Book of the Month: A History of Wales

I have two personal connections with this book. Firstly, this copy belonged to my Dad. According to the note inside the cover he bought this in 1994, which was the year it was first published in English in paperback by Penguin. 

This is one of the few books I took from the vast collection of books that Dad left behind when he passed away unexpectedly seven years ago. There was a bookmark in it at page 505, which for a while I thought was the point where he had stopped reading. But actually it was a marker for a short bit about the Christian revival of 1904 - an event my Dad was very interested in. 

So, I'm not sure if my Dad ever finished reading the whole book. But I have. I was prompted to read it by my second personal connection with the book - recently I've got to know Anna, one of the daughters of the late author, John Davies. 

Anna is standing for election to the Senedd and is top of the electoral list for Plaid Cymru in our area. We were out canvassing one morning and she mentioned seeing a copy of her father's book in a second hand shop. I asked what the book was, thought that it sounded familiar, and later went and dug it out of the stack of inherited books in my office.

Anna gets an anonymous passing mention in the author bio. 

Anna has also told me that it was the first book that Penguin published in Cymraeg. (And it was also a lot longer than originally planned!)

The opening few chapters are easy to read at pace because, truthfully, there isn't much that is easily verifiable in Wales's history up until the Norman invasion. The paucity of Celtic relics from Wales compared to Anglo-Saxon relics from England is down to the Christian faith of the Welsh who unlike the pagan Saxons didn't fill the graves of their dead with stuff that could be dug up years later by archaeologists. So the story rattles along quite quickly.

The few written records of Welsh history from before and during the Norman occupation of Wales are frequently fanciful. John describes the unreliability of one chronicler, Nennius, in a slightly waspish fashion saying: "where it is possible to prove the correctness of Nennius's material, it is clear that his ignorance was monumental."

There are several similar sardonic comments. Regarding the legend that St David raised up a small hill to stand on so he could more clearly address his followers, John points out that in the very hilly area of Ceredigion, "it would be difficult to conceive of any miracle more superfluous". When discussing the 19th century growth of holiday resorts on the North Wales coast, he unambiguously says Rhyl "attracted a less middle-class type of tourist" than Llandudno.

While this is a history of Wales, it's not really a beginner's history. I was glad to have a rough sense of Welsh history already, as several people and events are referred to in throwaway fashion - the reader is expected to know what happened to David, brother of Prince Llewelyn the Last, with two oblique references to his execution in Shrewsbury, without any more detail given. This trait gets more frequent as the book progresses. 

I think the favourite factoid I learned from this book was that to encourage Welsh people to emigrate to America in the 18th century, a story was invented of a Welshman called Madog who sailed west centuries before Columbus and landed in the New World. Madog's descendents were a Welsh-speaking tribe living in the American hinterland, known as the Madogwys. This led to a Welsh explorer setting out to find the Madogwys and along the way he became the first European to map the Missouri River. 

That story is amusing but it shows how powerful stories can be. Earlier in the history, John writes about the growth in Welsh poetry and how the poets reframed the subjugating defeats of Welsh leaders in "a cry against the extinction of identity and against the tyranny of fact." It's an evocative turn of phrase and captures how people have always wanted to describe the world as it should be, rather than how it is.

In later chapters, where there are more reliable sources to draw from, the overall narrative gets a bit bogged down in numbers. It's instructive to compare the numbers of people employed in the coal industry between one generation and the next but there are several such comparisons - numbers of Welsh-born inhabitants, number of Welsh speakers, number of people employed on the land, number of tons of coal extracted and exported, and so on. It all gets a bit statty and less easy to read.

Overall the theme of the book is about identifying the historical processes that resulted in Wales being Wales, an entity different yet thoroughly influenced by England. This uniqueness has survived numerous obvious and non-obvious pressures, from outright conquest through to the conforming pressure of militant socialism in the miner's unions. 

