sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com

Friday, 13 December 2019

Cymro Deubegwn - David Williams

Friday, 6 December 2019

Iechyd Meddwl Dau Begynol - David Williams

Wednesday, 4 December 2019

Anticipatory Grief

We are all going to experience it but not many of us write about it, let alone talk about it, but as you know, they broke the mould when they made me. The two that broke that mould, 'Mam a Dad' are still alive but for how much longer?

Dad turned 101 two weeks ago and Mam will be 92 in two weeks time. Both have lived longer than the average UK life expectancy, 79.2 for men and 82.9 for women so I should be celebrating their longevity but I am grieving their loss even though they are still alive.

I am perhaps more emotionally invested than most because I have been ostensibly their full time carer for the last five years. I grieve their loss before they die because we have been together forever. The longer he lives and the older I get, the relationship with my father resembles that of Steptoe & Son.

As evidenced in various blog posts and in a book I have experienced, endured, suffered, enjoyed various periods of mental and emotional illness. If it wasn't for Mam & Dad then I wouldn't be here now. I would have died in a faeces smeared and rubbish infested flat because I have never been able to sustain myself financially. So they have and continue to subsidise me as I try and help them. A 'quid pro quo' situation as Donald Trump would say.

Carer's Allowance is £66.15p a week so allowing for inflation, equal to the 50p pocket money we were given as children as a financial experiment for a few months. We never had a pocket money arrangement and I was told that if I wanted something that I was to ask but I never wanted anything so I didn't ask so I think my father was on to a winner there.

When we all retire to bed for the evening, I always think that it is going to be their last night on earth and that I am going to find one or both of them dead in bed and then what am I going to do? Get the death certificates, arrange the funerals and then grieve my lost life.

I have anticipatory grief for my parents but also for my remaining life after they have gone. In my early to mid fifties I do not feel the vitality of life required to become a captain of industry and therefore I fear that I will have nothing left to live for once they are gone. I do not relish the prospect of falling in love with a stranger and becoming a step father.

Since beginning this blog post I have been up and down from the chair to attend to their requests and needs. Even though I moan and groan and mutter and shout I know that I will miss the interruptions when they are gone because they are not interruptions they are reminders of mortality.

Tuesday, 26 November 2019

Man up Soft Lad Soft Lad Man Up

From birth to nursery little boy blue

learns to remain silent

to swallow his pride and self hate

"NO NO, he's too young for that"

"He's got his father's eyes"

I should hope so too.

From sandpit to down the pit

lad, me laddo, boyo

swallows pills of 'toxic masculinity'

brand name 'Viagra'

Cos it's important to keep it hard and keep it up

to be an upstanding member

till you die of heart attack

called unrequited love

It's all bollocks but you have to save face at the coal face.

cavemen in suits

business lunch

entrepreneurial spirits

pickling livers

like hob nailed boots

that we used to walk to work in

hooter sounds

the rave begins

glow sticks for Davy lamps

whistles for canaries

"Tell me my good man, is this Dawns y Glocsen or Riverdance?"

"It's the Colliery Viewer you needs to be asking"

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2019/apr/18/the-dust-goes-through-my-veins-portraits-of-former-welsh-coal-miners-in-3d

