where art collides philosoperontap

Pinch and a punch. St David’s Day. 1st March. 2026. Dave couldn’t possibly have imagined what the world would be like in the year twenty twenty six. Sometimes I find it difficult myself and I am there. Difficult isn’t the word. Hard to believe maybe. Something else he could not have forecast was how many boys would be named after him. I’m a Davies and that would originally have been derived from an ancestor named after St David. Do we think there are many folk around today with that impact? Any?

Yesterday we buried the Beyond The Woods festival. Most of the infrastructure was hired but we did have a lot of site decoration and quirky stuff like bar furniture that we had mostly constructed ourselves that was consigned to the bonfire. We did keep a load of good stuff that might be useful. Scaffold planks for making the compost bin, a bench, trellis. Things like that. There were also a lot of poles or canes that are going to be v useful for growing runner beans etc. Not yer bamboo canes. Solid wood jobs like Monty Don uses. I’ve been thinking about how to source these for yonks and hadn’t realised we already had them. Hey, we have them now.

I really need to thank everyone who had ever been involved with the festival and especially Tom, Joe, Lucy, Adie, Simon and Jo who were a big help these last two days in dismantling it all. We got somewhat wet on the Friday but got lucky on Saturday when the heavy rain made way for some nicer weather just in time for the lighting of the bonfire. We really moved on from the festival, a casualty of the weather and covid, some years ago but Joefest/Beyond The Woods has finally been put to rest. May it rest in peace.

This being St David’s Day we are having a leg of lamb for lunch with leeks and other solidly Weld accompaniments such as roast potatoes, carrots and broccoli. Well the Welsh do eat those vegetables even though I personally am not a big fan of the latter. There is also some Eryri Black Bomber cheese which is the dogs b0!!0c$. I realise the brand is actually Snowdonia not Eryri but I’m sure they must mean to change it. Surely.

I’ve also set the fire. It’s nice to have a fire going every now and again. Won’t light it yet. It’s a bit early. I was up at five thirty. This is what happens when you go to bed at nine o’clock, the result of being physically cream crackered after yesterday’s day of exercise together with a few celebratory sherberts in the Vic early doors. They had a new barrel of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord on but it didn’t taste right and I suspect it was still a little green. Should have left it another day. Moved on to Neck Oil instead.

Gotta go. A leg of lamb to get out of the fridge and a pot of tea to make for THG.

Heavy rain lashing at the window all night. Woke up a couple of times and lay there listening. Then up at six thirty as is usually the case when it’s my turn to make the tea. However today I was dressed and at it by six forty five and out of the house five minutes later taking our Tom to the stayshun. He came up with Joe and Lucy in their car yesterday but had commitments in London today.

Relentless rain yesterday an all. Spend the whole day at the farm shifting stuff which is why the London crowd were up. We’ve been storing miscellaneous bits from the Beyond The Woods festival. Old sofas, signs, lots of stuff from around the festival site. We stopped putting the event on years ago, a combination of cancellation due to a storm that blew through resulting in the cancellation of most outdoor events that weekend including  Boardmasters and then two years on the trot due to covid. After that the team had moved on and had busy jobs with no time to spare to run a festival. Takes many person months to get up and running and we had a core team of maybe fifteen or more volunteers with many more during the festival itself. The heavy rain is set to continue this morning so we will have to see how we get on. We have a load of crappy wood to burn.

On Thursday I discovered the resting place of my 2g grandparents Ben and Mary Davies: Amor Baptist Chapel, Llanfynydd. I’m in correspondence with a distant cousin I’ve not yet met but who I came across on Ancestry and he mentioned the place and that he was planning to visit. I am going with him in May. Then when going through some old bits of research I found a note re the chapel I’d scribbled when I was doing this stuff almost twenty years ago. Totes forgot about it. Next I found the will of his father, Ben Davies that I had also forgotten about. It’s quite nice finding these things as they have the handwriting of your relatives although on occasion this is an X, her mark. I have examples where I’m pretty sure both parents could read and write but their daughter couldn’t. Marriage registers usually. In one case Margaret Evans nee Davies was the daughter of a Baptist minister so not surprising that she could write. She married a farmer and had nine children and again not, perhaps, a surprise that her daughter Mary couldn’t.

The other interesting observation is that in the official documents they were Benjamin Davies but their signatures said Ben Davies. Natural really but nice to feel that touch of “reality” if that is the right word. Humanity perhaps?

One nice thing about working in the rain yesterday was that I stayed perfectly dry. It might not have been particularly nice working in the rain but having the right gear makes a huge difference. My boots had trodden through a lot of mud and water but kept it all out. Ditto my old Lonap raincoat. The Tilley hat keeps the rain off yer specs. It’s the one I wore on the coast to coast walk where the first two days were driving rain.

