my upbringing was boring. i had no pleasure. can you dig it ? i don’t recall being encouraged, to write, or, more precisely, being given more praise for doing it. It’s easy to knock my parents now they’ve gone…so here i go…

Why did i end up studying physics in university ? you can study physics just by looking at a wall. But to study…beauty. That is, that was, eccentric….regarded as eccentric in our family, to say the elast.

went for a walk in CraigyNos. lovely day for it, greenery and sunshine. Rivers and bridges, like a john lennon album. Why am i doing my life away? why am i so lazy? i tell people i’m lazy but they never seem to agree with me, maybe because they can sense that i don’t want them to agree.

Saw a man and woman, with their dog, sitting on a bench. they were clearly from the midlands. But lived in the area. had a friendly chat. i told them i would b doing a comedy gig in Craig y Nos in dec. he asked ‘ is it in welsh ?’ i said no it’s in english. Then he started on about his neighbour who’d died, she was old, and he was friends with her so out of respect he went to her funeral. ‘I couldn’t understand a word as it was all in welsh’…He said he liked the hymns, but anotehr person came up to him, said ‘ well i’m from wales and i didn’t understand a word’. I didn’t get his point. but didn’t hang around to debate it.

i mean, it’s common to hear non-welsh speakers moan about the language, but i’ve never heard anyone complain about a funeral held in welsh before ! Sounds like the start of a joke. but in fact it’s really quite tragic….’i went into a building in wales, and everyone was speaking welsh….okay so it was a funeral, so what…shouldn’t be allowed’

SG texted me out the blue. He never gives me a gig, ever, and i have problem with that. but didn’t mention it cos i know what he’ll say : ‘don’t take it personally’.

He wanted to know if i did a joke where i refer to the word ‘valleys’ and the word ‘Wales’ , and do a pun on them yes i texted back, i do that one. The insecurity is taking ag rip again. but at least i got some cynghanedd to distract me….

Despite my degree in accountancy

the board had seen a discrepancy.

I spoke to the chairman

and said i was German

to which he replied ich nicht sprechen sie

drove all the way from swansea to suffolk last friday. left at ten am and still failed to get to gig. the traffic was bad, a mixture of friday and bank holiday effect. the booker was not happy but then neither was i. i was down financially on the cost of fuel, hire car plus hotel. The hotel is travelodge haverhill, i like it, it’s inexpensive, well it is on a friday. The following morning i drove east for half an hour, through the quaint villages of essex…to Borley. There i found the site of the ‘Most haunted house in England’ Borley Rectory. Nothing much to see, just fields and tress, and an old parish church. Then i drove back home. but it took me at least 2 hours to get to the M4. when i got to reading services i stopped, and took out my laptop – on opening my ebay site the first thing i saw was that i had sold my copy of Harry Price’s ‘The Most Haunted House in England’ for £70. sounds good, but it cost me £60.

actually i don’t feel great these last dew days and weeks. a lethargic stupor is a good way of describing my innards. Still reeling from all that shit i went through last year online, and more recently the rejection at the hands of NCL. and i don’t mean an american football club… The reticence of a new day, a new decade fills me with inertia. But i guess i’ve had a good run, i have done various things and comedy has taken me to many places, including my heart of darkness. went to some village and bought – unnecessarily – some diecast model cars. No way will i make any money on them, what am i doing ?? just cluttering up the house.

went to see Alien Romulus with Jeanie. it’s full of the usual alien tropes, bang bang bang one on top of the other. yes the effects, the way it’s done is brilliant. But…well you know. When i saw the first one I took it that Ripley was a grown adult while in this one the crew seemed to be kids. or is that my aged perspective? The ending is the usual Alien fare, the heroine narrowly escapes, and brings back not cat not a girl but an android. Seems to be a surprise ending would have enlivened affairs, why not have the alien kill everyone?! i mean this film is set between Alien and Aliens so there’s no sequel….

Or is there ?