Monday, 25 November 2019

Yet Another Interview with the Same Author

SFOW: Well hello David, we last spoke to you way back on the 27th July 2018
DW: Duw, you've got a good memory, how's the shark fishing going?
SFOW: Mostly tiddlers Dai bach. So what has been happening with your alter ego, your anti-hero Ken Frane since we last interviewed you?
DW:Well I have to say that doing the interview enthused me. It showed that somebody cared, that somebody was showing an interest and that's all that you can ask for in this cold, indifferent world.
SFOW: Please continue, wax lyrical why don't you?
DW:Well I've surprised myself really. I brought out a volume of 5 short stories which included the first ever short story adventure namely 'The Dubrovnik Postcard Affair' which your fishy readers can read here for free right now. And since publishing that I have written another seven short stories which includes my most recent one featured above namely 'Murder at the Market'.
SFOW:Famous 5 & Secret 7? You weren't an Enid Blyton fan by any chance?
DW:I read the Secret 7 books as a nipper but not the famous five.
SFOW: So why short stories Dai? OK to call you Dai is it?
DW: Yes why not. I think we know each other intimately now. Well short stories are like poems to me. I can 'knock them out' relatively quickly in comparison to a novella or a novel.
SFOW: 'Knock them out'? what a quaint turn of phrase Dai. I'm sure your readership will be delighted that you knock your work out.
DW: Well, it's a Ken Franeism. It's the type of thing that the hard boiled, 'has been' gumshoe would say.
SFOW: Well tell us about the Famous Five & The Secret Seven Short Stories then Dai!
DW: Apart from 'Postcard' we have Ken Frane visiting Bermo(Abermaw)or Barmouth to the hard of hearing. A town that I as the author have always marveled at really, nestling in the Snowdonia National Park and a mini Las Vegas or Rhyl to all intents and purposes. An ideal location for a murder.
SFOW: I thought Ken Frane was the Last of the Cardiff Docks' Detectives so why are you taking him to other locales?
DW: Well I like to think that I know Wales quite well having traveled to most corners.I think that Frane would get a bit stale and stagnant staying in his 'filltir scwar' so similar to the National Eisteddfod I like to alternate him between north and south for his different cases. I do bring him back to Cardiff in the next two stories of the famous five 'Bluebird Voodoo Doll' & 'Rigorous Mortis'.
SFOW: Would we at the Aquarium be right in thinking that you like a good title?
DW: Well thank you for alluding to the fact. Location & Title do come to me first and then I work out the story and plot from there along with the ancilliary characters. I knew I wanted to write a story incorporating voodoo and football and I also wanted to write one that included the #Senedd as a character.
SFOW: Would it be fair to say that you took a few risks with the last story?
DW: I am back in the Docks with this one and the short walk up Bute Street to Cardiff Central Library and back again. The shortest of all the stories I wanted to write something about Jews and the Jewish faith linked to south Wales with anti-semitism swirling in the political ferment. The old sea shanty Farewell and Adieu sprang to mind and I changed that to 'Farewell and a Jew'
SFOW:The Secret Seven? Have you turned these into an anthology?
DW: Not yet! That's definitely in the pipeline. I would like them to be stand alone's perhaps for at least a year and then I will anthologise them.
SFOW: And the locations for these?
DW: Again places that I am familiar with. Tregaron with its eponymous bog, I thought would be an atmospheric location for 'Trouble in Tregaron'
Newport then, another atmospheric town, with similar psycho-geographical sensory points as Cardiff Docks.
SFOW: Exqueese me? Psycho-geography?
DW: Without wishing to sound too pretentious, my work is as much to do with location, genius loci as it is with crime, mystery and detective fiction. Somebody reading 'Nightmare in Newport' and Murder at the Market will see similarities in subject matter.
SFOW:The Catholic Church?
DW: Dammo! Is it that obvious?
SFOW: Religion plays a role in your work?
DW: The oppression of organised religion can be very atmospheric and add to location.
SFOW: The other stories?
DW: Hay on Wye, Rhuthun, Merthyr, Eryri & Cardiff Market.
SFOW: All places that you are familiar with?
DW: I hope so yes, although people from these places I'm sure will wonder if I have ever been there. My writing is as much about Wales as it is about solving crime.
SFOW:So what are you hoping for? What do you want to come out of these interviews?
DW: You make it sound as if I'm trying to flog my tat! I would hope for a wider readership. People with low expectations of the genre. People who are looking for a little entertainment and escapism in their dinner hour. If you are stuck to the screen with a sandwich and a coffee, why not spend your lunch time with Ken Frane & Terry Heston?
SFOW: So where to next for Ken Frane?
DW: without spoilers, Ken Frane is off abroad again. Not the Netherlands this time and he's hoping for a more successful resolution to the case on this one.
SFOW:Well thank you for your time Dai and we'll interview you again in another year or so?
DW:God Willing. Diolch yn fawr

Friday, 22 November 2019

Murder at the Market

Ken Frane had forgotten what it was like. Making love to a woman. Sex.

Terry Heston was walking down Dead Man's Alley between the Old Library and St John's Church to the Trinity Rd side of the Market when a Police van and car turn up with eponymous sirens blaring.

The last time Cardiff Central Market had been shut for business a suspect I.R.A Bomb had been planted by a cell from the Clifton Street/Broadway part of the City. It failed to detonate properly and there had only been superficial damage. They had tried to shift the blame on to the F. W.A who had been active a couple of years previously at the time of the Prince of Wales Investiture but the Police knew that their Leaders were in Swansea nick.

