Real Cardiff Rolls On

Real Wales is duly launched and the eyes shift back to Real Cardiff Three, the book for next year that needs to be researched and written now. Is there any of the city left that it is not covered by Vol One and Vol Two? You bet there is. As much as you want.

Here's a small slice from Library, a recently completed section:

Titles the library rarely lends:

A History of Minor Roads in Wales.
A Guide to the Sub-Post Offices of the British Isles.
The Joy of Chickens
The Book of Marmalade
Highlights In The History of Concrete
Bombproof Your Horse
Weeds In A Changing World
How To Avoid Huge Ships
Did Lewis Carroll Visit Llanrumney?
Dining Posture In Ancient Roath
Cheese Problems Solved
Wanted[i]


[i] Wanted For Writing Poetry – Peter Finch, Second Aeon, 1966. His first book.

Orders not taken yet. Read Real Wales (Seren Books, £9.99 but cheaper on Amazon) first.

The Book Future

If Dickens had been alive today then he would have been writing for television. How many times have we heard that? Dickens bringing the Cybermen to the London workhouse. Little Nell the new companion of Dr Who. If Russell T had been alive in the ninetieth century then he would have written vast, wordy novels and they would be issued in serial parts. It’s possible.

Books themselves, of course, change their form. In the nineteen-eighties publishers were convinced that the paperback as we know it was finished. CD-Roms were the future. Or if not those then electric books. Hand-held readers the size of boxes of washing powder were predicted to be in the briefcases of the entire population before the decade was out. Hasn’t happened yet.

Books do, however, have fashions in the way they look. The nineties saw super-glossy covers with lots of reflective silver. Paperbacks were throw-away. Hardbacks were the Rolls Royce you kept on the front room shelf. But not forever. “Set of hardback books, excellent condition, unread. £10.” That was a For Sale card I saw in a local shop window. Does anyone ever respond?

Innovative publishers have tried almost everything to make their products move. Books appear with CDs as inserts (soundtrack of the book, while you read hear what Nick Hornby heard while he wrote). A while back a London small press published titles with coat hangers bound into the spines. “Solve your storage problems overnight. Hang your books in the wardrobe with your shirts.”

To mark themselves out from the pack publishers have bound their books between pieces of wood, samples of carpet and metal sheets. None of these innovations have ever proved effective. Paper stays best. Flexible, manipulable, light-weight, cheap.

But now that bookshops themselves are under threat publishers are casting around for ways to mark their products out. Free gifts. Coupons in the back that win you holidays. Entire editions published only on the web. iTune iBooks read by the author. But most see the future as involving downloading. And once the reading machine problem has been solved then this will all be upon us. Bought your reader yet?

Meanwhile expect to see print on demand machines appearing in your local store. Books will be ordered up from a central database containing everything in the known universe, printed and bound in shop and then sold to you five minutes later. This is not tomorrow, this is today. The implications for small, niche and minority publishers are enormous. Nothing will ever go out of print. Everything will be always totally available. Books will be as vast as they need to be. Editing will end. Editors will become as passé as lamplighters. I’m not inventing this. This is round the corner.

The above first appeared in an earlier form as an Insider column in the saturday Western Mail (#56)

Vulcanised

The much-faded and painted advert for Guinness on the side of the Vulcan has been there since at least the 1960s. Back then this typically Cardiffian tavern was on the edge of a neck of tight working-class tenements, just the other side of the rail track from the recently slum-cleared district of Newtown. Cardiff was a dirty place, full of smog and dust. The sprawling steelworks of East Moors and the docks to their south provided a stream of men seeking sustenance and oblivion. In the Vulcan you sat on wooden benches in working boots and working clothes. There was sawdust on the floor.

Today, fifty years on, Newtown is a memory – replaced by industrial units and a corporate hotel. The docks have been anodised, reduced to a safety-conscious ghost of their former selves. East Moors is the Ocean Way Industrial Park, full of warehouses and articulated lorries. Even the terraces that once surrounded the Vulcan like ivy have been flattened and turned into a clean, black-topped car park.

When I first discovered this 1853 pub it still had the legendary sawdust and was still a home for working men. Railway workers, engineers from BT opposite, prison guards, locals from Duffryn Street, Taff Street and Pellet Street. I sat there with John Williams, the author whose anthology of short fiction Wales Half-Welsh (Bloomsbury) almost got titled Vulcanised. We were joined by a bunch of other writers who felt more at home here than in the aluminium and glass vertical drinkeries of Cardiff’s town centre. (If you’d like to follow this up then you can read more about the writers and the Vulcan in my Real Wales, published December 2008 by Seren).




