Recently Rated:
Stats
It was the day of the school Eisteddfod. The kids all had tummy ache with nerves, the teachers were wracked with cold sores from the pressure of trying to instil The Jolly Postman into four-year-old children, and the Friends of the School were flogging raffle tickets as hard as they could, whilst trying not to show the prizes - most of which had been re-donated from last year as no-one wanted them then either.
By the end of twenty versions of The Jolly Postman, coats had been removed and the doors were open. The cuteness factor of four-year-olds singing was wearing off and everyone wanted the toilet and a cup of tea. Even at four-years-old, the difference between the best and the pitch-challenged was huge. The parents loved the recitals and each one ended with a clap and the whispers of what was that one? I couldnt quite hear it.
As the performers got older, the songs got louder and the key was hit more often. Genuine applause would break out after an eight-year-old touched hearts with Calon Lan and another with Edlewiess. However, the biggest cheer was saved for the announcement of the tea-break and the children were released into the playground and parents were finally allowed to go to the toilet and given a coffee and a Welsh cake to take them through the second half.
Occasionally a child would refuse to go on, and everyone would catch their breath urging them to just try it , knowing that theyd feel upset with themselves just seconds after the next child was called. By the time the eldest children were performing, the audience were sitting back to enjoy a proper show. Recitations became a feat of memory as whole stories were word perfect. Some did actions, others swung to the beat.
By the end, the hall was reminiscent of a cattle shed with strange smells and noises from the bored toddlers at the back and the heat of two hundred bodies. The standing ovation was as much a chance to stretch limbs as it was of appreciation. But the general opinion was that it had been fantastic. The children had all been wonderful: the medals had been well-earned and everyone was proud of their children.
Of course, I was proud of my children too. I am also pleased not have to listen to Down In The Jungle or Never Use a Knife and Fork ever again. I was even more pleased to find that when I was helping to clear up, I found two unopened tins of Welsh cakes that hadnt been used: it would have been a shame to let them go to waste
There are times when all we hear about the youth of today is how obese / malnurished they are and how they spend all their time sitting in front of computer games, eating Toffee Crisps and cyber bullying each other. It's quite depressing to know that if you send your kids out to play in the streets, they'll probably get squashed by a massive timber lorry, savaged by a pit bull terrior or someone will ring the police to report that they're skipping in a funny way.
Therefore it did my heart good when it snowed on Saturday - snowed enough to scupper everyone's plans. I was scoffing cottage pie in a cafe, and had to abandon my last few chips - it was that bad.
Our daughter's friend's birthday party was cancelled, so instead we all piled to her house to have party tea there instead. The entertainment was changed to sledging....
Within ten minutes, there were fifteen girls wrapped up and wellied, chucking snowballs at grown-ups and the chickens. Luckily our village has a prime sledging slope - steep, bumpy enough to ruin your coccyx, with a small level bit before petering out into a river: perfect. We all traipsed down, dragging our sledges behind us.
These supposed obese / unfit / computer nerds were soon hurling themselves down the slopes again and again. A sheep got taken out, then a dad. Someone's welly came off, gloves got buried, hats got tangled up in the brambles, but still they kept going. When there wasn't a sledge going spare, they head-over-heeled or sat astride a younger sister. They all had their own styles - some tucked in with perfect streamlining, others hadn't much of a clue and spun off on the first bump, but they all kept going...
It started getting dark, someone had lost their sock, and there was suspected damage to a knee. Despite being a top-skidder when I was younger, I'd bought it over a pile of frozen sheep poo and had crashed and burned, much to the delight of my girls. So it was time to go.
We finally called "Last Sledge" and a big sister went to the bottom to get a photo. Fifteen girls piled down - those who didn't have a sledge dived down on their stomachs, with blood-curdling cries.
My thought about what the photo would be warmed my heart - all those bright strong girls enjoying themselves with no need for a hair straightener or a Future WAG t-shirt in sight. As we trudged back, dragging the younger ones on their sledges and then scoffed piles and piles of sandwiches and birthday cake, I was excited to see the photo.
It turned out to be a murky dark splodge, as it must have been darker than I thought...
Ihave been trying to blog about the anti-capitalist
protestors since they first took up camp, but have held back until I had really
understood what they were about. It would have been too easy to mock them for
moaning about capitalism whilst sleeping in shop-bought tents and chatting on
mobile phones: wearing an itchy jumper does not remove you from being a cog in
a capitalist society.
At first I was scathing if you inherently dont like
capitalism, then you should probably move to a country that has a different way
of organising itself, as 200 people nibbling on stew and sipping at Starbucks
lattes cannot change the way our country has established itself over a thousand
years. But then I listened a bit more and realised that anti-capitalist was
possibly a mis-nomer, and bank re-organisation lobby might be more accurate.
Then I had a bit more sympathy but only a bit.
Yes, bankers earn far more than me but they possibly
generate their company more money than I do to mine. Anti-capitalists tend to
forget that in the private sector people have to earn their company more than
they cost, and that is what determines their level of pay.
Of course, no-one has the right to bring down a bank
especially one that I want to pay my cheque for 37.50 into, but I think bankers
would be even stupider than people think they are if there were all these
wonderful ways of making lots of money, but they turned them down as it might
be a little unfair to earn more than the bloke who potters around in the
wholefood caf round the corner.