“Scabby cunt with hooded eyes, green sweatshirt, dirty blond hair, short arse maybe five foot seven” Terry Heston didn’t mince his words especially when describing a suspect to Ken Frane and he himself would expect no less from his old crime fighting pal.

“You gonna find another innocent man guilty Frane?”

“Depends, are you going to confess to it?”

“At my age?”

“Never too old to kill Macey eh?”

Arthur Macey fixed Terry Heston with the coldest, darkest stare, powerful enough to make him look away.

“Originally the site of Cardiff gaol, the gallows were located on the site of the current St Mary Street entrance, where Dic Penderyn was hanged on 13 August 1831.” The walking tour guide sounded bored and the motley assortment of American and Japanese tourists in cagouls looked at each other with “I don’t understand what he’s talking about”

“I had one of my first murder cases here Terry, before I met you, over the road there next to the Romilly Pub. Nasty case over Christmas 1988/89. Place called Six Arts Press, owned by a Swiss guy called Rainer Niedermeyer. What the fuck he was doing here running a pretty successful printing business I don’t know! memory doesn’t serve me well on that one”

With that Terry turns the torch off. Both Frane and Heston let their eyes become accustomed to, by now, the inner pitch black. It was lighter outside and the trees and branches cast shadows on the window frames. Terry Heston pulls Ken Frane by his coat sleeve and motions with a finger to the lips to remain very silent. The sound of a drunk wassailing on his way home from the Romilly stops them in their tracks. Terry shines his torch on to a corner wall.

“I’m a bit concerned Kenneth that you are taking Peter Price’s warning a little too lightly. Don’t forget it was me who witnessed him and his Docks’ posse arriving yesterday morning. If he knows we’ve been sniffing about, he’s probably got very good reason to warn us off”

Terry Heston and Ken Frane are now themselves fugitives from the law. Assaulting a senior police officer in the course of his duty would carry a serious charge. The only saving grace would be to solve the Murder at the Market and with that in mind, they head to Adamsdown.

Thursday, 14 November 2019

The Gloves are Off

"Adults control battling robots Red Rocker and Blue Bomber with fast thumb action and try to deliver the blockbuster punch that will knock his block off! Battle it out in the arena, with realistic sounds and jaw-jolting action. Land a punch and don't lose your head to be declared victorious!"

https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/best-boxing-ring-entrance-songs

Ladies & Gentlemen, Welcome to the Christmas General Election 2019 where the gloves are well and truly off. In the Red Corner, the Red Rocker, Jeremy Bernard Corbyn. In the Blue Corner, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. The Referee for this 'Bout from Hell' this 'Rumble in the Allotment Jungle' is Joanne Kate Swinson. In Corbyn's Red Corner also is Nicola Ferguson Sturgeon, "Ooops I'm very sorry, she has just jumped down from the ring to some rather unedifying heckling from this cauldron of an auditorium also known to some snowflakes as the United Kingdom." It's the 14th November and we have another 28 days of this trench warfare. Electioneering by Social Media. This one is so close to call on the back of the last one in 2017 that even Beryl from Bristol is refusing to take odds on a Hung Parliament. The people of Yorkshire are oop to their knees in Flood Water and you would have thought that this being the 'Climate Emergency Election', that people would be voting in their droves for Caroline Patricia Lucas in the Green corner, but they are not and they wont. Traditional as the puddings from the county under water the electorate will be voting on Brexit.

Ne'er mind the knife crime, the county lines, the A & E waiting times, this General Election is about immigration and freedom of movement also known as Brexit. The pantomime baddie Nigel Paul Farage in the light blue corner is twirling his moustache and whipping up the puddings into a lather of gravy and gammon. Only 13 days(UNLUCKY FOR ALL:BRING OUT YOUR DEAD) after the General Election we have that quaint tradition from the Middle East called Christmas where all the puddings will be stuffing their faces with gammon and gravy and masturbating to the Queen's Speech and the John Lewis advert. The big question is who will be on top of that Christmas tree cum Jesus Christ's Birthday?

Will it be Corbyn or Johnson? Will it be the King Makers & Ball Breakers Sturgeon & Swinson or will it be Adam (no middle name) Price who will be on top of the tree over by there shouting "What about the Welsh?"