I’m playing with fire a bit here as I am not a native Welsh speaker, and there are subtleties of meaning that I don’t fully understand.  Any feedback is appreciated, and please assume good intent.  Still, I was struck when reading a poem in translation – with the original Welsh on the adjacent page – at two different words that translate as granular but mean different things.  They are clapiog, which means awkward, lumpy, rough or stilted and gronynnog, which is a more direct translation.  In narrative and other areas of organisational development, this can translate into differences between categorising things and understanding linkages.  The former are two frequently awkward and miss subtle differences.    I’m using the metaphor of containers here as both a positive and a negative.  Container shipping resulted in radical improvements in efficiency over hand stacking of cargo holds and better integration with road transport.  While smaller containers were part and parcel of shipping from the early Greek use of amphorae in the 1950s, we see the development of standardised metal shipping containers that are now familiar on the road in trailer parks and docklands and highly specialised ships.   As most measures focused on efficiency, shipping containers radically reduced labour requirements at all points in the supply chain act, and embodied knowledge was also lost at the same time.  I’m making a judgment on that now other than to call it out as a more or less inevitable consequence.  The more coarsely grained, the more efficiency, the more adaptability within defined constraints, and the less resilience when those constraints no longer apply.   There isn’t a right and a wrong here, but there is a danger in not recognising unique contexts and changes in those contexts.  

But it does raise a question.  If you make everything a formal garden, where will genetic variety come from if the context of your formalisation is no longer sustainable?  Keeping a wildflower garden there is critical, just as are rare breed farms and so on in agriculture.

This post is part of a series on narrative and narrative approaches to sense-making. Having made the general point about granularity and its consequences, I want to apply that and a few other things.  One of the major frustrations I and others have is when well-meaning (and often less well-meaning)  people talk about changing or creating a narrative.  The idea that you can do this top-down or that some form of elite can choose or interpret the underlying narrative of a society is deeply problematic.  Populists don’t do this; they pick up an existing pattern and magnify it to work the dispositional landscape rather than trying to design it.   I’ll talk in future blog posts about citizen engagement in this respect.  But put very simply, if you want to change the culture of an organisation or a society, then you have to do the same thing, and that doesn’t work if your containers are clapiog.   The tendency of a lot of people in narrative,  in particular those indulging themselves with Jungian Archetypes (which are very definitely clapiog) in creating the Hero’s Journey, while attractive to Senior Executives, is not going to do anything other than generate anti-stories, the cynical watercooler stories that pick up and amplify the inevitable failure of the Hero to live up to expectations outside the comfort of a fictional environment.

More like these, fewer like those

Through narrative and estuarine mapping (assemblages and affordances), our work focuses on finding what you want to amplify and what you want to avoid, then asking people, at scale and in context, the question in the subheading.   We also need to recognise a few key things about human sense-making.  

1. We only really switch to real thinking when we detect anomalies.  A very small eye section moves into hyperfocus when something unusual comes along. Most of the time, we lack detail in vision, which is better for anomaly detection.  So, creating anomalies is vital; one of the ways we do that is to combine observational anecdotes about real-world events and then show different groups of people how they have interpreted them differently.  That leads to a variation of the above question: Why did they see these things like this while we saw them like that? Note the question is plural; we never look at one thing as we seek a pattern.   The fact that the parties have gone through the same process is critical to this work; it is not the same if a well-meaning factory admonishes or guilt trips people for not seeing things from another perspective.  Novelty is also critical here, disturbing the expected patterns.
2. That also plays out of curiosity, as does another critical aspect: the progressive and partial reveal characterising a good story.  The author gives us titbits, and we anticipate how the story develops. And a really good author makes sure we often get that wrong which sucks us in more.  In organisation work, this is done by looking at statistical patterns and clicking through to the story.  Something that makes outliers more interesting.  If I present a landscape or cluster map to an Executive and see an atypical cluster, they will tend to investigate it.  If the people behind that cluster seek access, they will be ignored – trigger curiosity through slight differences rather than admonishing people to be open to novel ideas and mavericks.  They should be, but that won’t happen, so seek a better course and make them want to look.  The sacred storybook I discussed in my last post is another way to do this.
3. History matters and any complex system has high path dependency.  We use our past individual and collective experience at a fragmented level to make sense of the here and now.  The past contains patterns now recognised as good or bad, with the benefit of hindsight.  By associating the current situation with a past failure, by associating, we can destroy a good idea, or using a past success can justify a poor decision.  Again, granularity matters;  if you have an entirely constructed story, there is too much clapiog and not enough gronynnog.  Anecdotal patterns provide greater resilience and variety.  There is then the exciting use of counterfactual (different from the use in Estuarine Mapping) story form, which takes the form:  What would have happened if ? Again, it triggers curiosity by linking the familiar with the unfamiliar.  It is a form of executive communication that is too rarely taught.