The beer was good, there was a dart board, the juke wasn’t intrusive. Liz, the landlady, offered regulars bowls of chips and complimentary sausages.

But then came the University of Glamorgan putting a tank on Cardiff University’s lawn by converting the old BT building into its splendid new Atrium over the road. The School of Cultural Studies. Library, students, light. The Pellet Street tower block of student flats (Ty Pont Haearn) went up at incredible speed. After that came St David’s 2 and the need for car parking. The surrounding streets were systematically flattened yet the Vulcan survived. A pub in splendid isolation. A Victorian gem for fans or a planning difficulty for developers. How you viewed it depended on where you stood.

Currently rumours abound. The pub will be pulled down next spring. Brains have sold out. In its place will be a multi storey car park, social housing, another student tower block, bars, restaurants, even Atrium 2, symbol of Glamorgan’s unstoppable sweep to domination. There’s also a half-credible tale that St Fagans will purchase the bricks and rebuilt the pub, restoring it to its Victorian splendour in the heart of the museum. Iorwerth Peate would spin.

It is a function of developers to sweep all before them. Cardiff has seen generations come and go, each cleaning the slate of everything. The city today has almost nothing with a past. If you exclude the Castle and St John’s Church almost everything standing is recent. We should preserve the pub by building round it and incorporating it into the overall plan. It has happened before. Check the retained Victorian frontage of the Altolusso block a few hundred yards on up the road. We should retain the Vulcan’s charm, its tourist attractability (it’s in the top fifty best UK pubs, according to Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale) and its delight. Removing it even to the secure and beerless pastures of St Fagans would be a crime.

Possibly the only good thing to come out of the present economic breaking halt is that new construction is almost universally on hold. Which should mean a reprieve for the Vulcan. For a time. Let’s hope.

Photo by John Briggs. An earlier version of this blog appeared at the IWA

Real Wales Launches

Real Wales, the new book, will be launched at the Cardiff Visitor's Centre, The Hayes, Cardiff. The Visitor Centre is the Old Library. The event will run from 6.30 pm. There'll be wine and readings and Peter Finch will be in conversation with the journalist, author and broadcaster, Patrick Hannan. The book is published by Seren at £9.99. expect it to hit the shops in the last week of November.

This has been a long haul, this one. Books are never instant things. But expect to be informed, stretched, wound up, entertained, taken palces and amused. Some places in Wales will never want to see the author again.

Real Wales

It's the new book and coming - ever so slowly - before Christmas from Seren. The Real technique applied to the whole country. Real Wales. Full of Finch photos and Finch humour. Here's an extract, described by John Osmond, Director of the IWA, as quirky. That's what I do.

So what is this place? Grey crags and green miasma in the western British mists. A place like poetry, where nothing happens. A place of sheep and hairy men. Where is this land? Most of the world do not know. And if they do then they can rarely point us out. Wales, I never heard of that place[i]. Wales, the invisible, the lost. Wales, the real Cantre’r Gwaelod. A small island in the Hebrides. A rock off the west coast of Ireland. A hummock out there in the stormy ocean. Wales, Grassholm writ just that little bit larger. A floating land, full of birds.

The great historian Gwyn Alf Williams said the people of this place had “for a millennium and a half lived in the two western peninsulas of Britain as a Welsh people, (and) are now nothing but naked under an acid rain.” The tourist trade sells us as a place of endless singing, long yellow beaches, rugby rugby and folk in stovepipe hats. Business promotion says we are a global centre, a land of opportunity, a place to relocate to, perfect transport, weather like Bermuda. The government says we have the highest incidence of heart disease in Europe. We smoke too much. We don’t climb enough of our hills. Wales, a fake place made by Woolworth, cellotaped to the west of the midlands, useful for car rallies, and as a butt of English jokes. You are a country. You can’t mean that.

Everyone looks for Wales and so many do not find it. Either like R S Thomas they search for a Wales which does not exist, moving ever westward, in hope. Or like the academics find a new Wales right in front of them, constructed from the past’s framework, a place that changes and doesn’t simultaneously. A land of magic. Wave your divining rod. Follow your ley.

