Just a couple of days into the second half of 2024 I was bemoaning the fact that I was finally beginning to feel old.
I was also putting the first half of the year down at about third on my list of: “the worst six months of my life.”
Well let me tell you, it was already lying at third and the last six months shoved it down a place and at the moment I am not sure as to whether or not it will head even lower in the next couple of years.
As we are only just entering the year 2025 I will save my report on the last few months until later in the week rather than upset my readers so early in 2025.
What I do know is that I am intending to try and make the most of every single day of this sparkingly shiny year and catch up on some of the jobs that have been allowed to accumulate over the past six months.
It will involve a lot of work in the garden: weeding; relaying gravel; sorting out the front garden (destined to be a cottagey wildflower area); putting up arches and arbours in the rear garden to create a framework for climbing plants and areas to sit and enjoy the summer sunshine; bringing in new fruit trees; and just generally creating a paradise without having to work too hard.
I am going in to the New Year with so many things lying ahead of me. Not just jobs but things I want to do for myself.
These “tasks” or “jobs” cover a wide range from tidying the garden to reading books; from tiling the kitchen walls to doing jigsaws; from redecorating the living room to tracing my ancestors.
The point is none of these will be New Year resolutions because once you “resolve” to do something you tend to find a myriad of other things that will need to be done sooner.
Over the past few months I have been getting up in the mornings and deciding to do this, that, or the other. Yet after our morning cups of tea, getting dressed, having our breakfast it suddenly seemed there was not enough time to do what I intended to do and I end up doing something other than what I had intended to do.
Procrastination is the thief of time, or so we are led to believe, but is it true? Is it not ourselves who decide what we should do or not do?
We can not steal time because time is constant, we might waste time by carrying out an unnecessary action but the time was still there no matter what we did with it.
This year I will read (I have received plenty of books from Brontë to Tolkien; Shelley to Stevenson; Dumas to Melville); I will bake (bread, biscuits and cakes); I will decorate and I will garden.
The point is I will do it in my time and when I want to do it, not to a strict timetable.
Which, as Julie Andrews told us all, is a very good place to start.
We might spend a lot of time with our ABC, but, in consideration of my followers, there will be no tonic solfa.
This is the start of a brand new year, the first day of the first month of the 25th year of the 21st century CE, or AD if you like the idea of a God sending his son down to sort out all the problems of the world.
I know many of you will be coming down from the highs of all the celebrations which are traditional at this festive time, so I’ll play it down a bit while we get to know each other all over again.
I’ve been away for around six months but in my defence I would say those months have been very overcast, especially the last three months.
We have come out the other side and are ready to face what we hope will be a wonderful year.
Before all that, however, let me wish you A HAPPY NEW YEAR, or, as they say in my beloved Cymru:
Personally I have about 40, all have a nice soft cotton feeling which gets softer every time they are washed. Not a single one is plain white and all of them have some form of logo on them.
My oldest was added to my wardrobe (or rather chest of drawers) over 40 years ago and it is still in great condition.
If you are a T-shirt wearer do you know when the first one was created? I say “created” because that is how it came to be.
It made its first appearance in the late 19th century in New York. Workers, especially construction workers and dockers, used to wear an all-in-one set of underwear known as long johns or union suits.
These covered them from their shoulders to their wrists and ankles and had a flap at the back for when you needed to visit the loo (workers wouldn’t have time to strip the whole suit off which would have necessitated you taking off your outer garments as well).
In the heat of the summer manual workers would get hot and the itchy material of the union suit would prove very uncomfortable. Then in the 1890s one manufacturer came up with the idea of a two-part union suit, still ankle length and wrist length.
This meant you could wear the the separate parts but didn’t have to strip your upper half when you needed to relieve yourself.
Then one bright spark realised that on really hot days if you stripped to the waist the sun would still be too hot on your back but if you kept the top half of your union suit on the long sleeves were still uncomfortable.
His solution? Cut the sleeves short.
Voila! The T-shirt was born.
Not a very well made garment but it served its purpose.
Unintentional design can easily lead to manufacturers picking up the idea and creating a fashion. Look at designer jeans with rips already across the knees. This saved the wearer from having to do it themselves.