Of course, all these build in nostalgia when appropriate and critical because they are based on real anecdotes captured at scale. They have strong coherence to reality but at the right level of granularity.  Decomposition and recombination are the essence of complexity.  Combined in different contexts, small things can help make sense in an uncertain world; more coarsely-grained things lack context sensitivity.  They are awkward, lumpy, rough and frequently stilted.

This is also a counterbalance to attempts to control the narrative by discussing how other people should behave.  One of the many problems with things like the Innder Development Goals is that they are a culturally specific form that approaches neo-colonialism by preaching Enlightenment and Northern European value systems.  IDG are not the only sinner here, by the way; most inter-government agencies make the same mistakes as do many of the great and good talking about climate change and the need for peace.  The granularity is all wrong, and the timing is always premature.  First, initiate changes in the substrate, then move to amplify what is working.  Oh, and gaslighting people into talking about a meta-crisis is not the way to avoid what is a poly crisis, but that is a subject for another post or two.

The opening picture of shipping containers is by Guillaume Bolduc sourced from Unsplash; the banner picture was taken by yours truly walking from Capel Curig to Pen-y-Pass.  It shows Castell y Gwynt en route from Glyder Fach to Glyder Fawr, with Yr Wyddfa’s distinct silhouette on the horizon just to the left.   Walking is problematic because it is on massive rock slabs, many shifting when you step on them.  I broke a rib when that happened once, and I ended up trapped upside down between two boulders, and it took some effort to extradite myself.  The granularity could be better …

Just over a month ago, I tagged an article in The Guardian which had picked up on the work of Italian anthropologist Vito Teti on the social value of nostalgia.   That sent me burrowing, but the only one of his books which I could find translated from la bella lingua (to quote Lucia, and if you don’t get that reference, then make a note to read E. F. Benson’s Mapp & Lucia novels or watch the BBC adaptation) was Stones into Bread which is about all the small things that make a village in Calabria its identity.  It is, to quote the blurb, “about migrating and about remaining, about yearning to leave if you’ve stayed and yearning to make the trek back if you’ve gone, about how both those who travel and those who never stray from home change.”  As it happened, I had also been sent a book, in a similar vein, by a friend of mine, Rob Sheffield, Pieces of Us , which is a story of the people and community of Greenhill in Swansea, once vibrant.  Both came to mind this morning, which is the twentieth anniversary of my Father’s death.   He died in Ysbyty Gwynedd a few minutes before I arrived to take over from my sister by his bedside.  My mother could not, as she was briefly at home before she was admitted to the same hospital to die in the early hours of St David’s Day a few days later.  To lose both parents within ten days of each other was never going to be easy, and the memory is a little less painful twenty years on.  That was also the period in which the politics of IBM made my life untenable. I would eventually take early retirement as part of an agreed settlement a month later.   I still remember a friend in IBM telling me not to take the viciousness of that process personally; I had just been “road kill’.  

