End of the Old Year; the Start of Something New

Taking a moment for some quiet contemplation....

Roman Marching Camp

I felt like a walk to blow the cobwebs off me, so I went out along the Offa's Dyke Path on the other side of the river. It goes through the wooded area that the owners want to make into a camp site (planning permission pending). They've certainly done a fair amount of work on the land, clearing undergrowth and a lot of Himalayan Balsam, and the path itself has been improved.

Up above the public footpath are the remains of a Roman fort. I haven't been up there for years, but yesterday there were no sheep in the field, and the gate at the top was open, so I went to have a look.

It's on the official lists as Clyro Roman Fort, and it's on Boatside Farm, overlooking the River Wye. Photos always seem to flatten out earthworks like this, but I think I got an angle where you can see the sudden rise in the ground where the rampart is, with the track cutting through it. On either side, in the next fields, there's nothing visible left at all.
This is where the Silures tribe almost wiped out the XX Valeria Legion, killing the prefect and eight centurions as well as many of the rank and file.

'Hostile Environment' Comes to Hay

News of refugees and deportations can seem very far away from life in Hay, but occasionally something happens that demonstrates the sort of ties people in Hay have with international events. Hay, Brecon and Talgarth Sanctuary for Refugees has been very active, organising days out in the countryside for refugees living in Swansea, but sometimes helping refugees means doing a little bit more than offering them a nice day out.
Otis Bolamu is an asylum seeker from the Republic of Congo. He was a government employee there, and also active in one of the main opposition groups to the government. When he was accused of spying for the opposition, he knew his life was in danger, and he fled the country, ending up here in Wales. At the moment, official government advice is not to travel to the Republic of Congo, due to political unrest, state violence and a deteriorating human rights situation.
Otis hasn't been idle while he was waiting for his claim to be processed - although asylum seekers are not able to get a job, he became a volunteer at Hay Festival, and in Swansea he has been volunteering at an Oxfam shop.
And then he was refused leave to remain in the UK. He appealed against that decision, but he was taken into detention by immigration officers just before Christmas - they planned to send him back to the Congo on Christmas Day.
On Facebook there has been a petition going round to allow Otis to stay here, supported by Hay Festival, and at the moment he is still in this country, thanks to the work of Hay, Brecon and Talgarth Sanctuary for Refugees, Oxfam and churchgoers in Swansea, the opposition group Apareco in the Congo, and various concerned MPs and lawyers.
This is only a temporary reprieve, but Otis and his lawyers are preparing a fresh case to allow him to remain in the UK.

Boxing Day Hunt

Just before they set off, around 11am.

Nadolig Llawen

This year's winner of the Small Window prize in the Window Dressing Competition - at the Red Cross shop.

Busking for Refugees

Here are Justin and Bob, singing Message in a Bottle. They were also joined by Toby, and together they raised £194.90 for Hay, Brecon and Talgarth Sanctuary for Refugees.

Celebrating Local Personalities in Art

The Hereford Times publishes a local walk every week, and last week they chose a route around the public art of Hereford. When I go into Hereford, I usually stay around the centre, so I wasn't aware of one of the sculptures on the list, which features Josie Pearson, the Paralympic athlete from Hay.

It's actually a Portrait Bench, featuring Elgar with his bicycle, Josie Pearson and Violette Szabo, who was the first woman to be awarded the George Cross, for her work in the Second World War with SOE.
To get to the bench (and I will try this the next time I'm in Hereford) you go past the Volunteer Inn on Harold Street, onto Crozen Lane, and Outfall Works Road, to cross the Greenway Bridge over the Wye. The bench is fairly close to the bridge, on the railway line.

Christmas Dinner at the Rhydspence

Last year we were at the Globe for the staff Christmas party, but this year none of us were that keen on the Christmas menu there.
The menu at the Rhydspence looked promising, though, so we hired the Booktown minibus taxi to take us all out there (apart from the staff member who lives in Clyro, who stuck to half a glass of white wine all night and drove herself home).
There was a big party in the restaurant, so we were put in the Welsh Bar, which is nice and cosy, with a real fire.
The food was very good indeed, and the drink flowed freely - I had salmon mousse for starters, and pork for my main course - I'd considered the pheasant, but I had pheasant at Kilverts with the Stitch and Bitch party. There were generous helpings of vegetables, and three different sorts of gravy!
There was a rather nice sticky pear pudding afterwards. The menu also included the traditional turkey and Christmas pudding options, and a butternut squash dish as the vegetarian option.
The pinot grigot was very nice, and they had a Hobsons beer on hand pump at the bar - Old Prickly Snuffly Hedge Grog (with a picture of a hedgehog on the pump clip). It's a fairly local beer, coming from a brewery in Cleobury Mortimer.
The Christmas crackers had something I've not seen for years - the plastic fish that curls up in your hand to indicate what sort of person you are (I got "Passionate"!).
The taxi was right on time both ways, and we had a bit of a magical mystery tour going back to Hay, as we had several people to drop off on the way. We crossed the toll bridge, which now works with a three digit code if you re-cross on the same day that you bought the original ticket. Mist swirled in patches near the river, as we took the back lanes back to Hay.

