Long hot summer - June 2025

June is probably my favourite month of the year. Long nights. Warm weather. It's usually busy. And it definitely was this year! 

It marked the end of the football season. I saw both Wales women's and men's team playing within a few days of each other to round off my season.

One of the big life events of the month was replacing dear old Marco the Polo. I'm now droving a Mazda 3, in "soul red" (their name for it) and we've called him Vincent. 

Here's a picture of Vincent looking suave and a teeny bit sandy on our holiday in North Wales at the end of the month.

My first long distance trip in Vincent was to Swindon because the British Thematic Association was holding its AGM at Swinpex, the annual stamp show of the local philatelic society. This year we had a presentation about daffodils, but there was surprisingly little Welsh content in the display. There was some, though.

Speaking of flowers, I went along to the Grangetown History Society's talk about Grange Gardens on the park's 130th Anniversary.

It was very interesting seeing pictures of the Gardens when they were newly opened, and also when it was turned into vegetable patches during World War 2.

There was even a cake, provided by the Friends of Grange Gardens. 

I've already mentioned our week on holiday in North Wales, where we encountered butterflies on Anglesey and played underground golf! 

But on the way back we stopped in Shrewsbury. Joy, our eldest niece, had her birthday during the week before we popped in, so we were able to give her some presents.

She so big now!

We arrived back home with just two days of the month left. On the last Sunday of the month we went to a big print fair at Chapter Arts Centre. 

I really liked this big print, but decided I didn't have the wall-space to do it justice!

And then on the last night of June, I accepted Sara's invitation to an event with Rhun Ap Iorweth, leader of Plaid Cymru. He was a very engaging speaker and came across as honest and realistic. I liked him. (He was funny too. When I told him I'd driven past his office in Llangefni a couple of days before, he told me I should have popped in!)

Sara is standing as one of the Plaid candidates in her area in next year's Senedd election. It was great to meet some of the other Plaid members who will be helping her try to get elected. 

And that was a wrap for a busy month!

Home runs and holidays - June 2024

June was another very busy month. I've blogged about some of the major highlights already but here's my traditional end of the month review.  

The big sporting event this month was a day watching baseball in London, courtesy of my friend Gawain. This is the first month since July last year that I haven't been to any football matches. But I have been watching the European Championships. 

The Euros have been pretty good, overall, so far. Wales fell at the final hurdle back in the spring and didn't qualify but Scotland made it. They had a torrid time, though, and were on the plane back home after three games. England qualified unconvincingly from their group and needed some very late goals on the last evening in June to extend their Euros into July. 

I've also been to two stamp fairs, starting a new collecting theme - pangolins. My stamp collecting mojo comes and goes and I hadn't bought any for ages, but I enjoyed getting back on the hunt for things. I'm trying to collect stamps from countries where pangolins live and so far have a good mix. 

Recent additions

The stamp fairs and baseball were good distractions from a difficult ongoing work situation. I won't go into details but the 'change programme' stepped up a gear in the first week of June. We are now facing a few months of disruption. 

It felt like a good time to take a short break from work. So I was glad we had booked a week's holiday in North Wales with my mum and a friend. I've already blogged about it - with lots of photos. Castles, beaches, steam trains - all the staples of a holiday in Cymru, with the added unexpected bonus of sunshine and zero rain!

At the end of the holiday we had a weekend in Shrewsbury, which was great timing as my eldest niece, Joy, was celebrating a milestone birthday - she's now a bona fide teenager and had the balloons to prove it.

Hard to believe it's 13 years since Joy's appearance turned me into an uncle. (I blogged about it back in 2011!) 

We also got to see other members of the family, who were all delighted to see us!

And that marks the halfway point in 2024!

Footballing with company - 2023 edition

In what may become an annual tradition, here is a round up of the football season that has just concluded with selfies of some of the people who I enjoyed it with. 

First up, the two Pauls. Between them I went to more matches with someone called Paul than without someone called Paul. This was at Llantwit Major v Barry on 2nd January. 

I went to lots of Shrewsbury games with one of the Pauls, including to Oxford, which was my 100th football ground. Paul was the selfie-taker on this occasion.

