Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention

We all have regrets, some have more than others, but all in all there are not many regrets in my life.

There are times when something doesn’t go the way you hoped for, but looking back you realise it was not a problem because it put your feet on a different, better path.

Even at primary school I had been interested in the sciences and by the end of the first year I was set on becoming a pathologist and my “hero” was Sir Bernard Spilsbury.

I did not concentrate on the sciences to the preclusion of all else. English language and literature still appealed to me but more as subjects for my leisure periods between cutting up bodies.

A few years later I realised that not only was my scientific future looking remote but my future at Rhyl Grammar School appeared to be coming to an end.

This is when I should have regretted not having put more effort into my studies, but looking back I don’t think I would have fitted into the academic regime.

I was more suited to words than to scientific dissection of body parts.

Thus I ended my desire for the academic world and the laboratory with its test tubes and litmus papers and embarked on a future of seeking out stories and telling them in a way that allowed people to grasp the truth.

Have I regretted leaving school to concentrate on journalism? NO!

What I have long regretted, however, is that I did not put more effort into one academic subject – the study of the Welsh language.

At that time “foreign” languages taught in grammar schools were basically Welsh, French, German and Latin. (note my quote marks around Welsh, which, of course, was not a foreign language in Wales even though it was treated like one by the education authorities)

I never took German but did study French, Latin and Welsh, but only to the rudimentary levels of those who did not take languages on to A-level.

This is partly understandable in that although I lived in Wales, and my father was Welsh, and my mother Liverpool Welsh, the language was not spoken in our house.

My father remembered his father, Welsh Presbyterian Rev Edward Vyrnwy Pierce, speaking the language as he was bilingual, having been raised in a Welsh family with both his parents being Welsh-born, Machynlleth to be exact.

I always enjoyed lisening to Welsh choirs and have been devoted to Welsh rugby as far back as I can remember.

I could even reel off the (in)famous Welsh place name from Anglesey as a party piece, but that, and odd words I have added to my vocabulary over the years, is the limit of my knowledge of the language of my fathers.

Compare that to another Rhyl Grammar School pupil, a year or so ahead of me, who also came from an English-speaking household and left RGS for university with a similar basic knowledge of the Welsh language.

He went to Aberystwyth University, where my grandfather Edward had also studied, and, alongside his other studies, learned to speak fluent Welsh.

At school he was Fred Francis but changed his name to Ffred Ffransis and was soon a leading light in the Welsh Language Society: Cymdeithas yr iaith Gymraeg.

As a political proponent of Cymraeg he was frequently arrested and even imprisoned for participating in non-violent protest actions.

As far as I am aware he remains a champion of the language and the rights of the people in the wonderful land we call Cymru.

Ffred Ffransis I salute you.

Nowadays I am doing my best to learn the language I neglected in my youth.

Maybe I can learn enough to read my great grandfather David’s volumes of notebooks about his family history, as well as his sermons and poetry.

Last minute hitch on house deal led to a far better home

Many of you will remember 1977 as a busy year, it was Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee as monarch; the Yorkshire Ripper was still on the prowl; National Front marchers clashed with anti-Nazi protesters in London.

Meanwhile Marion and I had moved our little family to North Wales, Anglesey in fact, and as I was settling in as Holyhead district reporter for the North Wales Chronicle, part of the North Wales Newspapers group based in Oswestry.

The Basildon house had been sold and we were looking for a place to buy in Holyhead, meanwhile we were renting a bungalow in Valley.

It wasn’t long before we found out about a new-build estate on the edge of Holyhead.

On viewing the plans and looking at the site we chose a plot for a nice little two-bedroom semi-detached with an open fireplace. We could just see ourselves, after the girls had gone to bed, putting our feet up in front of the fire in the autumn and winter (the houses would not be ready until the autumn).

We paid our deposit, arranged a mortgage and looked forward to living in our own home again.

Meanwhile I settled in to scouting out stories in Anglesey in general and Holyhead specifically.

At the weekends in that glorious summer we would take the girls to one of the local beaches, there were plenty to choose from, and watch them playing in the sand while we soaked up the sun.

Towards the end of the summer we went to check with the estate agents as to how the house building was going on, only to discover there was a minor hiccup, in fact a major hiccup, over our plot.

The building on the site was going well, it was the plot we had chosen but when we looked at the specifications we discovered there was no indication of a fireplace.

After a bit of a to and fro with the estate agent, who blamed the builders, we said – no fireplace, no deal.