Busking for Refugees - and some other ideas to help

Look out for Justin Lewis Preece around Hay on Saturday - he's busking in aid of Hay, Brecon and Talgarth Sanctuary for Refugees.
Other charitable things going on in the run up to Christmas are a collection of socks at the Old Electric Shop for refugees - the idea being that they are bought from the Sock Man on the Thursday Market to boost local businesses while helping the needy. They are also looking for the following (copied and pasted from the Hay, Brecon and Talgarth Sanctuary for Refugees Facebook page):

What is needed:
• Men’s jogging bottoms or jeans,
size 26-34 waist, joggers with cuff bottom
• Sleeping bags
• Men’s new boxer shorts
(esp small and medium, tight fit only)
• Socks, hats and gloves
• Men’s waterproof walking boots, sizes
38-45 (but most needed sizes 40-43)
• Mens and boys coats (especially small
and medium sizes)
• Unlocked mobile phones with chargers
• Power banks
• Tarpaulins
• Rain ponchos
• Tents..
.
Needed, but not a priority:..
.
• Toiletries and toiletry pack
• Hoodies
• Blankets
• Emergency blankets
• Rollmats
• Men’s T-shirts
• Trainers
• Wind-up torches and lanterns
• Batteries
• Bin bags
• Anti-bacterial hand wash.

St Mary's Church, and the Lib Dem offices in Brecon, and Talgarth Library, are also collecting a Reverse Advent Calendar - the idea being that you add a useful item to a box every day in the run up to Christmas, and take the box along to the collection point in the week before Christmas so the things can be distributed to refugees living in Swansea or Ystradgynlais. This could be tinned food, toys for children, toiletries and so on.

Small Business Saturday

I'm sorry to hear that the Forge Gallery on the Craft Centre will be closing at Christmas.
Also closing is Hey Hair, as the bay window which was damaged by a car crashing into it last year has still not been repaired. According to the B&R there have been problems with the insurance claims. The hairdressers from Hey Hair will be going mobile in the New Year.

Meanwhile Haystacks in Backfold has also featured in the B&R, this time as a success story! They were celebrating the resurgence of interest in vinyl records. They have just moved to new, larger premises, all of 12 yards from their old shop. The shop also features in a new music video. Les Penning and Lou (oops, should be Robert!) Reed have made a lovely little film to go with a new recording of In Dulci Jubilo, which is set in Hay. It can be found on YouTube.
There are also builders working in the shop which used to be Boz Books. For the Winter Festival, the new owners put an art display in the window, and now they're re-shaping the shop to their own requirements. It will be interesting to see what they do with the place.

Stitch and Bitch Christmas Lunch

We chose Kilverts this year, and we were not disappointed.
Ten of us came to sit in the lounge just down the steps from the bar. It was lovely to see Ros again, who had come all the way from Llanidloes, where she seems to be enjoying life.
It wasn't busy, so we more or less had the place to ourselves. During one lull in the proceedings, one of the ladies said there were so many interesting conversations going on round the table she was trying to listen to them all!
Did Neanderthals interbreed with Homo Sapiens?
Any suggestions for the next choice for a book club? One of the members doesn't like fantasy, so not Terry Pratchett! There were a few good suggestions including local author Horatio Clare.
What about books for the children of some of the ladies there, one of whom had just read Terry Pratchett's non-Discworld book Nation?
One lady was looking forward to a holiday in Guatemala and the Yucatan peninsular - another was suggesting Mayan pyramids to visit.
How would the world be different if whaling hadn't happened in the 19th century? (Probably in a better state as far as climate change is concerned, interestingly).
There were also discussions about health, and the state of the nation, and car crashes people have walked away from....
The food was delicious (I almost started someone else's turkey, having forgotten I'd ordered pheasant), and they were able to cater for one lady who needed gluten free food with no bother.
And we all saved the little gold ribbons from the Christmas crackers!

Gawain and the Green Knight in Hay

Gawain and the Green Knight is one of my favourite poems. Every Christmas I play a tape of a programme first heard on Radio 4, where the story is narrated by Ian McKellen, and this week Melvyn Bragg was discussing the poem with experts on In Our Time (also Radio 4). One of the experts was Simon Armitage, who has written a new translation of the poem.
Now Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who illustrated Simon Armitage's version of Gawain and the Green Knight, is coming to The Story of Books in Hay. He'll be there on Saturday 15th December from 12.30pm to 1.30pm.