The history of the Welsh language is similarly a history of pressure, again not always from obvious sources. I was unaware of how anti-Cymraeg the unions were in the 19th and 20th centuries. I was struck by the irony that top-down repression of Cymraeg was less effective than the movement that preached solidarity among the workers, effectively the people of Wales robbing themselves of their language.

This (first) edition of the book was published in 1994 and the last chapter covers the discussions about a Welsh parliament in the 1960s and the failed devolution referendum of 1979. There was a second edition published in 2007, by which time Wales had an Assembly and its own devolved government. Proof perhaps that history hasn't stopped. I would like to see what got added to the second edition. 

The final few paragraphs of the version I read - before devolution happened - outline the hope that the Welsh nation will continue to endure, as it had despite everything. The last page or so are very Yma O Hyd in theme and I found it uplifting. It made me happy to think that only a handful of years after the author concluded writing his history, steps had been taken to further safeguard and establish the nation of Wales.

Ultimate American patriotic footwear

Our friends Bryan and Elaine have recently returned from a trip to the USA. They went to Las Vegas and New York and somewhere on their trip they bought me a present - the ultimate American patriotic pair of socks!

A well-muscled bald eagle? Nothing screams 'Merica more than that!

Kurt Vonnegut's 55 year-old commentary on the American Poor

In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (published in 1969), there is a character called Howard W. Campbell Jr. He is an American traitor turned propagandist for the Nazis, operating like Lord Haw-Haw, during the second world war. 

There is a section of the book purportedly taken from an essay by Campbell about how American prisoners-of-war are so much worse in terms of behaviour than prisoners from other countries. Campbell wants to explain to his fellow Nazis why his countrymen are like this. 

It's an interesting take and I wondered how much of it might have been the author's own insights into the way American society functions. It definitely resonates with some of the political selfishness spilling out of the poorer parts of the USA in the past decade or so.

This is how Campbell explains things:

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but it's people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but It might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters."

(Unlike Campbell, Kin Hubbard was a real person; an American cartoonist and humorist who died in 1930.)

And then a bit further on, some more of Campbell's words:

"Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue... Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those with no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times."

"Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love each other because they do not love themselves."

There are two things that have occurred to me reading this. The first is this seems to fit with the political rage of the MAGA movement that has been so prevalent in the past decade or so. Particularly the idolising (and idolatry) of Donald Trump, who has no redeeming features except that most American of virtues - the appearance of being rich. And why they rage against "socialist medicine" being "un-American", preferring to risk bankruptcy if they get cancer than seeing that affordable or free healthcare for all benefits everybody. 

The persistency with which the American poor vote against their own interests has been referred to as a mindset that they aren't poor, they are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and one day the money truck will stop at their house and they don't want to be made to share. 

It also explains why American religious identity has had such a garish obsession with wealth. To the best of my knowledge, America has never spawned its own ascetic movement. The Amish, the Shakers and the Quakers were all imports from the Old World. America's gifts to Christianity are the Prosperity Gospel wealth-and-health movement with private jet evangelists, and Mormonism which literally promises it's most faithful adherents that they will each rule their own planet one day.

The second thing that occurred to me is that Vonnegut deliberately puts these un-American heresies into the mouth of a traitor because there would be no way to have a true American think these terrible things. And yet, these observations are so acute, it doesn't seem that he is just giving his character stuff to say. There is a ring of truth to these condemnatory words, which is maybe why he needs to distance himself from them. 

And 55 years after the book was published, the words still ring true. 

Delving into the family archive: my great-great uncle, Robert Ivor Bostock

Two years ago we rescued some old family photos from my parents’ garage and scanned them. There was a lot of family history in the albums and I ended up discussing my great-great-uncle with my Dad.

When my Dad was little he lived with his Grandma, who he called Ninna, in New Broughton just outside Wrexham. Ninna’s brother, Robert, had left the Wrexham area early in the twentieth century to seek his fortune in America. When my Dad visited New York and went to Ellis Island he found his great-uncle’s name in the vast arrivals logs that the US Immigration Service has open there.

