'Stephen Lawrence' by Carol Ann Duffy
Cold pavement indeed
the night you died,
murdered;
but the airborne drop of blood
from your wound
was a seed
your mother sewed
into hard ground –
your life's length doubled,
unlived, stilled,
till one flower, thorned,
bloomed
in her hand,
love's just blade.
Written by the poet laureate after the conviction of two men for the teenager's murder in 1993
Monday, 9 January 2012
Saturday, 7 January 2012
New Year, New Start!
Having finally accepted that being a political activist of any sort is a rather futile past-time,(it's only taken me forty five years!) I thought I'd record what happens for me culturally during 2012. This will be for my own benefit although if anyone happens on this blog and sees a post that they find interesting, they are welcome to post a comment.
January 2012 finds me halfway through a couple of Open University modules: A177 Introduction to Shakespeare and A150 Voices and Texts. In the Shakespeare I've completed one assignment on The Taming of the Shrew and am about to start a longer one on Romeo and Juliet. In Voices and Texts I've been struggling with doing 'group work' on-line. Not an easy task and one which I have found immensely frustrating. The subject matter - John Donne's Holy Sonnet VII and Book 22 of Homer's The Iliad have been terrific, trying to create a 'wiki-page' to which seven people contribute over the Christmas period has been a trial.
I managed to ready 50+ books of various sorts last year and hope to up this to 60 this year. Currently, I'm well into Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin as my non-fiction work and The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuiness as bedtime reading, and I'm thoroughly enjoying both.
My long-term project for the years is a poem a week in accordance with the recommendations of Ruth Padel in her terrific little book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. Week 1 is Jo Shapcott's Mrs Noah: Taken After The Flood and Ruth Padel gives a feminist interpretation which had simply not occurred to me stemming from a particular meaning of the word 'taken' in the title. Apparently. the poem has more to do with sex than with animals. Clearly, I have a lot to learn about modern and post-modern poetry.
A couple of days ago, as a member of the Poetry Society, I nominated a collection of poems for the Ted Hughes Award, presumptuous of me I know, but this collection entitled Catulla et al by Tiffany Atkinson has had me laughing ever since I bought it a couple of months ago. A wonderfully exuberant and quirky collection guaranteed to brighten anyone's day.
2012 looks like being a bumper year in culture with the Cultural Olympiad, the World Shakespeare Festival, the Charles Dickens bi-centenary and the centenary of the birth of Lawrence Durrell, not forgetting Hay25 - so much to look forward to.
January 2012 finds me halfway through a couple of Open University modules: A177 Introduction to Shakespeare and A150 Voices and Texts. In the Shakespeare I've completed one assignment on The Taming of the Shrew and am about to start a longer one on Romeo and Juliet. In Voices and Texts I've been struggling with doing 'group work' on-line. Not an easy task and one which I have found immensely frustrating. The subject matter - John Donne's Holy Sonnet VII and Book 22 of Homer's The Iliad have been terrific, trying to create a 'wiki-page' to which seven people contribute over the Christmas period has been a trial.
I managed to ready 50+ books of various sorts last year and hope to up this to 60 this year. Currently, I'm well into Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin as my non-fiction work and The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuiness as bedtime reading, and I'm thoroughly enjoying both.
My long-term project for the years is a poem a week in accordance with the recommendations of Ruth Padel in her terrific little book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. Week 1 is Jo Shapcott's Mrs Noah: Taken After The Flood and Ruth Padel gives a feminist interpretation which had simply not occurred to me stemming from a particular meaning of the word 'taken' in the title. Apparently. the poem has more to do with sex than with animals. Clearly, I have a lot to learn about modern and post-modern poetry.
A couple of days ago, as a member of the Poetry Society, I nominated a collection of poems for the Ted Hughes Award, presumptuous of me I know, but this collection entitled Catulla et al by Tiffany Atkinson has had me laughing ever since I bought it a couple of months ago. A wonderfully exuberant and quirky collection guaranteed to brighten anyone's day.