And I went to lots of Barry games with the other Paul although randomly, this is a photo from when we went to Ipswich v Shrewsbury and saw the statue of the great Bobby Robson. 

And this is from when we went to Caldicot Town to watch my friend Ben play. 

I managed to get a selfie with Ben too before the game. 

Lots of Shrewsbury away games meant several selfies, including with my brother, Dave, nephew, Zac and mate-of-Dave, new-mate-for-me, Dan. 

I also met up with Ken who now lives in Bristol, for Shrewsbury's game at the Memorial Stadium. Yet another game in the "temporary stand" that has been there as long as I can remember. 

And at Cheltenham Town I sat next to my friend Chris, who I first met in junior school way back in the nineteen-eighties.

I did my usual thing of inviting people along to Barry Town games. Tom, Jude and Seb came to their first football match. They picked a good game. Barry won 5-0 and won the league title. 

Connor was in town on a Saturday so he also got dragged along to a game at Jenner Park as well. 

And Steve came to a game too.

Steve was also my matchgoing bud at the Cardiff Met game that was my only 0-0 of the season and technically in a post-season game. Although we did see a penalty saved in the game and two more saved in the shoot out at the end of extra time. 

I also invited people to some random games. My friend Charlie (who I saw play as a goalie this season in a game where he let in 16 goals!) joined me for a trip to Llwydcoed. This is a selfie he took!

One of the first games of the season was up in Cwmbach. I'd been invited up by Allan who I got to know through my previous job. He's on the committee and properly committed to his local club.

As it was that part of the world I was joined by my friends Sara and Leanne who brought their twins. The children were having a camera shy moment!

My friend Tom often frowns in photos, but in Llanelli he seemed inordinately excited. 

However, Tom seemed to be at a normal level of excitement when we went to watch Portsmouth play Shrewsbury.

Football is great with friends and also great with family! Cathy came to a Shrewsbury game with us for my nephew Zac's birthday outing. 

My eldest niece, Joy, came to several games too. And sometimes agreed to be in a selfie. 

And I went to lots of games with Zac, including an evening game at the Meadow and seeing Barry triumph 6-0 in the Welsh Blood Service Cup Final in Newtown!

Roll on next season, and if you want to come to a game with me, let me know!

Turning 40: My friends filled my virtual farmyard

I like virtual gifts. For a small sum of money a person who needs a sheep or a chicken or blankets gets what they need and I get a nice card saying what's been given.

As I have just turned 40 and I wanted to throw a party I wanted to avoid ending up with a ton of presents that I don't really need. I have more than enough stuff.

So I decided to ask people coming to the party that if they really, really wanted to, they could help me fill a wall with home-produced art or fill a farmyard with virtual animals and things.

Some people combined both - my niece Joy drew me a sign for my farmyard.

Every farm needs a sign

And people were incredibly generous. Most people turned up with some little envelope, or my inbox pinged with an email the day before, to say that donations had been made and virtual chickens, sheep, goats, bees (lots of bees!) and even donkeys had been 'bought' on my behalf for people who really needed them.

I was able to display all these by clipping up the cards and by the end of the party my virtual farmyard looked like this:

A full farmyard

For people who like knowing this sort of detail, here's the run down of what ended up on the farm.

• A queen bee and four other lots of bees
• At least 4 chickens (2 single chickens and a further gift of chickens plural)
• 2 donkeys
• Ducks (at least 2)
• 4 goats - one of them a nanny goat
• 3 sets of piglets (so a minimum of 6 little piggies)
• 5 sheep
• 3 vegetable gardens
• One lot of drought resistant crops
• 2 clumps of useful worms (good for the soil)
• A pile of poo (useful fertiliser)
• An adopted manatee (to go in the pond with the ducks)

I was also given a $25 microfinance loan to be loaned out to the person of my choice in the developing world. I'm going to sort that out and blog about it later but it sounds like a brilliant idea.

In a future post I'm going to blog about the art wall that got filled. But I wanted to show off my farmyard first. I'm very grateful to all the people who came to the party and who have helped so many people who are living in challenging situations around the world.

30 seconds of fame

A while back I blogged about a piece I wrote for the When Saturday Comes website about half and half scarves (which was then published in the magazine).

