Gallery

Screechin’ in St John’s

July 28, 2019July 31, 2019 by willwain Comment Closed

You don’t come to Newfoundland for the weather. I’d flown in the previous evening in a misty rainstorm that would have seemed just right for Craggy Island, but my single day in St John’s before hiring a car and heading up country dawned sunny and clear, a summer day with none of the country’s notorious fogs. I was in the country to research the story of my great-grandfather, a sea captain in the nineteenth century who had vanished from his abandoned ship, along with all the crew. Before setting out on my quest for ‘the Welsh Marie Celeste’, I had one day as a tourist in Newfoundland’s capital and I’d had some good tips on how to get a taste of the state’s largest and most cosmopolitan town... Read more on travel blog site www.thetrundlers.com...

The Welsh Marie Celeste: a true story

July 28, 2019February 17, 2021 by willwain Comment Closed

THE WELSH GHOST SHIP RESOLVEN In August 1884 the Royal Navy vessel HMS Mallard was patrolling the fishing waters off Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, when she sighted the merchant ship Resolven, apparently adrift. She gave no answer to the Mallard’s signals, and on boarding her, the Navy sailors found that the ship was completely deserted, though there was no sign of damage or disturbance. A fire was lit in the galley and there was food on the tables, but not a soul aboard. The lifeboat, too, was gone; for some unknown reason, the crew had simply abandoned their ship. She was salvaged, but the crew were never seen again. The Resolven was a brig out of Aberystwyth in West Wales, sailing between Welsh ports and Canada with cargoes of timber and cod. Her Captain was John James, Master Mariner, of Newquay. Also missing from the ship was a large sum in gold coins, the Captain’s entire fortune. His widow died in poverty after making her small son...

The Rained-Off Rocket Battle

July 1, 2019July 31, 2019 by willwain Comment Closed

The film is the low res movie I took of the Chios rocket battle, Easter 2012 - please watch it with the sound on otherwise you won't hear the fizzin' of the rockets and the pealin' of the bells... ... The fireworks ‘war’ between the two parish churches of Vrontados, on the Greek Island of Chios, is said to have started in the 19th Century, with children firing stones at each other from slingshots. Now it's the young men who fight, with thousands of homemade rockets that they spend all winter stockpiling. The target on St Mark’s church, separated from the other church by a deep ravine, is the cupola, while the supporters of St Mark's try to score a direct hit on the clock tower of St. Erythianis the Virgin. Despite bans during the Nazi occupation of Greece, and then again when the Colonels were in power in the 1970s, the rocket war has flourished and is now a major spectacle, and...

My Mum Wrote Shakespeare

January 29, 2013May 7, 2017 by willwain Comment Closed

The strange idea that Shakespeare was written by someone else, a notion which only seriously began in Victorian times (and an aptly-named Mr Looney played a pivotal role in some of that early speculation) has not only not faded, it has been given a big boost by an entertaining film, Anonymous, which plugs the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the real author. All the renewed debate has reminded me that one person who actually added anything to Shakespeare’s own lines, though in a very modest way, was my own mother. Eirian James, who became Eirian Wain later, was working in the 1950s for the Arts section of the British Council in London. In collaboration with George Rylands of King’s College Cambridge and the Marlowe Society, the Council, and Mum, helped to produce LP records of the entirety of Shakespeare’s plays, and the Sonnets too. While working as the organiser and administrator of this labour of love, she got to...

Hitler’s Cheerleaders

January 29, 2013September 26, 2014 by willwain Comment Closed

Philip Larkin once wrote, about his childhood home, that ‘nothing, like something, happens everywhere’. Why is it so fascinating, then, to find places where you might think nothing happened, but where (in fact) a whole collection of somethings did? You have to get off that well-beaten track, to look for the odd corners of England – let’s just stick to England, for the moment, if nobody minds – and I’ve found that you can’t look for those places, you can only find them; stumbling around, but with your eyes open. (As the screenwriter and author Ben Hecht put it, writing about himself : I was... ' just walking down the road when [I] bumped into history.') My favourite of these rare discoveries is a village called Swinbrook, in the countryside where the Cotswold hills begin to rise, about fifteen or twenty miles to the west of Oxford, and a more likely place to find nothing happening it would be hard to...

Going to bed with Jeanette Winterson

December 5, 2012June 13, 2013 by willwain Comment Closed

I’ve never read any of Jeanette Winterson’s fiction, a shocking admission for someone who (against all the evidence) considers himself mildly well-read. That there are - I hope - still years ahead in my life to read Jeanette Winterson, ironically, may be thanks to her anyway. In February 2008 I tried to end my life. My cat was in the garage with me. I did not know that when I sealed the doors and turned on the engine. My cat was scratching my face, scratching my face, scratching my face. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, by Jeanette Winterson. In February 2012 I thought my life had ended. My intelligence told me that that was ridiculous, but my heart thought it anyway. Which is truer, in any case? The mind’s truth, or the heart’s truth? I’d gone through a chain of circumstances, dismal and not very interesting to relate, stuff we all go through, the same old divorce and bereavement, moving house,...

Up the Thames with a flat-coated retriever

October 11, 2012July 31, 2019 by willwain Comment Closed

In Memory of Millie, the Dog of the Title, who died in June 2016. It had been the wettest April for a hundred years. We knew that, but we’d been planning this boat trip for months. We were going to take an open Canadian canoe, tents, cooking gear and a retriever called Millie upstream from Oxford to the source of the Thames. By mid-May the unseasonal rain had swollen the river as far up as the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. What should have been an easy glide on almost still waters had turned into some sort of triathlon event. The Thames was not living up to its description of ‘a pond between locks’. When we set off, from Pinkhill Lock near Oxford, the sun had come out, but the ‘lay-bys’, landing stages where you step ashore to open the lock gates, were flooded. Waterlilies, normally sunning themselves on the banks, were drowning in the deep water. Further upstream, the Environment Agency had opened weir...