M J Johnson
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Once Upon a Christmas Time

21/12/2018

1 Comment

 
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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 Wettest Holiday Ever!

9/6/2016

2 Comments

 
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.
​
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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Making Room for the New

31/1/2016

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I wrote a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) blog recently about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, a simple, effective way to banish clutter forever by Marie Kondo (see Wrong Twice). I admit that I found the book a little bit of an ordeal to read, and I joked in my blog that the good thing about its lengthy title was that, being a slim book, there wasn’t that much more to get through! However, joking aside, it has proven to be an immensely practical aid to de-cluttering.

We decided that the most sensible (and sane) approach was for us to make a slow tactical ascent of Clutter Mountain by tackling it in stages. We pencilled into our diaries a series of weekend dates over the end of 2015 and early part of 2016 - aiming to tackle at least one of the categories Kondo describes in her book every third week (practical for us). First we took on Clothes, then Books, and our most recent session was with Papers. I foolishly thought this particular category would prove to be a doddle - but five solid hours later, after producing a heap of papers beside our shredder reminiscent of the Nixon White House, I thought differently! We still hadn’t quite completed the task by the time we deemed it necessary to stop for the day, the plan is to finish off with a few hour-long sessions over the next week. All this stuff, I hasten to point out, was all very easily identified as thoroughly unimportant, or totally redundant and of no significance to either our present or future lives. Frankly, it is hard to credit the amount of junk that accumulates around us over time. Clutter had taken on the persona of a curmudgeonly old miser that had insidiously built a little kingdom for itself around the periphery of our lives and was threatening to take us hostage. It had to be shown the door!

The ‘fumigation’ process still has a few months left to run, however, I think it safe to say, eviction orders have definitely been served and the clean-up is underway. What’s really remarkable is how much lighter and brighter the house feels, and despite having toted about half a dozen sacks of clothes and about twenty large boxes of books to charity shops, we still have clothes to wear and books to read - but only the things we actually like wearing and books we either love, plan to read, read again, or simply want to keep for reference etc.

So, basically, if the idea takes your fancy and you too would like to try this approach, take heart from my assurance that the baby doesn’t have to be thrown out with the proverbial bathwater!

I’d love to hear from anyone who has de-cluttered in this way, or pursued an alternative method. 


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Wrong Twice!

14/12/2015

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I listen to my wife’s advice on what to read for the following reasons:

1. Because after thirty odd years, she knows my taste.

2. She’s very well read herself (far better than I am - but don’t tell her I admitted it!).

However, advice and gentle suggestion are very different to being ‘told’ you have to read a certain title and are even issued with a timetable for completing the task. The ultimatum stated .... “Read it by 1 December or else I’ll start without you!”

Yes - not just bossy behaviour but behaviour that goes way beyond bossy!

I dug my heels in as you’d expect, and met her insistence and righteous fervour with sarcasm and the odd withering glance (mostly I withered when she wasn’t looking). But eventually, gentle reader, her eyebrow arched just one too many times, and my resistance collapsed.

Booohoohoo! (sound made by weeping man).

The book I was forced into reading, you’ll need to know?

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: a simple, effective way to banish clutter forever by Marie Kondo

Did I enjoy reading this book?

Nooo!

Do I think the author is a nut?

Yes.

Was it worth reading?

(Grudgingly) Yes.

Booohoohoo! (same sound of man weeping again).

Yes, this book was definitely worth reading. We were deluged beneath an ocean of clutter that had been acquired over decades. The simple points Marie Kondo makes, and her practical tips about getting rid of accumulated clutter, were definitely a new and useful approach for tackling this very real problem of having too much stuff!

And I should know about too much stuff - having had the unenviable task of reducing my late mother’s belongings shortly before she went into sheltered accommodation and a greatly reduced living space. I counted over twenty car journeys I made to the municipal tip/recycling centre, and approximately the same number to local charity shops. Mam hadn’t been able to throw out anything over her whole lifetime - hanging in a wardrobe were all my father’s clothes, despite him having passed away seventeen years before. It filled me with great sadness, and there were real tears shed at times; I vowed I wouldn’t leave such a legacy for my own son to have to deal with.

If you seriously would like to get rid of the clutter that surrounds you and lighten-up your life - then read this book! Fortunately, the book’s title covers a considerable percentage of the entire reading matter if you’re tackling it on Kindle - so, mercifully, not too much more to go!

