M J Johnson
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Once Upon a Christmas Time

21/12/2018

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Once, when I was very small, I remember Father Christmas flying past our house in Trecynon, Aberdare. Later on, my big brother attempted to convince me that the sleigh and reindeer had been mounted on the back of an open-backed truck, but I know what I saw, there was no truck, just Santa Claus waving at all the children as he flew by! No memory remains more powerfully lodged in my mind than this one which has helped to build the magic of Christmas ever since. Of course, in Wales in the late fifties, Christmas celebrations revolved around our chapel life, singing carols, the  Christmas party in the vestry with jelly and sandwiches and lemonade pop, with games and prizes to follow. But it wasn’t all laughs! Christmas came at that time of year when us kids were forced against our will to wear hand-knitted itchy balaclavas, and worse, mittens attached along each arm and secured beneath our coats by elastic strips with enough durability to power a mediaeval siege engine.
 
Christmas was a time when the air itself was infused with exotic smells, chocolate and cinammon and the citrusy smell of tangerines. I remember assisting my Dad on Christmas Eve, charged with the important task of taking our turkey to the local bakehouse, then excitedly returning after dark to collect it once it was cooked and being allowed to pick and eat a steaming morsel of meat from its wing. Everything seemed to add to the excitement and magic of Christmas.  Television consisted for us of just the one BBC channel, and I recall how they used to show each year a stop-frame animation about how Rudolph the Reindeer saved Christmas - a sort of animated bio-pic for mesmerised children.
 
There were of course our family traditions, like unpacking and re-hanging the brightly coloured paper decorations which concertinaed across our living room, which had undoubtedly been bought at Woolworths along with our small artificial tree. The tree was gaudily decked out with tinsel and coloured lights, which invariably proved to be a trial for my Dad; I think the bulbs themselves must have belonged to a powerful trade-union because if one blew they all went out and it was merry hell to find the culprit! A few years back I took that threadbare old tree to the tip when my mother, unable to look after herself any longer, went into sheltered accommodation and the task of dismantling our family home fell to me - it was a time of many emotional highs and lows, causing me to relive a host of sad and happy memories, the merry-go-round of this bitter/sweet experience we call life.
 
There were always amazing presents, I remember, and best of all one early Christmas was a doctor’s kit furnished with precision medical instuments made out of chunky plastic, probably bought from stalls in Aberdare market or the aforementioned Woolworths: there was a thing for peering into ears with, a lamp for the forehead to inspect a patient’s tonsils, a hammer to test reflexes, a stethoscope, some plasters and bandages, and a card that identified me, Martin Johnson, as a trained medical practitioner. Mam, driven to be imaginative and practical because of a shortage of money, had arranged the kit in a white metal lunch box with a red cross attached to the lid to delineate purpose made with sticking plaster and red ink! But I almost forgot, there was also a blue plastic clock for checking a patient’s pulse - after I’d outgrown my doctor’s kit this clock became a Christmas decoration and still hangs on our tree to this day.
 
But the very best thing of all that I remember about Christmas, and I don’t know if this is a Welsh Valleys thing, or something initiated by my Dad, I’ve certainly not come across it anywhere else - about half of the content of our Christmas stockings as children were booby prizes (Father Christmas had a very funny sense of humour we were told!) - people tend to look at me like I’m daft when I mention it! In our stockings eagerly left at the bottom of our beds and filled by Father Christmas as we slept were to be found all manner of things which we opened with glee. The bounty had been stuffed down into an old rugby sock, all carefully wrapped in newspaper with little cryptic messages attached, there were chocolate coins, toy soldiers, tangerines wrapped in silver paper, nuts, toy cars, plastic magnifying  glasses, gob-stoppers and usually a practical joke like a blood stained bandage that you could slip over your finger that had a large nail protruding from either side. Dad’s booby prizes were generally introduced with a label like “You’ll definitely love this!” or “Very useful item” - these could be anything from a candlestick off our mantlepiece to a carrot or potato. Father Christmas undoubtedly adored all the children in the world but he definitely enjoyed teasing them too! When I reflect on all those past Christmasses it is this memory of our Christmas stockings that fills me with warmth and brings a little moisture to the eye. It was the attention to detail of my folks, and that unfakeable sense of being held and embraced within the family fold.
 