The “union suit T-shirt” went the other way with clothing firms cutting the length of the sleeves during the manufacture providing a neat design.
By 1913 not only were sales of T-shirts taking off but the US Navy added them to the official uniform.
It was the 1950s before the white T-shirt became a fashion icon.
The two most memorable film stars to wear it were Marlon Brando: The Wild One and A Streetcar Named Desire, and James Dean: Rebel Without a Cause.
Brando wore one under a black leather jacket as the leader of a biker gang in The Wild One and without any other covering in A Streetcar named Desire. James Dean teamed the white T-shirt with blue jeans and a red jacket.
As the 50s headed to the 60s manufacturers realised the white T-shirt was a blank canvas just waiting to host an advertising image or a film title or the name of a pop group.
Nowadays T-shirts can have anything on them from a Disney princess to Led Zeppelin, and from Teletubbies to vampires.
My oldest T-shirt dates back to about 1980 and was bought in Australia when we lived out there. It is designed in the format now used for word clouds and based on Australia is followed by words associated with the country, for example: thongs, barbies, stingers, Great Barrier Reef, booze, billabong, swagman, billy tea, Outback.
I also have a number of Welsh T-shirts, including two black ones each with a simple statement:
You can take the boy out of Wales but you can’t take Wales out of the boy
and:
Never forget you’re Welsh
The latter having two meanings when spoken.
I also have a number of political T-shirts one of which also highlights one of my musical tastes, a Manic Street Preachers souvenir of my trip to one of their concerts which bears the band name on the front and a quote on the back which states: If I can shoot rabbits I can shoot fascists – Anon, allegedly spoken by one of the British volunteers to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.
Naturally I have not one, not two, not three but four Che Guevara T-shirts with the well-known image in black on a red T, a green T, a khaki one and a pale brown one.
Then there are the clearly political ones including one with the original Labour logo and Liverpool; another in red stating: It nothing goes right – go left; and the pride of my collection, bought in Burston, near Diss, at the Burston School Strike rally in 2015. It was just a few days before the Labour leadership vote was revealed in 2015 and Jeremy Corbyn was elected.
The T-shirt I bought at Burston has Team Corbyn on the back and Vote for Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader on the front.
The guest speaker at the rally that year was Jeremy Corbyn and it was the second time I had met him. He joins a very short list of people I admire almost as much as I admire my father.
Today, however, I thought it appropriate to wear the T-shirt my daughter bought for me a few years ago:
Sorry it’s been such a long, long time but let’s hope I can do better than I have done in the first half of the year.
It has been an odd six months during which I marked my 74th birthday.
I know it’s not a landmark birthday (that’s next year at 75) but it certainly seemed very different to previous years.
As a child birthdays mean cards, gifts, cake and jelly.
Your first birthday is a real milestone, but you rarely remember it. My fifth birthday was marked in Chesham but just a few weeks after that we moved lock, stock and barrel to Rhyl in North Wales.
This was the first real landmark year for me.
I look back on it now and realise that in the land of my father I was in the land of my fathers. My father was born in Wrexham and his father in Wales, and his father before him and all of my direct paternal lineage goes back in Wales to the early 1700s, to Machynlleth in the west of of the land of dragons.
To get back to landmarks, however, and 10 is the next big one because it has two numbers and is the age when we took the 11+ examination to decide whether we went to the local grammar school or the secondary modern, as I have already revealed I made it to the grammar school.
After that the next landmark was 21, that was when you could marry without your parents’ permission, and vote in a local or general election. If the decision to change the age from 21 to 18 had been taken in 1967 instead of 1969 I would have celebrated my 18th as the landmark year at which I become a man. Instead I missed that date so had to stick to 21 as a celebration of getting the key of the door.
There are many major events you will remember for the rest of your life: buying your first home; getting married; losing a close relative; but at the moment I am concentrating on birthday landmarks.
After 21 (nowadays 18) we used to look on 40 as the next big date when you suddenly hit middle age (nowadays people count 30 as the first real “0” landmark but that was just another date to us.
I suppose 50 counts because it is the half century. Women used to celebrate 60 as a time to retire and take life easy (it was 65 for men), then again 70 sounds serious and after that you forget the “0” and make every five years a landmark.
