Picture of the Year

 I usually look back over the photos I took throughout the year on the last day of the year - for 2024, I think this one is my favourite: the dragon at the top of the car park.

Best wishes for 2025!

Llangattock Green Valleys News

 I've had shares in Llangattock Green Valleys for some years now - as soon as I got some disposable income I wanted to put my money where my mouth was on green energy, and this local scheme was ideal.

They generate electricity from water power, with small generators in streams, and have a variety of other projects on the go.

I'm mentioning them today because they are offering grants to local community groups which are working on environmental sustainability within Bannau Brycheiniog National Park.  They have a pot of £12,000, and are offering grants up to £2,000 each.  Applicants need to demonstrate a clear understanding of the climate emergency and a strong track record of delivering impactful projects.  The deadline for applications is January 31st, 2025, and they can be reached at https://www.llangattockgreenvalleys.org/community-benefit-fund/

Previous grants have gone to the Llangattock Community Woodlands Group, Llangynidr School and Grwyne Fawr CIC.

Also in their latest newsletter is an update on the Black Mountains Community Energy project, which aims to supply as much electricity as possible to the Crickhowell area from local community-owned renewable energy projects - so something similar to what is being proposed for Hay at the Energy Assembly at the Swan Hotel on the 18th January.  At the moment they are at the stage of identifying suitable sites for energy generation in the area.

Between Christmas and New Year

 

Meanwhile, in the quiet space between the festivities, someone near the river bank is reading....

Boxing Day Hunt

 This is the view from my window a few minutes ago - I didn't even have to go outside to see the Hunt gather.

It's a foggy day, but a good crowd gathered by the Clock Tower.

I was a little bit too far away to hear the speech, but I did hear something about the gathering being a tradition, not a hobby.

Nadolig Llawen

 

Merry Christmas, with a view of a previous year on the Brecon Beacons (too wet and mild for snow this year!)

Trip to Hereford

 I intended to go to Hereford on Thursday, so I turned up at the bus stop in plenty of time, and waited....

Eventually, I realised that I have technology now, so I could check where the bus was on its route on my phone.  I showed this to two ladies in Hereford when I was coming back yesterday, so for those who don't know - google 'T14 bus timetable' and choose the TrawsCymru site - there's a map at the top of the page showing where the bus is on its route.  Remembering that I can do that makes me feel a lot less anxious about bus travel!  It's much better than huddling there in the rain thinking "I'll just give it five more minutes in case it comes."

Anyway, the bus on Thursday was still in Felinfach when I checked, which would have meant me waiting another half an hour, so I decided to try again on Friday morning.

On Friday morning, the bus was on time (a bit late coming back, due to heavy traffic, but that didn't matter so much) and packed.  Three ladies with small children in buggies got on at Peterchurch - and one buggie was actually for two little dogs - so the wheelchair area was packed out.

I stayed on the bus until the railway station, because I was buying tickets in advance for a holiday early next year.  As always, the nice man in the ticket office gave me a better option for travel than the website had done.

Then I had some banking business to do, which went a lot more easily than I'd expected - this is a hymn of praise to seeing actual real human beings in person to transact business, rather than doing it online.

I had some shopping to do, and I was surprised to see that a lot of shops are already having sales.  I'm not complaining, though!  

I was sorry to see that the Monkhide stall wasn't in the square - I'd been hoping to get a bottle of mead, and their mead is very nice.  I did see Spicing Up the Valleys, though, the Caribbean food stall that comes to Hay on a Thursday now.  I can recommend his goat curry, which I tried last week.

I had time for a Wainwrights Golden Ale (nectar!) in the Lichfield Vaults, and while I was there I picked up the latest edition of the Hereford Hopvine, the magazine from the local branch of CAMRA.  It contained sad news.  They will not be running Beer on the Wye next year.  There are a couple of reasons for that.  One is that the Rowing Club is having landscaping work done, and they want to be able to see it when its done to make sure they can get the marquees in.  The other is a lack of volunteers.  They managed to get 130 volunteers to serve beer and run the beer festival over the weekend this year, but there are fewer people involved in the planning stages than there used to be and it's getting too much for the ones who are left.  So, they're going to pause for a year, and use that time to try to recruit more volunteers for the organising committee, and hold a major review of how the festival is run and how it can be improved, so they can return, refreshed, for a festival in 2026.

Mistletoe

 It's the time of year that I take a walk out to a particular tree that is festooned with mistletoe in easy reach, and take a sprig home with me.

The weather was reasonably bright yesterday afternoon, so off I went.  By the time I got to the tree, there was sunshine with showers, and a rainbow was forming over Clyro in the distance.  Around the roots of the tree, a wren was hopping, and overhead a red kite was soaring.

I'm choosing to believe  that these are all good omens for the coming year.

Old Masters at The Chair

 The exhibitions at The Chair change pretty frequently.  Since the furore about pornographic art in the window, there have been quite a few, some of them involving paintings of nudes without any controversy whatsoever.