2012 looks like being a bumper year in culture with the Cultural Olympiad, the World Shakespeare Festival, the Charles Dickens bi-centenary and the centenary of the birth of Lawrence Durrell, not forgetting Hay25 - so much to look forward to.
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
What Will Be Next To Go Down The A470?
Yesterday, Powys County Council’s Board decided to close Theatr Powys and make it’s eight staff redundant. I do not blame Powys County Council, faced with the earlier withdrawal of funding for Theatr Powys by the Arts Council for Wales, the members of the Board had no real choice. It was clear that the county council could not bear the entire cost of funding Theatr Powys. Nor do we have any commercial businesses willing to step in and cough up any sort of contribution for the arts.
This is yet another example of the Welsh Assembly Government deciding, through their ‘arms-length’ agents, that projects in Powys and in Mid Wales in general can be sacrificed as long as the projects in South Wales and the Valleys are preserved. The closure of Theatr Powys follows on from the Aberystwyth Film Festival being ‘acquired’ by Cardiff and it won’t be long before ‘Brecon’ Jazz and the ‘Hay’ Festival of Literature will both find themselves re-located to the M4 corridor. Both these events have been fighting off the Cardiff grasp for years.
When are the movers and shakers of Mid Wales going to get their act together and resist the destruction of all that’s good and worthwhile in rural Wales?
This is yet another example of the Welsh Assembly Government deciding, through their ‘arms-length’ agents, that projects in Powys and in Mid Wales in general can be sacrificed as long as the projects in South Wales and the Valleys are preserved. The closure of Theatr Powys follows on from the Aberystwyth Film Festival being ‘acquired’ by Cardiff and it won’t be long before ‘Brecon’ Jazz and the ‘Hay’ Festival of Literature will both find themselves re-located to the M4 corridor. Both these events have been fighting off the Cardiff grasp for years.
When are the movers and shakers of Mid Wales going to get their act together and resist the destruction of all that’s good and worthwhile in rural Wales?
Friday, 11 March 2011
World Book Night
I was in Cardiff on Saturday last for a gathering of those interested campaigning to secure the REFORM of our voting system. I say REFORM because apparently certain Conservative fundamentalists have persuaded the BBC that the proposed change to our voting system is not a REFORM but merely an amendment. Anyway, while I lounging outside the Senedd I was given a copy of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, one of apparently 1 million books that were given away that week-end by some 20,000 specially selected donors.
I have now read and thoroughly enjoyed this book and wish to pass it on to someone else who has the stomach for it, so the first person to contact me with their postal address will get a copy of The Reluctant Fundamentalist on condition that they agree to pass it on to some other deserving person when they have read it.
Warning: Reading this book will change your life, well your world view, at least.
I have now read and thoroughly enjoyed this book and wish to pass it on to someone else who has the stomach for it, so the first person to contact me with their postal address will get a copy of The Reluctant Fundamentalist on condition that they agree to pass it on to some other deserving person when they have read it.
Warning: Reading this book will change your life, well your world view, at least.
Sunday, 6 March 2011
At Last! At Last!
Just as I was beginning to totally despair of the current Welsh political scene, with the smug complacency of Labour and Plaid in their ‘One Wales’ coalition and the noisy irrelevance of the self-styled ‘Welsh’ Conservatives, Kirsty Williams has proved that someone down at Cardiff Bay has listened to the Welsh people, has taken on board the smouldering discontent that permeates throughout Wales outside Cardiff, and is prepared to offer sensible, workable solutions for getting the devolution project back on track. She, at least, has realised that there is a yawning gap between the talking shop at the Senedd and the pubs, clubs and village halls of the real Wales, and well done to her for doing so.
