Wales Coast Path: day 42: Whitesands to Portgain
Friday is hotter still. There’s almost no breeze. We decide to head south-north for a change, starting from Whitesands Bay and repeating a little of our mini-walk in May. It’s so oppressive that Ca. turns back at St David’s Head to join us later. The rest of us sweat onwards, through the rough gorse and […]
Wales Coast Path: day 43: Porthgain from Aber Mawr
We’re back in north Pembrokeshire, with H. and Ca., to fill in the ‘gap’ in the coast path left when we were rained off in May. This time there’s no complaint about being damp: we’re half way through the hottest and driest spell for seven years. We resume at Aber Mawr, almost immediately accompanied by […]
Cyngerdd Tŷ
Ar noson grasboeth arall dyma ni’n dau’n cerdded ar hyd pafin ein stryd dan gario cadair blygu’r un, ar ein ffordd i ‘gyngerdd tŷ’. Daeth y gwahoddiad oddi wrth Delyth Jenkins a’i merch Angharad – ‘DnA’ yw eu henw proffesiynol – sy newydd ryddhau albwm newydd o awelon Cymreig traddodiadol a newydd, Adnabod (Fflach). Chlywais […]
Lester Young and ‘Oh! Lady be Good’
At 10 o’clock in the morning of Monday 9 November 1936 – an unlikely day and an even unlikelier hour for jazz musicians – five people assembled in the studios of the American Record Corporation in Chicago. They played just four short pieces. Two of them, the first appearance of Lester Young on record, constitute […]
Archives, libraries and the Heritage Lottery Fund
As government funding for memory institutions has declined – catastrophically in the case of regular capital finance for buildings, ICT infrastructure and collections purchase – the importance of the Lottery, and especially the Heritage Lottery Fund, as a funding source to those bodies has risen. What is the relationship between the HLF and those memory […]
Tri rhyfeddod Cymru
Ychydig wythnosau yn ôl daeth gwahoddiad i siarad ar Radio Wales am dri agwedd ar Gymru sydd â lle arbennig yn fy mywyd: tri rhyfeddod Cymru. I wneud pethau’n waeth doedd bron dim terfynau ar ystyr y gair ‘rhyfeddod’: gallai fod yn lle, yn berson, yn ddigwyddiad, neu unrhyw beth arall. Panig yw’r ymateb cyntaf […]
Peter Lord: iconographer / iconoclast
On 23 May in the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea Peter Lord gave an illustrated talk as part of the launch of his new book Relationships with pictures: an oblique autobiography (Parthian, 2013). It was a remarkable performance. As ever with Peter you couldn’t fail to be aware of the depth of feeling underlying his […]
Rhedwr Sul
Bob bore Sul, rhwng saith ac wyth o’r gloch, bydda i’n codi o’r gwely, gwisgo (siorts, crys-T, hen sgidiau), gadael y tŷ, a rhedeg. Yn 1964 dechreuais i redeg yn wythnosol, cyn gadael yr ysgol gynradd yn ein pentref ni, Hoylandswaine, yn yr hen ‘West Riding’. Erbyn hyn, hanner canrif yn ddiweddarach, mae’n rhy hwyr […]
UNESCO Memory of the World: what is its value?
Statutory protection for historic documentary collections in the UK is weak, with the exception of some highly specific categories of archives under the Public Record Acts. Similarly, non-statutory schemes that aim to identify such collections and grant institutional approval to them are rare, in comparison with programmes by national or international bodies to protect by […]
The Obituarist
For a living Jones wrote people up when they died. This was not strictly true. Some people he picked up before they corpsed, and did a dry run on them. Facts, dates and, if he felt interested enough, a sharp phrase or quotation he half-remembered from a colour supplement twenty years ago. This helped, because […]