Llangwm Blog Page
A big thank you to Blackbart for continuing his Llangwm Blogs. Click here to go to the April Blog, and here for the May Blog Otherwise for his latest, read on:
July
A lovely summer so far. The spring primroses and campion have gone but the hedgerows are lush with the long grass of summer, although I have not seen as many butterflies as last year. And so much has happened in the outside world while village life meanders on more or less as usual. The general election has been and gone, and we now have our novelty coalition government with its spending cuts yet to impinge on us. The dreadful oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico seems remote until you notice the tankers in the Haven and imagine an oil slick creeping up Llangwm Pill.
Already being forgotten after claiming the headlines for several days was the string of murders carried out by a lone gunman in Cumbria, which brought back memories of the shootings in Hungerford and Dunblane. All small towns and villages like Llangwm. Does the quiet desperation of small town provincialism have something to do with it I wonder? Apparently there are 5.4 guns per 100 population – that must mean quite a few guns lying around in Llangwm - just a thought.
And England went out of the World Cup with almost funny incompetence. Germany went through them like a bullet through a cream puff. In the meantime I have continued to sample the generally excellent services of the NHS, but remain bewildered at how Morriston Hospital manages to produce such relentlessly ghastly food……although the cornflakes and fruit jellies are ok.
I watched the village gig rowing downstream the other evening, flag flying, looking very stately. Perhaps I’ll get fit enough to join the crew next year. And I do like the new bright yellow paint job on the house in Main Street. Please let this warm sunny summer go on and on……
MAY
The other day I was looking at an old photo of the Baptist chapel with the congregation standing in front. I didn’t count them all, but it looked like half the population of the time, and I was rather awe-struck by the extraordinary energy and commitment that so many villagers must have had in order to build and fill two large non-conformist chapels in addition to peopling the established church. It brought to mind the recent news that the annual summer festival will likely be abandoned since there were insufficient people willing to join the committee to make it happen. In a poem called ‘Church Going’ Philip Larkin meditates on more or less abandoned churches, and wonders “When churches fall completely out of use / What shall we turn them into”. The poem concludes: “ A serious house on serious earth it is…… since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious…..
Maybe the possible demise of the festival is a sign that we need to come together again for something more serious, something as driving as those villagers in the past must have felt in order to create their chapels. These are, after all, serious, and perhaps increasingly austere, times. Although mostly expressed in terms of crisis in the economy, it runs deeper. In the recent election the Tory’s ‘Big Idea’ was the ‘Big Society’. I’m not a Tory, and the policy was vague and rhetorical, but the idea that we should do more for ourselves rather than ‘buying’ services from the state or the private sector might have a resonance for a community of people in a small, relatively isolated village. What more can we do, together, to be less reliant on multinational oil companies (in advance of the oil running out); what more can we do together to help and support ill and elderly people in the community (when service cuts arrive); what more can we do to become less reliant on Tesco’s etc…..? Perhaps a sustainable futures commitee rather than a festival committee?
APRIL
Well, here we are, late April, a few swallows and martins have arrived, but not a party political poster to be seen in a single village window. When I was a child, every house had one or more posters up in their front windows at election time. My Mum was a Labour councillor, but my Dad thought his small business would suffer if her allegiance were made public. She did it anyway, and he carried on grumbling and probably voted Tory in revenge. I suppose making ones political affiliations public in a small village like Llangwm could become a little incendiary if things turn nasty, as they might, with a hung Parliament, a run on the pound, a double dip recession and a vast ash cloud hanging over everything. So I’m keeping mum!
As well as the migrating birds beginning to arrive, I see some boats have arrived back on the river, and settled on their moorings. However, I know of at least one which is planning on a reverse migration, and will soon be heading south to the Mediterranean, no doubt passing swallows and swifts on their way north. Good luck to them, bon voyage, and enjoy the sun, wine and French lockkeepers! I fully expect our own boat to be requisitioned by the Navy in order to join a fleet of small ships setting out to rescue tired British holiday makers stranded on the beaches of Normandy and Brittany, while under fire from their insurance companies. And I bet we’ll have to pay for our own diesel too!
Speaking of fuel, and mindful on this glorious sunny day that winter will all too soon be upon us again, it has seemed to me for some time that the village ought seriously to consider creating a sustainable woodland to provide an alternative to oil for heating. Remember ‘peak oil’? It’s coming to a village near you sooner than we might think.
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