Would I recommend this book as a practical aid to de-cluttering?

Yes, definitely.

Would I recommend this book as good reading?

Sorry, I must’ve dropped off, what was the question again?

 
However, I did read something over the same period that satisfied all criteria. From First to Last by Damon Runyon is a truly fantastic read . This is a companion volume to On Broadway by Damon Runyon and between the two they contain (I understand) just about all his stories. They are truly delightful, literally from first to last! The language, dialogue and cast of quirky characters are richly comic and unique.

We have had these books on our shelves since the late 70s and Jude had encouraged me time and time again to read them. I resisted, mainly because I told myself I didn’t like short stories much.
I don’t think I had a closed mind. It must simply be because short-story writing has improved.

Okay, I was wrong again!

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Catalogue of Dreams!

8/11/2015

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​As a boy, I remember a favourite pastime of mine was browsing the pages of toys in my mother’s mail-order catalogue. When I was a little older I may have sneaked a peek at the ladies lingerie section (undoubtedly at the behest of naughty, bigger boys who’d befriended me and wished to deflect me from my naturally saintly inclinations!).

I remember my son Tom had a great penchant for the Argos catalogue and remember him as a little lad sitting up in bed happily surveying all the stuff he would like to have possessed whilst listening to the Mozart Horn Concerto that he invariably had on the cassette player at bedtime. He would have been lucky if he ever acquired a tiny percentage of those things he fancied, as we were pretty broke when he was small. But I recall the wise words of Bertrand Russell who said, “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”  Tom was always a happy contented child who easily accepted what he could or could not have, and let’s face it, sometimes a thing is far more enigmatic and satisfying in our imaginations than it is in reality. I recall getting a wonderful pedal car for Christmas when I was four - subsequently took a bend too sharply in Aberdare Park on its test drive, landed on my head - and never went near that car again! However, I played happily with the giant box it came in until it fell to bits and recall shedding a tear when it was put out for the rubbish men.

Finally, gentle reader, I come to the confession part of this post ! Brace yourselves!

On Saturday last, my wife caught me browsing the Tool Station catalogue before breakfast. It seems where I was once mesmerised by the Marineville Control Centre from Stingray, or ached to own a Thunderbird Two, I now find myself drooling over the Makita RP1801X Plunge Router or Milwaukee M12BDDXKIT - 202C 4-in-1 Drill Driver.

Maybe I should disguise this Aladdin’s cave of secret desires  in a brown paper wrapping, or better still, conceal it under another cover, perhaps one torn from a great work by Marcel Proust, or the collected poems of Ezra Pound, perhaps?
​
Happy browsing!

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Guilt Ridden Angst!

7/8/2015

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PictureForbidden Fruit (testing lacto/gluten intolerance)
I feel a touch guilty and need to make a confession ...

Oh-oh! What terrible crime or dreadful indiscretion has he committed, you’re probably asking yourself? Your imagination takes flight: you think of shoplifting, credit card theft, adultery ... murder ... steady on! Perhaps he’s about to confess to some minor but embarrassing compulsion - maybe he’s been posting pictures of himself on the internet dressed up as a nun or a Klingon perhaps?

Truthful confession: I haven’t written a new blog for several weeks!

“Flippin’ ’eck!” I hear you cry, “We were hoping for something a bit tasty!”

Sorry about that.

But you know, it’s a funny old business, this guilt thing. I seem to have always had it - felt a little bit guilty about one thing or another.

Anyone else feel like that?

Do you remember when you were at primary school and the headmaster was mad because someone had cracked a sink in the boys’ washroom, or written a bad word on a wall or left a poo in a teacher’s desk or something (I just made that one up!). His face was red and angry and he had a way of standing before you and making one eye bigger than the other and of eyeballing every single child in the hall - it was like having a spotlight shining in your face. When it was your turn to get the blast from ‘the eye of Sauron’ even though you were totally innocent, you felt almost compelled to confess - perhaps it really was you, you’d done it and forgotten - maybe it was done in a fit of temporary madness, a sugar-high perhaps after one too many Wagon-Wheels at break-time, or too much milk?

Pretty crazy huh? But I’ve always felt a bit like that. I can easily feel guilty about stuff I didn’t even do! I blame my Welsh Congregationalist upbringing - but then, my wife enjoyed a more secular upbringing in Kent and she’s pretty much the same. I bet we’re not alone either.