Defining Wales is rather like defining verse. For every rule someone comes up with there will be an exception which breaks it. Ultimately poems become what they are because the poet says so. Wales is like this. The bit you think of as real probably is. The Feathers in Llanystumdwy. The Greyhound on High Street in Newport. Barafundle. The power station at Connah’s Quay. Splott. The Millennium Coastal Park at Llanelli. The Spar at Flint. The writers gathered at the Vulcan in Adamsdown. The street of subscribers to Taliesin in Pwllheli. The coach spotters at Swansea bus station. Brecon Cathedral. The cairn at the far end of Golden Road. The Urdd Welsh classes for adults. The sewage works at Aberystwyth. The place up near Dyfi Junction where there’s no platform but the trains still stop. Pete Davis’ Chicken Shed at Brynamman. The left bank of the river Lugg near Bleddfa. The Codfather of Sole chipshop on Barry Island seafront. The place where Dafydd Elis Thomas parks his car near the Senedd. The steps of the National Museum and the pillars behind which John Tripp once hid his bicycle clips. The jetty at Mostyn from where the Airbus wings set sail. The bridge over the lost Roath Rail branch on Penylan Hill. All as real as each other.

In a country the size of ours it should be possible to visit everywhere – some claim to have – but there are still towns and villages appearing on the nightly BBC Wales weather maps that I have never been through. And on occasions there is one of which I’ve never heard.

Some people never bother. Cardiffians – and some of them can be the worst – live and die inside the capital. The Wales beyond is an alien land. Full of workless pits and mountains. No Asda. No Lidl. I am not going there. Why should I? What would I get out of it? I have also met a well-known north Wales novelist who claimed never to have visited Pembrokeshire. The south. Not Welsh enough. Non-compliance as a political act. For him there are three countries: Y Fro Cymraeg, Welsh Wales, an arc of land in the western reaches; Wales that might as well be England, including the capital and the north east and the southern coasts; and Y Fro Efallai where desire and actuality mix, where reality comes in like a short wave signal – Myddfai, Banwen, Merthyr, Pontcanna, Aber out of term time. Trefdraeth when the sun shines. Who is to say that his Wales is any better than mine? Or that mine is more real?

This book is about this country. A place where some imagine that no one has raised a sword in anger since Glyndŵr’s rebellion went down in 1409 and the Welsh were banned from ever owning anything outside their borders. A place where others know, for certain, that the real Wales is waiting, just round the political corner, and a new day will come. Minorities rise. Nation states fragment. It’s the post-modern way.

The real Wales may well be a place of people, a land of human intervention, of despoliation in the search for minerals, of pipelines and power grids, and roads that mesh the green like fishnet, but it is not an urban country. The city life of disenfranchisement, dislocation and alienation is not ours. Wales, land of communities, where decisions reach the surface through compromise and conciliation. Wales where power frightens and underdogs are prized. Wales where time slows and life is longer. Wales where the past actually is important and historians are honoured. Wales where highrise is feared and there is no navy. The real Wales is where people always talk about who they are, strive after roots, want fields rather than mansions, although generally have neither. The real Wales is the one I’ve gone looking for. Not sure I’ve found it all yet.

When I wrote Real Cardiff, back in 2002, I determined to write about the land as I saw it. No considered history nor topographical guide, no socio-economic handbook, nor fictional prose. As I observed it the world kept changing. The past slid from me. Those guarding it seemed to want to usher it away. What we were went underground to stay hidden or to be dug up by the disinterested and burned. Few seemed to care. The land also seemed to be secret. Full of self-contained, excluding epi-centres, places where you could only gain access if you had a key. The Cardiff of Geraint Jarman’s Welsh reggae, of Philip Dunleavy’s Castle, of Callaghan’s slum clearance, the Cardiff of Geoffrey Inkin’s Barrage and Bay. These innovations were making us a completely new Welsh city, a post-industrial capital for an incoming millennium, something out there was happening. It had to be tracked and written down.

Real Wales adopts the same approach for the whole country. The Real Cardiff books (volumes one and two already best sellers and a third out there in the hazy, not-yet-completed wings) spawned a series. Real Swansea. Real Merthyr. Real Newport. Real Wrexham. Real Aberystwyth. And more. Written by experts to the Real formula. Series edited by Peter Finch. The present volume is my look at my country. Didn’t know it was mine until I grew and went out there to see. There are many like me. Lights go on. We need to find out just who we really are.

