My June 2026 round-up

Another busy month. On tbe blog I shared my good news about my diabetes recovery, my book of the month, my album of the month and my summary of the football season after I went to my final football match of the season and watched Wales women win against the Czech Republic. (And in tabletop sport, the dice were kind to me and unkind to Bryan when we played Blood Bowl!)

Cathy and I went to two gigs: Garbage in Cardiff Castle and Counting Crows in Bristol. We also had two cinema trips this month. The first was Masters of the Universe. I own one MOTU t-shirt and made sure I wore it. 

I liked the film. It was the perfect mix of homage and gentle mockery of the original 1980s cartoon. 

Cathy and I both wore suitable t-shirts when we went to see a tribute to the Muppets followed by a screening of The Muppet Treasure Island.

I had a nice work-related surprise when I was told I was one of a handful of people nominated as a 'Voice Champion' by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. I didn't know anything about this until I opened an email with this certificate attached. It made a grey Tuesday morning a bit special.

I made it to the Keep Grangetown Tidy litter-pick this month. Nothing very exciting to report this time in the three bags of trash I collected.

After a few weeks off, I was back on the canvassing trail. I went up to Treorchy to encourage people to vote in the council by-election. 

I was back knocking doors with James from Pontyclun. It was like old times! (As in, just a few weeks prior!)

Canvassing is great exercise. I ended the session by calling into a chip shop for a tray of well-earned sglodion! They were delicious. #NoRegrets. (Richard, the Plaid Cymru candidate, won the election with 70.8% of the vote!)

Canvassing wasn't my only political activity of the month. I went to the Tafwyl festival to help out on the Yes Cymru stand. While working there I met several Senedd members I knew, and got pics with a couple of them.

Senator Gonzalez

Senator Crowley

We had lots of interest from passers-by, and with the Westminster government sliding into even more chaos, the discussion about independence feels as timely as ever. 

One of my longer days out this month was to Swindon for the AGM of the British Thematic Association, the stamp collecting group I've been a member of for 16 years now. The meeting was at the stamp fair, Swinpex. 

It's been a good stamp collecting month for me, with two new philatelic passports added to my collection (from France and New Zealand). At Swinpex I bought a few stamps for my collection of pangolins on stamps, including this one produced by Sarawak in 1950. For a 76 year-old stamp, it's looking very crisp.

And at the end of the month we had a heatwave that set new temperature records in Cardiff. My impulse buy to help is cope was half a giant watermelon. By the time we finished it the heatwave was over!

Hand for scale!

Our summer of gigs continues with Counting Crows

You wait ages for your favourite bands to tour and then they all decide to tour at the same time. This was gig 2 of 3 in a fortnight for me and Cathy, after seeing Garbage a week ago, and with another gig coming up at the weekend. 

This time we were off to The Beacon in Bristol. It was the first time we had been to the former Colston Hall since their big refurb and name change when they wanted to distance themselves from the historical baggage of links to slave trader Edward Colston. 

We were sat right at the back, in the penultimate row of the third tier. We were so high up we had a good view of the lighting riggers. I've sat right at the back of a few venues and the Beacon definitely has the best views from that sort of seat. It didn't feel dizzyingly steep either. 

After a forgettable support singer, the band came on. 

This was billed as the "Complete Sweets" tour. We were expecting them to play most of their latest album, which was released in two parts. Instead they played mainly their classics. Most of their debut album August and Everything After got an airing along with various singles. I'm not complaining although they didn't play my favourite song off the new album, 'Boxcars'.

There were also a few covers. I have heard Counting Crows play 'Friend of the Devil' so many times now it feels like it's their song (and I sing along). They also did a cover of  'the 1' by Taylor Swift. It didn't feel like there were a lot of Swifties in the audience but everyone seemed to enjoy it. 

The camera on my phone isn't good enough for pics from up in the gods, but they look colourful at least!

And so, after an enjoyable night, we are now gearing up for gig three of our summer run of gigs!

A tribute to treasure

A Sunday morning to remember at the Riverfront Theatre in Newport as the Puppet Folk Experience introduced a special screening of The Muppet Treasure Island with a tribute act. (The film is 30 years old this year.)

The Puppet Folk are puppeteer and singer Liam and guitarist Andy, who also proves to be a handy banjo player as well. Liam performed with Kermit and Ernie who appeared for a rendition of 'Rubber Duckie', which is one of his signature songs.

Costume change for Kermit

I was impressed with the way Liam captured Kermit's vocal inflections in the songs. I have read about plenty of fan criticism of how Kermit sounds in recent Disney productions. It's a hard voice to do well, and Liam gets him sounding like "original Kermit" (Cathy's words).

Overall what came through was the clear love and respect that Liam and Andy have for the characters and the source material. There was a mix of songs, some of them in a medley, covering everything from the original Muppet Show theme through to a song from the 2011 Disney reboot. (Which is itself a shocking 15 years old now!)