I was lucky enough to have loving parents and a stable home growing up in North Wales; otherwise, I might not have survived to set up Cognitive Edge.  , identifying (through my mother with Cardiff in the south).  My father, a vet, spent much of his spare time in his garden.  I’d help him create the substrate for that when we moved into a new build on clay soil.  He and I dug (with pickaxes,  spades and shovels, no mechanical assistance) through that clay to a depth of ten feet and then dug in the truckloads of manure, dumped at the gate by his farmer friends before breaking down the clay and refilling the massive trenches.  I was in my early teenage years, and honestly, I resented but did not question the necessity of the task, although I still remember the smell.   The other memory from those days is that everything that went into the car’s boot (trunk for my American readers) ended up smelling of Lysol.  My involvement in the garden was limited to the heavy work, adding flagstones and wall construction.  My all-time favourite picture of him, using a wheelbarrow as a deck chair, opens this post.  The banner picture is of me, taken by Iwan Jenkins on day 63 of my 67-day walk around and through Wales; this a bleak moorland section between Glyndyfrdwy and Milltir Gerrig.   Dad’s place was his garden; mine was, and still is,  the mountains of Cymru and the Celtic kingdom of Rheged; for the ten days leading up to my 70th birthday, I will be ticking off some more stages of my second full Wainwright round starting with four days at the Wasdale Head Inn before moving onto a holiday cottage in Cockermouth.  All Fools Day, my actual Birthday, I will also have to drive the five hours to Heathrow Airport, which is how things have panned out.  But if the weather is good, I will be somewhere around Ambleside to minimise the drive overall.  I belong in the mountains, not the all-too-gentle agricultural landscape of Wiltshire; I once yearned to leave, and now I yearn to return.

This post is not just one of my memories of my Father; I didn’t want the twentieth anniversary to go unmarked.  It is also about the sense of belonging that is associated with places in your past.  When I read Stones into Bread, my mind immediately jumped to the Welsh word hiraeth.  The idea of yearning to leave and then yearning to return better summarises it, and it is often translated as a nostalgic longing for a place which probably never really existed.  It, like Cynefin, is a word of movement and change, not a static one, and it recognises the power of narrative, both collective and personal, to weave us into histories that define our identity.  Understanding where we are is not just factual, although that is important; it is also about how our memories have reconstructed those many pasts to create positive and negative identities in the way we perceive ourselves and our communities today.    The notorious (at least in Wales) Report of a Commission of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales stated, “The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects.”  The Commissioners were a group of young English Lawyers who spoke no English and only paid attention to the reports of witnesses from the Established Anglican Church of Wales, ignoring, in the main, those from the dominant non-conformist and Welsh-speaking majority with their network of Sunday Schools.  The Commissioners were asked to address  “the means afforded to the labouring classes of acquiring a knowledge of the English language,” which gave rise to the Welsh Not and was used throughout Central Europe as an exemplar for linguistic subjugation.

In understanding society, we need, to quote Alasdair McIntyre, to understand “the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources”.  That applies as much to an organisation as it does to civil society and is one of the reasons we created a narrative offering around the idea of a Sacred Storybook for organisations, which not only captures those dramatic resources but also makes a tangible part of onboarding new employees and leaders.  We are just putting one of those together for one of the major car manufacturers, and it also gives an effective way of mapping culture and change over time.  Cynthia and I wrote about the criticality of these stories for any form of learning in our Bramble Bushes in a Thicket article.  The essence of estuarine mapping at a collective and individual level includes understanding the substrate of memory and culture that stories provide. When I update the method on St David’s Day,  I will deal with some new options for using narratives as a base-level input to the framework and as a novel form of conflict resolution and measuring differences in perception and micro-changes in that perception as change initiatives start to unfold and/or unravel.  We are woven into our memories, but they do not necessarily bind us, and that is what I want to address in what will be a linked series of posts on understanding and using micro-narratives in organisations.  Understanding the substrate and getting it right is something my father understood about gardens, but that understanding is often missing in organisational change.  You will need manure and a lot of spade work at some stage, and the earlier you get around to doing that, the lower the cost downstream.    And go with the Italian and the Welsh, not English …

Ten years ago today I was walking around the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau when an email came in from my Doctor to say that the results of my tests can come back and I had Type II Diabetes.  There is an irony there in the speech by Obersturmfürer Hössler to Greek Jews about the enter the gas chambers, which I recorded in the post I wrote the day afterwards.  I’ve made the point several times since, orally and in writing, that the context of the place put a harsh perspective on what was a small issue in comparison.  And, while the rest of this post, it more a reflection on my journey at least that isn’t over yet, while it was for nearly everyone arriving on that fateful railway line.