I’ve used classic Real Cardiff techniques here. Visited places by accident, simply because they sounded interesting, or because I found myself nearby. Places determined by their importance to Wales. Places that had to be rediscovered. Places where things existed. Places where, apparently, they did not. I went on tour, doing poetry readings. I visited alone, with my partner, in the company of local experts, literateurs, odd balls, historians, novelists. I used old maps and new ones. I read local histories and national overviews. I travelled by car and train and on foot. Much of the distance on foot, for often there were only unpaved tracks.

I discovered a lot. The sheep are many. The rain is often. The light is brilliant. The skies can be huge. The past can be picked up because it is often so near the surface. The past can also never be found again because of what we have done to it. Broken it, built on it, lost it, thrown it away. And there is also the matter of the mysteries, that stuff of Wales which makes things happen, or seem to happen, of which I’ve found no evidence anywhere else. Kings sleeping below rocks. Blood in trees. Wonder in the grass. Future in the air.

Notes:

[i] conversation between the author and some picnicking black Americans on the coast of South Carolina.

Where can you get your copy? In the shops at £9.99 pretty soon.

BayLit – Shocking Enough?

Why light up the Bay? In 1999 when the Academi first came up with the idea of a long-weekend literature festival Cardiffians were rarely in the habit of venturing further south than the main rail link. The Bay was another country. And a recently renamed one at that. Cardiff was two cities: the municipal capital standing in quiet Portland stone grandeur around Cathays Park; and then the buzzing Bay, new centre of the urban Welsh universe, full of cafes, bars, restaurants, and light. BayLit would knit the two places together. A weekend of Llên y Lli, literature of the waves, would get citizens of a literary persuasion out of the back bar of Park and into a multiplicity of venues they’d never yet visited – the Sports Café, the Norwegian Church, the Baltimore, and Techniquest.

This was a risky venture but largely its worked. Over the years new Bay venues have come on line, not least the grandest of the all, the Wales Millennium Centre and, as a solemn back up, the great slate hall at the Senedd.

Some may ask why we need literature festivals at all. Aren’t books for reading? Don’t you take them home and deal with them in private? You do. But literature is also a spectator sport, a performance art and a participatory game. Public readings by famous authors are popular. Even better attended are events where the famous spill the beans about what it is or was or will soon be.

In the 2005 BayLit queues snaked around the block to hear Howard Marks, Mr Nice, talk about a life in drugs. He’d written the biographies, made the pitch, and created the books but what he did on stage was simply to talk. And the south Wales crowd loved it.

Academi has a responsibility for the whole of Wales, of course, and Cardiff is never the central focus. BayLit alternates with an Academi-supported Festival centred on Ty Newydd, the Writer’s Centre at Lloyd George’s old house outside Criccieth. Among last year’s participants were Jon Gower, Eigra Lewis Roberts, Angharad Price, and Gwyneth Glyn.

This year, however, Academi is back by the impounded waters making literature work in Cardiff Bay.

The festival runs at the Wales Millennium Centre, at Terra Nova on Mermaid Quay, at the Glyn Jones Centre opposite the Senedd, and upstairs at Brain’s flagship, the Wharf, which faces the old East Dock on Schooner Way. Outrider events are at Borders’ spanking new bookshop in the Hayes where new books have been profiled all week. Meirion Jordan’s Moonrise, Eurig Salisbury’s Llyfr Glas Eurig, Joanna Davies’ Ffreshars. Saturday at 1.00 pm it’s the turn of the multi-talented Fflur Dafydd with her Bardsey Island black comedy, Twenty Thousand Saints.

For those who want to try their own hands at things there are three workshops. The Young people’s writing squads meet with the chaired bard Mererid Hopwood creating short films of their newly written poetry. Eurig Salisbury offers a new take on an ancient form with his cynghanedd workshop at the Glyn Jones Centre (10.00 am). In the Seligman Room at the Wales Millennium Centre Yemisi Blake delves into creative blogging at 11.00.

Upstairs at Terra Nova at 2.00 pm one of Welsh fiction’s revived strands, rural writing, gets some urban exposure. Horatio Clare, Cynan Jones, Tom Bullough and local farmer Hugh Cory join Ifor Thomas to uncover the joys of the greener life.

