As the lock-down continues and normally passive individuals start to become brittle and argumentative, a new phenomenon has emerged. It goes something like this: Person…
Martyn Winters: Author, Composer, Musician
Month: April 2020
During the lockdown, I ordered some groceries online and had a pickup slot at the local supermarket a couple of days later between eight and…
A new word for me. I saw it for the first time today in the sentence, “They’ve been spruiking that theory from day one”, in…
Before I get stuck into my thoughts on my ten a day tomato habit, I’d just like to pause for a reflective moment. I’ve just closed Twitter and Facebook. Just the pages, not the accounts. The Coronavirus news is filling me with too many morbid thoughts. So I thought I’d take a break for an hour, just to ease the pain.
On the day that the USA passes twenty-six thousand dead and the UK homes in on thirteen thousand, I find a dental nurse from Sketty – just down the road from me – has fallen victim to the disease. I looked at her photograph and imagined her previous life and premature end. It’s not a face I know, but one you see on passers-by without thought of what their life is about. Now I’m imagining what life must be for her husband, son, sister and parents, all of whom are now suffering unimaginable grief. Rest in peace, Linette, my thoughts are with you.
When I was young, I had a Ford Fiesta Supersport as my first car. It had all the bits: flared wheel arches, a tailgate spoiler,…
Crossing the threshold between the street and a coffee shop should be a magical experience. It used to be. As little as ten years ago, even Starbucks and Costa had that home from home feel. In one step you would move from honking cars, the dull thrum of the street beat and the thick, oily smell of petroleum fumes into a cave of mystery, with low lights, big potted plants, dark leather chairs that “whoomph” when you sit in them, oh-my-God-coffee scents, and there was always good music; often so good, I would have to ask. That’s how I discovered “The Weeks”, now a firm favourite on my playlist.
A decade or more ago, I used to suffer from chest pains. Once, when I was travelling as a passenger in a car, it was so severe I asked the driver to take me straight to hospital. She looked sceptical, but I insisted, so she acquiesced and took me to Princess of Wales in Bridgend, where they did a battery of tests. They kept me in.
“Just as a precaution” the doctor said. She was a young, pretty woman with unfortunate hips and a kind manner that seemed genuine. By that time I was dying for a cigarette, but they had already confiscated those, along with my clothes, shoes, money, and watch. I had abandoned my pre-rolled joint in the car park, anticipating this and spent my time wondering if someone had picked it up before the summer rain shredded it into nothing. They let me keep my phone, which for once was charged to hilt.
Port Talbot is pretty much famous for its Steel Works and not much else, although it has quite a nice beach in Aberafan and a bloody good rugby team, the Aberafan Wizards. Wait, you say, that’s Aberafan, not Port Talbot. A brief history will suffice to disabuse you of that notion.
The town of Port Talbot is first mentioned in the history books in 1837 as the name of the new docks built by the Talbot family to the South-East of the Rover Afan, but as the conurbation surrounding the docks grew, swallowing up the villages of Baglan, Margam and Aberafan, the name came to mean the whole area.
It’s a week now since I closed the front door on the world. Since then I’ve contended with a burgeoning headache and a slowly escalating panic. Every cough brings with it a worry that this is it, I’m going to end my days sat between these four walls wondering where the hell I put the can opener.
Rationalising the headache, it’s probably a combination of my tinnitus, which has been in a particularly vengeful mood, constantly Tweeting and Facebooking on my phone and the stress of having very little to do other than tidy up (again), make meals and act as my own tech support, which carries its own particular stresses.
There can be few politicians in the post war era who have excited so much comment and yet achieved so very little that is either worthwhile or noteworthy than Jeremy Bernard Corbyn.
Today, Mr Corbyn attends his final Shadow Cabinet meeting. No doubt there will be plenty of farewell cards from his adoring colleagues. Hopefully, there will be more than few resignation letters too. As a collective group, they have been spectacularly poor at stemming the advance of the reactionary right. The only two who can reasonably hold their heads up are Jon Ashworth and Keir Starmer. Even those two, hamstrung as they were by the rules of collective responsibility, have singularly failed to score a telling blow on the Conservatives.