Nine years ago today I completed my challenge to complete all 214  Wainwrights in forty days.  450 miles horizontally and 130, 463 feet vertically.   The average daily total was 11.26 miles, 3,262 feet in just under 9 hours.  The discovery in 2017 that I had no cartilage left under my knees, a permanent consequence of obesity which triggered diabetes, explains the slow average.  Going up is fine as are the ridge walks, but going down is a different matter.  Using kinesiology tape, two strips per knee after cutting has speeded me up a bit and removed the more severe pain, but I still live in fear of a slip as that will put me out of action for a few weeks and could leave me stranded on the hillside awaiting mountain rescue.

I wasn’t aware last year, although I should have been, of completing that challenge on the ninth anniversary.  I was just disappointed that I hadn’t made it on my birthday.  But it does make for a good opening paragraph in the Walking through Diabetes book for which I have been keeping notes.  Since then I’ve walked around and through Wales, not to mention trekking the Forbidden Mountains in Albania, which was significantly harder than the Annapurna base camp walk.  On my 65th I spent the week in the Cradle Mountain area of Tasmania and I’ve rediscovered the mountains of Wales, especially in Eryri and Bannau.    It’s good to see us reverting to Welsh names and displacing the Saxon ones by the way.  Travel means I have been able to walk in the Rockies, the Columbian River Gorge along with sites in South Africa, the Blue Mountains and coastal paths around Sydney and multiple paths in New Zealand, south and north islands.

Last year I also completed the South West Coastal Path in the UK which has taken around ten years; it was an accident in the early stages that resulted in a hospital consultant suggesting that I might have Diabetes and suggesting I get it checked.  I’m eternally grateful for that by the way, otherwise, by the time it had been picked up, it might have been too late to achieve the reversal.  I didn’t write a blog post on completion which was remiss of me but I’ve inserted a photo of the finish point, which also displays the kinesiology tape and the bulky full-frame camera, in its skout, the discovery of which has made my life so much easier.

I had the good sense to go public with the fact I had Diabetes although it took me a couple of weeks to pluck up the courage and I then documented the whole journey in a series of posts.   It kept me honest. people accommodated an issue I was not trying to hide which made things a lot easier.   I also take considerable satisfaction that going public encouraged others to follow the same path.

I also discovered that I really don’t like short walks.  Even on the road bike (mountain biking is for adrenaline junkies, not reflection), I don’t really like to go out for less than 50km.  Being on the hills, or the coast for eight hours or more (five of my Wainwright walks were over 11 hours) allows for reflection and I really despise those who carry music with them onto the hills, even with the privacy of ear pods.  It’s also allowed by collector habits to come out, always with justification.   I have four sets of boots, one for summer, two for three seasons and one for crampons.   And as of this birthday, I also have four rucksacks at 18, 24, 33 & 48 litres.  Walking those distances weight minimisation is an issue and given I am normally carrying 2.5kg of camera equipment optimisation of the rest is critical.  I’ve also got a little obsessional with GPS tracking of each walk, initially with Viewranger and now with Outdooractive its successor.  That means I can prove that I walked the path and it keeps me honest.  A few times I’ve had to add several miles to a walk when I made an error the previous day.   Interesting I cycle in kilometres but walk in miles.  Never really worked out why.

The other thing I have learnt is the need to keep up the exercise and engagement in the world around me.  One of the reasons my weight soared was the stress of creating a new business with constant travel.  It was the easiest thing in the world to collapse into yet another hotel room (at the peak I was spending 252 nights a year) and order comfort food.  OK, there are risks, I’ve broken a rib and had to have eight stitches in my forehead after a fall – still my best-ever tweet by the way.  But overall the mountains have been kind, but from time to time remind me not to take them for granted.  And from time to time I forget myself and do stupid things.