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Boys Will Be Boys
Reading a number of recent reports and perusing recently published statistics dealing with educational performance in Wales, the well-established trend of boys underperforming vis-a-vis girls in most subjects, but particularly in the humanities, is getting progressively worse. This is a serious issue and needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
At the risk of being labelled politically incorrect, I would argue that the problem is deep-rooted and extensive and is, in some measure, a consequence of profound changes in our society. There seems to be a current fashion for single parenthood which, when combined with ‘education’ coming to be regarded as a ‘female’ profession, especially at primary level, can result in male children rarely having any contact with male role models in their formative years. As a result they have little awareness of the benefits of a sound education and how a lack of a good education affects their economic prospects. Moreover, these boys tend to become disaffected from school relatively early and under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that they under perform.
Alongside this, households seem to be more likely to have widescreen televisions and computer games machines than books and in such households there is apparently little encouragement for children to read of their own volition.
What could government do to address this problem, assuming that they are aware of it? Well, one thing they could do is to positively discriminate a little in favour of getting more males into the teaching profession, particularly in the primary sector. Secondly, in the secondary sector, they could arrange for children to be taught in single-sex classes for the core subjects of English, Mathematics and Science. Thirdly, they could instigate a serious and integrated campaign throughout the education system to make poor literacy and numeracy as socially unacceptable as smoking. Such a campaign would be an ideal theme for Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and have a much more profound effect that all the much-vaunted foreign aid that he proposes to target in other countries to prevent the radicalisation of potential religious extremists.
At the risk of being labelled politically incorrect, I would argue that the problem is deep-rooted and extensive and is, in some measure, a consequence of profound changes in our society. There seems to be a current fashion for single parenthood which, when combined with ‘education’ coming to be regarded as a ‘female’ profession, especially at primary level, can result in male children rarely having any contact with male role models in their formative years. As a result they have little awareness of the benefits of a sound education and how a lack of a good education affects their economic prospects. Moreover, these boys tend to become disaffected from school relatively early and under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that they under perform.
Alongside this, households seem to be more likely to have widescreen televisions and computer games machines than books and in such households there is apparently little encouragement for children to read of their own volition.
What could government do to address this problem, assuming that they are aware of it? Well, one thing they could do is to positively discriminate a little in favour of getting more males into the teaching profession, particularly in the primary sector. Secondly, in the secondary sector, they could arrange for children to be taught in single-sex classes for the core subjects of English, Mathematics and Science. Thirdly, they could instigate a serious and integrated campaign throughout the education system to make poor literacy and numeracy as socially unacceptable as smoking. Such a campaign would be an ideal theme for Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and have a much more profound effect that all the much-vaunted foreign aid that he proposes to target in other countries to prevent the radicalisation of potential religious extremists.
Monday, 28 February 2011
Idle Speculation
A friend and I were discussing the coming referendum on additional powers for the National Assembly and idly speculating what we, as residents of Powys, might do in order to raise our profile in Cardiff Bay. This would be particularly relevant after the demise of the ‘One Wales’ Government in May.
His idea was to set up border posts on all access points to Powys, charge a toll of all inward journeys and use that money to make up for the much-publicized failure of One Wales’ economic policies.
My idea was simpler, if we want to stem the flow of resources from the rest of Wales into Cardiff, all we need to do is to petition 10 Downing Street for Powys to be allowed to secede from Wales and to re-join England. Powys couldn’t be worse off by being part of England and, with a fair wind, might even be better off with regard to certain devolved areas like education and health.
All idle speculation, of course, but something has to be done about reversing the trend for the rest of Wales being transformed into the new state of Greater Cardiff.
His idea was to set up border posts on all access points to Powys, charge a toll of all inward journeys and use that money to make up for the much-publicized failure of One Wales’ economic policies.
My idea was simpler, if we want to stem the flow of resources from the rest of Wales into Cardiff, all we need to do is to petition 10 Downing Street for Powys to be allowed to secede from Wales and to re-join England. Powys couldn’t be worse off by being part of England and, with a fair wind, might even be better off with regard to certain devolved areas like education and health.
All idle speculation, of course, but something has to be done about reversing the trend for the rest of Wales being transformed into the new state of Greater Cardiff.
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