In a few days time, I shall relive many of these feelings again by observing the joy Christmas brings to my wonderful little granddaughters. Yet, despite it being a family occasion, we are reminded that Christmas is a time for wishing peace and goodwill to all mankind, so as we settle down to a feast amongst our families, please spare a thought for those who are less fortunate. We share a planet with thousands of other species and we so often tend to take it all for granted, but it isn’t money or power that makes Christmas special, it is simply love made manifest. Be kind to each other and have a lovely Christmas.  

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The Art of Creative Collaboration - a family business!

9/12/2018

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​I was asked recently if I’d like to write six hundred words for one of our local newspapers about my new title Wilhelm & Laszlo and its precursor Niedermayer & Hart. These two form the first two instalments in what will eventually become a trilogy (no overall title yet!). The link to the The Times of Tunbridge Wells article, if anyone would like to read it, is at the bottom of this blog piece.

When I first published Niedermayer & Hart, although I had always visualised it as the first part in a trilogy with a fully complete and rounded story arc, I brought it out as a standalone piece. This was primarily because, as a newcomer to the writing game then, I didn’t want to commit to something I knew would take up many more months of work before first receiving some feedback from readers/reviewers etc. - I thought I’d dip a toe into the pond before committing myself to full body immersion. Once, however, Wilhelm & Laszlo was ready to publish, we (‘we’ being the production team at Odd Dog Press, wife and editor-in-chief Judith Johnson, son and cover designer, artist Tom Johnson) felt both the book covers needed to be more informative about content - the original front cover of N&H gave very little away, and unless you flipped over to read the blurb (not possible on Kindle) and saw the bloody fingerprint depicted on the name-card there, a prospective reader might have thought they were about to begin a work of historical fiction, or gothic romance perhaps?

So these were the main motivators behind the new-look for Niedermayer & Hart. Firstly, to guide and inform the reader more accurately about content, and secondly to create a ‘brand’ look and feel that might be applied just as effectively to the first two books, as well as to the planned final part of the trilogy. We had numerous discussions over many months of possible themes, at first thinking to portray an inanimate object like the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey (as depicted on the first edition of N & H) on each cover. Over time however, the concept changed and it was agreed we should try and hint at something contained within the books themselves, and that this was probably best achieved through its cast of characters.

The amount of art work involved in creating both covers was enormous. Tom is a very busy man and he generously gave what little spare time he had to the project, never once stinting on or suggesting corner-cutting if more work was required. I am a proud and grateful father. There were times when we found ourselves wandering down a few blind-alleyways before we could finally agree as a production team that everything was exactly how we wished it to be. The books (8.5”x 5.5”) required Tom to complete five intricately detailed much larger pieces of art work (see photograph) in oils on paper, which he scanned into a computer before sizing, ordering and arranging them with text etc.

The printed books are simply a delight to behold (okay, I’ll admit to a little bias here!). And although reviews are slow to appear as yet - an eternal problem for independent authors - feedback I’m hearing via email/twitter etc. from readers is very positive on the content front too. So, phew!

I loved the old N & H cover and I simply adore the new artwork for the trilogy. I hope you agree.

Niedermayer & Hart and Wilhelm & Laszlo are both available through Amazon as ebooks and in printed versions.

Click this link to see more of Tom Johnson’s artwork.

Click link to read the article described above from The Times of Tunbridge Wells.

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The Wettest Holiday Ever!

9/6/2016

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PictureIn 1960 we looked like this
Holiday time approacheth ...

Memories of childhood are notoriously imprecise, but certain things, whether entirely accurate or not, somehow lodge themselves in the brain and refuse to budge.  One such recollection is a family holiday to the Welsh seaside town of Porthcawl during what must have been the summer of 1960, when I was five/six.  Porthcawl was considered the holiday mecca for us Valleys folk; in fact, it was impossible to visit the place without bumping into someone you knew from home - no place then to fly off to for an illicit weekend liaison, not that such thoughts would have had any place in my innocent mind back then; any fantasies I entertained were wholly confined  to fighting injustice and righting wrongs like my heroes the Lone Ranger and his ever-faithful Indian companion Tonto.

