Dedicated to my next guest Blogger

Drwgdybiaeth/Suspicion

http://www.diagnose-me.com/symptoms-of/paranoia-paranoid-personality-disorder.html

 Dwi'n person drwgdybus, mae'n flin da fi. Os wnewch chi wasgu'r botwm chwarae ar record Terry Stafford rŵan ac wedyn darllenwch ymlaen, diolch yn fawr. Efallai rydych yn fwy cyfarwydd â fersiwn Elvis, a finnau hefyd, felli dewis un arall i fod yn wahanol ontife. Dwi'n ffeindio fo yn anodd trystio pobol ac i ymddiried ynddyn nhw, a'r Cymry a phawb arall fel ei gilydd. Dwi'n sylweddoli fod hwn yn rhan annatod o fy mhersonoliaeth ac yn gobeithio bydd sgrifennu amdano fo yn mynd i helpu fi ddatrys o. Wnaeth o ddim gwella yn gyfan gwbl ond ar drothwy fy mhen-blwydd yn 'forty fucking eight' dwi eisiau mynd yn gyhoeddus gyda'r ffeithiau yma. Dwi wedi cilio rhag y byd ers fy mhrofiadau yn Amsterdam ac yn y carchar yn 2005. Dwi'n meddwl i mi weld y byd yn lle peryglus a melli mi rydw i ar bigau'r drain yn aml. Dwi'n ffeindio fo yn anodd iawn i ymlacio. Ceisio meddwl beth oedd yr experiment yna gyda llygod mawr ble ddysgon nhw i beidio trio ar ôl cael cynifer o siociau electric. Dwi'n meddwl erbyn rŵan fy mod yn debyg i'r llygod mawr yna, wedi blino gyda phobol ai triciau. Dwi'n berson cymhleth felli dwi'n meddwl fod pawb arall yn mynd i fod yn gymhleth hefyd ac yn dipyn o sioc pan ddwi'n ffeindio dydyn nhw ddim. Gan edrych yn ôl dwi'n meddwl dechreuais fod yn amheus o oedolion yn yr ysgol ac mae fy amheuon am y natur ddynol wedi fy nilyn ar hyd fy oes. Oherwydd bod rhywun yn siarad Cymraeg dylech chi drystio nhw fwy? Rydym yn yr un cwch? Wel na, dwi ddim yn meddwl rydan ni. Mae cefndir economaidd a chyfalafiaeth yn gwneud ni yn wahanol, mae ein cefndir gwleidyddol ac mae'n flin da fi deud ond dwi'n teimlo fod y gwahaniaeth rhwng y de ar ogledd yn ormod i oroesi ac i uno ni fel cenedl. Beth bynnag mae'r rhai pybyr a selog yn deud does 'na ddim byd yn gyffredin rhwng Llangefni a Llanrhymni. Mae anghenion cefn gwlad ar ddinas yn hollol wahanol ond mae pobol yn mynnu mae un wlad i ni. Does neb yn gwadu'r ffaith fod 'na North/South divide yn Lloegr felli pam gwadu fod 'na un yng Nghymru? Mae digon yn cwyno am yr A470 ac yn mynnu system trafnidiaeth well rhwng y de ar ogledd ond yn fy nhyb i, y tirlun, y mynyddoedd a'r ffaith fod rhai ardaloedd mor anghysbell sydd wedi cadw'r iaith yn fyw. Yn teithio dol o Fanceinion yn ddiweddar meddyliais fod o'n wyrth fod yr iaith yma o gwbl i feddwl am yr holl mewn llifiad dyddiol sydd yn dod mewn i Ogledd Cymru yn nhermau bobol a nwyddau. Roedd hwn yn digwydd yn ugeiniau'r ugainfed ganrif, roedd trefi glan mor gogledd Cymru megis Bae Colwyn a Llandudno yn hollol Saesneg ei naws ac roedd fy nhad yn cofio un Cymro yn bloeddio ar gwr estron ar ei wyliau mewn acen gref y gogledd 'You have no right in our country'. Roedd hwn yn gyfnod Lloyd George. Y Prif Weinidog efallai wnaeth ddim sylweddoli'r fath effaith fasa’r ymerodraeth Brydeinig gael ar ei iaith gynhenid ag o yn bennaeth am gyfnod ar hwn. Dwedodd Saunders Lewis yn 1961 fod yn unfed awr ar ddeg ar yr iaith ac mae wedi bod bob munud, bob awr, bob dydd, bob wythnos, bob mis a bob blwyddyn ers hynny ond fel dywedodd y Gogleddwr o Frynaman, Dafydd Iwan, i ni yma o hyd. 