We had our deposit returned plus ancillary costs and started to look all over again.

Then out of the blue I was talking to a member of the local council, who also happened to be an estate agent, following a meeting and after hearing about our let-down he said he had a two-bedroom cottage on Holyhead Mountain where the buyer had just pulled out.

We went to view it the next day and fell in love with it. From the garden you could look down to South Stack lighthouse.

As it happened the seller had bought the next-door cottage because it was bigger.

There was already an up-to-date survey on the property and with a purchase agreed we were able to settle within weeks and moved in at the beginning of autumn.

The place was two cottages made into one with solid stone walls and deep window embrasures.

It also had a magnificent stone fireplace.

We couldn’t have done better.

This trickle, once a torrent, will be in full spate again soon

First of all please accept my apologies that instead of the torrent of new posts for this New Year, 2025, it has slowed to a small stream, if that.

The past few months have not been as smooth as I had hoped but I am not here to wallow in my sorrow.

There have been wonderful times in these same last few months and I want to fill you in on them.

I especially want to talk about the glorious year when I not only returned to my chosen profession, journalism, but also returned to my beloved Wales, even though it was not as lengthy a time as I would have liked.

So watch out because Robin’s about.

Never mind Inspector Gadget we’ve all got gadgets at home

Have you ever opened a kitchen drawer, or cupboard, and wondered what some of the items in there actually do?

We know about the ice-cream scoop and, possibly, the melon baller, you might even recognise an old-fashioned potato peeler.

What about that odd thing with cog wheels and what looks like the winding key for an old clockwork toy train?

Once upon a time people peeled potatoes with a kitchen knife; if you had ice-cream it was probably in a brick-shaped block wrapped in cardboard which would then be sliced up into individual pieces.

As for melon, well you’d be lucky to see one from one year’s end to the next unless you went out for dinner at a posh restaurant.

We’ve all got these kitchen gadgets tucked away, an old breadmaker which was shoved in the cupboard because the baker in the house had decided proper bread needed to be handmade or, more common, the baker could no longer be bothered.

I’m sure my parents had some gadgets, in fact I might have some of them in my possession, possibly handed down without instructions, but the first one I remember is something which cost me just 6d (that’s 2.5p in modern coinage).

My friend Roger and I had travelled down to London to go the the International boat show. We were about 16 at the time and, coming from a seaside town and both interested in messing about in boats, were interested in looking over boats of all sizes, with or without engines, and all the accessories that go with them.

There were stands throughout the exhibition with men and women demonstrating everything from outboard engines to galley equipment.

One man was demonstrating a gadget which could be used to squeeze an orange and extract all the juice and pour it into a cup.

Despite being a sophisticated young North Walian (that’s right, from North Wales, not a Northerner which implies English) I was drawn to this little plastic gizmo which could make extracting juice from an orange so simply.

They were on sale for just 6d as opposed to a shop price of 1/-, which was still quite a lot (actually 5p in modern money).

Surprisingly out of all the gadgets I can remember that orange, plastic juice extractor is the only one that I would still appreciate and lose.

I still like gadgets and even admit to having an electric breadmaker tucked away under the stairs. I prefer to mix my dough by hand.

A few days ago I did treat myself to a new gadget – a milk frother, battery powered. Mid-morning I enjoy a good frothy coffee while my wife enjoys a mug of hot chocolate.

The trouble is even a balloon whisk does not froth the hot milk enough whereas this little battery-operated frother does the job as well as any modern variety.

It cost me a fiver and if you compared it to that juicer I bought all those years ago for 5p then nowadays that £5 should have been £50, or possibly more.

From innocence to sexual predators in one fell swoop

It is amazingly simple to make a giant leap from a fairly mundane chat about songs from the 60s and 70s to suddenly find yourself in a discussion about paedophiles.

I’m not suggesting this was a chat over a pint in a pub. I’m not even sure that people discuss pop songs and paedophilia in pubs these pubs.

The chat in question was on an internet group reminiscing about growing up in the 60s, and the sort of music people enjoyed.

A quite anodyne chat about songs of the 1960s suddenly turned into a trawl amongst the lyrics with a suggestion that many of them would fail to get any airtime in these “enlightened ” days.

There were the usual suspects of course, Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris for example, but these were actually based on the men themselves.

Admittedly there were songs which nowadays would be blacklisted.