Wales, a mountainous place with a large coastline, is famed for its rain. I’ve heard it rumoured that some of our sheep, if not a few of the locals in some rural parts, are web-footed.  Back in the Porthcawl summer of 1960 a natural proclivity for an amphibious lifestyle would have come in useful.  I wouldn’t entirely trust my own memory here; my parents however always maintained that over a two-week holiday we did experience fourteen days of almost non-stop rain.  The first week we boarded with a lovely lady called Mrs Jones (the names of both saints and sinners were always faithfully recorded by my late mother); the second week, we suffered the misfortune of lodging with a Mrs Martin. Mrs Martin was a widowed lady who quite evidently detested children, which naturally didn’t bode too well for my brother and me. Even my father, normally big-hearted,  found his good nature put to the test by this woman; Mrs Martin was more strict Victorian governess than welcoming hostess, and to top it all, she was a rotten cook to boot - this is probably what riled Dad the most! I think Dad regarded a bad cook as a work of the Devil (well, not far off!).  I recall him, after one of numerous inedible meals, gruffly muttering to my mother that perhaps the late Mr Martin had gone to his heavenly reward after consuming one of his wife’s dinners.

Mrs Martin’s guest house truly was cold and unwelcoming.  In those days, families like us who lived on modest incomes purchased their own food and had it cooked for them by their hostess. I’ve no idea what this practice was called, eventually it was of course succeeded by B&B and half-board. I have a feeling it may have been called something a bit misleading like ”All found”.  So, our domestic situation only made matters worse; outside it continued to rain and inside the guest house we were subjected to Mrs M’s culinary abuse and sneering dislike of children. One evening, shortly before the evening meal, Mrs Martin accused my brother and myself of vomiting over her bathroom and leaving it in a terrible mess. She was very condemnatory and quite scary in her manner I recall. My mother, like all good mothers,  would not stand for her ‘chicks’ to be maligned thus, “I can assure you, Mrs Martin, that It wasn’t either of my boys!” she protested. “Who on earth was it, then?” sneered the awful Mrs M, “I don’t know,” replied Mam on the verge of tears, “But it wasn’t either of my boys!” At the same moment as Mrs Martin scoffed scornfully at this, a plaintive voice called down from the landing upstairs, “It was me!” a frail male voice called out. The Joneses were a kindly, elderly couple from the Rhondda who were the only other paying guests in the house.  “I’m very sorry, it wasn’t the boys, I was taken ill and I was about to clean up the mess!”  Mrs Martin looked appropriately shamefaced as she shuffled away from my mother who was standing guard over her boys, proud and victorious. As far as my brother Ian (seven years older than myself) was concerned, the confrontation was the final straw. The next morning he caught the bus back to my grandparents’ house. I don’t recall him coming on a family holiday again - Mrs Martin had been the line in the sand for him!

I don’t think I gave my swimming trunks an airing at any time over that holiday, but I did manage a few paddles in the odd rock pool between cloudbursts. One evening we went to see the variety show at The Grand Pavilion. I remember Dad particularly enjoyed the comedian,  and was still telling a joke he heard that night about a family of rabbits thirty years later. The local cinema had only one offering as I recall, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the 1958 Hammer version of Dracula. It had an X certificate (i.e. eighteen and over!) so no good for me, in fact I recall my hair standing on end just looking at the black and white stills that were displayed in a glass case outside the cinema. The large shelter on the promenade with its multiple rows of benches was filled to capacity every day. Each day we did the same circuit of shops around the town - Woolworths was by far the best, of course, and hours were spent browsing its aisles. Every day we’d have a Fulgoni’s ice-cream cone or two; we’d generally escape the rain mid-morning and mid-afternoon by going to a cafe to have cups of tea for the grown ups and a glass of pop or a milk shake for us. Sometimes, to avoid Mrs Martin’s meals we’d have faggots and peas from the stall in Coney Beach (to allay the concerns of American readers here, faggots are a ball of minced lamb and offal, traditionally served with mushy peas) or Mam’s lifelong favourite, fish and chips. I think the putting green, a traditional holiday pursuit, and still surviving in Porthcawl to this day, was waterlogged and closed up those weeks, I certainly don’t recall us playing. But not all was lost, on the last night of the holiday I was taken to the fair and allowed to go on half a dozen rides and to spend any pocket money my grandparents had pressed into my hand before leaving.
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One of the best things I remember was going out one evening after dark when it was high tide and dodging the waves that surged into the air like a blowing whale and left its spume washing across the promenade.

Here is Another Porthcawl story

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Bring Me Sunshine!