Christmas Experiences

There's apparently a growing trend to give "experiences" rather than "stuff" for Christmas, and there are various opportunities to do that locally.

Talgarth Mill is offering bread class vouchers - learn to bake Christmas breads on Sunday December 16th. The course is a full day for four people, and the cost for all four is £125, including lunch, tea and coffee and home made cake.

The Story of Books is offering a papermaking course on Saturday 22nd December, at £10 each. Maureen Richardson, who has been making paper locally for around forty years, will be teaching a Vegetable Papyrus Workshop, making paper from carrots, parsnips, beetroot and turnips. They also have an exhibition at the moment of Wordless Books.

A bit further afield there's the Brecon Mountain Railway Santa Special, on Saturday 15th, and a Mari Lwyd Winter Solstice Eve event in Brecon, hosted by the Brecon Mummers and Brecon Mari Lwyd, on Thursday 20th. The Mari Lwyd is a decorated horse skull on a pole - traditionally this was taken around the area, and at each house would stop to have a poetry "battle" with the householders. It also involves lots of singing and making music (and pubs!). They're meeting to start processing round the town at the Brecon Tap.

Just after Christmas, on 5th January, Westons Cider Mill are holding a Wassail. The Silurian Morris side will also be there. This is at Much Marcle in Herefordshire, and the proceeds from the evening will go to St Michael's Hospice locally.

Christmas Weekend Away

I've just come back from a lovely weekend in the Cotswolds, staying with old school friends.
Over the last few days, I've ridden a train from Chepstow up the Severn Estuary, attended a Druid Mistletoe Blessing, had lunch at Highgrove, drunk mulled wine before an open fire in a pub in Tetbury, shopped in Stroud and visited a narrow boat in a marina near Frampton-upon-Severn. And we never stopped talking the whole time we were together.

So that was my Christmas treat, and now I'm back in Hay for the run up to Christmas here. I'm going to two Christmas meals so far....

War and Pieces

This looks as if it's going to be good.
I had intended to go, but I'll be elsewhere that evening.

For a Flower Album - Colette Exhibition

There's a new exhibition in the Hazy Daze shop by the Clock Tower, featuring embroideries inspired by the life of Colette, by French publisher and embroiderer Agnes Guillemot.
It runs until 15th December.

The latest issue of The Cabbage Leaf from Botany and other Stories tells more:

Colette was, of course, one of the great French writers - she was granted the honour of a State funeral when she died in 1954, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. TS Eliot won the prize that year.

In her old age, Colette became crippled with arthritis. Once or twice a week, Mermod, a publisher in Lausanne, proposed to send her a bouquet of flowers, and when she wanted to, she could write about them. The 22 essays were collected into a book called Pour un herbier, which was published as a limited edition in 1947. One of these rare books is part of the exhibition. It was found in a second hand bookshop in Lausanne called OH 7e CIEL (Seventh Heaven is one translation).

Also in the Cabbage Leaf, on the theme of embroidery and other fibre arts, is an article about the local Stitch and Bitch group; an appreciation of the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, by Gareth Howell-Jones, local garden designer and Hay Festival bookseller; some facts about roses; and a flower design which can be pasted onto card as a template for an embroidery. Botany and other Stories are planning to bring out embroidery cards next year.

Extinction Rebellion

Here's some information from the leaflet I was handing out on Saturday, to give a general idea of what the march and the Extinction Rebellion movement are all about:

On the front of the leaflet, below the large word "REBEL", they note that scientists have been warning governments about climate change for 30 years, and in that time emissions have increased, so that now forests are burning and the average temperature is rising all the time.

The leaflet goes on to emphasise that Extinction Rebellion is about non-violent and respectful direct action.

On the back, there's some more science. Global CO2 levels hit a new record high in 2017. 200 species every day are becoming extinct. Since 1970, 60% of wildlife globally has disappeared (World Wildlife Fund report in 2018), the oceans are becoming more acidic and filling up with plastic.
Campaigners have been drawing attention to the problems for years, but now drastic action really does have to be taken. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has said we have 12 years to cut our emissions to zero to avoid dangerous global warming. However, the Arctic is melting faster than their predictions, and the ice may disappear in ten years, or less. This sets off a feedback loop which makes further global warming inevitable, as there is no ice to reflect the heat of the sun back into the atmosphere, and the darker sea water absorbs the heat instead. (and, of course, melted ice means sea level rises, means low-lying cities and land around the world flooded).

And yet our government supports fracking, which releases methane into the atmosphere (a greenhouse gas), and has pledged £30 billion for roads - car exhaust emissions are, again, bad for the climate.

Extinction Rebellion wants to see these policies reversed, and carbon emissions reduced to zero by 2025.