Saw Lucas. saw Anna in Cinema and Co. got something booked in there for december. the september gig in llanberis is now cancelled – lack of ticket sales plus every time i book an act it seems they pull out, it’s too much hassle. The potential gigs i have contacted – that is venues where i have tried to set something up – don’t ever get back to me despite them sounding interested. Though i did pick up a good gig for next year in carmarthen golf club (or is it rugby), and that came from me doing a gig in Saint Clares.

Following on the advice i got from Lucas – Gareth not George – i bought star wars figures in the Entertainer shop in the Quadrant for 4 quid each. He reckons i could sell them for double that. I told gareth about an amazing film i saw on Youtube: Battle Heater. a japanese surreal, ludicrous, hilarious horror comedy. In in an electric heater comes alive. Definitely an original.

Dewi Morris died today, also known as dewi pws. what a songwriter, genius he was. he wrote a song called Lleucu Llwyd – all in welsh language his output – in the late 60s which other artists covered thinking it was a trad tune. what greater compliment can a songwriter have ? He wrote ‘Rhywun wedi dwyn fy nhrwyn, Ie Ie na fe, Mynd nol i Flaenau Ffestiniog, Nwy yn y Nen’, all classics. That was with Y Tebot Piws, then as if that wasn’t enough he followed that band with the 70s rock group Edward H.Dafis….they produced more amazing tunes : Lisa Pant Ddu, Y Nos a Ni, Ti, Dewch at eich Gilydd, all of his composition. so sad that he’s gone, i feel lonelier now. To give you who are not familiar with him some idea of his staus, the passing of this guy , if the equivalent happened in the english speaking world, would be like the passing of McCartney, Lennon and Burt Bacharach rolled into one.

well, to me it is.

I worked with him on the welsh sketch show Giamocs in 1994 – if one can term it ‘work’, writing and producing ideas in a room – So yes i got to meet him. He was unapologetically sexist in his humour. He was a man of many faces, an excellent actor, a charismatic performer, a brilliant poet, a humorist. But i will always think of his songs, and always come back to them, his exceptional talent shone through them. He produced them through to the end of his life, but his stuff up until the early 80s is what kept my interest in welsh culture alive.

when i was in school welsh lessons with mr John Evans could be dry…old poems on the walls, posters with academic names, books with complex meters. Then , one day, i open a text book, a welsh text book, and i read this amazing spike milliganesque poem called Ti – which means ‘you’ – it blew me away. It was a love poem but at the same time a surreal, funny thing, a series of metaphors, of comparisons both poetic and silly: you are Polly Parrot who lives with Uncle John, you are the crumbs from welsh cakes, you are the Pakistani who drives the bus to town….

Politically correct now ? I don’t think so, but yes a poem written in 1973, and maybe today some people would skip it, the contemporary radio cymru plastic Huw Stevens lot, the Griffs and the Sali Mali Cachis, those for whom contemporary welsh music started with Jarman, everything before being a load of crap. Fuckin idiots! But that poem sparked some life in my dying enthusiasm for the old language. I understood it, it made me laugh, made me wonder. and i am certain that Dewi’s work did the same for many young welsh people. For this, if nothing else, DP is in the pantheon of greats.

Torri Gwynt was S4c’s attempt at the Kenny Everett Video Show, (torri gwynt meaning ‘breaking wind’), Dewi seemed to have a monopoly on anarchic comedy in 80s welsh TV> and even though it wasn’t, for me, a classic i do have many good memories, many evenings, many cold rainy nights of laughter, of smiling, of doing this in my own old language. S4C gave us something that wasn’t there before its existance.

when i listen to some of the songs off Sneb yn Becso Dam – y breuddwyd, n ol i’r dechre, cylchoedd o few cylchoedd, Sengl Tragwyddol – the brilliant proper welsh lyrics, ‘proper’ welsh yet accessible to my young mind. Dewi’s songs took the language seriously, took the audience for them seriously. Brilliant intelligent songs that don’t pander to commercialism. The welsh lyrics in them are of the highest standard. He’s like a troubador from the middle ages, he came back and now he’s gone again. From Llangyfelach he came, when there were welsh speakers living there…just down the road from me.