25/4/2015

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The sun has taken its hat off and has been shining down on us for well over a week now, a situation I find very tolerable, although I’m suffering a little earlier than is normal for me with hay fever symptoms. I suspect the pollen situation must be high this year as even Judith was violently sneezing a few days back and said she thought she was coming down with a cold - no cold developed but she’s still sneezing a lot! I guess that’s what happens when acres and acres of Kent countryside are turned over to oil-seed rape. You know, I really could launch a personal vendetta against that particular genus of plant!

The last week or so has been fairly uneventful. We went to a jolly good organic farm shop the other day and we plan to stop shopping in supermarkets quite so much and lend our support to these people who are doing a good job at a fair price and making the world a bit greener and healthier in the process! I daresay I’ll be writing more on this blog about Cherry Gardens Organic Farm Shop in the future.

The second draft of the follow-on book to Niedermayer & Hart is busy underway at the moment and I’m really enjoying it. Mrs J gets given the completed chapters and really doesn’t have a clue what it’s about yet; of course she recognises themes, characters etc from N & H - but says she trusts that I’ll bring the whole thing together satisfyingly by the end (poor deluded fool!). I hadn’t previously discussed anything about the book with her, she didn’t see a word of the first draft, and so she’s experiencing it now completely ‘blind’ as it were. I personally find this is a really good opportunity for gauging response - and so far, so good! I stopped writing for over a week while we had some guests staying from Amsterdam, and although I was happy to get back to work, I didn’t in any way resent stopping work for our lovely relatives. It was fun spending time with them and we especially enjoyed having a toddler about the place, Tee hee hee! Actually they were model house guests. Judith’s Mum is the little-un’s Great-Great-Grandmother - now that has to be a pretty rare five-generations photo opportunity!

Keep smiling whether the sun is shining or not - might as well!


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Easter Mondays!

9/4/2015

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PictureDad was very proud of his Austin
The sun made a sudden and unexpected appearance at a happy family occasion held on Saturday last and I’m delighted to say has remained present over the ensuing days. It seems like years since sunny weather might be anticipated at Easter time in the UK with any kind of reasonable expectation. However, when I was a boy/teenager in the sixties and seventies, unless memory misleads, the British Isles seems to have enjoyed far more agreeable weather.

The Johnson family acquired its first car, an Austin A30, around 1964. We were one of the first families on our road in Gowerton, near Swansea, to own a car and my father would have been forty-two by the time he set about learning to drive. In those times if you left the car parked on the road you had to leave its side-lights on, which played havoc with car batteries. I remember Dad was forever charging it and topping its cells up with distilled water. Mam never learnt to drive and always cited the skill as one of her most regretted non-accomplishments. In conversations with her right to the end of her life she (an Aries!) maintained she would almost certainly have made a very good driver. She most definitely made a damn fine driving instructor - as my father often experienced, “You went  round that bend a bit fast, Danny!”

 Most of the time Dad remained stoically good-tempered with his ever-present advisor alongside; but very occasionally he’d snap, “Do you drive, Mair?”

She would respond dismissively, as though this small fact was simply an irrelevance,  “No.”

 “Well shut up then and let me get on with it!”

A tense hush sometimes descended upon the front of the car at these times. In such difficult moments, awkward looks were exchanged in the back seat between me and my friend Keith, who was almost guaranteed to be present if we were on an outing to the seaside. 

At Easter we invariably headed for the coast, regardless of the weather. If wet, we browsed our way slowly through the town’s Woolworths, hoping climatic conditions might soon alter for the better. Perhaps this was the reason why I felt so genuinely sad when these stores finally closed down a few years back - they were such a powerful icon from my childhood. However, if the sun was shining we’d be on the beach with our buckets and spades, and when Mam told us, teeth chattering, tinged blue and shivering from head to toe,  to get out of the sea after an hour’s joyous splashing, we’d always insist we weren’t cold at all. She’d generally have to bribe us in some little way to get us to come peacefully, thereby probably saving us from being hospitalised with hypothermia. If we went to Porthcawl we’d have faggots and peas (this is a meatball akin to haggis and not to be confused with the North American definition for a faggot) in the fair for our lunch, or, Mam’s heavily salted cucumber sandwiches with a chunk of cheese, always ingested with large quantities of sand. There was generally an ice cream or two to be had on an Easter Bank Holiday Monday and if the destination was Porthcawl (Mam’s lifelong Mecca) it could only be a Fulgoni’s cone.  Last thing, as the sun was going down and everyone started heading for home there was always a bag of fish and chips, scalding hot, served up in newspaper, always smothered in salt and dripping with vinegar, to be eaten as we made our way back to the car. Lovely.