Interlude

Any Questions?

Sitting here I was last night as per usual, wasting my life on Facebook, paying the occasional visit to the twitterrati and with Radio 4 on in the background. I don't have a Television Set and haven't had one since 2006 so when someone asks me "Have you written for Television?" Well I've tried but not very seriously. It is not a medium that delights me but it pays well apparently. My aim is to break through with the Playwriting and then I'll await the knock on the door from TV Producers rather than TV Detection Vans. I'd heard the trailer for any questions and my heart sank when I heard that it was coming from Neath, a town that I don't know why, but I don't like it. The Shark Fisherman can state here quite publicly that he doesn't like Neath, whether it was because I canvassed there for Dr Dewi Evans, the Plaid Cymru candidate in the 1989 Bi-election. The people were generally quite kind and pleasant apart from two men in a van who stopped and shouted out "what are you selling there butt?" I said Plaid Cymru, they revved the engine and shouted 'bloody rubbish'. I then went to a residential home for the elderly to try and sell the joys of an Independent Wales to people with dementia and alzheimers. A man washing his car said "I''ll vote for you cos we remember what Peter Hain did at the St Helens Rugby Ground, putting tin tacs down". I didn't know who Peter Hain was apart from being the Labour candidate but I found out that it was in protest at a visiting South African rugby team. 

Now 25 years on I probably agree with the two men in the van but because it was my first time canvassing I was a bit taken aback. I remember seeing Captain Beany in Neath once in his full regalia and by now my politics is closer to his than to Plaid Cymru.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Beany

Last night I was listening to Jonathan Dimbleby pronouncing Castell Nedd 'chwarae teg' and listening to David Steel (Liberal), Carwyn Jones (Labour), Michael Fabricant(Conservative) and Jill Evans(Plaid Cymru) Everything was mundane and boring as per usual when the whiney, nasally question of one Cerys Bevan came across the wireless like Lord Haw Haw 'ers llawer dydd'. The question was something along the lines of "Can we blame the Welsh Language for the poor showing of our schools and education in the PISA tables?"
Loaded or what!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03qfzh7
I knew the type of person this was. I had met many on my travels. The Welsh Quislings who blame the Welsh Language for all of societies ills. These are people who didn't enjoy the experience of learning Welsh in school, they didn't like their Welsh Teacher, they don't see the point in it, there's too much money spent on it, they are the minority, they get all the best jobs, it alienates children, nobody speaks it round here, blah di blah di blah like a toy with a string in its chest.  By this stage I was standing, shouting at the radio as if I was shouting at every one of these I had ever met. The most sensible answer was Lord David Steel when he declared 'No Comment'. You could hear the ripples of approval and the folded arms from the audience when Cerys went on "I am not a Welsh Speaker and I am obviously biased towards the English Language". This is why the language is in such dire straits because so many of the Anglo Welsh have an ambivalent nay poisonous and resentful attitude to something which is the pure essence, the nectar of communication for the country. They would rather their children learn French or German than Welsh because they are bound to be going on their holidays there...at some point. "You live in fucking Wales Cerys, Welsh is the indigenous language of Wales".  I would like to see Cerys in years to come singing the National Anthem like John Redwood. I did what any self respecting Beany would do, I went into the kitchen, opened and ate a cold can of baked beans and as Jonathan Dimbleby declined to say 'Castell Nedd' brow beaten by the 'Cymraeg Dissaprovers' in the audience at the end of the programme. Even the Scottish continuity announcer declined. This is not a fucking joke. I went up to the radio and farted into the speaker. I think this is why I don't like Neath.     

Sex & Death in Wales

 Sex and Death in Wales is probably like Sex & Death most places else in the Western Hemisphere. It is locked away, illicit, underground. It isn't talked about until it actually happens and is quite a shock in both cases.

Apparently the French have been at it! In the Torygraph another one of these scientific studies show that philandering which is a posh word for cheating is common place.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/10587153/French-study-shows-a-majority-of-men-and-a-third-of-women-cheat.html

As a confirmed singleton I can only wonder out loud why do you get married in the first place if your intention is to cheat on your spouse. Well obviously you don't get married with the intention of cheating but after seven years of marriage you have an itch that needs scratching. Those itches are being scratched in Travelodges and Premier Hotels across the land as I type this. We're all at it apparently.  Well we are if we're French.

