from the slate

We creep upstream along a narrow path, stooping to get under the low, twisting trees that line the riverbank. It looks far too shallow to swim and there is no way down to the water, which races along over rocks that catch the sunlight just below the surface. A few miles upstream is a weir that was designed by Thomas Telford to carve water off for the canal system. This curved weir — named the Horseshoe Falls, a tiny, manmade version of its namesake on the Niagara River — creates a fresh-water swimming pool that is as popular as a beach in the summer, where toddlers can paddle in the silt whilst parents sun themselves on the bank. It’s here that, for the sake of ease and speed, I usually swim. But not at weekends or during July/August, when the inflatable flamingos and barbecues change its allure.

We wander on amongst the trees and after a few minutes a minute beach appears below us. Here, the river is dark despite the sunlight and surely deep enough to swim. Finn clambers down gamely onto the pebbly beach and starts flinging stones into the water. I change and wade in. Once my breath steadies and I adjust to the cold, I swim on my back and another of Thomas Telford’s achievements comes into view—the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, a canal in the sky. A barge is labouring across and, as it does so, a pedestrian overtakes it. I wave from the water at no one in particular then turn over, put my head down, and swim into the current.

This idyllic Sunday-morning dip was marred later that day by my reading a story published in The Times about the results of tests by the National Environment Agency. These tests found that not one of the UK’s rivers can be certified as safe for swimmers. Our rivers are among the most polluted in Europe. Unlike beaches, they have no blue-flag system to tell swimmers about the water quality. Meanwhile, across the country, sewage spews unchecked into waterways that we, the public, bathe in unawares.

Our water companies, privatised nearly three decades ago, operate some 16,000 emergency outlets, which divert sewage into rivers when there is too much rain. According to The Times, these outflows kick in after as little as 1mm of rain. So, while shareholders reap the rewards of privatisation, the rest of us swim in shit.

I could stop swimming in the River Dee, but that is exactly what the water companies, and the National Environment Agency (who should be keeping them in line) would like.

Earlier in the week, I swam in a reservoir inside the Snowdonia National Park that was crisp, clear, and deep.

“You can't swim here,” I overheard another party of people saying to one-another as I finished dressing on the shore.

Sure enough, there was a large yellow sign warning of leptospirosis (commonly known as Weil’s disease), blue/green algae, and submerged hazards. I fully appreciate that reservoirs are full of hidden dangers, but so are rivers, oceans and beaches. So is our house and our garden. I would rather the National Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, or the various water boards provided accurate information, so that I can judge the risks for myself. The blanket scaremongering—identical signs show up at almost every reservoir I have seen in North Wales—does little but encourage me to disregard it all as nonsense.

So I will swim on, in the hope that our privatised water companies, councils and regulators get on with the job of keeping Britain clean and stop telling me what not to do.

An international music festival founded by residents of a small Welsh town to promote reconciliation after WWII is struggling, but organisers are determined to usher it into a new era. Because, while the fault lines that threaten the world today are less evident, they are just as toxic – and the festival is as necessary now as it was 72 years ago.

Pictures by Phil Hatcher-Moore. 

Eisteddfods are peculiarly Welsh events, competitive festivals of music and poetry that take place every summer across the land of lore and bards. Each has its a unique history, but none more so than the Llangollen International Eisteddfod.

When the Second World War ended, residents of Llangollen, this small town in North Wales, decided theirs should include international performers, from Europe and beyond. The war had wrought terrible divisions in Europe, but had also strengthened the bonds of communities and renewed people's sense of purpose. Motivated by this, the residents of Llangollen invited choirs from across Europe to sing and dance on the small stage, only half-expecting them to attend. But, sure enough, in 1947, over a dozen choirs turned up from all corners of the continent. Two years later, a German children’s choir, many of them war orphans, brought people to tears with Der fröhliche Wanderer, a song that five years later took them to the top of the UK charts. In 1999, the year of NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia, the Obrenovachke Devojke Female Choir from Serbia made it to sing––and win––at the International Eisteddfod having rehearsed in a cellar while bombs fell around them.

