Weekly review 13/6/24.

3 Responses to Weekly review 13/6/24.

1. Dai Woosnam says:

   June 13, 2024 at 10:07 pm

   Thanks as ever, Paul.
   I will resist talking about the Bluebirds as it is too depressing to think of another season of this turgid fare being served up. As for Ross Stewart, if he has any sense he will stay away. Put it this way… if he does come, he will have to make his own goals from his long solo runs, which as I recall are a real feature of his play.

   Instead of talking City, I will talk Robert Page. And I will give him credit for one thing… putting Tylorstown back on the map of South Wales. Many years had elapsed since the days of The Tylorstown Terror, the great Jimmy Wilde… aka ‘The Ghost With A Hammer In His Hand’… so it was about time that grand Rhondda village got some prominence.

   When I was about 14 in 1961, I recall climbing to the top of Tylorstown Tip… easily the tallest coal tip in the Rhondda. (Gosh my skin took some scrubbing clean in our zinc bath afterwards!). The tip was removed some 6 or 7 years later following Aberfan.

   I recall relatives coming from Norfolk to visit my mam and me in the Great Snowy winter of 1963. And me taking them down to the bottom of our garden at our house in Birchgrove Strret, Porth, from where we could just see Tylorstown Tip… and telling them that the snow covered peak was our local version of the Matterhorn, and them – being from the flatlands of the Norfolk Broads – falling for it.

   Well, Robert was the first man to be ‘Tylorstown Proud’ since Johnny Caesar from South Shields… best known as an actor in Emmerdale Farm.
   A bit like the guy who wrote ‘There’ll be Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs of Dover’ had never been to Britain let alone seen them white cliffs (and certainly could never see an American bluebird flying there… a pig being more likely to be airborne) so Johnny had never ‘walked down to Tylorstown’ as he had never been to the place… just found the rhyme convenient amongst place names.

   Johnny writes about ‘seeing The Rhondda one more time’… but I don’t think he’d even seen it ONCE when he wrote the song while staying with a friend in Merthyr… and certainly had never ‘walked down to Tylorstown’.

   But hey, thank goodness for poetic licence… and for Robert Page too (though maybe not Page the football boss…!!)

   Anyway let me leave you with the late Ricky Ebdon from Blackwood. He was a couple of years older than Tom Jones, but alas died far too young at 56 in 1995.

   Their vocal DNAs bear striking similarities: one man became a world superstar, while the other never quite got the national prominence he deserved.

   https://youtu.be/MfsVBhshJR0?si=qP5gOhqSwOl8I2aY

   TTFN,
   Dai.
2. Dai Woosnam says:

   June 13, 2024 at 10:43 pm

   PS. Apols…
   Oh I forgot to comment on your commendable disregard for the events of the Sky News prime ministerial debate in Grimsby.
   It took place about 10 minutes’ from my door. A few of my neighbours were clamouring for tickets. Not me, nor my wife.
   Let me tell you: had those two been debating down in my back garden, I would have closed my bedroom curtains. And if that one of them who says ‘MPs are in a life of public service’, were to say it just once more, I swear to God that I will not be answerable for what happens next…!!

   ‘Tis us, Joe Public, who serve these scoundrels their incredibly inflated salaries, allowing them to employ their often unemployable spouses, and take them on so-called ‘fact finding’ trips to 5 star hotels in exotic places… get gold-plated pensions and the right to claim expenses on everything under the sun, down to a bottle of HP Sauce. We even subsidise their meals and their beer and wine.

   In the immortal words of John Junor… ‘pass the sick bag Alice’.

   DW
3. The other Bob Wilson says:

   June 15, 2024 at 6:10 am

   Thanks Dai, I’ve heard it said, not without reason, on social media that Cardiff City Stadium is a striker’s graveyard.

   I’ve probably mentioned this before, but Tom Jones was employed as a construction worker involved in the building of the Pentrebane estate on the outskirts of West Cardiff. Our family had one of the first six houses there to be rented to the public and so down the years I became fond of saying Tom Jones built our house. We moved in around this time of year in 1963 nearly two years before It’s not Unusual was played on Juke Box Jury on its way to bering a number one hit. So, while my claims about his personal involvement in the building of our house are probably rubbish, it is true to say that he was working in the area not long before he became a star.
   I generally to make this a politics free area despite me having some pretty strong opinions of my own, but I’ll break my rule to some extent to observe that the first election I could say I had a reasonable idea of the personalities of the leaders of the two main parties would have been 1970 and I’m struggling to think of our more uninspiring pair that Messrs Sunak and Starmer since then, possibly Cameron and Milliband in 2015 and May and Corbyn in 2017, but I’d say Cameron had an air of authority about him and the two from 2017 were basically more honest than the current pair.