So Tom is now on his way back to London and I’m sat in the snug. Didn’t seem much point in going back to bed when I could be catching up on my diary. Had no time yesterday and was somewhat fatigued when we got home. Not used to all this physical work. In fact I wouldn’t have been able to do it during the last three years or so. The new hips are pretty miraculous. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to walk pain free and not I notice it all the time. The contrast. Wow.

Today the plan is to shovel sh!t. Horse manure to be specific. THG has identified a source (name of dobbin) and roped me in for some shovelling. I am of course, in my lowly position as the occasional undergardener, happy to help. In preparation for said shovelling it is necessary to nip to Wicks to purchase some bags of a strength suitable for the “job”. This I will this morning do whilst THG is occupied with the Pink Ladies running club, an esteemed body of fitness enthusiasts who get put through their paces every Tuesday.

Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic. No, not really. It’s not very nice out there. I have no idea why that song came into my mind. Pretty darn random. It happens a lot. I guess life with me would be a lot more boring if it wasn’t filled with this random stuff. I keep singing it now and THG has taken her cup of coffee into another room!

God it’s orrible out there. People reading this stuff in hundreds of years time, assuming the human race still exists, will at least have a good understanding of the weather at the time. No need to look up those bland, tedious reports in the weather archives. I mean when did the BBC weather forecast ever tell you god it’s orrible. Or bloody freezin. Or cold enough to freeze yer knackers off.

In other non news, not seen the muntjac deer for a while. Wonder if they are ok. I don’t think they hibernate. Maybe gone somewhere warmer for the worst part of the winter. The fox still comes, increasingly during daylight hours it feels. Before the lake cam alerted me to the fact I can’t say we have ever seen, or at least noticed a fox in the back garden but now I spot it when I’m sat in the shed or, as was the case the other day, on the way to the shed. 

Today, btw, I am going to pot the chilli seeds wot our Tom bought me for Christmas. Just been waiting for a bag of seed compost to magically appear which it did yesterday. Won’t be long either before I can get going on the raised bed THG has requested in front of the kitchen window. Handily placed to nip out and pull some veg fresh for Sunday dinner etc. Our rosemary bush is now a good size down by the greenhouse and the thyme plant is also doing well. The knack is to not over harvest them in the early years to let them get established.

At some stage soon I will need to procure some water based plants for the lake. I realise that given time they will naturally establish themselves but impatient me doesn’t want to wait the decades it will take. I daresay Brian the fishing gnome will appreciate some more cover when he gets black from Barbados or wherever he is right now in da Caribbean, maan.

Yesterday I spent a chunk of the afternoon poring through the Episcopal Register of St David’s for 1397/98. It is an interesting read. The new bishop, Guy Mone was put in place on 11th November 1397 but the selfish bastard took the money and stayed in an inn on the Strand in London for most of the time. He didn’t set foot in Wales until the following September when he went to St Davids on a short visit for his enthronement. In his first year he gave leave of absence to 15 of his parish clergy for a year’s “sabbatical”. They didn’t call it a sabbatical in those days but my point is most of these men were English and took the job just to cream off any tithe income that came into the parish coffers. Not much of it would have been in cash form in those days. Basically a tenth of the harvest, but they probs sold the surplus left from what they needed to eat themselves. In their absence from the parish they would slip a few quid to local and almost certainly barely literate curate to look after the spiritual needs of the flock.

There was a lot of croneyism going on in those days (as well) and old bish Mone in his first year on the job gave one parish living to someone called Sir William Mone. Coincidence ou quoi? Woteva. The fact that Wales eventually became a hotbed of religious dissent was largely down to absenteeism by the local, non native, clergy. The Welsh found an outlet in dissent because the independents, baptists et al ministered to their religious needs in the absence of instruments of the established church.

Thursdays in the Davies household have a fairly relaxed start. If I did yoga that is what I would now do but I don’t. Instead I’m off to pot some seeds. Ciao teddy bears…

I keep getting AI generated Facebook posts about celebrities, sitcoms, stuff like that. Then underneath there are suggested AI queries that invariably include “what is their net worth”. AI clearly does not yet understand me. I mean who gives a flying f%ck. Obviously people must do as I imagine the system comes up with popular questions. I force myself to ignore these posts despite the fact that I might like said celebrity or sitcom. I don’t really understand the cult of the celebrity anyway. 

AI does continue to be useful though. Yesterday I was trying to get my brain around how to get from our  hotel in Rome to the one in Sorrento in March. The first bit was easy enough: taxi to station followed by train to Naples. After that it got complicated. Yer rome2rios and man in seat 61s of this world talked about changing trains, catching the slow local commuter line to Sorrento followed by nothing in the way of real advice when we got there. It’s either a 1km walk with luggage or pissing off a taxi driver with such a short trip which would be expensive anyway. 