We are all dying as well but we never talk about it until it happens. I am obsessed with death. Anybody else? I think I am so obsessed because I am so disappointed with my life. I am disappointed with my life because I am not getting any... I mean enough sex. Is sex a euphemism for love & intimacy I wonder or is it the act that can facilitate it?  This must be a difficult post for women to read (Hello women, waves hand!) because as blokes we are led to believe that women don't actually enjoy sex. That they only participate in it as a favour to the man. We blokes in small towns across the UK of a certain generation learnt about women's physiology and needs from a certain kind of magazine that was available in shops and sold in brown paper bags. From the start human sexuality is taboo, a mystery, something that you have to search for online. Trouble is, this education is from a man's point of view so its bound to be a bit oppressive because men in a patriarchal society are oppressive.  In the gender wars of cheating and mistrust one thing that men and women have in common is that they are both going to die. Maybe this fact explains why men are generally keener and more insistent on the sexual act, because they know they are going to die sooner. They have a shorter life expectancy than women. 

Sex has been a lot in the news recently especially in relation to 1970's DJs and Celebrities. There is a lot of condemnation and 'burn the witch' (The Irony) type statements. Paedophile is perhaps the worst accusation or slur that can be levelled at anybody. Is nobody actually interested in why these men committed these crimes? What was in their upbringing and psychology that led them to these actions and crimes. Or is it just best to lock them away and gloat?

I actually saw a heavy set man in a black coat today sneaking a peek, in a what the butler saw type fashion, in the window of Anne Summers, was he looking at the tantalising lingerie mes amies or was he looking at himself in the shop window? What's so strange about that? Well he was wearing a Dog Collar ( as in what Vicars and Ministers wear) not as in some kinky bondage attire. (You see I had to add the word kinky) He looked more like a bouncer than a vicar. Perhaps he was God's Bouncer? Sex & death are fiercely intertwined in Religion. Can abstinence and celibacy be a good idea if it leads to sexual abuse? The Pope running a seminary on 'family values', so a single celibate man can tell families what they can and can't do! Use a condom for 'feck's sake! And we believe this bullshit.  

 

Second Anniversary Guest Blog Post

I love the incongruous title of this blog, and I love this blogger’s thoughts, quirky and off-the-wall as they usually are. I love the way they click with rich seams of thought and reminiscence in my own psyche. Sometimes it’s the blog as a whole; other times it’s simply a sentence or phrase. Introvert reaching to introvert, trying to identify their home, their hearth, their ‘true’ self, in an insane, increasingly sorrowful – but, thankfully, also increasingly anonymous - world.

I’m not sure if everyone spends valuable hours of their life on such a search, or whether it’s only the extreme introverts. Or is it that introverts continue the search all their lives, despite the setbacks, because they’re also naively optimistic that they’ll find the ‘true’ answer? Maybe - for me – to quote the (in)famous character, Arthur Fallowfield,  from the radio comedy series Beyond Our Ken (older blog-followers will remember), “the answer lies in the soil”....but I get ahead of myself.....

I’ve been searching for my true self all my life. Even by the age of 8 or 9, I was experiencing life as though watching through a window (the early development of my introvert personality, or a response to emotional and psychological abuse?). I knew I was a girl – that was painfully obvious. But learning to ‘be’ a girl in my dysfunctional birth-family of the 1950s was, with the benefit of hindsight, an intellectual – and emotional - impossibility. I rebelled. I rebelled in ways that I’m not proud of now, and would not boast about, but – suffice it to say - in ways that enabled me to identify closely with David Williams’ journey of escape in his e-book, ‘Amsterdamned’.

Later, I became a mother: and devoting one’s entire existence to bringing up a large family is a wonderful way of switching into denial the search for the soul-self.  Changing and washing nappies, and baking bread, and jam-making, and re-painting barge-boards, and teaching kids to ride bikes, and refereeing repetitive arguments and fights leaves no mental energy, let alone physical energy, to reflect on who I ‘really’ am. The crisis comes years later when the all-consuming task of parenthood eases and you realise that you have allowed the self – whoever that is – to fall into a bottomless pit, and you don’t even have a ladder long enough to go and look for her.....

Becoming a sociologist provided me with the language with which to start asking the questions: effectively enabled me to start constructing a ladder down into that scary, dark pit. It also enabled me to feel some self-worth, having destructively left my grammar school education the moment I was legally allowed to do so. Unlike with secondary modern schools, there was no provision for those who left at 15, before they’d run the full gauntlet of the grammar system: I left without even a school-leaving certificate. I felt then – and still feel – that our education system did nothing except hold us captive, teaching us to repeat the answers that had already been discovered and written down. For heaven’s sake – if I really wanted to know the answer to something, all I had to do was read the book! Why did I have to spend all those long, long days and interminable years being forced to write it all down? And those mathematical ‘problems’ – why so illogical? Who on earth needs to calculate how long it would take for 3 people to empty a 125-gallon bath of water with a 2-gallon bucket each, when there’s a perfectly good plug at the bottom?

