Bringing in the Sheaves

                     

  Where were you on the 29th July 1981? 

Going through some drawers in the house I have found the above two items that to a casual observer would give the impression that the Shark Fisherman of Wales was a rampant royalist way back then. Not so, the plastic bags, they were handing out like sweets, the tin of travel sweets in fact that were made by a company called Smith Kendon of Waterton, Bridgend founded in 1780. Let's face it, there were a lot of royalists with a small r in the Principality with a big P then. It was only five years after the Queen's Silver Jubilee and even though that nurtured an anti-establishment punk movement, the comfortable and complacent still followed the machinations of Buck House with more than a passing interest. This was before the Windsors became such a dis-functional family worthy of any episode of Benefits Street. The woman in the pictures is now dead, driven by a drunk driver and chased by the paparazzi into a Paris underpass. She was almost driven to insanity by British royalty. Her sons, now, twenty years after her death have been given the go-ahead to talk about mental health by putting their heads together. The whole thing has been carefully choreographed and stage managed. Give it time! Time is a great healer! Well it is for the British Upper Class. Carlo has just orchestrated the sacking of the Queen's Private Secretary and he has firmly got his eyes on the prize. Diana died before devolution. I remember her in a white dress as a speck on a television screen in the far corner of a farm parlour because I was helping to bring in the sheaves, as an unhappy fifteen year old schoolboy but I was happier than either Charles or Diana on that day because I was outside in the sunshine, working on the land, collecting bales of hay and drinking copious amounts of tea and eating bread and jam. That day I was a member of the 'werin datws' helping my uncle and cousins on the farm where my father was born. A community effort, a farmers' collective, the agrarian dream. 15 then and 51 now and all I've got to show for it are an empty tin of travel sweets, a plastic bag and a stirring hymn.