Home and Away - but mostly home

Our anticipated hectic summer was interrupted by some unexpected health issues - but thankfully not before the National Eisteddfod. Reading at the festival (once I'd stopped shaking) was a great experience and the launch party for Adar Y Nant most enjoyable. That publication will probably mark the pinnacle of my Welsh writing achievement - but two days later on a trip to Cardigan Castle I couldn't resist having delusions of grandeur and had some fun posing in the Chair commemorating the very first Eisteddfod there in 1176! 

Some enforced leisure allowed me to catch up with some very overdue correspondence and quite a lot of very interesting reading. A fascinating poetry collection that I was asked to review was Exposure, War, Media and Democracy (Culture and Democracy Press, 2026) by Angela Graham. I'd recently met Angela at a reading at Cwtsh in Newport and was profoundly moved by her poems. They have their origin in responses to journalism, photography and film generated by the wars in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza or in civic confrontations involving governments or citizen activism. In my earlier career as a nurse I was caught up in one IRA mainland atrocity which has stayed with me ever since; I related very much to the poems on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In many of the war poems I found it was the sheer humanity of Angela's approach to such inhumane events that was the strength of her work. The collection makes for very sobering, thought provoking reading. 

The last few weeks have been considerably enlivened by the arrival of Bryn, our new Border Collie puppy. He's now 14 weeks old and both delightful and the devil incarnate. During his first week with us he chewed through our internet and landline connection; he's very partial to a good gnaw on skirting boards and the corners of the sideboard. The garden room where I usually write is well nigh impossible to puppy proof so I'm working largely from a well nibbled camping chair in the kitchen or at the patio table. It certainly puts a different perspective on things!