My Journey Begins Here Well, that sounds as pretentious as fuck, doesn’t it? In reality I’m closer to the ...
Three Cats, One Mountain We have three rescue cats. People ask me what that's like, and I never know how to answer. It's like running a small, chaotic republic where the government is feline, the laws change daily, Jane handles Interior Affairs (litter logistics, vet diplomacy, treaty negotiations), and I am merely the Minister of Food Distribution. They arrived in our lives the way most good…
A reluctant defence of the garden's most necessary arseholes European Paper Wasp pollinating a marigold - My photo Wasps. The striped bloody nuisances of the garden world, the uninvited guests at every summer picnic, the tiny, winged psychopaths that turn a man sipping a beer on his terrace into a flailing, panic-dancing fool. I've sworn at them, run from them, and on one memorable occasion,…
Before health and safety, before helicopter parenting, there was Guy Fawkes Night in 1960s Swansea. For anyone outside the UK wondering what any of this is about: in 1605 a Catholic man named Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament and got caught before he could light the fuse. Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, rather than burned at the stake, as the bonfire tradition…
I know now that Whitsun is a Christian festival marking Pentecost. In the 1960s, though, it meant something far more immediate to us: the annual ritual of being dressed up in our Sunday best and paraded round the relatives like tiny overdressed beggars. We'd trot round the aunties and nans, collect a handful of coins for looking "nice", and then watch the loot vanish into Mam's handbag "for…
In Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s, Sunday school was not negotiable. You went to school, you played endless games of Kick the Can on the patch of wasteland we called the Bank , and on Sunday you were scrubbed, buttoned into something uncomfortable, and marched off to the Ebenezer Gospel Hall on Wern Fawr Road. Nobody sent you there out of burning religious conviction. You went because it…
How we waged war on laundry, phone boxes, and Mr Vincent’s car in 1960s Swansea We weren’t bad kids in the Port Tennant end of Swansea in the early 1960s. We were curious, bored, and occasionally criminal. Most of what we got up to would get you therapy now, or a court date. Back then it was just what kids did. Our criminal high command operated from Ysgol Street, where the public phone box stood…
Photo by James Xander on Unsplash Growing up in Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, nobody tracked where we were. We had the sun, our wits (questionable), and Mam's voice carrying up the street when it was time to come home. We often didn't come home. Not when we were meant to. It got to the point where Mam called the police more than once to report us missing. In reality we…
Or: How I Bought Myself Some Digital Immortality This is a re-edited version of a post that first ran here in October 2025. I’ve just migrated this entire site from WordPress to BearBlog. All 70 posts, every image, every internal link. It took days of work, a DNS switchover that made me nervous, and one epic late-night session where I said “bedtime” and then stayed up fixing links for another few…
Photo by Denley Photography on Unsplash Kilvey Hill loomed behind our street in Swansea like a sleeping giant, all through my childhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Not far in reality, but to a small child's legs it felt like a hike into the wilderness. I didn't go up there often, it always seemed just slightly out of bounds, and to get there we had to walk past the Cem, the cemetery, a…
Kick the Can and Second World War Shootouts Across the road from our house on Wern Fawr Road , in the Port Tennant end of Swansea, was The Bank, an unassuming strip of land with old garages, overgrown grass, and a handful of crumbling concrete shelters. This was the late 1950s, close enough to the war that the shelters were still standing and nobody had got round to knocking them down. To anyone…
We lived at Wern Fawr Road in Port Tennant, Swansea, until I was eight, packed in with Nan and Grandpa Davies, Auntie Cynthia, Uncle Teddy, and by 1960 us five kids. The house seemed enormous through the eyes of a small child. It probably wasn't. There was a bay-windowed parlour at the front, strictly off-limits to children. Nan's sanctuary. A glass-fronted cabinet with her ornaments in it, a sofa…