This year, however, there were no applications to the festival from France or Germany; only three of the 30 plus groups were from the continent. Pre-sales of tickets were down (although they rallied once it got started). People are nervous about spending money unnecessarily, and the festival faces a growing budget deficit. Brexit is an inescapable reality and people are asking whether the Eisteddfod is being threatened by the very thing it sought to end, namely European disunity. But organisers are sure of one thing: that the festival is as necessary today as it was in 1947, if not more so. Because whilst we’re active in very few conflicts, and conflict doesn’t feel the same to us as it did in 1974, there are still myriad wars around the world in which we have a hand by proxy. And on home turf the divisions exacerbated by Brexit are becoming toxic and threatening the future of our union.

As Terry Waite, the festival’s president and former Beirut kidnap victim, said at the festival's opening: "All the arts are under threat at the moment […] The world is in a desperate state, we’re in political turmoil at home, and there is hardly a country in the world that doesn’t have major political disputes. As has been proved by the founders of the eisteddfod all those years ago, we can make a difference.”

The International Eisteddfod provides a unique opportunity for bringing people from across Europe together again. Amidst calls to modernise it, there is a lot of soul-searching going on. How can the International Eisteddfod remain relevant today? Opinions in the town are split. While for some the choirs and dancers from Africa and Asia are the best thing about it, for others, the exotic costumes and thumping West African beats have lost their appeal. As one local tells me, television has broken down the cultural barriers to the point that someone interested in Japanese culture do better to watch Joanna Lumley’s Japan than to visit the Eisteddfod and see Japanese singers on stage. It is a turning point for the festival, just as it is for the rest of the UK; we are on the brink of a new international role and identity. The fault lines are just less obvious and more complex than they were seventy years ago. 

This year, the festival’s ten-year old Inclusion Project, to foster understanding through music and dance, brings together a Wrexham sign language choir, ukulele players and singers from mental health groups, disabled performers, former addicts, and the formerly homeless and socially marginalised. It is an inspiring line-up, but not one that will attract crowds in large numbers. Likewise Thursday's peace day, which was a multicultural mixing-pot of Asian, European and African performers brought together by the Celtic band, Jamie Smith’s Mabon. The atmosphere at the festival is collegiate but unchallenging. And certainly nothing has dented the community spirit – almost all of the organisers are volunteers, and even the local schools get involved, supplying parking attendants and other staff. 

There is a healthy discourse around peace and unity in the UK and our spoken word scene in particular is thriving, full of searing social commentary and impassioned calls to arms. Rather that steer the International Eisteddfod towards the mainstream, organisers of the International Eisteddfod have spoken of the need to return to its roots, as a statement of peace and community goodwill, and a celebration of togetherness. Could they tap into the spoken word scene to tackle some of the contemporary issues at play in the UK, simultaneously embracing the tradition of bardism in Wales? 

I’m breathing life into this blog after a two year hiatus. I could claim having a baby meant I was too busy, or that I was too lazy, but actually I just found it awkward writing about myself. (And writing about other things was equally tricky because when I do that I need to get paid for it.) 

I’m now back to work after a year of taking only occasional assignments, and it feels great. Looking after children––or in my case one child––is by far the hardest full-time job I’ve ever done. (I’m going to use his nickname, Boz, by the way.) We’re also weeks away from moving into our house, which we bought back in January and have gutted and renovated throughout (after initially saying we’d paint the kitchen cabinets, patch up the roof and move in).

Since having a baby I’ve become increasingly conscious of stuff, and how much of it there is in my life. It began with children’s clothes. I’m bad at organising my own clothes, but all of a sudden I have an extra human’s possessions to look after. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad if the person in question wasn’t growing like a courgette patch in July. Friends give him clothes, I gratefully accept, he wears them, and then days later I’m humping them down to the charity shop. Our absurd obsession with decluttering (Marie Kondo, beautifully curated blogs about minimalism etc.) isn’t something I’d encountered before moving back to the UK. Here, people are decluttering their books about decluttering. In Nairobi, everything from a yoghurt pot to a broken pipe, had value—and didn’t tend to stick around if you weren’t using it. I was but a temporary custodian to most of my possessions and when I was done with something, no matter how battered or bruised, it was effortlessly and organically re-homed or repurposed. 

So to alleviate the burden of stuff I have resolved to own fewer, better quality things. The point of all this is to tell you that I am now the proud owner of a ridiculously expensive boiler suit and it is the best thing I have ever owned. (And before you wonder, I have no ties to the company and paid full price for the garment.) It is tough as anything, has deep pockets for the things I regularly lose, doesn’t reveal anything when I’m crawling around on the floor, and, crucially, looks great. Our plumber went so far as to say it’s kinky, and a plumber knows a thing or two about a boiler suit. After going out for dinner in it, I threatened never to wear anything else. 