Robert Ivor Bostock was born in 1877. He was adopted by the Roberts family of Brymbo, my great-grandmother’s family, but kept the Bostock surname. I’m glad he did because there is a website dedicated to tracing Bostocks and it has a lot of information about him, and his family, on it.

For example, thanks to that website I know that in the 1901 census he was registered as a clerk in a brickworks in Brymbo. The next census he appeared in was an American one, in 1910, by which point he was living in Long Beach, California.

What happened in those 9 years? Well in 1905 he went to America on a ship called the Oceanic. Having gone through immigration at Ellis Island, he then travelled inland to Mahoney City, Pennsylvania. I know this because he had a photo taken there, which he sent back to his sister, Elizabeth (Ninna). Sadly the photo mount got cut to make it fit into a photo frame at some point, so his message on the front has been lost, but the information on the back is intact.

From Mahoney City he made his way to Los Angeles. A couple of years later, in 1908, he got married. His new wife was also called Elizabeth. She was originally from Skipton in Yorkshire and was another immigrant to California. We have a wedding photo.

I think Elizabeth must have emigrated with her family as she seems to have her mum present. Robert went the America alone, although he did already have a cousin who was also called Robert living in the USA. I don’t know if his best man is his cousin or a friend he made in California.

Within a year, Robert and Elizabeth’s first son, Albert Ivor was born. Albert lived until 1995. We have a baby photo sent back to Ninna. Photos like this would have been the only sights she had of her nephew.

In 1911, Robert and Elilzabeth had a daughter called Gwendolyn. I think this photo is of Albert and Gwendolyn as small children, mainly because we have no other photos of children dressed like this in the archive.

The next item in the archive is a postcard sent in 1917. It’s dated 23 May. 

The message on the back is a bit difficult to read. I think it says:

“Dear sister and niece [possibly my grandma, Eliza Jane Richards]

Just a line to say we are all well, hope you are the same. How is [???] boys that are at the front

did you hear from [???] soon

What do you think of the U.S.A. joining in the war

with best wishes

Your brother Bob”

It gives his address as 622 South Hope Street, Los Angeles, California, USA. This is now right in the centre of downtown LA, only a couple of blocks away from the Omni Hotel where Cathy and I stayed on our first ever American roadtrip in 2004.

Robert had applied for American citizenship in 1912, at which point he was an agent of the Metropolitan Life Assurance Co., now commonly known as Met Life. In September 1918 he registered for the army, at the age of 41. A large number of men he would have known from his days in Wrexham would have been fighting in the First World War, and maybe the pull of loyalty to his original homeland persuaded him to sign up once his new homeland entered the war. However, I doubt he would have left the USA as the war was over a couple of months later.

In the 1920 census he was a bookkeeper in a shipbuilding company. By the 1930 census he was back working as an insurance salesman. He died in 1932, aged 54.

The only other photo we have in the archive is this photo of Gwendolyn, or Gwennie as she is called on the note. It’s dated 1927, so she would have been 16 in this photo. She lived all her life in Los Angeles and died in 1992.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been thinking a lot about Robert and his journey to America. We forget sometimes what emigration meant in the era before air travel. He left home, travelled abroad, and never saw any of his family again. There was probably an exchange of photographs and occasional letters. His sister only ever knew her nephew and niece through those pictures that arrived in the mail. None of his family from Wrexham was present at his wedding or his funeral, and none of them ever visited his grave.

I feel this small blog post is a belated tribute to someone who went out and changed their own future, swapping Denbighshire for California. 

My collection of collections, part 2: baseball cards

Baseball cards aren't a particularly random thing to collect (unlike souvenir monks). They are one of the most well-known things that people collect. Maybe not in the UK, though.