Anyway, I feel guilty about not having written a blog for a few weeks. I love my blog, I really do,  and I haven’t forsaken it; it is simply that I’m working flat out on my new book. Plus I generally take a bit of a break over the summer - a blog holiday if you will!

I have been busy in other ways though: both my books are now available once again at Smashwords. They can also be purchased via Barnes and Noble and i-tunes. I hope this will introduce the titles to a wider audience. You can see a selection of what people have said about the books on the review pages of this website or check out the reviews and ratings on Goodreads.

And to celebrate my return to Smashwords I thought I’d be very summerly (? is that a word?) and offer the titles with a fifty percent discount for the next two weeks for your holiday delight! All you need to do is choose either book, or both, go to the Smashwords checkout and put in the following codes:

Niedermayer & Hart - 50% discount code - LZ65A

Roadrage - 50% discount code - UE79V

Enjoy! Happy August reading!


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Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Smashwords
Barnes and Noble
i-tunes

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Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Smashwords
Barnes and Noble
i-tunes

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Scaredy Cat!

31/5/2015

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I remember back in 1977 watching The Towering Inferno at a cinema in Derby. It was while I was doing my very first acting job, a national tour for a Theatre in Education company. Because we performed in schools and therefore worked daytimes, my evenings were always free, so I’d taken the opportunity to catch this popular star-studded disaster movie. In those days, long films tended to have an intermission, and this one I recall came to its half-way point leaving Paul Newman and Steve McQueen on an explosive cliff-hanger; after a number of well-loved box-office names had already been char-grilled, deep-fried, toasted and flambéed to the delight of the audience. In those days people still smoked in public places, and as the light on the silver screen faded at the half-way mark and before the house-lights came on to guide us to our Kia-Ora and choc ices, the chap next to me struck a match to light his cigarette. Still entirely caught-up in the movie, I saw the naked flame in my peripheral vision and literally jumped about a foot in the air!

Embarrassing.

I suppose that reading is generally a good deal safer than film-going . The stuff I write isn’t likely to cause any similar embarrassment - not publicly anyway! Although if you’re planning to read Niedermayer & Hart at bedtime you might heed the following warning posted on Goodreads:

“... If I use the quality of my nightmares as a rating system for horror novels, this one was definitely a 5/5 ... Just don't read this book right before you go to sleep unless you like waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with your own screams echoing in your ears.”

This could prove awkward if sharing a room!



Niedermayer & Hart from Amazon.com
Niedermayer & Hart from Amazon.co.uk


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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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Whimperings in the Dark!

16/1/2015

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I’d started reading The Long Valley by John Steinbeck shortly before Christmas and was proceeding happily in the company of the great author, before my son and daughter-in-law-to-be presented me with a volume of The Collected Ghost Stories of M R James. A bit like a character in a James tale, I found myself irrevocably drawn to them, and immersed myself in these dark pleasures at bedtime over the next few evenings. 

“You aren’t seriously going to read those before turning off the light and going to sleep are you?” 

“Why not?” I asked (perhaps somewhat dismissively). 

“Because you’ll have nightmares ... you are daft!” 

I smiled and may have gone as far as a scoffing sound. 

A few hours later: my wife was shaking me awake after I was found whimpering; whilst I, simultaneously, gripped firmly in the arms of Morpheus, was being confronted by a coarse-haired creature (no, not the wife! considerably more diabolical!), that was all too rapidly materialising before my eyes.  

Once awake, I was duly told off for foolishly entertaining ghost stories last thing at night. And, as if this wasn’t quite humbling enough, the next day  my son was informed about the incident by the aforementioned wife; yes, gentle reader, they could actually be heard sniggering! In fact, I couldn’t, it seems, have provided them with finer amusement, and for the next few days mockery and derision became my lot; I, who have (I admit to it!) sometimes (often?)  boasted about how untroubled I am by all things ghostly or which go bump in the night. So, understandably chastened by my experience, you’ll appreciate that I didn’t dare  run the risk of embarrassing myself again; M R James was confined to the hours of daylight whilst the Steinbeck became my book at bedtime. It’s proved a comfortable arrangement, and I’m pleased to announce there have been no more whinnies in the dark. 

