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It’s a warm midsummer morning and we’re back, the same quartet, in the centre of Port Talbot. By coincidence Radio 4 is broadcasting a programme called Playing the skyline in which the musicians Kizzy Crawford and Gwilym Simcock are taken…
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Community journalism: a MOOC case study
Courses provided online across the world at no cost to the student are causing waves in higher education. The Open & Online report to the Welsh Government (March 2014) called on higher education institutions in Wales to think carefully about…
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Wales Coast Path, day 1: Chepstow from Caldicot
A day of dogs and bridges. Dogs first. We start from the railway station at Caldicot, three of us this time. The path to the motorway and across to the coastline is studded with notices, official and handwritten, about the…
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National Theatre Wales’s ‘Mametz’: a review
As part of Wales’s commemoration of the First World War, and almost exactly two years ahead of the centenary of the battle, National Theatre Wales has ‘staged’ a version of the fierce struggle for possession of Mametz Wood. This battle…
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Wales Coast Path, day 2: Caldicot from Goldcliff
Like many coastal settlements on the Bristol Channel Goldcliff still remembers the disastrous year 1607. Behind the Farmers Arms in St Mary Magdelene’s Church – a shady avenue of limes leads to its porch – a brass inscription, now about…
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Diffyg gwybodaeth, diffyg democratiaeth
Am sawl rheswm leiciwn i ddim bod yn sgidiau Mark Drakeford, y Gweinidog Iechyd yng Nghymru. Yr wythnos hon mae ‘na reswm arall: arolwg cyhoeddus a gynhaliwyd gan ICM ar ran y BBC sy’n dangos bod 48% yn unig o…
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Wales Coast Path, day 3: Goldcliff from Newport
We surprise J. by arriving early, for the first time ever. We’re at Lighthouse Road, Duffryn for a walk round the industrial underbelly of Newport and on into the Caldicot Levels. It’s a cloudy day, but warm, with the promise…
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Coffee, public and private
Treorci is still a real town. It sits far enough up the Rhondda Fawr and has a big enough hinterland to support a good array of shops, mostly independent, and a lively civic life. The best way of approaching it…
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In search of a younger self: John Clare and me
Thursday afternoon I’m in a café in Market Deeping, just north of Stamford, Lincolnshire. I buy a coffee and then pull out from my wallet two miniature black and white photographs from the early 1950s. They show a house that…
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Caratacus, Caradog, Caractacus
If Calgacus might be thought of as the earliest known anti-imperialist Scotland has produced, Wales has some claim on an earlier native leader of resistance to the Roman occupation of Britain, Caratacus. He’s a figure well worth excavating, as an…