So this post is here simply as a matter of record and also a part of my project for the last year to start linking current thinking to multiple past blog posts.

The world as most of us knew it ground to an abrupt halt in the first quarter of 2020, when many governments closed borders to the seamless travel we’d come to take for granted. I clearly remember the sense of foreboding I felt on the evening of 23th January 2020, when I saw the news alert that China had in effect cancelled Chinese New Year – something unthinkable to us. I don’t know if the rest of the world grasped the significance and gravity at that point in time, but it wouldn’t be long before they did.

For those of us privileged enough to stay safe and healthy, the past 17 months have passed in a blur of quotidien drudgery, and time has lost much of its meaning without usual routines to fall back on. The past 17 months have also offered a chance at renewal and re-wilding.

This coming October will mark 12 years of service at Cognitive Edge. I have enjoyed every challenging moment and opportunity of it, from entry-level delivery to consultation to administering to business development; it has never been boring. It is truly a privilege to be part of a paradigm shift towards anthro-complexity-based approaches in business and management, and I’ll always be an advocate wherever I go.

A lot of soul-searching and career counselling took place as the changes in Cognitive Edge were taking shape, and in response to them, my decision was to remain and challenge myself by pivoting, so that I can continue to provide value in this next stage of the company’s growth.

My new role is really a lot of the same old, but with a renewed focus on enabling our network to utilise SenseMaker® and the methods in the EU Field Guide with their clients. Many of you in the network have already participated in the briefing webinars over the past two months, and thanks to all your input, we’ll soon be ready to launch commercial and non-commercial offerings that reduce the barriers to adoption, including that of cost. I can’t wait to introduce this to the network, and to the wider world.

I’ll also be working closely with Donna (what a pleasure), who oversees training, to package our offerings with our latest thinking. Where appropriate or needed, I’ll also be stepping in to deliver some training.

Over the years I’ve formed meaningful relationships with many of you in the network, and I aim to continue doing so. I’ll always be available for a chat, and before too long, I hope we’ll be able to see each other in person.

Yesterday I mentioned the family history with reference to my mother fighting for her chance to be the first in her family to go to University which got me to thinking about the family and I then realised that today, the 10th was my Nan’s birthday, one she shared with my cousin Peter.   I’ve no idea why we called her Nan as the Welsh is Nain, which is what my children used for my mother but there it is.  She was an indomitable character as I think her picture to the right shows.  She had grown up in the country where her father was Head Gamekeeper to the Maquis of Bute.  He was then the richest man in the world who build castles for a hobby and plated one tower room with gold (and I mean plated not leaf) with a ceiling comprising multiple precious stones.  He had come up from West Wales from the Bute’s estates and had reached one of the pinnacle points of the servants’ hierarchy.  I have his family bible and previously wrote about the history.  I won’t repeat myself here other than to say that when they were cast onto the streets by the Bute following my Great Grandfather’s heart attack she ended up in Cardiff Docks which was a notorious area.  The banner picture shows one of the docks in a state of decay, taken on my Round and Through Wales walk, but in its time it was the largest port in the world, and one of the richest, as Welsh Steam Coal for the world’s ships was its main export.  It was an area where the police went in threes, but also one of remarkable racial harmony.  The family managed overtime to save enough to leave for Precisely Avenue where they created the family home.  I think their two daughters were old before they moved there and they were ensconced by the time of WWII which given the bombing of the docks was probably a good thing for the family.

Her husband died before Mum left University so I never knew him, but signing over the family house to my Aunt she then spent many years moving between her two daughters – is it out turn for Nan? was a frequent question as we knew the quality of the food would go up immediately and her Chelsea Buns were to die for.  She was a harsh teacher there, when I entered the Boys cooking competition for the annual school Eisteddfod she took me in hand.  I can still remember the pain of having to hold a bag of ice for what seemed like an hour, but was almost certainly less, to get my hands cold enough to make the pastry. The pain was worth it as I won first prize and Apple and Blackberry Pie has remained a featured dish ever since.  If she wasn’t with one of her two daughters she was on holiday, acting as unpaid space labour, with her sister in Cornwall, but we always got sent a tin of clotted cream so we looked forward to that as well.