The real villains are obviously the people who set the rules
that allowed our banks to exchange their foundations of gold to foundations of traws
(hedging detritus), but 200 people pissing
behind St Pauls Cathedral isnt going to get to the inner circle of them.
I think the thing that sealed my opinion of the
Anti-capitalists was the fact that within hours of setting up camp, they had
established a kitchen tent (maybe fair enough), a prayer room, a library and a
university! To me, if youve time to set up a university, your work has been
done. If I wanted to protest about something,
I would spend my time banging on doors, debating convincingly with people who
can make decisions, and thinking of clever things to say to TV cameras. I
wouldnt spend it arguing about where the tent poles for the prayer room were
put when there is a bloody great cathedral next to it.
This week I was slung out of The Hay Festival!
For anyone who isnt aware, Hay-on-Wye is the little Mid Wales town that has become world reknown for second hand books. About twenty years or so ago, a few enthusiasts were chatting over a beer and decided to start The Hay Literary Festival. It is now a huge event with people coming from all over the world to speak or to listen or just to read books in the sunshine (rain).
I thought, where better to gather interest in voting for my novel Cold Enough to Freeze Cows to win The Peoples Book Prize? So, I bribed the children to wear t-shirts that I had printed up for them and we set off in the rain to speak to people.
My plan was for the children to smile sweetly at people to attract their attention. I would then nobble them and ask them to vote for me. To a point it worked. But then the girls started to get bored and then a bit wild, spinning around poles, rolling along the corridors and getting the baby to crawl through the wet grass. My back-up plan was to feed them junk to keep them occupied for another ten minutes.
Being rather a high-brow event, I am still convinced that I wouldnt have got thrown out if I had fed the children oatmeal biscuits or a tub of chopped-up fruit, but my mistake was to give them crisps and horrible chocolatey mini-rolls. It was only a matter of time before Security was called, and I was ejected for unauthorised canvassing...
Therefore, in place of the votes I didnt manage to get from The Hay Festival, I would like to ask whether the good people of Americymru might consider voting for me, please? If so, the website is http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/finalist.php and the book is Cold Enough to Freeze Cows . If anyone does vote, please let me know and your name will be put in my grand prize draw to win a signed copy!
Many thanks! I havent won anything since the 50metre skip in 1978
Of course, the most galling thing is that they still get called farmers wives which conjures up an image of a rosy-cheeked woman baking a ham and egg pie, rather than one covered in chicken muck hitting a pile of sacks with a shovel trying to get those b*@**!*d rats that lurk underneath.
Therefore, when I decided that my book, Cold Enough to Freeze Cows, was to be set in a mid Wales farming community, I wanted to do justice to the level of getting stuck in that these women farmers do. At lambing time in my village, for example, instead of chatting at the school gates, these women screech to a halt on the double yellows, jump out wrapped in overalls that are slopped in every possible bodily fluid, shout, GED IN, GED IN! to their children who are sprinting down the pavement instead of their usual dawdle, and then they zoom off back to the farm before the next emergency happens.
When writing my novels, I make sure I do lots of research to try and stop the jarring that occurs when you notice an author has made an error. For Cold Enough to Freeze Cows, I spoke to a number of farming women to try and glean what their days entailed and what exactly was their way of life, and although every farm is different, a few regular themes cropped up.
The women typically did the stock related side of the farm the checking, feeding, drenching, tailing, lambing side of it, whilst the men did the bits (and this was a regular comment too!) that required sitting in a tractor or mucking about with machinery.
There are downsides to this split, the main one being that when stock needs seeing to, it needs seeing to now - be it morning, noon or the fifth night in a row. The upside was that the women were able to sneak through some of their favourite little characters mostly ones that should have gone to the butchers some time ago! More than one said that she was glad that she had the powers to allow the little ewe that she took care of as a tiddler during a previous season, to hobble through to be kept for another year: even busy farmers are suckers for a cute little face it seems!
Of course, doing any job is difficult when you have small children in tow and many farmers rely heavily upon extended family and friends during the busier times. Despite this, it seemed common enough to have a separate sheep pen for the toddler to doze in and even an industrious two-year-old who would take the dead lambs away in her pedal tractor and trailer! Farming children have to grow up fast; as soon as they are able to do anything useful, they are required to do it, but the general consensus was that this was a positive thing, something that turned the next generation into people who can cut the dags off 500 sheep on an open hillside in horizontal sleet...
The need for pragmatism had spilled over into their sense of humour too. What do a group of women farmers joke about? I asked. Someone else having to deal with foot rot, they replied (it stinks) or someone else getting covered in bodily fluids and the smellier, the better. A friend stepping back onto a dead rat was funny when I was a child and it seems that this hasnt changed either.
The overall thing that struck me as I chatted to these women was their attitude to their farming. It was not a job: it was very much a way of life. Their farms were their responsibility - not just in terms of an income and the welfare of the animals, but also as part of the local community and the landscape. If diversifying a sheep farm to growing, say, grapes was a viable and more profitable option, would they do it? No, was the carefully-thought-through answer.
The proof of the pudding: would they want their daughters to do it? No, its too hard, was the reply then they would think about it, then proudly relate how, actually, maybe the middle one would be up for it: she was already pretty good