Why, then, does 74 feel so threatening?
Do you know what? After telling you all about it I suddenly feel better.
What is more is that there were no politics, despite the warning.
Yesterday was a special day, it marked a milestone date in my daughter Jacqueline’s journey through life.
Although she is currently enjoying a well-earned holiday in America she is always with me.
Today is a completely different matter. Today I am thinking of a very, very good friend who is no longer with us in one very definite sense but still walks by my side and will continue to do so for as long as I live.
On this day, 4 April, six years ago, in 2018, the best friend I ever had, Roger Winston Charles Steele, who had lived in the same house in Rhyl, North Wales, for as long as I have known him, died.
When I was informed of his death, one of his nieces was kind enough to inform me, I was lost for words (a circumstance Roger would have thought to be almost impossible), but I was not lost for tears, I cried an ocean.
From the age of five Roger and I became pals and remained so throughout primary school and then grammar school and then on to our first jobs.
Even then we were close – he worked in a science laboratory in Greenfield and I had begun work as a journalist just up the hill in Holywell.
We used to meet up at a pub at lunchtimes and have a pint, a ham roll and a game of darts or snooker.
At darts we were pretty equal, both playing for one of our favourite haunts in the local darts league.
At snooker, though, he could beat me hands down and frequently did, but he never made a big thing of it.
I will be thinking of him today.
I will be thinking of a friend, a pal, a fellow mischief-maker, a drinking companion, a sailing companion and so much more.
They say it never rains but it pours, whereas in the last two or three days the rain has been waiting until late afternoon before bursting out of the heavens, which meant I could get some time out in the front garden.
I had to clear all the gravel away a couple of years ago and then remove roots coming in to the garden from two massive trees on the grass verge outside. There were more roots, from fibrous to thick, which had to go as well to allow anything I planted had at least a few inches of decent soil.
Left over from last year’s garden were a host of forget-me-nots, a few primula and and a couple of cowslip, some bluebells and foxgloves and, finally, some charming ornamental grasses to edge the pond.
After digging it over, and the addition of a few binloads of sieved soil as well as a couple of buckets of horse manure, the garden was ready for the broadcasting of wildflower seed, mixed with sawdust, covering a wide variety of plants suitable for bees, butterflies and other insects which are good for pollination.
In the last few days I have been adding a few extra plants from the main back garden to provide some height and now I will be concentrating on raising specific plants from seed to fill out any gaps that may be left when the broadcasted seed makes its appearance.
It’s been quite an effort but this year I feel my endeavours will finally offer that cottage garden/wildflower meadow that I have been working towards over the last few years.
Here’s to the summer with the bees buzzing, the butterflies fluttering and a random group of wildlife flora and fauna adding to a peaceful garden haven.
For those of you who do not recognise the name Arthur Askey, and are unaware of who he was, then let me tell you, he was a diminutive comedian born in Liverpool, home of my grandfather, my mother, my brother and myself. In almost every performance he would sing his Bee Song*
Oh, what a glorious thing to be A healthy, grown-up, busy-busy bee Whiling away the passing hours Pinching all the pollen from the cauliflowers I'd like to be a busy-busy bee Being just as busy as a bee can be Flying around the garden, sweetest ever seen Taking back the honey to the dear old queen.
Bzz-bzz-bzz-bzz, honey bee honey bee Bzz if you like but don't sting me Bzz-bzz-bzz-bzz, honey bee, honey bee Bzz if you like but don't sting me
It continues for another two or three verses plus choruses but all the time he was singing he was also prancing, leaping and running around the stage and if you think of the size of a stage such as that at the London Palladium and Arthur Askey’s slight lack of height you have to admire him for his energy as much as anything else.
I haven’t been around much for the last couple of weeks. In fact my last post was on my birthday and concerned the Six Nations final games (men) which resulted in Wales being awarded the Wooden Spoon having failed to win a single game.
Now some people, mainly those who don’t really know me, might think I had wandered into the Slough of Despond.
This Pilgrim is too wise to venture into such a negative area, better to take a longer route than to be sucked down in despair.
Since my birthday I had every intention of “getting things done”, the first of which would be to clear the unwanted growth in the area round the pond in the front garden in readiness for creating a wildlife mini-meadow.
