Plays and poems

I'm very much a fair weather camper, so I'm not sorry that I'm not under canvas at the Hay Festival this week - though I'm very sorry not to be able to get to some of the events there this year. The town was gearing itself up for its annual invasion when we were there on Wednesday, tents and caravans setting up on the field, Bed and Breakfast establishments welcoming early birds, the marquees awaiting their writing celebs. It was a preview performance of Owen Sheers' "Unicorns, almost" at the Swan Hotel that we had gone to see, and I certainly wouldn't have missed it - beautifully scripted and very convincingly acted.

Yesterday afternoon saw the launch of "Cardiff Boy", the debut poetry collection by one of my Wye Valley Writers colleagues, Bernard John, published by Carys Books. Bernard had a very appreciative audience in the library at Caldicot - the town that was my grandfather's birthplace and my early playground, so it felt an appropriate place to be listening to poems of a 1950s childhood, tin bath by the coal fire, "Family Favourites on the Light ...Woodbines after dinner." I found the pieces about his Irish ancestors, abandoning their starving country in the mid 1800s for a chance of survival across the water, very moving. My favourite in the collection though is "Talking Hands"; Bernard's father worked as an instructor at Remploy, where disabled people were once trained for employment. The tragedy of the demise of that facility is so simply evoked - "Not for him to witness the factory / as it is now; the blue hoarding / conceals the rubble. The men  / he loved scattered and scared / of what their lives may become." Only too apt a description of the fate of many more in the current climate of health and social welfare cuts, I'm afraid.

Bernard John