BayLit 2008 celebrates the Shock of the New. New ideas, new writers, new forms, new styles. If things get too edgy do we still enjoy them? Is one of literature’s main jobs to administer 5000 volts every now and then? At Terra Nova at 4.00 pm novelist and Dr Who fictioneer David Llewellyn ask us what we think. Are You Shocked Yet? Tell us please.

BayLit’s big bang is at the Wharf (8.00 pm) where one-time poetry boy band Aisle 16 present their take on motorway service stations. This bizarre poetic travelogue in the footsteps of John Betjeman features new poetry, a digital lightshow, video, and beauty created from a soulless hell. Thought the M4 couldn’t be entertainment? Think again.

Fuller details are at http://www.academi.org/ and tickets for most events can be purchased at the door.

The preceding piece was pitched at the Western Mail as a promotional description of what has been an essential annual literary bash near the water.

Highlights so far:

Tiffany Atkinson at the Poetry and Film event at the Point. Having got in past the drunks outside Tiffany made memorable the idea of having one of your hands that thinks it's a chicken. Even non-poetry lovers caught onto that image.

Joe Dunthorne at the Poetry & Prose made forever real the Second Life idea of avatars coming round the corner with three symbols on their chests: name, thing in life and emotional state. John Pik left with his reading John, The Ancient World, and Deaf

Ifor Thomas for spotting that all you had to do in the poetry world was to go away for a year or so to return and find things unrecognisable.

The Old Book Destock Trick

Convinced that my Institute of Welsh Affairs blog entry (http://www.iwa.org.uk/blog/) on a subject that is heating things up among academics and librarians (if not quite yet the larger reading public) could do with some personal pushing I repeat it here.

Is the decision by Cardiff Council to auction off some of its ancient and valuable book stock a harbinger of larger change to come? I think so. If the book trade hasn’t yet hit the sort of hurricane season that the world of finance has then it is only a matter of time. The digitisation of everything from bestsellers to the documents which define your personal identity are not just around the corner but actually upon us.

Recently the National Library of Wales announced its ten-year plan to digitise a large section of its holdings and to make the results instantly and universally accessible online: books, artworks, documents, letters, maps. Its previous plan to digitise entire runs of twentieth century Welsh periodicals is almost complete. This has been managed despite storms of protest from original authors. These have yet to abate.

All this poses the big question: Do we need original manuscripts when virtual ones allow the world and its uncle slick and searchable access at will?Old books, and in particular those from the dawn of print, cannot simply be put onto a shelf and called up from the stacks for any casual visitor to handle. They need to be preserved with care, viewed under controlled conditions, repaired, conserved, de-foxed, cleaned, pressed, boxed, have their rot excised and their bindings mended. All that takes money. Cardiff says it is already overstretched and simply cannot find the resource to care for the 18,000 antiquarian volumes, maps and original manuscripts it has decided put up for sale.

The yard sale it proposed has been replicated at libraries elsewhere and not just in the UK either. Libraries, once eternal guardians and repositories of our cultural heritage, can now be seen engaging in Fahrenheit 451 style stock clearances. Get rid of these dirty things. They are mere containers. Their content is that which matters.

It’s a point of view. Many don’t share it.

What troubles me is that conservation and research are developing arts. Who’s to say what the future may be able to extract from an original document actually handled by its original author. More than could be got from a digital replica that’s for sure.

Cardiff Council has since backtracked slightly and are in discussions with Cardiff University about the preservation of at least some of the Welsh-interest component of its soon to be flogged-off holdings. All will not be gone. Just a lot of it.

How much of the past should we preserve? Certainly not everything. How do we make choices? Not that Cardiff were intending to make choices. There were no proposals to digitise and thus release the original as surplus. This was shelf clearance. And it’s not that this kind of thing hasn’t happened before. Check the stacks at Bute’s once great library at Cardiff Castle. Empty. Did you spot the stock leaving? Me neither.

Spark

I've spent most of my life wondering just where the spark of creativity actually comes from. From the sky maybe? Coming down on rays of sunlight as in the engravings of Blake. From the ground, seeping up into our minds by some process of osmosis. From the air about us, blowing into our veins. From the back of the head, from the well of the mind, from that untouchable dark space within us all. The surrealists thought that Freud had discovered the truth. The unconsciousness was where everything began. That place of dreams and mist where chance and stumble created sparks.

They were probably right, I think.

