Category Archives: Miscellaneous

A wonderful start to Christmas yesterday evening, with the Christingle service at St Peter’s, Ruthin.  We drove through the Elwy valley, thick with snow, looking like a Christmas card in the twilight. 

Today, after morning service at St Paul’s, we returned home and put up the barricades against the cold.  There is no better place on earth at this time of year than home, and I can’t imagine how utterly awful it must be to be without one.

No matter how depressing the economic outlook, how dreadful the political climate, most of us have a huge amount for which we should be deeply grateful.

A very happy Christmas to all of you.

Last Thursday, Sara and I were delighted to visit the community centre in Old Colwyn, where we enjoyed a dinner sourced and prepared by members of the Tan y Lan Kidz Club.

The meal was excellent: well cooked, presented and served.  All the guests (who included ward councillors Brian Cossey and Cheryl Carlisle, community beat manager Mike Williams and parents of the hosts) thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

The club’s organiser, Jenny Hughes, plans to extend its activities next year by planting out a vegetable garden, so that the entire meal, from soil to plate, may be produced by the children.

The ability to cook is important and fundamental to a civilised society.  Jenny is doing a wonderful thing by helping the Kidz Club youngsters to discover its delights.

Apologies for the silence on the blogging front over the last few days.  It’s been a manically busy period, with wall-to-wall select committees, as well as heavy constituency business.

Got home last night after midnight after winding up on a statutory instrument taken on the floor of the House.  I tweeted that I had just done a 16 hour day and received a tweet in response telling me that I should feel lucky that I was not a serving soldier in Afghanistan.  I think it came from a soldier’s wife.  She was entirely right and I tweeted back saying so, feeling a little guilty.

Trawling through the blogs, I was surprised to see myself criticised by a Welsh language blogger for reading the Times, on the grounds that “there is almost never anything of interest in it”.

Sometimes you feel you just can’t win.  I sent out a tweet saying as much and was amazed and amused to receive a reply (by now it was 1.00 a.m.) reading:

Wow.. what a criticism of an MP.. to read the Times. Sometimes I think the current Govn’t get their inspiration from the Beano.

What a strange world we inhabit.

From today’s Sunday Times:

Scientists have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a Petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

I’m sure those “scientists” mean well, but I, for one, would rather turn vegetarian than introduce such ghastly, Frankenstein ordure into my digestive system.

If, of course, in the brave new world that awaits us, it will be still possible to find fresh vegetables that have not been genetically modified with bits of octopus, jellyfish or whatever.

To Rhos on Sea and the launch of my friend Graham Roberts’s new book Colwyn Bay through Time.

Graham is a noted local historian and his well-researched book of photographs is a sheer delight, showing what a very prosperous and elegant town Colwyn Bay was in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries and what it could be once again if the European strategic regeneration money is wisely spent.

My favourite of all the illustrations appears on page 36.  It shows a confident and impeccably turned-out gentleman named Jack Jones sitting on his horse, the equally well turned-out and wonderfully named Eurgain, at the bottom of Coed Pella Road sometime around the turn of the 20^th century.  A photo below shows the same location in more recent times, with a troop of WRVS volunteers marching past the less than lovely edifice housing the Jobcentre that now occupies the site to the east of the entrance to the road.

If you are a resident of Colwyn Bay or a lover of the town, I thoroughly recommend Graham’s book.  It would make a wonderful Christmas present and can be purchased here.

And no, I’m not on a commission.

Abergele surgery today, with a number of heavy appointments.

After it was over, I looked in at a coffee morning organised in aid of the maxillofacial unit at Glan Clwyd hospital.  The event was packed out and raised over £540 in the space of just a couple of hours.

The extraordinary thing about these events is that they are always organised by a core element of precisely the same people.  They support all the good causes in the community and give hours of their time without the expectation of reward, or even recognition.

When people talk of “unsung heroes”, these are the sort of individuals they should have in mind.  They are to be found the length and breadth of the country, organising raffles, street collections, coffee mornings and bring and buys; they are the backbone of our communities and we simply couldn’t function without them.

Visited the Cadbury factory at Chirk today. 

I always enjoy industrial visits, and this was no exception.  The remarkable cleanliness of food processing, which I also witnessed recently at the Rachel’s Organic factory at Aberystwyth, never ceases to impress and is immensely reassuring.

The Chirk plant is Cadbury’s principal facility for the processing of cocoa beans, imported via Liverpool.  The beans are transformed into cocoa liquor and then taken for further processing into cocoa crumb at the company’s factory at Marlbrook, near Hereford.  The final stage of transformation into the iconic Dairy Milk still takes place at the famous Bournville plant.

I asked my hosts whether Britons’ consumption of chocolate had been hit by the recession.  They told me that the market was remarkably resilient and last year had been a record one for production at Chirk.

It seems that when people need cheering up, they indulge in a bar of chocolate.  And who can blame them?  Napoleon did much the same with champagne: “In victory we deserve it; in defeat we need it.”

Signor Silvio Berlusconi has declared:

“I am without doubt the person who’s been the most persecuted in the entire history of the world and the history of man.” 

Appallingly early start for Manchester means no blogging this morning.

I’m sure that there’ll be plenty to blog about over the next few days, but whether I get the time and opportunity is an entirely different matter.  I will try using the WordPress mobile phone application, though my experiments with it to date have been less than satisfactory.

If that doesn’t work, I’m afraid it’s a case of hasta la vista, but I will use Twitter more often to compensate.

 Early turn-in tonight; setting off early tomorrow for Manchester and the Conservative party conference.

Manchester is one of my favourite cities and I am looking forward to spending a few days there; the great Town Hall (pictured) is my second favourite High Victorian structure, after (naturally) the Palace of Westminster. 

Nothing epitomises more completely the confidence of the cities of mid-19^th century Britain than their great civic buildings.  Manchester Town Hall is arguably the best.