This empowering onesie is made by a Telegraph columnist whose mother cut a dash in her bottle green boiler suit in the eighties. Frustrated by the lack of functional but flattering clothing for women, Daisy created Spry Workwear. 

As well as own fewer things, I’ve also been trying to get rid of stuff I don’t use. So I gathered all of the lambswool and cashmere items I’ve shrunk over the years and was about to throw them out. Somehow I then managed to shrink little Bozzle’s beautiful woollen dungarees which were a present from friends. The crisis moved me to order 50g of Fuller’s Earth on Amazon for a few quid. It’s a clay used in wool production and, according to one lone blogger, relaxes wool. It felt like a long shot but it worked. I dissolved a few teaspoons in warm water, soaked the garments, then teased them back into shape.

Surely the didn’t have selfie sticks at the coronation of King George VI? In a photograph taken by the Magnum photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, excited crowds hold aloft what look like selfie sticks in London on 12 May 1937, as they try to catch a glimpse of the new king. Only the pork pie hats, scratchy tweed overcoats and formal buttonholes date the image long before the advent of mobile phones. 

The photograph is part of an exhibition I saw recently at the Manchester Art Gallery, Strange and Familiar, curated by British photographer Martin Parr. The exhibition seeks to show Britain through the lens of international photographers who have been drawn to the country since the 1930s. 

Of course the men and women in Bresson’s photograph are not using prototype selfie-sticks. They are using periscopes, some mass produced and sold as merchandise, others makeshift DIY-versions. 

Does Bresson’s image capture how little we have changed? Or does it send up a current-day obsession with the self, captured perfectly in the ludicrousy of the selfie stick? 80 years ago we were outward looking—using periscopes to look outwards, to watch the event, without putting ourselves in it—and now, we’re looking only at ourselves, and missing the event. 

In September last year, Hilary Clinton’s official campaign photographer, Barbara Kinney, took this photo, which also says a lot...

Like my mobile phone, my brain shuts down when it gets too cold. Phil and I moved to Berlin in 2015 as the long, hot summer was ending, tanned legs and arms retreating back into their winter shrouds, black jeans and hooded parkas. The temperature in our apartment dropped steadily. As it did so, we resisted the urge to turn on the heating, preferring instead to layer up. On cold days, we would be working in two pairs of trousers, multiple jumpers, padded jackets and woolly hats. Being self-employed in a new location, with many financial unknowns, we deemed heating an optional and unnecessary expense.

Only a few months into the notoriously long and miserable winter, we made a joke about our sub-optimal working temperature to a new friend. She looked as us with curiosity: “Isn’t your apartment a warmmiete, meaning the heating is included in the rent?” It was, and for the next few months we basked in it.

Twelve months later, we’re half way through another Northern European winter, but this time there’s no free heating to fall back on. Office-goers romanticise working from home in a rambling farmhouse that costs a fraction of their London two-bed to buy. 

The reality is a little different. At the moment when you cave in and push the “advance” button because you can no longer feel your toes and are wearing as many layers as is practical when typing, a well-insulated apartment and carpeted office suite that promotes short-sleeved dresses and heels holds a powerful attraction. 

Living in Kenya, we would shiver with similar vigour, but only for a few months every year, June and July. Neither central heating nor merino wool base-layers were part of our wardrobe there, so for two months of the year we lived under red checked Masai blankets.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that country folk don’t dress frowstily or eccentrically by choice. It’s because they have no one else to pay their heating bills, and while it’s usually cold, when you’re moving around it’s hot, so, rather than spend a fortune on “technical” clothing, they make do with what they have, layering with artistry and flair. I defy you to look elegant or sexy wearing three woollen jumpers and a body warmer.

I rented an office last year, an outsize cupboard of uninsulated stone walls with a few ominous cracks in them, but it is freezing, despite the radiator’s best efforts. I wear layer upon layer, hug a hot water bottle and drink gallons of tea. (I suspect that when sitting around at home we spend more boiling the kettle to keep warm than we save by having the heating off in the daytime.)

Farmers say they don’t need much heating because they’re on the move all day long before retiring to a log fire but anyone who is desk-bound does. But what about the retired folk next door? If I’m reluctant to keep the heating on because of the cost, I hate to think how our pensioners feel. Our electricity rates are higher than anywhere else in Europe, and set to rise again this month due to new taxes.