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A Trip to Wales and Another Good Welshman

4/3/2015

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The wife and I spent the weekend in Wales - most appropriate of course, to be back home for St David’s Day! We stayed with a newly reacquainted long-lost relative in Cardiff. One of my first engagements as a professional actor was for a theatre company, long defunct, based in Cardiff, called the Welsh Drama Company. I enjoyed working in the city then and have continued to do so whenever work or play have taken me back there. It has continued to improve as a city. When I worked there initially the magnificent St David’s Hall was simply a building site and the whole shopping area around it was in the process of being redeveloped. A great deal of Cardiff was rather grey, just as much of post-industrialised Britain looked back then. Its heyday as a port, at one time one of the world’s largest exporters of coal, was past, and this once economically vigorous city was struggling to find a new role for itself in the world. Of course Cardiff  has seen many more great building projects since the late Seventies, including the redevelopment of the whole Bay Area which includes the Welsh Assembly Building and the Millenium Centre. And of course our national passion (bordering on obsession) for the game of rugby is now catered for at the magnificent Millenium Stadium, right in the heart of the city.

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Any visitor entering Cardiff’s Queen Street from the Castle end is met by the statue of Aneurin Bevan (1897 - 1960), or Nye as he’s more affectionately remembered in Wales. He was born and raised in the valleys town of Tredegar, the son of a coal miner. He left school to work in the pits himself at the age of thirteen, where he soon became active in the trade union movement, which sent him to Central Labour College in London. It was here that he gained in confidence as a speaker and began to overcome the stammer that he had been afflicted with since childhood. In 1929 he stood and became elected as the Labour MP for Ebbw Vale, and he was to remain in this seat for the next thirty-one years until his early death. He is perhaps best remembered as the founder of the National Health Service, which became fully operational on the 5 July 1948. He defined a civilised society as one that takes care of its weak and vulnerable. Those of us who have grown up in a happy time where health care was provided unquestioningly by the state have Nye Bevan to thank for this. The National Health Service wasn’t born without suffering the pangs of childbirth and was vehemently opposed by the Conservative Party, the British Medical Association and by some in Bevan’s own Labour Party.

The National Health Service is, we are currently told by too many of its workers to be just scare-mongering, splitting at its seams. It is one of the finest institutions this country has, and we would all be far poorer for its loss. I for one will almost certainly be considering it as one of the foremost issues to be considered when the time comes for me to cast my vote in the general election in May. My Great Aunt Mary had lived almost sixty years before the National Health Service and the Welfare State were fully in place for the protection of all British citizens. I was often amused as a young boy when she expressed her darkest fear of ending up in the workhouse - it seemed preposterous to me then; workhouses belonged to the world of Oliver Twist and Charles Dickens! Actually, the workhouse system was only abolished in 1930. But the kind of poverty experienced by the working classes of the past isn’t possible today, is it? Again, I am reminded of Food Banks and the 900,000 British people forced to resort to them last year.

In 2004 Aneurin Bevan was voted No 1 by the people of Wales in a poll to name 100 great Welsh men and women. After my recent visit to Wales, and seeing as it’s customary for this blog to present to its readers a Good Welshman or Welshwoman on St David’s Day - I give you Nye Bevan: “The National Health service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so it is not difficult to understand, if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic competitive society. A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.”


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The Sky is Overcast

19/2/2015

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PictureChallenging teenage behaviour in South Wales
I met someone yesterday who had formerly been a scene-painter in the world of theatre. I immediately expressed my great enthusiasm for the scene-painter’s craft. I imagine the scene-painter’s role has changed considerably over time, and I guess the real heyday of scene painting as an art must have been the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, before the advent of television, when music hall and repertory theatres were attended with a regularity that can only be dreamed of by people working in live theatre today.

My own first experience as a scene painter was as a teenager at my local youth club in Gorseinon, near Swansea, in Wales. The director of our pot-boiler play The Sky is Overcast, which had been entered in a one-act play competition amongst Glamorganshire Youth Clubs, was a lovely chap called Howell Edwards. He’d heard somehow that I was safe with a paintbrush and so I got drafted in to paint the fairly straightforward box set as well as playing a character in the play. The story was set in occupied France during World War II and concerned a dastardly German plot to parachute in a spy purporting to be an RAF officer but whose real aim was to infiltrate the French resistance. I remember doing the set painting very fast and extremely broadly using really bold brush strokes.