I was just surprised that anyone could think “Young Girl” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, or “Does Your Mothr Know” by ABBA could be considered subjects of a ban based on lyrics.

In both cases the songs are based on a man telling a young girl that he believes her to be under the age required to have sex.

He recognises that he has strong feelings for her but knows he cannot start a relationship.

There are far worse songs these days that even seem to imply violence, rape or even murder against women.

Don’t destroy our memories of a time when musicians knew how to make music and singers could sing in tune.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Published by Penguin Classics

We all know the horror story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, well a lot of us know the story of the kind and gentle doctor and the evil counterpart.

You can see it now, a man takes a drink of a potion which bubbles and glows then falls behind the settee before standing up as Edward Hyde, a stooped over, ugly figure who disappears into the night intent on murder and mayhem.

Except that is not how RLS wrote it.

I know many people are positive they have read or seen the mild-mannered man turn into a monster, as described above. Except that is a better fit with the films, or TV series, or “sequels” that have proliferated since the story was first published in 1886.

The description above could have been taken from any of the films of the book and even from spoofs such as Carry on Screaming with Kenneth Williams as a mad scientist (more Dr Frankenstein than the pleasant doctor of Stevenson’s novella).

In fact the description could have been a scene from the Carry On film except the person drinking the potion was an upright Victorian policeman, played by Harry H Corbett (the H there so that he could be distinguished from Harry Corbett of Sooty fame).

I will not give you details of the actual book because if you go to it with an open mind you should find the original far superior to any other version.

The book tells the story of friends and relations, the good doctor, his long-term friend, a lawyer, as well as a loyal manservant.

It is also about the id, the ego and the super ego , the three aspects of personality as viewed by Sigmund Freud.

Do not be put off by what some see as psychobabble. Stevenson has presented the whole thing in a manner that can be read at any level and still remains a cracking read.

I urge you to give it a go.

What goes around comes around – especially spectacles

There are certain things in our lives that are important, yet we only think about them if someone else comments on them.

A classic example is glasses, or spectacles if you prefer.

When you first get them you notice how they press on the bridge of your nose, or how they lie along your ears.

It only takes a couple of days to get used to them and within a week you won’t even think once about them.

You are more likely to find your wallet at home, if it isn’t in your pocket, than you are to find your glasses, having only put them down a minute before.

You only really notice them if someone sees you wearing them for the first time, and comments on them.

I started wearing glasses when I was about 17 and studying at Kelsterton College in North Wales. I started one term at the back of the class, when all your classmates are teenage girls you don’t choose to sit at the front. By the end of the term I had moved gradually to the front, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to see the blackboard.

The crunch came when I was at the Flint railway station heading for home.

It was a two-track railway line and I was standing opposite the station sign, a large purple sign with large letters spelling out the station name: FLINT.

To me it was a blurred purple with some fuzzy white blotches.

When I got home local businesses were closed but I asked my mother to make an appointment at the optician’ for the following Saturday morning.

When I did get the spectacles back the first thing I noticed was that everything was clear again.

The second thing I noticed was that the glasses were the same as those worn by Michael Caine in the Harry Palmer spy movies.

Since that time I have had plain black frames, wire frames, contact lenses, prescription sunglasses, varifocals, the plain glasses that go dark in sunlight, and so many more in the last 56 years.

Guess what my latest glasses are – a very chic pair of black-framed spectacles.

“My name is Michael Caine – not a lot of people know that.”

Ding dong the Bells had the literary world in a muddle

In 1847 three books were published by authors with the surname Bell. There was Currer Bell, Acton Bell and Ellis Bell.

Literary stalwarts, reviewers and those in the publishing world immediately smelled a rat, but they were on the wrong track. They suspected the books were all written by one person – a man.

What had probably missed their attention was that the previous year a book of poetry had been published- the works of three brothers: Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell.

The reason no connection was made, between the poetical brothers and the novels of Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell, could well be because the volume of poetry only had a two-volume print run.

Nowadays we know the Bell brothers were actually the Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Anne, daughters of a country parson of Irish extraction, Patrick Brontë.

The novels of the “Bell brothers” were well received and many reviewers considered it brave of the authors to indicate support for female characters who showed strength in their actions, and a degree of learning, often shown through them becoming governesses or even teaching young men of a somewhat “lower class” to read and write.

If Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey had been published under the writers’ real names it is highly likely they could have fallen foul of male prejudices and sunk into oblivion.

That would have been a literary tragedy and could well have put back the feminist cause back for decades.