I first fell in love with baseball cards when I was 10 years old and we went on a family holiday to America. This was in 1987. The cards looked like this:

We had collected football stickers back home, and baseball cards were a bit like them, except that you got loads more in a pack for hardly any money at all, plus a stick of gum, and they were cards not flimsy stickers. The backs of the cards were covered in weird statistics and facts using incomprehensible terms. Of course I loved them. They were everything about America, that culture that was both foreignly weird and discomfortingly familiar. This was sports, but not as I knew it.

Baseball cards got me into baseball. I've since seen four major league baseball games while exploring North America, and been to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. I've watched the Boston Red Sox on Star Wars Night, and heard Art Garfunkel sing the American national anthem before a New York Mets game. But my first game was in San Diego, watching the Padres play the San Francisco Giants. Barry Bonds was the San Francisco star player and he had just been busted for using steroids, so the reaction to him from the Padres fans was savage.

Anyway, I have been a Padres fan since that first game, even though they aren't a successful team. As I've been collecting baseball cards I've tended to collect cards of Padres players, and one player in paticular, "Mr Padre", Tony Gwynn.

I still like random cards. I am about 40 cards away from completing the set of Topps cards from 1987 (there are hundreds in the set). I frequently ask friends who visit the USA to buy me a pack or two of baseball cards. But in terms of a collecting focus, Mr Padre is now it.

Tony Gwynn is a sporting hero of mine. He played for the Padres for 20 seasons. Baseball is all about the statistics and Tony's are stellar.  He won eight batting titles in his career, tied for the second-most in Major League Baseball history. He accumulated 3,141 career hits, one of just ten players to make 3,000 hits while only playing for one team. He had a .338 career batting average and never hit below .309 in any full season. Now what that means is that for about one in every three times Tony went up to bat he would get a hit and make it safely on base.  That ball comes at a batter at anything up to 95mph. Ordinary mortals can’t even see it.

In 1994, Tony was batting at .394 - almost a 40% success rate when the season was cut short because the baseball player's union called a general strike. The season ended in chaos. There was no World Series. In the summer of 94, Tony was in the form of his life, hitting .475 in 10 games in August just before the strike started. Tony was literally three hits short of .400 for the curtailed season. It's a classic 'what might have been' and remains the highest single season average since 1941.

4 of these cards look the same. But they aren't.

Tony played in the World Series in both 1984 and 1998; the only two times the Padres have made it to the World Series. In the World Series games he batted .371 - that's almost 4 hits every 10 times he went to bat. He was a 15-time All-Star - when the best players in the American League and the National League play against each other. He won seven Silver Slugger Awards for batting and five Gold Glove Awards for fielding. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2007, his first year of eligibility.

Tony Gwynn died at the age of 54, from cancer. Among the many tributes paid to Tony, many people  commented on his loyalty to the Padres, staying in San Diego even though there were several opportunities for him to leave and play elsewhere. In fact, his willingness to accept less money to stay in San Diego than move to another team got him in trouble with other baseball stars, because they said he was driving down the market value for top players.

He is "Mr Padre". When I saw his plaque in the Hall of Fame, I felt very emotional.

I've grouped some studio portrait style cards

Baseball cards have been produced by a number of different manufacturers. In addition to the regular cards (known as 'base') some players will appear on special subsets within sets (know as 'inserts'). For example, players who make the All Star team, lead the league in particular statistics, or achieve notable milestones tend to feature on these extra cards. So, as you can imagine Tony Gwynn appeared on lots of baseball cards. There are actually over 10,000 listed on various baseball card indexes.

While most of the cards in my folder were printed while Tony was still playing, new cards are still being made. This retro style one was printed last year.

So there are still plenty of cards to collect, and probably new ones will be produced this year. Currently I have about 175 different ones. I'd like to collect 394 as that seems a suitable number. I think I need to set myself a target limit before the house fills up with oblongs of cardboard.

Torchwood goes west (big mistake)

Although other people have said some favourable things about the new Torchwood series that started last Thursday, I was less impressed.