After the tribute was over, we watched the movie. It had been a long time since I had watched it. I had completely forgotten one set of characters until they popped up in a proper 'oh, yeah...!' moment. The gags were still funny. I enjoyed it. 

Like several other fans in the audience, Cathy and I wore suitable t-shirts for the occasion. Kermit commented on Cathy's t-shirt after we queued up for the post-film meet-and-greet.

After taking the photos with Kermit we chatted to Andy afterwards as he was on the merchandise stand. He told us there might be another show introducing The Muppet Christmas Carol at the end of the year, so hopefully that will be coming to South Wales!

My second philatelic passport acquisition in a month

A couple of weeks back I blogged about a new philatelic passport, and now I'm blogging again about another one! This time it's a passport issued for an exhibition in New Zealand, way back in 1990!

These passports don't pop up on eBay very often and when they do they tend to come along in clusters. It's the fourth passport I've added to my collection in 2026 and the oldest one I've bought this year.

The opening stamp features Goldie, the cartoon kiwi mascot of the Commonwealth Games that were being held in New Zealand that year.

Whoever completed this passport included a couple of miniature sheets issued to commemorate the Games. Goldie appears again.

How old is this passport? Well, the USSR had sent their stamp bureau to exhibit. This asteroid is maybe a premonition of the extinction events that would see the Soviet Union disappear just a year or so later. 

There's always one stamp in a passport that just grabs my attention. This time its a lovely stamp from New Caledonia marking the bicentenary of the 1879 French Revolution. There's a smudge on it from the cancellation on the opposite page, but that doesn't detract too much from the stamp.

One of the things I love about these passports is that I never know exactly what stamps or postmarks I will find inside them. It feels a bit like a treasure hunt, never knowing quite what will be unearthed. 

Garbage (thunder)storm the castle

Yesterday Cathy and I went to our second ever gig in Cardiff Castle. Three years ago we saw Bastille play there. This time we arrived shortly after a heatwave-induced thunderstorm.

We missed the opening act but we arrived in good time for the set from the main support band, Skunk Anansie. I even had time to buy a tour t-shirt and a decadent doughnut before the music started because Skunk Anansie were a bit late starting.

I really enjoyed their set. Although I said to Cathy that Skin, the lead singer, was in a totally unsuitable outfit considering the heat. She had to change out of her really heavy trousers after a few songs. 

Skin also went crowdsurfing twice, which impressed me. I discovered I liked several of the songs I didn't know more than the limited few I did know so I might well explore their back catalogue sometime.

The weather may have resulted in a few people not turning up as the performance area felt less crowded than I expected. I know it wasn't a sell out but I was pleasantly surprised at how much space we seemed to have without being ridiculoualy far back from the stage. 

Also, this is mega-gig week in Cardiff with massive concerts  every night at the Castle, Blackweir and the international stadium. There's obviously an upper limit on how many gig tickets can be sold in a week and it may be we have hit the upper cusp.

It was an interesting demographic in that the crowd seemed to skew more female. All three bands on the set list are fronted by women, which might have something to do with it. 

Garbage came on slightly earlier than expected, kicking off with the opening track off their latest album. They played several songs off that album (which I reviewed back in March) during the gig. I was surprised at some of them, including the gig finale when they played 'The Day That I Met God'. Amusingly, Shirley messed up the cue for that song and had a friendly go at Butch for leaving her hanging in an awkward silence. 

Garbage always used to be Shirley and three middle-aged dudes. Now it's Shirley and three old dudes. Shirley is still Shirley though, keeping time by fiercely stomping around in a circle during songs; amusing us with rambles and rants. 

The set list was a mix. They didn't play any of the poppier songs off Beautiful, but I was stoked to hear them play 'Control' from Not Your Kind of People. The old tunes were the bangers though. They gave 'Stupid Girl' a bit of a refresh and 'Only Happy When It Rains' was joyous. The singles off Version 2.0 are all strong songs and play well almost 30 years later. I was surprised they omitted 'Queer' from the set list and I was expecting them to play 'Witness to Your Love' but that didn't feature.

Overall, though, they played a cracking set. The new songs sounded better than I expected. I can tell Shirley really likes 'Chinese Fire Horse'. An unusual inclusion was 'It's All Over Bar the Crying', off the fourth album, Bleed Like Me. Shirley said they has never played it live before this tour, but she's a slightly unreliable historian. I enjoyed hearing it anyway and, of course, I sang along. 

Unusually, there was no encore as they played right up until the allotted curfew time. I quite enjoy the pantomime of cheering for a band to come back out but it didn't happen. It's hard to just turn the house lights on in an outdoor venue so they put up a message on the big screen about the exits. The castle keep glowed red and moody as we left.

