Mar 2019 – A Corner of Cornwall

The Green Hollow by Owen Sheers: How to talk about it

As I researched the details of what happened at Aberfan, I realised this was a historical story with a deeply urgent contemporary resonance: a story of what can happen when a community is run by a corporation.
(Owen Sheers)

On Friday 21^st October 1966 a slag heap shifted. It slid inexorably towards a small mining village in South Wales, destroying several houses and at least one farm. The worst hit building was Pantglas Junior School. In total, 144 people were killed. 116 of them were children. The name of the village was Aberfan.

I remember this disaster; I was a contemporary of the children in that school. I remember the shock waves and the disbelief and later, the country’s sadness. I would have been nine years old. Continue reading “The Green Hollow by Owen Sheers: How to talk about it”

Dewithon Diary ii: Welsh Tracery

My Welsh spider’s lattice trembles with the passion of those fighting to preserve a native tongue.

Margaret’s weekly prompt for ragtag Saturday is ‘tracery’. In words and photographs, she offers us nature, pared back to the bones. Like Margaret, I take much from the skeletal branches of winter trees. When I think of tracery I think of intricate and often irregular pathways: interlocking, overlaying. Tracery is embodied by the slumbering arterials of naked branches against a winter sky. Continue reading “Dewithon Diary ii: Welsh Tracery”

The Snow Spider Trilogy by Jenny Nimmo

When they went home, at last, the sky was a riot of violent colours and a lonely bird, hidden in the chestnut tree, cried out, like an augury.

Published 1986-89

(Read as part of Dewithon 19 and for The Classics Club.)

Continue reading “The Snow Spider Trilogy by Jenny Nimmo”

Dewithon Diary

“If you want to find God,” Jon says “you just have to come here and look, don’t you?”

It’s St David’s Day – or it was when I first sat down to write. I have daffodils in the garden and on the window sill. And we are at the start of Dewithon 19, hosted by Paula aka Book Jotter. I’ve been swept up with the idea of a Welsh readathon; I have an impossibly long list of books in mind with others being added all the time. And I feel that I should post something on this, the first weekend of the event. But what, with several books started and none yet finished? Continue reading “Dewithon Diary”