Author: Andrew Green
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Making Hay: diary of a first-time speaker
1 Talk of the Devil An invisible voice apologises: Marcus Brigstocke regrets he’s unable to be with us tonight. Instead, a cloaked figure bursts on to the stage. There’s a white flash of outsize teeth and ghoulish eyes. Yes, It’s Satan, and he’s in talkative mood. By the end of the hour his biting…
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M4+: a road to nowhere
Two public issues overshadow all others. That’s because doing little or nothing about them puts our own existence in danger. They are our own warming of the earth’s environment (anthropogenic climate change) and our destruction of life on earth (loss of biodiversity). Very soon Members of the National Assembly of Wales may be asked to…
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What’s wrong with BBC news?
Nowadays I seldom choose to watch or listen to ‘national’ BBC news programmes. I’m certain I’m not alone, to judge from personal enquiries and listener statistics: the Today programme lost 800,000 listeners between August 2017 and August 2018. Some of this listener loss could be down to the changing shape of media – there are…
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Indexing Gilbert White
Selborne, Hampshire. Why we’ve never been there before I don’t know. The village isn’t far from Winchester, familiar enough territory. It’s a bit off the beaten track, though a busy B road passes through the village, channelling noise and people through the narrow main street that would have been quiet in the mid-eighteenth century, when…
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In Bunhill Fields
This week we paid a visit to a place that’s been on my wish list for many years: Bunhill Fields. Some might think it a perverse pilgrimage, because Bunhill Fields isn’t not a rural glade or open park, but an old burial ground – the origin of ‘Bunhill’ is thought to be ‘bone hill’ –…
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Norman McLaren’s ‘Neighbours’
In the year I was born, 1952, just seven years after the end of the Second World War, the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal released a remarkable political film entitled Neighbours. Just over eight minutes long, it was the work of Norman McLaren, a Scottish director who’d settled in Canada. It was widely…
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Cymru yn cynhesu
Ydy, mae’n digwydd Erbyn hyn does dim amheuaeth. Datganodd yr IPCC (UN International Panel on Climate Change) y mis yma fod tymheredd y blaned yn rhwym o godi’n sylweddol. Y brawddegau allweddol yn yr adroddiad yw’r rhain: Amcangyfrir bod gweithgareddau dynol wedi achosi tua 1.0°C o gynhesu byd eang yn uwch na lefelau cyn-ddiwydiannol ……
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The Monmouthshire and Caerleon Antiquarian Association
1 Origins and foundations The first local archaeological society in Wales, the Caerleon Antiquarian Association, was founded on 28th October 1847. It owed its existence largely to the efforts of one man, John Edward Lee (1). Born in Hull in 1808, Lee worked from the age of sixteen in his uncles’ shipping office, but…
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Mr Deas
Another birthday, and I’m celebrating by throwing out yet more paper hoarded over the years. This time it includes a dark red ring-file containing notes and essays from my first-year university course in Classics. They’re written in handwriting it’s still quite easy to make out. (By contrast, my handwriting today, disabled by decades of keyboard…
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In search of 100 objects
September 2018 has turned out to be a month of personal endings. Three weeks ago, after five and a half years of sporadic legwork, we finished the last mile of the Wales Coast Path. This week saw the publication of two books I’ve been working on for what seems almost as long, Wales in 100…