So, the Steinbeck ... 

The Long Valley was published in 1938. The majority of its stories had previously appeared in various American magazines. The stories themselves, Saint Katy the Virgin being the exception - a strangely whimsical tale set in mediaeval France - are set in Steinbeck’s birthplace, the background for so much of his writing, the Salinas Valley in California. Apparently, Steinbeck demanded that Saint Katy the Virgin be included in the collection, and although I enjoyed it, I have to admit that it does seem a bit of a puzzle alongside the rest. In all the other stories, Steinbeck does what Steinbeck can do like no other: informs us about the human condition. He uses symbolism to good effect, and his descriptive imagery is admirably lean; sometimes a tale’s starkness certainly left this reader with a haunted, almost desperate feeling. However, I never feel that Steinbeck is ever being wantonly bleak. Above all, Steinbeck is telling us stories about human beings and of their relationships to others. He lets us make our own inferences. The scholars, critics and academics have it seems from the very start often been divided on their appraisal of these stories. I’m perfectly happy to let them go on arguing! This collection is eminently readable and worthwhile. 

I’m still reading my collected ghost stories - more to come on these ... if I survive the nights!


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No Tea Party!

8/10/2014

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PictureQuel horreur!
This is a subject dear to my heart, a matter NEVER to be trifled with and one of great importance to most of us Brits. It’s a subject I’ve raised and celebrated before on this blog - however, this posting is sadly not concerned with celebration! 

As previously mentioned we recently returned from our annual summer holidays (see Bavarian Hols!) and a thoroughly enjoyable time it was too! The location, accommodation, food etc. were all quite faultless, ten out of ten! However, there was one area where I am reluctantly forced to shake my head in despair - to award, as the old Eurovision Song Contest cliché goes, ‘nil points’. I sincerely hope that I’ve fully communicated the sheer importance and gravity of this issue. It is a problem that, despite a personal appreciation for almost all things European, continues to magnify the relatively small distance occupied by the English Channel, forcing a giant chasm between mainland Europe and our island breed. And it’s not the first time in our history that this seemingly slight matter,as some may view it, has caused strife and difficulty - great Chinese dynasties once strove to keep its secrets hidden from the British Empire; people have lied, stolen and smuggled it to gain possession of it; a rather famous War of Independence was reputedly triggered because of it. You guessed it: Tea! 

You may think as you read, gentle reader, that I’m composing this piece with my tongue firmly planted in the side of my cheek - but you couldn’t be further from the truth! 

On numerous visits to Boulogne or Calais over the years I have often had cause to reflect on the number of cups of tea served to British visitors in French cafes - over the years, tens of millions I expect! Is it British phlegm, or just our national reluctance to complain and make a fuss that has allowed some truly awful cups of tea (criminally bad in my view!) to be tendered in our direction? Are the waiters too busy shrugging their shoulders with Gallic indifference to notice the look of sublime joy on our British faces as we rest our tired bones in their cafes and order a restorative cuppa - but don’t they also subsequently notice the dashed hopes, the look of panic in the eyes as our drink appears and we observe with horror the rapidly cooling glass of hot water with its tea bag neatly wrapped-up beside it on the saucer? I must confess, dear reader, in my bitterest moments to wondering if they do it on purpose - but surely not, after all, I mean Agincourt was an awfully long time ago, and anyway it’s not just confined to the French, actually it’s not just a European thing - the same thing happened to us in cafes in the US where in all other areas great service ruled the day! 

I love coffee but at breakfast I MUST drink tea - anything else imbibed first thing can upset my day. I confess I almost cracked this holiday - I mean fourteen breakfasts where I was forced to infuse a tea bag in a pot of tepid water is almost too much for any Brit to bear ! I wonder if it might be possible to make it compulsory EU Law for all hotel and restaurant staff outside the UK to read George Orwell’s essay on the art of tea making? He was pretty fanatical about how to make a cup of tea and clearly stated how the pot containing an appropriate measure of the noble leaves should be brought to the boiling water - never the other way round! 

The couple from the Wirral on a nearby table never drank anything but fruit juice or water at breakfast time. My wife Judith said something to them about us not being able to drink coffee first thing. 

“Yes, we’re the same,” the wife of the couple replied. 

“But you’re not drinking anything hot,” Judith said. 

The woman nodded sagely, “We bring our own,” she said.


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