So – a woman, a mother, a sociologist...and later, a ‘born-again’, ‘liberationist’  (oh, those labels!) Christian, a socialist, a communitarian....but maybe these labels are really about my social identity?  Not ‘I’, not my soul-self. As I approach the seventh decade of my life, I’m feeling optimistic. I think, finally (finally?), I’m coming near to finding that soul-self.  Several years of keeping an allotment, developing a Church project for sharing food from a communal garden, and caring for two other gardens, have started green shoots of contentment in my life: contentment that’s totally new, that I’ve never experienced before.  I realise I am, in the very depths of my soul, a nurturer, a grower. The product of growing – the harvest - is not the most important thing; the key lies in the very process of the growing and nurturing of plants. But, preferably, food-plants which may, in some small way, help the human species to survive the economic and social chaos that is surely around the corner. Maybe, after all, “the answer lies in the soil”.

As your blog, Shark Fishing in Wales, nears its second anniversary, David Williams (known to me more colloquially as RB), I thank you and salute you for the part you have – quite unwittingly – played in my own search for self. 

 

About the Author

In a former life, Gillian Reynolds (and, as she always responds when asked by the BBC, yes, she IS the real Gillian Reynolds!) was a sociologist, gaining her PhD in 1994. But the greater honour was that she was officially awarded her PhD alongside the amazing and awesome journalist, John Pilger.

As well as writing numerous chapters for other people’s publications, she teamed up with her great friend, Professor Gayle Letherby, to write Train Tracks: work, play and politics on the railways in 2005. Having enjoyed that experience of working together so much, they went on to edit the collection of writings: Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions in 2009.

Now happily retired, Gillian facilitates a sociology group for her local U3A, adores her grandchildren, contributes to several community ventures, lives a full life in her local Church, and spends as much time as possible on her allotment, in her greenhouse, and in various gardens. Oh – and nurturing and maintaining her wonderful friendships on Facebook!

We Shall Overcome!.wmv

Emotion over Logic!

I don't deal in facts or logic. I deal in vibe, intuition and emotion. Maybe that's why I am in the pickle I am in. I am a fantasist who finds succour in the esoteric realms. In a strange kind of way I admire pragmatists and realists but I don't envy them because its very unlikely that they will go crazy.

I agree with Charles Bukowski.

I don't think that pragmatists and realists actually think that they are going to die! If you know that you are ultimately going to die, then at some point in your life I believe that it is important, if not essential, to go crazy. If this can be done in a controlled environment then all the better. It is important to plan your craziness rather than have craziness thrust upon you. I know, I speak from experience. I think that my 'psychosis' which is defined as a psychological break from reality was my opportunity to come to terms with my own mortality. I am over 40 and I think about my own death and demise every single day. Is that pathological? Maybe? Does it stop me from achieving, competing, trying? Yes, quite possibly. I mean if we are ultimately going to die, then what is the point of trying? To get a better obituary?  

People who deal in the mundane, the trivia, must think they are going to live forever! The immortal twenties and the slowing down and slow realisation in your thirties. Life is a gift! Surrounded by the cities' skyscrapers, the noise and bustle, it doesn't feel like it.





Barddoniaeth y Storom/Storm Poetry

Dynion dewr y Cyngor yn sefyll fel Neifion da'i ffyrch,

Meistres y môr yn chwerthin arnynt,

ac yn chwibanu fel blaidd yn y gwynt.  

Sŵn llais y bos yn torri ar ei clyw

"Dewch 'nôl i'r depot bois bach

Mae'r llywodraeth yn wneud toriadau syth bin

Gadewch i'r llanw ddod mewn

Ni aiff e ddim mas"

Pobol gyffredin sy'n dioddef

Rhaniadau, colledion di-ri!

Nawr a wnewch chi gredu

Fod y ddaear fam yn dial arnom ni!

Brave Council workers standing like Neptune with their forks.

The Mistress of the Sea laughing at them,

Wolf whistling in the wind. 

The Boss's voice comes over the radio

"Come back to the depot my boys

The Government have made immediate cuts

The tide will come in but not go out."

Ordinary people are those that suffer

With losses and divided

Now will you believe that Mother Earth

Is wreaking her revenge on us.