First off, this was an 'establishing' episode that only really existed to take you to the next episode and explain how Captain Jack, Gwen et al end up in America. As that kind of episode it was done to an okay level. Quite why a black ops helicopter was trying to blow the crap out of a house on a beach in Wales where Gwen and Rhys were holed up was never adequately explained, but presumably it will be. Also the casting of Bill Pullman (who has aged significantly it seems) as a creepy child-murderer could well be inspired (and is a bold role for anyone to take on).

But - and it's a big but - nothing actually happened or got resolved in the episode. There was one exceptionally gross scene where they detached a head from a barely living charred corpse, and the head remained alive. But no answers. Only a very long teaser for the rest of the season.

I don't mind TV series having story arcs, although too-rigid story arcs killed The X-Files, Alias, even The West Wing in the end. The problem an episode that is all about the arc and nothing else really happens is boring in the extreme. Exhibit A: those X-Files episodes that just seemed to be mysterious characters sitting round tables smoking cigarettes talking about codenamed projects. Snore off! You want to see some kind of conclusion in an episode, even if the conclusion is open-ended so the bad guy can return to wreak havoc later.

For me, the emphasis on a story arc instead of having a story is a minus for the new Torchwood.

So is the relocation of the series to the USA. I recognise why they're doing this - the American TV audience. It's the same reason the news series of Doctor Who unnecessarily kicked off in Monument Valley in Utah instead of the Rhondda. But it misses the point of what made Torchwood interesting to start with.

If I wanted to watch overblown science fiction in an American setting I could tune in to repeats of the X-Files, or watch more of the new series of V. There are enough good programmes made in America already to satisfy my lust for all things American - Castle, Chuck, The Big Bang Theory, to name a few.

What made Torchwood fun was that it was set in Cardiff, and, okay, that might be because I live in Cardiff and location-spotting was amusing. But it also set it apart from just about anything else in the schedule. Turning it into an American-based drama removes the one thing that made it a must watch for me. It will be hard now to pick it out from a line-up of similar, high-end, slickly-produced, drama serials.

I think trading the dorkiness of being based in a little big city that few people have ever heard of for trans-Atlantic bright lights is a big mistake. So far no amount of aliens, government duplicity, mysterious time travellers, or poor TV scheduling have managed to kill Torchwood off.

But this decision might.

Threatened worldviews threaten other worldviews

I've been reading 'The Last Word and the Word After That' by Brian McLaren, that covers a lot of the same ground as 'Love Wins'. This struck me as a relatively good explanation for the criticisms levelled at Rob Bell during the recent "controversy".

"...faith must engage with the culture in which is finds itself but... can become so excesively enmeshed with that culture that its power is neutralized - actually, neutered... If a faith becomes enmeshed, not just engaged with a culture... people hardly notice - until a wave of cultural change hits. Then, when people want to move on from that fading culture, when they want to be part of that new wave, they feel they must leave their faith behind as well. Their only alternative is to try to disengage their faith from the fading culture, but this is one of the most painful things a person can do - mentally painful, spiritually painful...

"In times of profound cultural change... such as our current transition from a modern colonial culture, with its emphasis on rational certainty and conquest and control, to a postmodern and postcolonial culture, which distrausts rational certainty because of the violence that confident people have inflicted on others in their striving to conquer and control them. In times like these, people, thousands at the same time, face this agonizing task of disengaging their faith from the culture it has grown with, like two trees whose roots are intertwined." [page 15, bold text mine]

It's no accident that the last colonial superpower left is the battleground between the modern and postmodern elements within Christianity. It's no surprise that those with the most to lose - the theocrats whose worldview is bound up in a scientific narrative that insists on one form of truth as supreme - are so vocal in their criticism of reformulation (and potential reformation).

IMO.

Ironically, it was the Republicans

Well following my rant about the governmental bail out of the Wall Street banks, it seems Congress has gone and voted against the bill. Some people are already hailing it as the death of capitalism.

The big question: is that such a bad thing?

