Gallery

28 Jul

Screechin’ in St John’s

By willwainWill

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…

28 Jul

The Welsh Marie Celeste: a true story

By willwainWill

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,…

01 Jul

The Rained-Off Rocket Battle

By willwainWillGreece, Rain

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…

29 Jan

My Mum Wrote Shakespeare

By willwainWillCamels, My Mum, Spliff

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…

29 Jan

Hitler’s Cheerleaders

By willwainWillCamels, Rain

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…

05 Dec

Going to bed with Jeanette Winterson

By willwainWillJeanette, Rain

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…

11 Oct

Up the Thames with a flat-coated retriever

By willwainWill, WritingCanoeing, Large Dog, Rain

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…