And now another Big Freeze is coming! As 2017 gets underway, I’m layered up and ready to go with a plan… 

Commentators have likened the Welsh, and the British farmers who voted “out” in the EU referendum, to turkeys voting in favour of Christmas. Pity the fools who are both Welsh and farmers, the ardent Europhiles thought.

Broad-stroke news reports would map Llangollen in Denbighshire, North Wales, as a bastion of Brexit brimming with British hubris. And yet, on a sloping sheep-field in the hills above the town, the guardians of the world’s second oldest sheepdog trials have embraced internationalism to transform their 120-year old rite of passage, sheepdog trialling, into a diverse event and a global brand. At the Vivod Sheepdog Trials in August this year, the “leave camp" was not, to my eyes, there to find.

The event used to be “very trendy,” says one spectator who, 48-years ago, came with her future husband to the Vivod trials on their first date.

Faded glory is a phrase that comes to mind often in these parts. Many of the small and medium-sized towns in North Wales do look, well, sad, with their derelict piers, shuttered shop-fronts, and crumbling pitch-roofed stone barns not worth restoring.

The Vivod trials used to attract hundreds of visitors (one of the organisers even likened it, somewhat generously I suspect, to the Grand National at Aintree). It was an outing for motor vehicle owners and railway travellers who, in their finery, would pile onto the steam train in Chester or Liverpool and disembark in Llangollen. Now, at first sight, it amounts to a few dozen soggy locals gathered around a burger van, competitors with their 4x4s and devoted dogs, organisers sheltering under a white awning, and a few flocks of sheep that are constantly escaping. The steam-train's high, fluting whistle can still be heard up in the hills, but today it is a replica of Thomas the Tank Engine that is ferrying people back and forth along an unjoined 10-mile stretch of line.

Brexit analysts who tried to rationalise the older British voters’ desire to leave the European Union repeatedly found themselves confronted by nostalgia – which is maddeningly difficult to either quantify or disprove. (After-unification, the Germans developed a word for their particular brand of it, “Ostalgie” –– a compound of East and Nostalgia –– that refers to a longing for the bad old days in the German Democratic Republic behind the wall.)

Our Brexalgia seems to come out as either a rose-tinted view of the Commonwealth, or a belief in English exceptionalism (as per Michael Lloyd in his blog for LSE). However, development indicators for Wales, like to further education, levels of crime and quality of healthcare –– the criteria we apply to the developing world –– show that life has not got worse at all. Based on figures from the nineties, disposable income is up, unemployment down, life expectancy and health budgets up, crime down. Yet, disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction is running high.

Whether rational or not, we still all, to some degree, hanker after the good ol’ days. But while spectator numbers have dwindled at the Vivod trials, the number of competitors has risen – to many more than ever before. The event may not look like much, but, in new ways, this is the Vivod sheepdog trials’ heyday.

Competitors came this year from France, Germany, Switzerland and Holland, while spectators came from Hong Kong, Cyprus and Kuwait.

Anne Haag, a 30-year old competitor with a glossy dark burgundy fringe, wears her dog whistle around her neck on a pink and green beaded thong. She drove 900 kilometres from South-West Germany to run her Collie here. (By relaxing our animal quarantine laws in 2012, the UK opened up a new playing field for sport dog handlers in Europe.)

Haag is a special-needs teacher. Her fascination with sheepdog trials began as a student in 2006 when she saw the sport live, but she had to wait four years before she could train her own dog – because she couldn't find a way to accommodate sheep in her student digs. Unlike farmers, Haag keeps the sheep for the dog, not vice versa.

When she tells friends in Germany that she’s off to a sheepdog trial in the UK, their eyes widen in surprise. “You take your sheep to England?”, they ask. (And heavens knows what they say now, post-referendum.)

European triallers struggle with Welsh sheep, which are, “not like ours. They are very quick. One ran off in the wrong direction with no clear motivation at all,” said Barbara Gyesen, a Swiss competitor who sent her husband fishing for the day. Gyesen visited Wales on holiday four years ago, fell in love with a Border Collie puppy, and went home with it. She, too, now keeps sheep for the dog rather than the other way around.

The sheep being chased up and down the competition fields have just been dragged off the moorland for the event. They are fit and wily, unaccustomed to being extracted from the flock and penned in triumvirates, unlike sheep-dog sheep.