I like to have all the details nailed down in advance. Which train to catch from which platform, where to get a taxi etc. This is particularly unclear in Brussels midi where there are perhaps 24 platforms with train services that often change platform at the last minute meaning you really have to be on the ball. Also catching the slow train by mistake adds time and tedium to your trip.

Anyway I shared my troubles with Gemini and it said “don’t mess about Tref, book yerself a limo pickup from Naples Central Station and hey presto, you’ll be sorted”. Doh. It’s only obvious with hindsight. I had considered this option natch but figured the traffic might be an issue. I messaged the contact that gemini gave me and to cut a long story short a driver named Luigi is meeting us by the fountain at the end of platform 24 with our name on a piece of card. He might not be Luigi. I guessed that bit. Could be Mario or a variety of common Italian first names but I digress. I also booked the return dropoff at the airport at the pickup time suggested by the limo company. Simples. Happy days. It’s about taking the stress out of life. Let the limo take the strain…

The wireless timed out before thought for the day came on so now I find I’m still in bed when really I should have got up fifteen minutes ago. Takes much longer to type things on your phone and I’m not ready to use dictation yet. Take a memo Miss Jones. Do people still have secretaries?

Today I’m off out for a walk. Lee Road, Nettleham Road, stroll around the Bailgate, castle and cathedral and back down Greetwell road before turning left onto Queensway and right on Wragby Road and home. It’s cold out but nice and crisp. Gotta start building up my mileage. The goal is to go hillwalking with THG. A few years ago when I was in training for the coast to coast I did hundreds of miles around Lincolnshire. I found this didn’t really help me much when it came to walking off road, up and down hills. You have also to train on the right terrain. This time I know better. Forewarned is forearmed. 

Will also take in a swim though I’m going to push that back and try later in the afternoon. See if I can find a quiet time. The old hands in the sauna the other day were talking about how much busier it has got. Noticed it meself.

A slight lightening of the sky at six thirty this morning suggested the days are stretching. Not noticed that for a while. It must be so. My turn to make the tea, hence the six thirty bit. It is now an hour and twenty minutes later and I’ve just switched off the wireless. I think they should ditch “thought for the day” even though it is a useful prompt for me to get up. Wouldn’t matter if I accidentally stayed in bed a little longer in its absence.Yesterday’s John Rutter workshop was wonderful. Sir John Rutter I should say. I felt like the least qualified person in the theatre. Sounded as if most people there were regular choir singers. The guy sat next to me had come over from Paris especially for the event. I got by 🙂 JR recanted the story of how one of the pieces had been written. The phone rang one day and it was David Attenborough calling to ask if he would write a piece for some nature charity or other. Sir John thought it was one of his friends playing a prank! We then sang the song.THG and I stopped to pick up a takeaway from The Castle View on the way home. Couple of beers in the Vic while we waited. They used to serve Gamma Ray there but the guy behind the bar said they had just stopped. Brewery price increases meant they would have had to sell it at £12 a pint. Nobody would pay that much. I bloody wouldn’t have although I don’t usually ask how much a beer costs. That would soon learn me. They’ve also stopped serving Guinness as that would have to be £7.50 – £8 a pint. London prices. Trying Murphys instead. As I recall I found Murphys to be a bit on the sweet side. Back into the normal routine today. Granola for breakfast, swim at lunchtime. A few work bits and bobs to do and the putting away of some of my stuff from the Berlin trip. THG is off weight training. Pumping iron. She does two sessions with a ten minute break in between! Different instructors.Nice as it is to go away on trips it is also v nice to get home innit. We are here now until the first week in March when I have a London meeting followed by a trip to Italy. Due birre per favore.

Berlin is just as dull and damp as Lincoln. Where I am sat at breakfast I can see an ad for a Berlin Phil gig in March. Dvořák Symphony Number 9. Oo. Prompted me to look and see if owt is on this week. To cut a long story short we are off to see Lang Lang play with the Berlin Philharmonic tomorrow night. You have to grab these opportunities when they are presented. All because I was sat in the window at breakfast. Advertising does work.

This trip is notable for being totally joint pain free. I particularly notice it when I am walking along in a stream of people in an airport. In the past most of them would have overtaken me but now I’m walking like a “normal” person.

When I got home from the rugby club last night I ordered a takeaway chinese curry. Went to the shed whilst waiting for it only to fall asleep and wake up 20 mins after it had been delivered. Fortunately it had been left in the porch and was still warm so didn’t need to stick it in the microwave or owt. Can’t have been too long after that when I hit the hay.

Another soggy morning in Lincoln town. Dropped THG off at the stayshun to head for Liverpeul and I have a car arriving at ten fifty to start my journey to Berlin. The capital city of Germany is quite a bit colder than Lincoln so have warm gear on. Picture snow on the ground, the cold war is in full sway and the flight to Berlin a real adventure. I’ll jump in a cab on arrival and head for the Doubletree Kudamm. The snow geese have arrived early this winter. No hold baggage.