The strangest thing is that literary connoisseurs of the early 19th century not only thought the three works were written by a man, they also thought they were written by the same person.

Yet if you read the books you could not see them as the works of one person.

Admittedly there are authors who have produced novels using different characters in the lead. Murder mysteries are a classic example.

Agatha Christie had Hercule Poirot as her main detective, but Jane Marple also played her part, yet the characters could not be more different.

Hercule is a prissy little Belgian, a refugee in the First World War who had been a police detective.

Jane Marple was one of those little old ladies you see everywhere but never really notice, yet she uses everyday situations to solve crimes.

The point is you can always recognise that Agatha Christie style.

If you were to read Jane Eyre and follow on with Wuthering Heights you would need to be very narrow-minded to even contemplate that the authors were the same person.

Even the man on a Clapham omnibus could understand these basic instructions

You never know what you’ll find on an instruction sheet when you buy a gadget.

Once upon a time it would identify the component parts and explain what each part did.

If it was made in the UK it would have assembly instructions (if it needed assembling) and operating instructions. These would be written in English and possibly in French, German and Spanish.

When we joined the EU the information required grew and the number of languages had to cover every single one.

From the days when a small slip of paper was enough as an information leaflet a lot of items we buy these days have what amounts to a slim paperback.

My son works for a company which has to ensure the information in these tomes is accurate. A lot of this work is now done online.

He started off in this line working as what amounted to a quality controller and also involved quality testing an item to make sure it is safe.

Nowadays he concentrates on ensuring all the information needed (including warnings on whether or not it is suitable for different age ranges) is provided.

Over the years he has explained to me the necessity for certain things provided in these leaflets.

It is not down to bureaucracy, much of it is to ensure the safety of the purchaser and any user of the item.

As a journalist I was always told that a news story had to be understood by an average reader, known in the early 20th century as “the man on a Clapham ombibus”.

Although the term is archaic it is still a good guide these days and applies to any purveyor of information.

Mind you this tenet now looks as though instructions are being brought to an extremely basic statement.

I have just bought a kitchen gadget for which information instructions have come down to the most basic I have ever seen.

HOW TO USE:

Press button: machine works.

Release button: machine stops working.

I think even Donald Trump could understand that.

From home phones to mystery emails – grifters keep trying

Why do scam artists (actually that’s an insult to real artists, sorry Vincent, Renè, Michelangelo, Pablo, Salvador et al) think that anyone over 70 is as dumb as Trump, and you’d need to get close to the bottom of the IQ ladder before you’d find a candidate, and an easy mark for a grifter.

Five years ago it was mainly our landlines that had the trolls jiggling in excitement when they called on behalf of: “your bank”; “your computer security company”; “your Sky account”; or whatever company they claimed to be.

My initial reaction was to accuse them of lying and put the phone down.

The trouble is that did not deter them. They continued to use a range of different numbers in the hope that I would not notice the same person was calling from so many accounts.

I did go to the well-tried move of engaging them in conversation:

“Ah yes, didn’t you call yesterday? Good to hear from you again. Sorry I cut the call short but I was concerned about my mother who is 92 and bedridden. How is your mother by the way?”

This would put some of them off, but there were the persistent ones who would change tack and start telling you that with an elderly person in the house you needed to ensure your cyber safety, as if you were scammed you might end up unable to provide care for them.

Anyone who tries that just gets cut off.

The problem is that some of the scammers just can’t stop. This used to put me on the “shaming” tack.

“Does your mother know what you do for a living? Does she know that you try and con elderly people to pay over all their savings just so that you can live the high life?”

Surprisingly this does turn some of them away. I have had an occasional one even say sorry but most of them get narked and tell me to do things to myself that I have not been able to do in 20 years before cutting the call.

Eventually they appeared to have realised they were not going to con me out of my hard-earned savings and the phone calls slowed to a trickle and then just stopped.

Then they tried a new tack. An email, which was allegedly from my Internet provider; or my bank; or my McAfee security.

Over the past couple of years these emails have increased from one every now again to two or three a week; then to every day; and now three or four a day.

The thing is all you have to do is to put your marker on the word details and will reveal who sent the email. Normally it will have a name and what is also a company name.

These are not necessarily cyber thieves, they just want you to open the email which takes you to their email site and gives them a click on their site.

It might make it difficult for you to leave the site unless you shut down completely.

The scammer only succeeds if the recipient opens the email.

Do not open the email.