And, ironically, it was the Republicans in the main who voted against it... because it actually conflicted with their capitalist convictions (and also because the voting public has turned around and let it be known that this bail out isn't popular).

"I don't want to survive - I want to live!" (Wall-E film review)

I've been surprised by the core messages of a few films recently, and Wall-E was no exception.

By now just about anyone with a passing interest in films will have heard/read/worked out the gist of the plot: a cute little cleaning robot struggling to make sense of the mess the planet has been left in meets a sleek explorer-bot and falls in love. Everyone is raving about the animation (how many more times can Pixar raise the quality bar?), and the brilliance needed to write a film with virtually no dialogue for the main characters. The best description I've read so far was in the Times, which described the hero as "the lovechild of R2-D2 and ET".

There have also been plenty of comments about the 'environmental message' and the criticism of corporate consumerism, the latter being ironic in a Disney film, which is all about corporate branding and selling Wall-E toys to the masses. But there are also some human characters in the film, mollycoddled into roly-poly flab-sacks by their robot attendants until they've forgotten all about Earth.

In a sinister scene stolen from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the humans discover their servant robots are actually preventing them from returning to Earth because it's deemed too risky. But the captain realises humans need to take responsibility for their mess and sort things out. He asks whether they should do nothing, then says: "I've been doing nothing my whole life." In a face off between the sentient auto-pilot and the captain, the auto-pilot insists the humans stay off-planet, because here they will survive. The captain responds by saying: "I don't want to survive - I want to live!"

That line really made me think as we walked back to our car afterwards. We so often take our freedom for granted - Cath and I were free to go out and watch a film, which other people were free to make, and distribute, even though it contained a critical appraisal of our society's self-destructive tendencies. We had the freedom of so many choices - to drive or walk, to go out or stay in. We could do what we wanted in almost total safety. Actually, that's something many world citizens would aspire to, or dream of... or wouldn't dare to even dream of, for fear of those in authority.

And I was struck by how valuable and precious freedom is. There's a line in a Midnight Oil song, which they've borrowed from somewhere, that 'it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees'. And, of course in America, where they take liberty seriously (and then take liberties with it!) one of the main rallying cries in the War of Independence was 'Live free or die'. Because to live in chains is to die a long, slow death.

I'm not sure the writers of Wall-E meant to inspire such thoughts. But they did. And it was a cracking film too.

Jongudmund's rating: 9.5/10 It don't get much better than this!

A Scriptural tour around the USA

Utah is known as Mormon central, but it took a bit of getting used to finding the Book of Mormon sitting in the drawer of the bedside cabinet in the hotel room. For what it’s worth, here’s my road trip record of holy books…

Holiday Inn, SLC - Gideons Bible; Book of Mormon
Sleep Inn, Moab - Gideons Bible; Book of Mormon
Desert Rose Inn, Bluff - Book of Mormon, The Qu’ran (!)
Grand Hotel, Tusayan - Gideons Bible (this hotel was in Arizona so no BoM)
Stratosphere, Las Vagas - Gideons Bible with a gold cover (probably because it’s Vegas!)
Circle D, Escalante - nowt
Metropolitan, SLC - Gideons Bible

Real Salt Lake v San Jose Earthquakes - Major League Soccer match report

I didn't know Utah had a Major League Soccer Team until I picked up a fixture list in a shop. And then I found out Real Salt Lake (twinned with Real Madrid no less!) were playing tonight. Well, you have to go, don't you.

US soccer is quite different to British soccer. For one thing the atmosphere is nicer. There were several families with very small children. I was a bit worried there would be no chanting, but there was a small "ultra'' section and everyone booed the ref when necessary. And, of course, Americans know how to do sports. There was a 'pre-match carnival' on the Olympic plaza for an hour before the game. We got a free programme, and the catering was great. There were numerous concession options on the concourse - we settled on Pizza Hut - and not a dodgy meat pie in sight.