My collection of everything
that's wrong with modern football

Last night at just past 11 o'clock I had a tweet from a producer on BBC Radio 5 asking if I was the guy who wrote the article. When I said yes they asked if I would like to be on Radio 5 this morning to defend half and half scarves. Apparently a pub in Manchester had banned people from wearing them in and Radio 5 wanted to do a bit about it on the breakfast show. I said yes. I mean, who wouldn't like to be on national radio first thing in the morning?

It's interesting to see what goes in to a tiddly piece like this. First there was a phone call at 11.30pm, then another call at 7.15 to check I was still available, then the actual call where I waited for them to start talking about the topic, then I had to listen to grumpy Liverpool fanzine editor who reckoned watching football should be an Orwellian-style 'Ninety Minute Hate', then my 30 seconds saying 'they're just souvenirs', then grumpy bloke again, cut to the eight o'clock news, a goodbye from the researcher who had phoned me and it was all over.

Was it worth it? Maybe. It was a different way to start a Monday. Do some people care too much about trivial things like half and half scarves? Yes. Clearly they do. Is there anything wrong with wanting a memento of a big game? No, I don't think so.

Unofficial Ars-cannon-nal

I can understand people who follow big clubs being fed up with tourists turning up and buying half and half scarves at league games. Although, as Cathy pointed out, it would have been nice for my four year old niece to have had a special scarf to commemorate the first game she went to earlier this year. But while half and half scarves are apparently the worst thing about Premier League football, they aren't that common in the murky depths of League 1. My niece will have to wait until Shrewsbury next get one of the big boys in a cup.

I hope it's Liverpool, just to annoy that grumpy fanzine guy. I will be buying two!

2011 – year in review

I did this last year and found it fun, so here’s a look backward at 2011.

January

I was recruited to write an end-of-session report for a Commission that ended up a few weeks later with having lunch in the then Health Minister’s office in Cardiff Bay. I also had a wisdom tooth out and had a bad reaction to the anaesthetic that laid me up crook for most of a week.

February

I spent most of the month working on the report for the Commission, interspersed with a family wedding in Bournemouth, which included drink in a remarkable Victorian booze-house. I branched out onto a new social media platform and joined Twitter. One aspect of my migration to Twitter is my daily use of Facebook dropping to weekly, or even longer, between visits. As someone (can’t remember who) said, “Facebook feels so 2008”.

March

Went to an odd gig – Boothby Graffoe at Chapter Arts Centre. He was filming a DVD and that meant occasionally he’d be asked to repeat stuff if the cameramen hadn’t quite got the shot they wanted. He had to make his entrance several times. At that point I knew it was going to be a long night. I also went to my 22nd Wales football game at the Millennium Stadium. They lost, to England, 2-0.

April

Did my second ‘in the News’ studio slot at UCB Radio on April 1 and then went to a football match on my birthday – love it when that happens, especially as Town won 4-1. Had two round trips to Newcastle to see a poorly sister-in-law later in the month and ended up driving home on Royal Wedding Day.

May

Marked my first-year anniversary at the job I still sometimes think of as my ‘new’ job. A couple of weeks after that I got to travel to the exotic city of Birmingham for a conference. Spent the end of the month driving round Wales filming people – including my first ever visit to Llanidloes. Shrewsbury Town bodged the play-offs and stayed in League 2.

June

Summer holiday in Mull and then on the Ardnamurchan peninsular. I preferred Mull. Ardnamurchan was the wrong kind of remote for me, although the Lighthouse was cool. I also enjoyed eating lunch next to Loch Morar and wondering if Nessie’s cousin Morag would appear. (She didn’t.) On the 24th I became Uncle Jon to Joy Lindsay Matthias.

July

Bit of a weird month in work. One of my line managers was overseas the entire month, although I was left with plenty to get on with! Outside of work I restarted building a model railway. Updates have been infrequent of late as I have barely had time to work on the project, let alone blog about it.

August

Mum and Dad came down for a couple of days and we went to Cardiff Castle for the first time. It only took living here 16 years...

September

I travelled to the Emirates Stadium and saw Shrewsbury Town take the lead against Arsenal before eventually losing 3-1. A great occasion, though, despite the result. And then we had a week with my family in rural Herefordshire.