The foreign competitors and spectators all remark on the pride the Welsh take in their land, and in preserving the “original spirit” of sheepdog trials. Some say they can’t stand English trials. Gyesen calls it snooty, “the country of the Queen," rubbing her nose and waggling her head from side to side. "No one speaks to you. The Welsh, by contrast are incredibly welcoming and open,” she says, flouting the xenophobic rhetoric. And the Welsh farmers remark with pride on the number of foreigners there are here.

A young-ish French woman surprises everyone when all three of her dogs qualify for the final. How do the local farmers feel about this, when no Welshman has qualified more than one? Surely this is the sort of thing that gets a Welshman's goat?

It seems not. The farmers I spoke to did not waste time entertaining nostalgia. Quite the opposite, they were deeply practical. This is, after all, their livelihood and international competitors represent an opportunity. One farmer, Alun Jones, travels regularly to southern Germany to run sheepdog handling masterclasses. Many of them sell their sires and pups abroad. They judge internationally. They are embracing the European market. And most of those I spoke with did not vote “leave”.  

The farmers’ only reservation about the international aspect of the sheepdog trials is a pragmatic one. European “sport dogs” perform brilliantly in a controlled competition environment, but are not contributing positively to the real-life performance of the breed. Sheep dogs need “power, guts and stamina” to cope with the sheer inclines and unforgiving elements of the land, one farmer grumbled. “I’m not sure any of these hobby dogs could ever do a day’s work.”

As a young girl, every week or so during the school holidays, my mother would announce we were going “to town” and my little sister and I would fizz with anticipation. Driving in, mum would curse the “awful traffic”, a designation it took me two decades to learn to question, when I moved to Nairobi and encountered jams so savage they can last days. In Shrewsbury, “awful traffic” usually amounted to around nine or ten cars waiting at a red light under the railway bridge. 

Nerissa and I would gaily bob along beside her skirt, excited to be in this hard-edged, fast-paced retail environment. We would flop into a teashop after a couple of hours of traipsing shop to shop––we only went to town when we had a number of things to achieve––and mum would gratefully gulp tea and say things like, “ooof, I needed that.” Or, if we made it home without a tea break, she would then enter the kitchen on the verge of collapse, drop plastic bags in a heap spilling their contents all over the kitchen table, and lurch towards the kettle. “Ufff! Does anyone else need a cup of tea?” Urban environments were exhausting. They required recovery periods and medicinal quantities of tea.

Once, I got a piece of clothing stuck in a “moving staircase” and very nearly got swallowed by it. Another time, someone left a handwritten note on mum’s windscreen in town saying, “INCONSIDERATE ARSEHOLE,” after she parked too close to them. (She was much better at turning a trailer around in a narrow lane than she was at parking in a multi-storey carpark.) We considered these incidents, which took more than the average quantity of tea to get over, highlights in an otherwise green and muddy childhood. (We were mud-prone to the extent that, after a few disastrous encounters with the offspring of more urbane parents, mum would change visiting children's clothes on-arrival when they came to play with us, bathing and re-dressing them in their original outfits prior to return.)

Happy go mucky:

I spent my early adulthood revelling in cities, at first racing time, ravenous for experience, and then eventually learning to find stillness amongst the concrete, absorbing as much as I could of London, one of the world’s greatest cities, then Nairobi, one of the world’s fastest growing cities, and, most recently, Berlin, one of the world’s coolest cities. 

Now, as migration to the cities continues to gather pace around the world and the future lies, more clearly than ever, in its cities, my husband Phil and I are moving against the grain to a remote hillside in Llangollen, North Wales.

Like many, I was genuinely shocked by the outcome of the European referendum and spent some time not understanding it at all – which means I was, and still am, desperately out of touch with my own country. After several years overseas, agonising over how best to represent the views of Somali fishermen or South Sudanese cattle herders, I want to start listening to people in my home country. What does the north-south divide look like from the north [of, er, Wales]? What does the urban-rural divide look like from the countryside? How out of touch is the ruling political elite? And how will leaving Europe impact life here – will the farmers, the manufacturers, the factory workers and the unemployed see an improvement as we “take back control”?

Sometimes I wake up and I ask, what have Phil and I done? I was ‘lucky’ to brought up to believe I could do anything (see Tim Urban’s brilliant Wait But Why if you want to know more about our generation’s problem with expectation and entitlement), but does “anything” stretch to building my career from a remote Welsh hillside? Or is there a good reason few people make this sort of move?