This really could be the "end of civilisation as we know it" yet, as Richard Priestley said in his speech on Saturday, it is possible to do it with present technology - it's just a matter of applying what we already know.

One of the problems with any campaign like this is that it's impossible for individuals to change the way the climate is changing, no matter how much they recycle or switch to Green energy companies or cycle instead of drive. It needs a mass movement, putting pressure on governments and corporations to change their behaviour in a radical way. Several of the people at the march said that they had been involved in campaigning for years, but it really did seem as if there was a change in the air now - that people were starting to realise what was happening and that we need to do something about it.

Rising Up for Climate Action in Hereford

I can't easily get to London when there are big protest marches planned, but I have no such excuse when the march is in Hereford, so on Saturday morning I headed off on the bus.
The rules for the free bus service on Saturdays on the T14 have been tweaked again. Last time I went into Hereford I was able to get a free return ticket but this time the driver was only issuing single tickets, which meant I had to pay the usual £8 for a Powys Rover to get home - so no saving at all.

Once in Hereford I headed for Castle Green where the marchers were meeting. The plan was to have several speakers there, and then march, and sing, at various points around the centre of Hereford, ending up at the Shire Hall. Clipboards were being passed around the crowd to collect email addresses for future contact from the organisers, and also to sign a petition which was going to be handed to Jesse Norman, MP.
The dress code was either bright and colourful and nature-related, especially for the kids, or black, for mourning the terrible state the planet is in. Bearing in mind that it was 1st December, and therefore cold (though mild, and the sun came out), I decided to go for black - and was almost mistaken for a vicar! There were lots of kids in costume - a little girl dressed as a bee was very good, and there were kids in onesies that looked like gorillas and other animals. Among the adults, there was a lady with a peacock tail and hat, and another with elf ears and a white dress (Galadriel, maybe?). Gandalf was there, the spokesman of Don't Frack the Shires, who were helping to organise the event. He also introduced the first speakers from a little stepladder by the PA system:

We were standing between the River Wye and a large tree on the edge of the Green, a good place to be speaking up for the natural world.
The first speaker was from the Herefordshire Green Network, talking about organising locally. She was followed by Ben Salmon, who was at the big protest in London a week or so ago when five bridges across the Thames were closed by protestors. A poem was read out by his eleven year old daughter about how all nature is connected.
Then there was a lady from the local Wildlife Rescue, who had brought along a barn owl and a tawny owl, who are both trained to go into schools for educational purposes. There was also a hedgehog! Owls and hedgehogs have seen their numbers fall drastically in recent years - barn owls can't live within 25km of an A road, because so many get mown down by the cars as they fly too low. The solution to this is well-known - if trees are planted along the sides of A roads, the barn owls perch higher and go over the cars. The trees are also traffic calming, and improve the air quality, among the many benefits they have. So solutions to the decline of species are there - it's just the political will to use them.
This theme was carried on by later speakers, Kathy Monkley, who said a few words about the science of climate change, and Richard Priestley, who has been writing a blog for several years now about solutions to the problems of climate change around the world. It's called Global Problems, Global Solutions. There was also another poem, by Gary Snyder.

Some of the marchers - there were more behind me, and more round the corner of the Cathedral

We marched from there to the Cathedral, led by mourners carrying a painted coffin labelled Nature, where we stood on the paved area with the picture of an apple tree outside the West End and sang choruses, including "Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Helpfully, two of the marchers were carrying a banner with the words on it, which they held up at the front.

From there we continued to All Saints, where we stopped again. I didn't hear much of the speeches this time, because I had been asked to hand out leaflets, and got into conversation with an old chap who told me all about how he was encouraging his grandson to enjoy the countryside and old games that he had enjoyed, and how everyone used to use glass bottles for milk, and the same carrier bag every day.
On we went again to the middle of the market stalls in the Square, for more singing, including the chorus of the English version of This Land Was Meant for You and Me ("From the coast of Cornwall to the misty Highlands").
And from there we continued to the Shire Hall for more speeches - no microphone this time, and sadly one of the speakers couldn't project, so a really interesting speech got lost because only a few people could hear it. The second speaker, from the Green party, was much better at getting her voice heard at the back of the crowd.

The event was organised by Don't Frack the Shires, Ban Fracking in Herefordshire and Human Mappa Mundi, all of whom have Facebook pages. This was the launch of Extinction Rebellion in Herefordshire, and they can be found on social media at www.rebellion.earth twitter.com/ExtinctionR @extinction.rebellion.hereford and @Extinction Rebellion and Facebook Xr.hereford

Small Business Saturday

Hay has a new jewellery shop, which also changes watch batteries and so on.
They're hidden away in the courtyard just below Eve's café and above the Falafel shop.