October

I seemed to spend most of October either on the road filming or editing the masses of footage we accumulated all over Wales. I also had another live morning in the studio at UCB and ended the month with a disappointing trip to see Shrewsbury play AFC Wimbledon, the only upside of which was introducing a new person to the ‘joys’ of watching Shrewsbury Town. Went to a Bowling for Soup gig that I felt was disappointing, but really liked one of the support bands, Suburban Legends. Bought their CD and have played it repeatedly since.

November

My second Town ‘away’ match of the season, but the shortest trip I’ll make to see them for a while as they played Newport County in the cup. So far I’ve seen at least one match a month this season – the streak continued into December as well. Work-wise, we had two massive events on consecutive days and then later in the month I got to go to The Guardian offices for a conference.

December

Always a busy month, particularly with all the travelling we tend to do to see family at Christmas and all the friends we only seem to catch up with at Christmas. (We started Christmas Day in Cardiff and ended up with my folks in Shrewsbury having eaten Christmas dinner with Cathy’s folks near Gloucester.) For the first time since 2002 I went into work between Christmas and New Year. It was a bit strange.

Mid-October Mayhem

I seem to be too busy to blog of late, so here are some random bits and bobs to keep however many people click on here regularly to see what is going on in my life in the loop:

Work
Crazy busy driving round Wales filming brilliant people doing a brilliant job improving healthcare and saving lives. Had a day-trip to Wrexham the other day, which involved 8 hours driving and a fatality. A suicidal pheasant added itself to my roadkill tally and managed to rip a bit of the bumper off The Tank for good measure.

My favourite quote from filming so far was the person who said they had been on "a real learning kerb". (Don't hit that too fast.)

Church
Cathy got baptised at the end of September, after 20+ years of waiting. When she read me the first draft of her testimony she made me cry. Friends and family turned out to see her get dipped, and make it a real special moment for us.

I've been co-opted onto the youth co-ordinating team thing and also taken on responsibility for Soul Mr, the once-a-month boy's night. It's fun, but we are in a period of adjustment as our new youth leader in training settles in.

Back in August, I did a Sunday morning talk ('sermon', if you want to get old school about these things). You can read it here. It was my first talk of that kind for over 5 years.

Family
We survived a week with the family in Herefordshire. Some pictures will make their way on here soon, including my cute little niece, Joy, who is in the grabbing-your-thumb-and-not-letting-go stage of adorability. Given the location, I didn't buy too much cider (although how much is too much?)

Freelance theology
I haven't had much chance to write for this project for a few years, but I have been buoyed by having my first ever donation off the site in the last couple of days. Someone likes it. (More importantly, someone reads it!)

I have had some good sessions on UCB Radio on the back of it. The most recent one was last Friday. I may be doing some more 'slots' for them in future. I've also recorded some stuff for them for future broadcast about the possible existence of aliens, because apparently I'm the guy to talk to about stuff like that.

Model railway
I liberated some of my Dad's old model railway gear last weekend. Will post some pictures soon, because I know how much you all love them!

Most recent film
Cowboys versus Aliens - fairly daft, but enjoyable. 6.5/10

Currently reading
'Franny and Zooey' by JD Salinger. I'm on a bit of a Salinger kick at the moment. I've recently finished his collection of short stories, 'For Esme with Love and Squalor'. One of the stories made me laugh so loud Cathy arched her eyebrows at me.

What's on this week?
More filming and editing in work and lots of plans outside. Going to see Bowling for Soup on Thursday, baby-sitting Friday, model railway exhibition on Saturday and ice hockey in the evening, leading youth on Sunday morning (need to prep for that - aagh!), visiting relatives in the afternoon (possibly). All good stuff.

There is another Skywalker

On Friday morning I became an Uncle, courtesy of my brother, Dave, and sister-in-law, Esther (who did most of the work, to be fair!). Joy Lindsay Matthias arrived on a Friday at about 6 in the morning (same as her Uncle, so she's obviously going to be awesome).

We had a whirlwind trip up to Shrewsbury yesterday to meet her. As you can see from the pic, she treated me the same way the rest of the family treat me - by yawning very loudly as I was talking to her. So, it looks like she will fit in nicely.