Yesterday, I saw something a bit different.  There were some very good animal portraits in the window, but inside there were copies of Old Masters, in a variety of styles from Monet to Canaletto (Monet being very impressionistic and blurry, Canaletto being very crisp and almost photo realistic).  The artist told me that he hadn't been allowed to copy the whole of the Canaletto painting, so he'd only done two thirds of the original view of a canal in Venice - and that had taken him about nine months!

I didn't get the artist's name, but he's very good!

[Edited to add: I'm told the artist is Steve Haigh]

Energy Assembly

 I was going to wait until after Christmas to post this, but tickets are going fast, and space at the Swan is limited.

Last year, there was a citizens' assembly at the Swan on the theme of Food Resilience.  Lots of good ideas were generated, and the organisers have spent the last 10 months working with Welsh governmental and non-governmental agencies to get support and funding.  So it may have looked as if nothing much was happening, but there was a lot going on behind the scenes to set things up.  In the course of this, they've joined 35 organisations working on the Climate Issue in Wales, on Food, Energy and Well-Being, which are the three most important areas they want to concentrate on in Hay.

There is now funding in place to employ a Project Co-ordinator, who will provide professional support.

One of the visible results of last January's meeting is the Tuesday evening food market at Hay Castle.  They also want to support local growers and farmers, and grow the market for local produce.

So now it's time to launch the second "pillar" of the initiative - the Energy Assembly.  The idea behind this is that Hay can generate at least some of its own energy for local consumption.  The aim is for Hay to become self-sufficient in clean energy, and the Assembly is a means of getting all the interested parties in one place to come to a consensus about how to achieve this.

The Energy pillar is a vital part of the plans for the future.  If Hay decides to go for its own Community Energy company, within five to seven years, there should be enough money to create a Wealth Fund from the profits.  So energy will be cheaper than the big companies, and there will also be money to fund locally produced food and other initiatives.

The meeting will be at the Swan Hotel on Saturday 18th January, between 2pm and 5pm.  Space is limited, so the event is ticketed, but the tickets are free.

There will be a third meeting, in May for the third pillar of the initiative, on Mental Well-Being.

Kings College London Choir Concert - "Angels aren't always saints"

 The church was packed again for the Christmas concert by Kings College London Choir.  

It wasn't exactly a carol concert, though some carols were included - the glorious finale was Joy to the World and they also sang the Coventry Carol (probably the only Christmas carol about the Massacre of the Innocents by King Herod), and Three Kings from Persian lands afar.  During the course of the concert, I was very impressed to see that the choristers were singing in Russian and Latin as well as English.

The first half was music by Taverner and Rachmaninoff.  

I had a vague recollection that I'd heard choral music by Taverner before, and I was right - his Song for Athene was performed at Princess Diana's funeral.  This time, the pieces were Ikon of the Nativity and As One Who Has Slept, both solemn and complex harmonies, bookending the much longer six part Vespers from Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, which was heavily based on Orthodox chants.

I think my favourite pieces came in the second half - the conductor, Dr Joseph Fort, had constructed the order of music around four linked pieces by Poulenc, written after he had seen a series of frescos about the Nativity story in Florence.  One of the things that struck him about the frescos was that the angels all seemed to be having fun, making faces at each other, and sticking their tongues out!  Hence his comment: "Angels aren't always saints".  So some of that music is very jolly, especially the piece about the shepherds.

To pair with each of the Poulenc pieces, he chose The Coventry Carol and In the stillness by Sally Beamish for the first (Christ lying in the manger); Angelus ad pastores ait by Raffealla Aleotti for the shepherds; O Radiant Dawn by James Macmillan and The Three Kings carol for the wise men, and Joy to the World to follow the last Poulenc piece, Hodie Christus natus est (Today Christ is born).

It was all absolutely sublime.

Hay Music has a full programme of concerts already planned out for next year, the first being The Marsyas Trio on Sunday 12th January at 3pm.  As usual, tickets are available through Hay Music or the Tourist Bureau.

Christmas Fayre

 In the morning, I had plenty of time to look round the Christmas Fayre, both on the Market Square and through town, and in the Castle.  There were some wonderful stalls - pottery, hand carved spoons, interesting bric-a-brac, cider, wine, olive oil, vintage clothes, soaps, wicker baskets, and an ingenious arrangement with a big metal firepit behind barriers, where you could toast your own marshmallows on a long stick.

I bought a little bag from the stall of book related gifts, with a list of fanfiction tropes printed on the side: 

enemies to lovers

forbidden love

grumpy x sunshine

slow burn romance

star-crossed lovers

These are all basic plots that fan fiction authors use to put their characters (or rather, the characters from TV shows or books they are fans of) in interesting situations.  I am a fanfiction writer, so it was fun to see something so familiar on sale. 

I also treated myself to a good quality hand carved wooden mixing spoon, and a pottery star to add to my Christmas decorations.

Up in the Castle there were lots of stalls I recognised from last year, on all three levels of the castle, and also leather goods, and fabric bunting, and lots more.  The stalls in the Castle were also there on Sunday, but the ones in the square were only for the Saturday.