The part I played in The Sky is Overcast by playwright Anthony Booth (not to be confused with T Blair’s Father in law) was that of a very unpleasant SS Officer whose name I now forget. However, what I most certainly couldn’t have forgotten is the fact that when the costumes arrived in a wicker trunk from costumiers Bermans and Nathans in London, mine wasn’t among them! Yikes! There wasn’t enough time to get another costume sent, so Howell went to a fancy-dress shop in Swansea and picked up the kind of Nazi uniform some people might wear to a silly eighteenth birthday party! The aim of this costume was clearly to be funny rather than authentic. Take a look at the picture of me above at fifteen threatening my mother (Mam looks about as terrified as she’d be if mauled by a King Charles Spaniel named Cindy). I don’t know how he did it - hypnotism perhaps - Howell managed to convince me that nobody in the audience would probably even notice it wasn’t a proper uniform.

The night of the competition, which took place in the Little Theatre, Aberdare, arrived. I come originally from Aberdare so I was even fielding a few family members in the audience. I had a big powerful entrance set up with the characters on stage rushing about nervously announcing that my approach to the house was imminent. There came a loud rap on the door, centre stage. My friend Paul Davies, taking the main part in the play, went to the aforementioned door and drew it open, only to reveal me in my fancy-dress Hitler. It was an entrance designed to bring hush and awe, but when the people of Aberdare saw what I was wearing, there was just a huge, spontaneous guffaw of laughter. It was the theatrical equivalent of Benny Hill’s Ernie the Milkman making an impromptu guest appearance as the ghost in Hamlet.

Anyway, teenage chutzpah got us through on the night. And things worked out well in the end: we won the cup for best production, the main adjudicator gave me a special mention for a good performance despite a bad entrance she said was beyond my control, and perhaps most unexpectedly of all, we won the prize for the best set.

The Youth Club took us all out to a posh hotel in Llandeilo for a slap-up meal to celebrate. Happy days!


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Christmas 2014

19/12/2014

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As we approach the final few weeks of 2014 and another year appears to have mysteriously flown by, I find myself (quite customary at this time), in a reflective mood. I suppose this was inevitable, especially as I’ve just been listening to a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his marvellous A Child’s Christmas in Wales, recorded at Steinway Hall, New York in 1952 (You’ll find it on You Tube). If you don’t know this work, then take my word for it, it is pure joy! 

As Christmas in the UK has become increasingly secular and commercialised, I wonder whether it is a happier occasion now than it was in former times? It certainly seems to have become increasingly more stressful; I don’t recall hearing about people being trampled by over-zealous shoppers, or of fist-fights breaking out over goods in our shops. My family’s Christmas when I was a boy was divided mainly between chapel and home. The children’s Christmas party in the Chapel vestry was a definite highlight. Father Christmas inevitably made an appearance and passed out presents to each of us; some of the bigger boys suspected it was a deacon dressed-up; I for one never believed this, though come to think of it, for a man who spent three hundred and sixty four days a year in isolation at the North Pole he did have a remarkably strong Valleys accent! However, the seeds of commercialisation had already been sown even back then, and although the pile of presents I was given might seem modest compared to the personalised Aladdin’s cave the average British child seems to be presented with these days, compared to my parents’ generation who got little more than a tangerine and a few brazil nuts, we were generously provided for. 

It has always been a Johnson family tradition that a certain percentage of stocking fillers (always wrapped in newspaper when I was little) are booby prizes. My Dad (I learnt later on to recognise his packing style and handwriting) meticulously wrapped up for us, under numerous tightly packed layers: a broken pen, in fact anything broken might appear, carrots, potatoes, often a solitary brazil nut, and I generally received one or other of the small brass candlesticks off the mantlepiece (being a matching pair, brother Ian got its pal!). Dad’s written messages always urged us on, “Almost there!” “You’re going to love this!” “Something really good!” “This is just what you’ve always wanted!”. In a way the boobies, and their attention to detail, spoke as much to me about the love in my family home as did the ‘good stuff’. Yes, the Matchbox, James Bond Aston Martin DB7, complete with tiny man and ejector seat was a jaw-dropper, but I would have been awfully disappointed if my parents hadn’t taken the time to wrap up a few really misleading ‘duds’ that year. Judith and I continued the tradition with our own son. 

