52 Comment Off the record! THERE are times in every


man’s life when he has to stop and take stock of things. Not in a tick-box way of measuring his life against the dreams he had when he was younger. That’s where crushing disappointment and madness lie; after all, not once did I captain Wales to victory over the All Blacks – even though I am still able to conjure Brynmor Williams’ disappointment in commentary that my team had conceded a penalty during our 100-0 win. No, you have to have a good think about just how happy you are. The key thing about life is not


only enjoying it, but taking the time to reflect upon that enjoyment in order that it can once again illuminate your life. That, I think, is very important. Last week, the wife was very


upset by the death of one of her relatives. The death of an uncle is usually a pretty distant event, especially as one gets older, but the wife had spent many happy childhood hours out on Uncle Huw’s farm slaughtering chickens. And she was genuinely upset at his passing.


How to restore a smile to the


wife? That was the question. I remembered her uncle as a jolly


soul with one of those tanned and lean physiques that is the product of a lifetime of hard outdoor labour. I can still remember his finger-mangling handshake. But what I recalled most was the mystery of his stammer and how it vanished when he unleashed his singing voice. He was possessed of one of those baritone voices that could rattle chapel windows. Nowadays, with the opportunities available to him, he would almost certainly have become a professional singer. Certainly, for many years, and into his seventies, he enthralled chapel congregations and male voice choir audiences when he launched into arias from Mendelssohn and Handel. But his great love was opera. By which circuitous route, I


come to making my wife smile. I told her of the time that Huw and I got drunk. Huw loved his rugby, was fond


of a pint and, in his cups, would burst into song at the drop of a hat, or certainly if offered a pint of Double


with Mike Edwards


Dragon. So it was that in 2005, I had the pleasure of sitting with him while Wales were winning the Grand Slam against Ireland. The partying continued into the night, and Huw got gradually redder and redder in the face as songs swirled around the small pub in the village. In the end, someone asked Huw to give ‘em a song. He rose unsteadily to his feet and sang Calon Lan. He sat down to cheering and was asked to do one more. He rose unsteadily to his feet


and made the universal signal for hush. He then proceeded to launch Vesti la Giubba at full throttle on an unsuspecting bar. You could have heard a pin drop, right up to the point when he plopped puce-faced back in his seat at the end and farted loudly. “Here, Hughie. How about


singin’ us, Nessun Dorma?” Huw goggled and bellowed


without a hint of a stammer: “Duw, mun, have some standards! We’ve just won the [startling expletive deleted] Grand Slam. This isn’t the time for [even more startling expletive deleted] football songs!”


Safwynt Plaid I HAD a busy weekend with a


variety of meetings and events in Pembrokeshire. I met with Pembrokeshire Friends


of the Earth, who raised their concerns about the proposed biomass plant at Blackbridge, Milford Haven. As part of the campaign against the


facility, a public meeting was held by Friends of the Earth and Biofuelwatch UK last July to inform local people. The company Egnedol’s plans to


build a 49.9 MWe waste and biomass gasification plant at Blackbridge, Milford Haven. Egnedol state that this is the first phase of a gasification plant development seven times as large, one which will ultimately require 3.4 million tonnes of waste and wood every year.


The technology for this has never


been used successfully at a commercial scale in the UK. The technology is fascinating and


I have long supported the principle of energy from waste wood and energy crops. However, any such proposal needs to proceed on the basis of sustainability, including the sourcing of wood in Wales or the UK and no diversion of otherwise recyclable materials into energy production. Such a plant would generate a


great deal of heat as well as electricity and there are associated applications looking at cheese making and aquaculture (prawns). There is also an interesting angle looking at the use of algae for bio oil. Clearly, the area around the haven


is dominated by energy capture and distribution and so this plant could be


THE HERALD FRIDAY FEBRUARY 3 2017


Follow us on Twitter @ceredigherald


SCUNTHORPE, readers. Think about it for a moment: What do


any of us really know about Scunthorpe? Wikipedia says ‘Scunthorpe is a


town in Lincolnshire, England. It is the administrative centre of the North Lincolnshire unitary authority, and had an estimated total resident population of 65,163 according to the 2011 census. A predominantly industrial town, Scunthorpe, the United Kingdom’s largest steel processing centre, is also known as the ‘Industrial Garden Town’. It is the third largest settlement in Lincolnshire, after Lincoln and Grimsby’. So, an industrial town in


Lincolnshire. And, yet, Scunthorpe has much to


teach us about Donald Trump’s approach to formulating foreign policy. You see, Scunthorpe has a problem


with Simon Tomas


said to fit. It will be an early test of the Welsh Government’s new planning regime and Environment and Well- being of Future Generations Acts to ensure that it is evaluated on full sustainability. I was also privileged to the annual


team pursuit race in Crymych to give out the prizes (and raffle!). Many thanks to Roland and Pat Sherwood and others for their voluntary work organising the event. I am in tremendous admiration of the 250 plus who ran in teams on a dreadfully wet day. I took the opportunity of being in


Crymych to visit local residents outside Blaenffos with local County Councillor Rod Bowen to discuss their concerns regarding road safety and speed on the A478. I will seek to raise their concerns in the National Assembly.


– or rather had a problem – that suggests that a scattergun approach to an issue is seldom without drawbacks. Way back in the dim and distant


past when AOL was a big player online, it introduced, for the most sensible and socially responsible of reasons, a profanity filter. So sensitive was the filter that it prevented the residents of Scunthorpe from creating email addresses on its servers. The name ‘Scunthorpe’ created a false positive for bad language. Draenog hesitates to point out


why that could have been the case. He will leave that to your own powers of observation. Let’s just say the inhabitants of places as far apart as North-West Austria (21 miles north of Salzburg - look on a map) and a small settlement in Orkney can sympathise with Scunthorpe’s one-time plight when it comes to unfortunate conjunctions of letters of the alphabet. The answer to the Scunthorpe problem is not straightforward, readers.


Draenog finds the flaw


You either have to be less sensitive and the odd profanity slips through, or inoffensive inhabitants of inoffensive places find themselves forbidden from mentioning where they live when they venture online or fill in forms. So in internet searches, so in


American politics – or so it appears to Draenog. Sometime last weekend, there was


the noise of metal on metal around the base of the Statue of Liberty while Donald Trump set to it with an anglegrinder to remove the words on a plaque at its base.


Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates


shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose


flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her


name hand


Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-


Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin


cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired,


your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to


breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming


shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-


tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden


door!” My goodness, readers; even as


awful 19th century sententious rot goes, that’s pretty dreadful poetry - with ropey scansion, hobbled under the weight of overwrought language, and self- conscious symbolism. It’s not so much the word as the sentiment that is important. High-


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