The Town Cryer was also there, and the Community Choir sang carols from the Castle steps.

American Children's Books at Enchanted Hour

 Caryn Schafer is an American children's book illustrator who now lives locally - and she has a new book of her own out, about Christmas, which is available in several shops around Hay.

She was talking about some of the picture books that she'd grown up with in the States - mostly, the popular authors there are unknown here, and vice versa, so it was interesting to see her selection.  Her choices were also informed by her Christian faith - there was a lot about the characters in the books discovering their talents, or their creativity, and she said a lot of good things about how to encourage our own creativity - by the end of the talk I was itching to get my art supplies out again.  She was emphasising how creativity should be for our own enjoyment - even if it's only a dot on a page, like one of the stories she read to us.  One of the books, Math Curse, was about finding creativity in maths!

One of the books that she did share in common with British children was Voyage of the Dawn Treader, part of the Narnia series by CS Lewis - she loved the idea that Aslan could be found in this world as well as Narnia (as Jesus, of course).

She also recommended a couple of adult books: Your Inner Critic is a Big Jerk, and Big Magic: creative living beyond fear.  Basically, the message is - if you're too self critical, you'll never do anything you enjoy.

The next Enchanted Hour is on Friday 10th January, and the subject is obscure local archaeology.  It's called A Tomb With A View, and I'm going to be the speaker.  And because there were some problems with modern technology at the start of Caryn's talk, I'm going to try to make my talk technology-proof!

Carol Concert

 Yesterday afternoon I was at St Mary's Church for a very enjoyable carol concert, given by the Hay Madrigals (or Hay Mads!) and the Come Back Quire.

The Come Back Quire is composed of the members of the Village Quire who didn't want to give up singing together when the Village Quire wound up operations, and I think they've recruited some new members, too.  Some singers were in both choirs.  Sadly, one of the tenors couldn't make it, and one lady had a footstool ready to rest her knee because she only had a knee operation a few days ago - the show must go on!

There was also an organist/pianist, who was treating the church organ like Reginald Dixon at Blackpool Tower Ballroom, with a lively rendition of Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer (complete with cuddly Rudolf toy).

The music was a mixture of 17th century madrigals, Welsh plygain carols, a folk song from the Copper family, and interesting settings of carols like Dancing Day and O Little Town of Bethlehem that I hadn't heard before.  There was also a reading of the carol singing scene from Cider With Rosie.

Oh, and for one song, called Sheep, the choir donned flat caps (for the shepherds) and head bands with sheep ears (for the sheep)!  Great fun!

Next Saturday I'm looking forward to the carol concert by the choir of Kings College, London, organised by Hay Music, which I think will be a slightly more serious affair.  That concert starts at 7pm, and tickets are still available from the Hay Music website or the Tourist Information office.

Floods Expected

 I've been looking at Facebook, and people in Builth Wells are saying that the river is starting to flood there, so it won't be long before it goes over the banks in Hay.

Meanwhile there are flood warnings across Herefordshire - again.  And the electricity has been cut off down near the Co-op and in Cusop.

This is all because of Storm Darragh, of course, and we're not getting anything like the problems that they're getting along the Welsh coastline.

Christmas Post Box Topper

 

A lovely nativity scene - and the straw has stayed remarkably fluffy, considering all the rain we've had.  

I'm assuming those are the Three Wise Men with Mary and Joseph.

More Winter Festival

 I was back in St Mary's for the talk George Nash was giving on Neolithic Tombs of Wales - I treated myself to the book.  Some of the talk was about Wales, but the rest covered his whole career, including caves in South Africa and tombs in Sweden.  If anything, the church was even fuller than for Metropolis, (and there was cake on offer) and he was a very entertaining speaker.  He was especially pleased by the way Logaston Press had laid out his text and photos.  "Never mind the text - just look at the layout!  And the cover - that's sexy!"  (It's a photo of a dolmen, which he took, but it's a very fine dolmen with a great view).  His next book is on rock art in Wales, so maybe he'll be back as a speaker when it comes out.

I caught some of the poetry at the Poetry Bookshop as I wandered round town - the poets were performing on the Pavement outside the bookshop, and gathering small but appreciative crowds.

The rest of the centre of Hay was taken up with the Food Fair - and crafts.  There was a stall selling miniature books, as badges or as part of bookmarks and so on.  Later I saw a chap wearing one of them on his lapel.  He and his girlfriend were getting ready to get married, and they were giving copies of the book - Pride and Prejudice - as wedding favours, which they had sourced from charity shops and second hand bookshops at random.

I found some very nice honey - Bydafau Woodland Honey from Carmarthenshire - and a bottle of sparkling white wine called Shouting At Weather, from the Black Mountain Vineyard who were at the Secret Garden in the summer.

While I was at work today I got chatting to a lovely couple from Antwerp, who said that they had very much enjoyed the talk at St Mary's called The Dead of Winter: The Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas.  This featured an accordion player and the Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk morris dancers!