Unfortunately the weather in the last two weeks has not been conducive to regular work in the garden.
Then again a rainy day means I can get on with indoor activities.
Sorting the garage workshop out; tidying the loft to make sure I know what is where; reorganising the study so that I can actually use it as a study; baking bread; and so it goes.
At least when it doesn’t rain I know exactly what I’ll be doing.
Hopefully over the next week I will have the time to tell you how the garden is progressing; how my foxes are getting on; what the hedgehogs are up to; whether or not I find something in the loft I had forgotten about; or just comment on odd things I have found on social media.
If I was a churlish oaf I could possibly say that the boys let me down today, especially when you consider it is my birthday and I had high hopes of a victory in Cardiff against Italy.
I am not, however, churlish or an oaf and I can honestly say that Wales made me proud with those three tries, all converted, three tries equal to those of the opposition, who remained just that penalty ahead at the end.
Mind you the penalty was just one of many awarded to Italy and the referee treated that whistle the way a youngster would treat a brand-new toy they had been given for birthday or Christmas.
I am not suggesting that the Italians were not the better team. On the day they played good rugby and, certainly in the first half, were no real match.
Yet the signs were there.
Rather than playing the kicking game they had played early in the championship the relatively young Welsh team were passing the ball the way we saw in the 60s and 70s. The instinctive passes, made without looking, were based on a team who trusted to the knowledge that there was a safe pair of hands to receive it.
It didn’t work all the time, occasionally the receiver would fumble, but the idea and the trust were there.
Even after the interval the Welsh side did not immediately notch their game up and take the play more fully to the Italian half.
In the final 10 to 15 minutes, however, they came roaring like the dragons they are and with their final conversion they came within a single score of a draw or even a possible victory.
Many people will see this Six Nations Championship as a tragedy but you have to remember that from a position such as this the only way is up.
Warren Gatland did not come in as head coach to give us a Grand Slam in 2024, not even a Triple Crown. He came back to Wales to build a squad capable of winning the Rugby World Cup in Australia in 2027.
As happens quite often there comes a time when the top players in any nation’s team will hang up their boots, just as George North has done today. That is when you start looking around for new blood for the next contest and in this case Warren is looking at that World Cup rather than at the Six Nations in ’25 or ’26.
Not that he, or we, would be happy with any more wooden spoons, even though the Welsh look upon such implements as tokens of love.
No, we would like to see a Grand Slam or a Triple Crown, or even just a top of the table (preferably having defeated England on the way), but second or third would still show that Warren’s investment in young new blood was paying off.
That is the thing about Welsh supporters, we trust a good head coach.
The boys did us proud today – I know they lost to France but the first half was a brilliant back and forth game which, for the most part, led to Wales just keeping a couple of points in front.
They had certainly had a rousing pre-match sing song with Max Boyce belting out his rewritten lyrics to Hymns and Arias bringing in references to the French, Mothers’ Day and the daffodils in bloom.
He even managed to get in a dig about the ban on singing Delilah.
During that first half the Welsh played the sort of game I remember from the 60s and 70s. When the ball was passed in many cases the player did not look for someone to pass to but took it that someone would be there to receive it.
This is a new team and they are still getting to know one another, by the end of the Six Nations they will be a cohesive unit and they will be able to grow their game.
Through most of the game there was a touch of turn and turn about as one side went a couple of points ahead then the other would score until it came to a point when a French try was disallowed (it was “their turn” to take the lead) and Wales had a chance to then increase the lead.
As it happened by part way through the second half the French had managed two scores, rather than the turn and turn about, and, hard as they tried, Wales were unable to make any more breaks in the French defence.
The final score was disappointing, but the knowledge that they had played their best and could only get better was a form of balm.
The games when one side loses by just one or two points often leads to comments from both sides about a good game well played which could have gone either way.
Then again there are other squads who will treat a one point win as though it was a major rout and work on the basis there always has to be a winner and a loser, and losers are losers.
I am sure there are squads who will recognise themselves. Mind you it’s quite possible they have reached a point where they do not recognise themselves and consider themselves good sportsmen.
Robin's Nest 