I think what I want to say is that Christmas isn’t solely about receiving, it’s about sharing too; a time for each of us to be gathered into ‘the fold’. It’s a time for inclusion and for expressing love; a time that makes me grateful for my family and friends; and causes me to remember too that I belong to a far wider human family. Henry James said: “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”


Have a lovely Christmas everybody!


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Thunder 'n' Lightning

19/7/2014

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PictureGreat Aunt (Bopa) Mary's little chair
There’s a right-angled cloud up in the sky looking down at me as I sit at my desk by the window in the corner of what used to be (and occasionally still is) our dining room. Right-angled clouds appearing in the sky, what next, I ask? Perhaps it’s there in the sky as a precursor to the mega-storm we’ve been warned to expect in the UK sometime this afternoon. The treetops are somewhat billowy and there are ominously dark clouds fast approaching - I’m on my guard! Judith instucted me to be off the computer before the storm strikes - good sense, of course, and I shan’t disobey her. Judith is not a fan of thunder and lightning. She is of course not alone in this: my Great Aunt Mary at the first thundrous drum roll would immediately gather her favourite little chair and head for the cupboard under the stairs; my father, generally a sanguine type, used to turn quite pale and become unusually silent during thunder storms. He’d seek out a quiet spot in a dark room and sit the thing out.

Dad said he’d never been troubled by whatever the weather had thrown in his direction, until, in his early twenties, he’d experienced storms in the Himalayas. He was taken to Darjeeling to a nursing home to convalesce after first having undergone some weeks of hospitalisation and treatment for amoebic dysentery during World War Two. He was stationed on an RAF base in Mumbai (then Bombay), where he’d fallen prey to the ‘bug’. The treatment for this form of dysentery in those days required being filled-up with a pink foam that Dad said smelt like disinfectant. I shall spare you, gentle reader, a fuller description of exactly how a pink foam might wend its way along to find the small intestine of a British serviceman during WW2. Apparently, the treatment demanded that the foam had to be retained incrementally - initially for perhaps only fifteen minutes or so, gradually increasing to several hours. Dad always made me laugh when he described the joyous agony this experience could be at times. It’s not difficult to picture the scene - a ward full of bright-eyed young servicemen all attempting to retain the pink foam that had been inserted in their nether regions - the banter and waggish humour, and in the face of this, the Herculean effort required to avoid laughter and the bubbling gurgles that must inevitably follow any muscle relaxation.

Isn’t it strange where a right-angled cloud up in the sky can take you? Actually, in the time it’s taken to write this blog post the sky has totally cleared and it is now a gorgeous clear blue, not a storm cloud in sight - not even a pink bubble!


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Father's Day

14/6/2014

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Picture
Tomorrow is Father’s Day in the UK, and I’m fortunate enough to have a son who has planned something for us all to celebrate the occasion. My own father died prematurely almost nineteen years ago because of a very bad medical diagnosis. It was a tragic end to a worthwhile life and my family and I have greatly missed having him around all these years. He’d be ninety-two if he was still with us.

As explained here before, I’ve formatted both my books ready for their various e-book versions and print editions. And I have to admit, although I certainly enjoy reading on Kindle, nothing beats the buzz of leafing through your own printed book if you’re satisfied with the outcome. When the shipment of books arrives, I invariably think of Dad. I always think of him too when I’m formatting, because apart from the years robbed from him and his generation by Adolf Hitler and his megalomaniac pals, he remained a printer all his working life. He did a seven year apprenticeship from the age of fourteen. He once told me how on the fresh-faced first day of his working life he’d been sent out by the experienced men of his printing office to a local chemist shop for a pot of ‘elbow grease’. The chemist had chuckled when he’d placed his order and gently informed him, “They’re pulling your leg, boy.”

Dad loved his job and was highly skilled at it. He was bi-lingual and used to set books in Welsh and English on a Monotype machine. For the technical know-how, justifying of text, kerning etc that we now rely on computers to organise and beautifully arrange for us, Dad had nothing else to depend on but skill and experience. He was however no Luddite, and I can easily imagine he’d be fascinated and impressed by the kind of technology that makes the abilities he’d acquired over years being available to his son by utilising a very straightforward piece of software. I think the digital revolution would have found my Dad thoroughly mesmerised. When you think of it, the actual idea behind printing, basically using reversed lead letters to make an imprint on a piece of paper, was pretty much the same in Dad’s day as it had been at the time of William Caxton.

So, it’s Father’s Day tomorrow. I’ll be thinking of you Dad.


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