the many things you have to think about, as Christmas approaches! And then, just as soon as it's over - the day after Boxing Day - there's the New Year's so-called celebrations coming up fast. Your...
View ArticleThe menace of social media
I don't look back on the 'old days' with over-much affection. It was a wrong time for me in any case, full of occasions when I felt forced to do things I felt unfitted to do, and be someone I felt I...
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