Post-script

I know what you're thinking. How decadent was that doughnut? Well! Judge for yourself!

Book of the Month: The Mountain in the Sea

This was an impulse purchase in a TK Maxx earlier this year, because, well, octopuses.

It's a slice of speculative fiction set in the near future. Political entities and alliances have shifted, big tech companies run the world, and the boundary between human and machine intelligence has broken down. In the middle of all that a scientist fascinated by octopuses is invited to study a mysterious new species that may be sapient.

The scientist is aided by the first true android who may, or may not, be a conscious being. It is the subject of fearful hate and has been banned from most territories on Earth, so is working on the octopus project on a remote island atoll to keep it out of harm's way. Other forces are seeking to access the islands - one for the mysterious octopuses, and one just to harvest the fish that live in the protected zone.

As a 'first contact' story between two species that think very differently, this works pretty well. But there are some other story threads interwoven which are distracting.  I felt the storyline about a human crew enslaved on a fishing boat captained by an AI was horribly feasible but was superfluous to the overall plot. 

There are several conversations that act as exposition. Mini-monologues that explain certain things that, in-world, probably wouldn't need explaining. But generally that's my only real gripe and the exposition moves the story along rather than holding it up.

This is a very grounded science-fiction book, based on what we currently know about octopuses and the fascinating way their brains work. I felt like I already knew some of that from reading Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaiskovsky, but this went into it in more detail. In the acknowledgements, the author, Ray Naylor, outlines his impressive background reading. He successfully weaves this into the story without showing off about his research.

To conclude, then, as far as speculative fiction goes, this was reasonably believable. Society is changing unpredictable and technology is changing quickly, making the wider human world in this book feel realistic. And octopuses are wonderful clever creatures. If we ever did find ones that could communicate, our inter-species conversations might look a lot like this. 

Cursed dice and leaping wardancers (Blood Bowl match report)

This month I took my high agility wood elf team to play against the Tomb Kings. I don't have any names for the team except for Mosstyn the treeman. He had a decent game, including a successful blitz on an opponent. 

Mosstyn was bostin!

Although he did end up on his face at one point after a bad roll. 

Double skulls!

The wood elves are high agility, and their wardancers have a special ability called 'leap', which means they can jump over an opponent. I have only just learned to use this skill, but it meant on two occasions I was able to get a wardancer into the Tomb Kings back line and sack the ball carrier before running in to score. 

However, the event of the game was a disastrous dice roll of truly epic proportions. Bryan had a power advantage which meant he could roll three dice to resolve an attack on one of my players. He rolled 2 skulls and the 'both down' option where both players are knocked over and his turn would end. But, a lifeline! His attacking player had a skill that meant he could re-roll a both down result. Bryan rolled the dice again and rolled... another skull. 

Triple skulls from four dice rolls is unbelievably bad luck. And possibly a new record. We are seriously wondering if the dice are cursed. 

The Tomb Kings managed a consolation down after the wood elves had put four on the board.

I was a turn away from scoring a fifth down when the game ended. The final score was 4-1.

So close...

We had a very suitable snack this time. Reese's dipped peanuts. They make excellent edible Blood Bowl balls!

Album of the Month: Bwncath, III

I bought this CD because I heard it playing in a shop in Carrnarfon last summer as a brand new release. I took an instant like to it and bought a copy that was sitting next to the till. 

It's the first album I've ever bought recorded entirely in Cymraeg. I've chosen it as my album of the month this month because I've been listening to it while revising for my arholiad Lefel Sylfaen (Foundation level exam), which I'm taking on Friday.

This is the band's third album, released after they dropped from being a four piece to a trio. 'Bwncath' is the Cymraeg word for 'buzzard' and the album art is of three stylised buzzards reminiscent of Celtic art.

There are 10 tracks on the album and they are all pretty short. The band have a folk-rock sound, lots of harmonies, with most songs played at a tempo towards the rockier end of the scale. They bring in a children's choir for a slower song called 'Castell Ni', which is about Caernarfon castle. The kids sound like they're having fun and they turn a slow song into a singalong.

I really like the opening track 'Dy feddwl' (which I think means 'you think', could be 'your mind'). But my favourite track is 'Prydwen', which is a reference to King Arthur's ship in the Welsh legendarium, here used as a metaphor for being young and adventurous. The song has an echoed refrain 'Ddown yn ol, ddown yn ol, ddown yn ol at y gwir' ('we come back... it's the truth') before kicking into a key change and the chorus. 

Overall, it's a great album and accessible even with limited (or no) Cymraeg - Cathy doesn't speak Cymraeg and she says she likes it. (Which is just as well as she's been in the room while I've been revising!)

Details

Year of release: 2025

Tracks: 10

Favourite track: Prydwen

Track to skip: this is a very lean album, with short tracks that make their point with a minimum of fuss, so no need to skip any tracks.