The game began with a 'team tunnel' greeting the players, composed of about 60 kids, in addition to the 22 mascots. Leo the Lion roared onto the pitch riding a quad-trike. (At half time he came on in the scoop of a digger!) We all stood to sing the national anthem. And then the game kicked off, about 5 minutes after it was due to start.

Being honest, both these teams would be eaten alive in the football league over here. Technically the game was very good. Slick passing on an astroturf pitch, good ball control, and good positional play. However, despite the good build up play, neither team seemed to have a cutting edge in the final third. Things seemed to go to pot in shooting range, which is why the game ended up 0-0.

To be fair though, Real did score a perfectly good goal, which was then disallowed. It's the first time I've ever seen a score go up on a scoreboard, then get taken off again. This prompted the crowd to heartily boo the officials and chant "You suck, ref!" A minute later Real hit the post, further adding to the sense of injustice, and they had a couple of chances when it seemed harder to miss than score, yet they managed to. San Jose were happy to hang on for a draw, having been a man down since just before half time, but for Real this was definitely 2 points dropped, rather than 1 point gained.

On the Trax back to our hotel, we got talking to two guys who were very interested in our opinion of the game, as Brits. When they found out we were from Wales, one of them said how he'd spent a year in Blackwood, and a year in Neath - I'm guessing on a Mormon mission trip. He even put on a class Valleys accent to prove it. I told him he must have done something really bad to have been sent to Blackwood...

Back to Salt Lake via Bryce Canyon

After a long road trip yesterday to Escalante where we drove through Zion National Park, we had another mammoth trip today returning to Salt Lake City, but first we saw the sights of Bryce Canyon. And what sights they were.

Bryce is full of 'hoodoos', naturally carved red sandstone pillars and fins, in such a quantity, they become eye-boggling. We didn't have time to hike down among them, which must be amazing, so we travelled the rim trail, stopping every so often to look down on a new vista of knobbly rocks.

A Native American legend related to Bryce Canyon has it that the spirit god Coyote turned the inhabitants to stone on account of their wickedness. The white discoverer, Bryce, a Mormon pioneer farmer described it as "a hell of a place to lose a cow". I'm happy to believe both of those stories, having seen the place.

We didn't see any coyotes, but we were chuffed to see a Utah Prairie Dog on the rim trail. He stopped and posed for photos for us, which was cool, as apparently they're quite rare. However the privileged feelings didn't last long. An hour or so later, we were eating our dinner in a tourist trap restaurant and there was one running around inside the restaurant eating fallen bits of food. There's nothing like finding out endangered animals are considered rodent pests to take the shine off seeing them in the wild.

Monument Valley to Grand Canyon

Remember that scene in Back to the Future III when Marty McFly ends up in the old west? We went there today. Or, more accurately, the place where they shot the exterior scenes, and just about every John Wayne Western ever made.

So what's Monument Valley like? Towering red mesas erupt from scrubland without warning. Every few miles a small shack peopled by members of the Navajo Nation try to sell you jewellery or other trinkets. It's hot, it's awe-inspiring, it's hot, it's amazing, it's hot.

And if you know where to have lunch you can try Navajo Frybread. Imagine a yorkshire pudding crossed with a doughnut and you'll have a good idea what it tastes like.

Then we reached the Grand Canyon, which is, indeed, "grand". But the problem is it's so vast you can't really gauge the scale of the cliffs, mountains, ridges etc. You can stand there and gawp, but that's about all you can do. At Arches you could interact with the landscape - go and stand under an arch, walk round a mesa. Here all you can do is stand and say 'Yes, it's very grand...'

Arches

1st day proper of 'the trip' and we made it to Arches National Park just in time for sunset. We hiked to a couple of arches that have been formed naturally through erosion, saw wild jack-rabbits in among the scrub bushes between the mesas and arrived safely in Moab just after dark.

My favourite arch was 'Double Arch' which runs three ways to form a triangle of arches. Standing underneath it and looking up gave me a funny sense of vertigo. It was like looking up the tower of a cathedral or another high-ceilinged building. I'd post a picture but pictures don't really do it justice.

