52 Comment Te Blue View THE MONTH of January


with Angela Burns AM Newspapers often experience


always brings with it much promise. It is the first month of a new year; a month when resolutions are made and sometimes very quickly broken and a month of renewal when we consider our aims and objectives for the 12 months to come. As a mother to two young


girls, my husband and I often find ourselves having to explain to our kids rights and wrongs and perhaps those grey areas which become more apparent as children get older, wiser and more independent. One of the hardest messages to get across to our two, and I imagine many parents and grandparents will sympathise here, is the message of moderation. To try and explain this after a fortnight every year of eating well, gifts being exchanged and relaxing afternoons out for a walk with the dogs and family, it is not always the easiest message to reinforce. However, the idea of moderation is a key message which all of us would do well to bear in mind.


slow news days over national holiday periods and this is when we have stories informing us of the latest food that has been deemed good/bad/cleansing/toxic. It is strange how different foods feature in different years. Sometimes we are told that a glass of red wine is good for you, then the next year we are told it can be harmful. Butter is sometimes the villain, but sometimes the hero as it has the ‘right’ type of fat. Fruit juice is occasionally one of your five a day, but on other occasions has massive levels of natural sugar which is more harmful than fizzy drinks. In the last week alone, burnt toast and other foods have been claimed by scientists as having a detrimental impact on your health. As with all these cases, moderation is the key. As films such as Supersize Me have highlighted, if the extremes are reached then they can be very harmful, but the odd burger here and there will not leave any permanent damage. This message really hit home


earlier this week when I met with representatives of Alcohol Concern who took the opportunity to bring me up to date with current thinking surrounding addiction treatment. We spoke about how addicts are now encouraged to tackle all aspects of their life to bring their drinking under control. We may not be looking at total abstinence, but reducing the consumption to safer levels where the drink no longer has a grip on everyday aspects of your life. It is not just alcohol where this message rings true but also other forms of addiction such as gambling. We all need to be aware that


doing anything to an excess can be harmful and moderation is a message which politicians must also adopt. Instead of being extreme in our policies, we need to employ moderation to develop consensus. Let us hope that in these tumultuous times that politicians on all sides around the world bear this in mind.


Off the record!


IS THERE a more dispiriting job than cleaning out a garage? I mean, as a domestic chore:


compared to cleaning cesspits and unblocking fat-bergs from inner London sewers on a full time basis, cleaning out a garage is a breeze. It’s just compared to almost any


other domestic job it is one that is replete with opportunities to injure oneself. Along with almost everyone


else in the UK, we do not use our garage to store anything as important as a motorcar. No. Over the last 12 months, our garage has filled up with stuff that was in the half-life between not being used and heading for the tip. Old barbecues and bicycles lurked


under boxes of paper like a rake in the grass. But there could be something valuable, something important. You


never know what you will find! And then there’s THAT smell. A


miasma of dust, damp and dead rodent that leads one to peer closely into every corner lest the next footfall be greeted with a sudden damp squelch of half-mummified mouse. On Saturday afternoon, it was


my turn to venture into the gloom to get rid of stuff and clear the space for the next 12 months worth of junk to occupy. Moving the rubbish out into the garden, I was struck by just how often we had failed to throw out the children’s toys as they grew out of them. All those Japanese card playing games and boxes that once held consoles and plastic replicas of Galen’s head from the Planet of the Apes TV series; every single one a little slice of memory and memorabilia and all destined for the


find. Cadno’s 


SOMETHING amazing happened in Carmarthenshire on Thursday. The sun rose in the morning; the


weather was relatively calm and not too damp; the early morning mist cleared; people went to work; went to the pub; in fact, people did all the things they usually do and – perhaps – some things they should not have done. And yet Thursday was astonishing. The village of Llangennech had


with Mike Edwards


dump this time. Glaring accusingly at me from a


damp corner of the garage, I fleetingly spotted what I thought was a toad but what turned out to be Yoda. Strong the Force was within me as I dropped him in a binbag. And then, just as I filled up the car


for the first visit to the tip, the weather, which had been threatening all day, decided to drop its first load of rain. Swiftly, I got boxes bags and bikes


all back under the leaking garage roof – next weekend’s job – and dropped the accumulated rubbish of years at the dump. The remainder - the stuff ready for the tip but not ready for the rain? Well, best wait for a while. Don’t want to be too hasty, after all. You never know what you will


not been raided by a horde of undead druids, brandishing back issues of Y Faner Newydd and declaiming the works of Mererid Hopwood while plucking the brains from the skulls from villagers and replacing them with rolled up photocopies of Trefor and Eileen Beasley’s rates bills. Newsagents still stocked the Daily Mail instead of Y Cymro. Judge Rinder was still on the telly in the afternoon just before the kids came home from school instead of enforced repeat viewing of Rhaglen Hywel Gwynfryn. Vitally - and this is very important


- uniformed members of the Provisional Wing of Dyfodol i’r Iaith had not rounded up English speakers and decanted them into a penal colony where they would be forced at gunpoint to learn how to conjugate imperfective tenses formed with ‘bod yn’. And that, readers, that made Thursday a remarkable day. Because if you had been listening


to the assembled contributions of the overwhelming majority of Labour members at County Hall on the day before, voting for the transition of Llangennech School from dual-stream to Welsh-medium would have precisely that effect. Or something like that, anyway. ‘Policies can change’ was said often.


Yes, councillors, they can. But in 18 months, the Labour benches kept their mouths shut and made not one attempt to change it. The policy on Welsh in Education is your party’s policy; having


made not a single attempt to change that policy when you were in power, you have raised the issue not once as a motion before the council or on Committee since you lost power. Of course, there were sound electoral reasons for keeping schtum then - best not strike out against your party’s policy before an Assembly election and give fuel to argument that Labour is less a party than a nervous breakdown. And there are sound electoral reasons for raising it now; after all, you have electoral opportunism on behalf of your candidates in … well, Llangennech, say. Cadno was struck by Alun Lenny


mentioning ‘Education First’ - the group of doom-mongers and nay-sayers that were opposed to Welsh-medium education in the days of Dyfed County Council. The public face of that campaign was the then MP for Carmarthen, Dr Alan Williams. A party political point that Alun Lenny did not make, largely because the Labour group on Dyfed County Council ignored the MP and voted – with the Independent Group – to approve the Welsh-medium education policy. It took Cadno a little while to dig out


the material on Education First and their failed arguments from nigh on 30 years ago.


Some who were hostile to the


language insisted that the whole scheme was based on a political conspiracy which would lead in the end to the polarisation of society and to the creation of Welsh language ghettos. Pause here and think on that sentence please, readers. Those are not Cadno’s words. Those


are the words of the former Director of Education for Dyfed County Council, W.J. Phillips. And yet the arguments that were


spurious and rejected by Labour members of Dyfed County Council then were precisely those advanced by, amongst others, Cllrs Tegwen


THE HERALD FRIDAY JANUARY 27 2017


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