Dream as good as consideration.
Discovery by flash of light.
Writing by starting the hand to move.
Writing by keeping moving.
Writing by staying the course.

Or maybe it's just as Flann O'Brien suggested it might be in his great novel, The Third Policeman. You become your bicycle by spending time sitting on it. I'm hard at it right now. I have a volume of Proust, heavy, in each hand.

Night Shots

I'm out on Newport Road at night in the dry with the camera on a tripod. This is to test white balance, according to the course I'm following. Take shots under artificial light but with differing white balances - see how the colours shape up.

I'm using a long exposure - three seconds - which lets passing cars and buses appear as illuminated streaks. The road is silent, hardly any traffic. Just the slow throb of the traffic lights, the red wink from the bus shelter sign board, sodium orange from streetlamps, house windows glowing tungsten, tv screens inside them flickering. So much ambient light. There's a moon up there somewhere. Can't see the stars for ambient dust.

I get stopped by drunks. What are you doing? A woman with a bloke on a bike ask if they can be in a shot. What's it for? Makes ghosts, I tell them. I get the woman to walk along the pavement, take a shot. Show her. That's you, a blur like a ghost. I am a ghost, she says, laughing. They roll off towards the Royal Oak. Looking for the light.

The results are great. Huge white mist from a London coach. Red streaks from breaking sports cars. A taxi I didn't notice smearing itself up onto the pavement and a puff of smoke that's the passenger exiting.

Photography or real life? Poetry actually.

Chance

Chance brought me here. Its application, anyway.

Cobbing and Chopin stood in the old Poetry Society in Earl’s Court Square once, up there on the first floor where the floorboards were bare and so filled with grit and foot grime that you never put your bag down. There, among the scraping chairs and late arriving, bag-laden audience, they proceeded to pull words out of a hat and perform them. Schwitters, said Bob. This method has solid foundations. Cut the text into tiny fragments, mix, retrieve by a chosen random system (ie: pulling them out without looking first). Perform. Henri Chopin, discoverer of language’s micro particles, pressed a microphone to his throat. Cobbing used his voice as a boombox. Would have done, if they’d had them then.

The problem with chance methods of composition, once you’ve got beyond the inherent difficulties of creating a method of generating selection in the first place, is that there’s a arty desire to interfere. To tweak. To watch the chance come out of the hat and then mimic it. Try to mimic it. Make a few amendments. Add a word. Smooth a little. Jackson Mac Low whose entire early output consisted of randomly generated poetry would have been appalled. Impure. But today we are beyond purity, well beyond.

Methods of chance generation:

Hat
Computer random number generator
Cards
Open book and point
Falling
Rip
Splatter
Shuffle (see Cards above)
Density of freckles
Random walk hypothesis
Trance
Mishear
White noise

I must come back to this

Urology

In theatre I spot a cupboard with the word "Pain" handwritten onto a sticker on the front. What's that, I ask. We keep the pain in there, replies the blue-gowned technician. You don't want any do you? By now I'm full of local anasthetic so I don't care. I had Travis Elborough's "The Long Player" with me in the waiting room. A slab of a book that tracks the tracks from the post-war start of the 12 inch album to it's recent death among the downloaders. Hugely engaging, witty and more informative than I'd imagined would be possible from an author who looks about nineteen, to judge by his jacket photo. If I had it with me now would I read on as I wait? There's a tv over my shoulder on which I could watch the tubes and the scouring pad and the little internal lamp gushing upwards and onwards into my system, if I wanted to. I don't. I stare hard at the pain cupboard instead. Wiggle my toes.

The procedure is actually all over in a few minutes. Result: Clear. Nothing. No return. No regrowth. No certificate. No shouting. Prostate larger than normal, just a bit, nothing to concern you, happens to those your age. Does it?

50% of those my age it says when I look on the net later.

In the waiting room reunited with Travis I sip my tiny cup of tea and think about peeing.

What was in the pain cupboard? Who knows.

Anthony Brockway

Anthony Brockway put me onto this. He's been blogging for years at Babylon Wales http://babylonwales.blogspot.com/ and so efficiently that I thought it was simply a well-designed web site. Check out his introduction to the subject of blogging in the new edition of the New Welsh Review. He's the man who discovered that Roy Orbison had once done a week at the Double Diamond Club in Caerphilly (in the lost 1970s). Watch out for more.