Irony in Minnesota

Sitting in the transit airport in Minneapolis-St.Paul, I started reading The Great Gatsby, which I've borrowed from Bryan at book group. Reading the intro I found out that F Scott Fitzgerald came from St.Paul. It was an odd coincidence.

California flashbacks

I'm currently munching my way through a box of Hot Tamales - the cinnamon candy you can't buy over here. I discovered them in California and every time I bite into one and close my eyes I can see sunshine on the surf as we cruise down Highway 1 from San Fran to LA. The beaches are pristine, the road is winding and fun to drive, the trees are huge and evocative of an untameable land, the pampas grass flutters in the breeze, and life is good.

In my heart I think I'll always be a little bit in love with California. And the taste (and smell) of Hot Tamales will always take me there.

On the eve of All Hallows

Given that it's Hallowe'en, it's perhaps fitting that we watched a truly frightening film in life group tonight - the documentary Jesus Camp. As an outsider, it was incredibly worrying to see full-on 'children's ministry', complete with speaking in tongues, extended prophetic prayer times and so on. Watching the children pray over a life-size cut-out of George Bush left me feeling incredibly uncomfortable. And that wasn't the only part of the film which had my skin crawling.

I guess I could sum up why it was frightening for a number of reasons.

1) Realising that, although far more extreme, there wasn't much difference between what was in the film and my own childhood experiences.
2) The stat that 75% of home-schooled children in America are Evangelical Christians, but in the film 'education' looked more like 'indoctrination'.
3) The way young children were frightened by stories of the devil and convinced they were sinners because sometimes they found it hard to believe what was in the Bible.
4) Because it left me unsure what the difference is between finding a faith and being brainwashed. (And hearing that 43% of evangelicals were 'born again' before the age of 13, doesn't help either.)
5) The absolute certainty with which highly debatable concepts were presented as fact, e.g. America is a Christian nation and should return to it's Christian roots; George Bush has been raised up by God and is surrounded by "godly" and "righteous" people.
6) The doom-laden prophecies of the semi-narrator radio host who warned of a religious take-over any time now.
7) The way it reminded me so much of the book The Handmaid's Tale, which describes what happens when the fundamentalists take over.

Jongudmund's rating on Jesus Camp: 7/10 (Be afraid. Be very afraid...)

Spidey 3

Reports of Spider-Man’s demise may have been premature, but it’s hard to see where the franchise can go after this latest installment. The film isn’t half bad, although I have to admit I was more thrilled with the trailer for Transformers beforehand. Now that looks amazing.

The problem with Spidey part three is primarily the time it takes to get going. Maybe I’m in a minority, but I find the Aunt May character incredibly boring. In most of the ‘rocky relationship’ scenes I found myself distracted by Kirsten Dunst’s peculiarly pointy teeth. And then there’s the cheese factor too – really, what is the likelihood of Spidey being cheered on by a street full of New Yorkers with the backdrop of an American flag?

And I know I’m not the only person who felt that Peter Parker’s turn to the ‘dark side’ should have had more obvious signs than changing his parting to a moody emo ‘fringe in your eyes’ look, a black suit and eye-shadow. Gosh! How evil!

I was also slightly disappointed, given the high quality of the two main villains involved, how little screen time they got, especially Venom. But there’s an interesting subtext to Spidey 3 – when Spider-Man offers Sandman forgiveness instead of taking revenge, he makes amends for giving in to his own dark side previously. In teaming up with a former enemy (I’m not going to spoil it and say who), and appealing to him for help, he breaks down old, misguided hatreds in the face of a common foe.

And in those two instances, perhaps Spider-Man reveals something of the psyche of contemporary America; a move away from posturing next to a flag and going it alone towards a world where even long-time villains are capable of redemption. Or maybe it’s just a comic book flick trying to do something a bit different.

Roll on Transformers.

Jongudmund’s rating: 7/10