Season's Greetings

Hard as it is with so much awful international news and the forthcoming car crash scenario our own country faces, as a damp, mild Christmas Day dawned here and I got underway with the usual chores (and cooking is a chore for me!), so many fond memories of past Christmas Days came to mind - and fervent hopes for brighter times to come. If your year hasn't been great either, if this season isn't your favourite time - I hope it can be in some way positive for you, that you can find something in it to celebrate, to hold on to, to take forward. Here's to a better future for us all.

Christmas is coming ...

Call me Scrooge, but I can't be doing with all the Christmas hype from the beginning of December - and much earlier still in most of the shops this year. As a child I was used to the tree and the decorations going up on Christmas Eve, a tradition I continued with my own children (despite their plaintive objections - "Everyone else has got theirs up!"). But this year my nearest radio broadcast to Christmas was on the 20th so I broke the habit of a lifetime; I played Christmas tracks and read Christmas stories and poems just those few days earlier - and the sky didn't fall in and I actually enjoyed it!

I hope my two guests enjoyed it too. Tony Lawrence and Andy Phillips joined me from Newport Writers, a very active group who meet at the Riverside on the banks of the Usk on Saturday mornings. They brought with them a couple of great stories - one about an unexpected Father Christmas proposal to a lonely woman and another about a young boy transported back to the 1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front. It was good to welcome them to the station and we hope to have more input from the group in the next few months.

For my "Book of the Week" for the programme I'd chosen "Christmas in Wales", an anthology edited by Dewi Roberts. I'd discovered it during the Christmas holiday last year - it's a lovely collection of poetry and prose from the country's leading writers, both past and present. If you're still looking for a present for someone who really enjoys a good read - especially someone who has an affection for Wales - this might be just the thing. It's published by Seren. (And make sure you have a quick look on page 79 at the excerpt from Kilvert's Diary about his Christmas Day bath in 1870 ...!)

Andy Phillips

Tony Lawrence

Let's hear it for the oldies!

So often now I'm meeting writers who, like myself, have taken up the craft in later years - perhaps having dabbled in their youth, perhaps having written "professionally", but only coming to being truly creative in later life. By which time, of course, they (we!) have so much more to write from - years of experience of work, family life, people, places, the everyday and often the extra-ordinary too. And often I find the realisation of a shrinking  time frame focuses the mind sharply - let's get on with it whilst we have the time to do so! I've read many authors who have been prolific in later life and who have enjoyed commercial success too; Mary Wesley was well into her sixties before she started to write fiction and she became a best seller in her seventies. A great role model for all of us "oldies"!

U3A's (Universities of the Third Age) around the world have become focal points for many retired and semi-retired people in recent years and often have very active creative writing groups. This morning I had four members of Newport U3A Creative Writers as my guests on The Writer's Room at NHSound - Pam Cocchiara, Ian Lumley, Glyn Sutton and Martyn Vaughan. The group recently published 'Musings', an anthology of their work, which I'm much looking forward to reading. Their contributions today included poems that had us laughing out loud and short stories that prompted much deeper thought.

I do hope our visitors enjoyed their visit as much as the listeners and I enjoyed hearing about their lives and their writing and listening to some fascinating work - it was a very interesting morning.

Pam Cocchiara

Ian Lumley

Glynn Sutton

Martyn Vaughan