Her breakfast was always two slides of thinly cut bread lightly spread with butter and a pot of tea.  My father was popular here as his training as a Veterinary Surgeon meant he could cut more thinly than the rest of us.  My sister or I used to then trot up to her bedroom with it on the tray.  But on the rare occasion, we stayed in a hotel en route to a caravan or cottage she would say everything on the menu saying Jimmy’s paid for this.  Jimmy was my father.  She had a real hatred of waste which goes back to those early days of poverty but could whip up delicious meals with any manner of leftovers.

We spent a lot of time in Cardiff when I was young, sleeping on the floor of the three-bedroomed house with a sofa bed and camp beds (my fathers from when he served in the Veterinary Corp in the Kashmire during the War) brought into play.  A large part of my childhood was trips to Cold Knap and Barry Island Fair, not to mention the walk to Victoria Park where we tended to congregate as children.   To this day I do not know if I belong to North or South Wales as I was brought up physically in the former, but emotionally and intellectually in the latter.  I’ve talked about that a few times, but most extensively in this post. There are also memories, I was in Cardiff and can still remember where I was standing in the house when the news of the Aberfan disaster hit.

After I left University, got married (picture to the right) and eventually ended up in St Albans she was getting on in years but she, along with my father and wife were enthusiastic and if I may say so immoral gardeners.  The sheer amount of cuttings she took illegally and stored in her handbag doesn’t bear thinking about.  The picture to the above and to the left I am especially fond of as we say and talked for a long time in the garden of Hatfield House when she was down on a visit.  If the picture had been taken earlier I would have been smoking my pipe which she liked as it reminded her of her husband.

She had her downsides, as I reported yesterday she didn’t understand why my mother wanted to go to University and fought against it.  She saw the role of women to marry, give birth, and provide a home.  If we had guests she spoke in the most excruciating English accident – the influence of the Welsh Not in teaching her to despise her own culture.  If Nan didn’t like something or disapproved of it then you knew about it, but you always knew she would be there if you needed her.  And no one ever left any house she was in hungry as not feeding a guest was considered shameful, even if the family then started for days after the guest had left.

So in memory of grandmothers everywhere, and my Nan in particular I dedicate this post.  Also to set a context for the current crisis over COVID and Popularism, if we think about what her generation lived through then it may give us a sense of perspective.

The news this evening (Bogota time) that Daniel Berrigan died in New York at the age of 94 has had a greater impact on me than any of the other deaths that 2016 has brought. I doubt any activist of the 60s and 70s need to be reminded of who he was and what he represented, but the name may be less familiar to a younger generation. A Jesuit Priest he was one of the most prominent of the protesters against the Vietnam War, imprisoned for burning draft papers using home made napalm (an irony he attribute to his brother, also a priest and protester). He was also a truly great poet and a person of great humanity. A small thing in his life, he was an advisor to the 1986 Roland Joffé film The Mission which told the story of conflict between the Spanish authorities and a Jesuit mission to the Guaraní people in Latin American. He also appeared in it briefly.

He was part of that great movement in the Church, enabled by John XXIII, that brought a focus on truth and justice, on peace and reconciliation, which attracted me and many others to a faith which was not that the faith of our fathers. Ironically I am in Bogota at the moment working with Uniminuto University on a programme which will see SenseMaker® deployed in Colombia as part of the post-conflict resolution process. Earlier today in our final session I was asked by one of the participants, who has been working with indigenous groups, about oral history and power. I referenced that movement in probably my most passionate contribution to the session. We need to enable the voices of people’s day to day hopes, dreams and yearnings to be heard at the seats of power. I referenced the birth of Liberation Theology in Medellin in 1968 through the declaration of the Latin American Bishops, the hopes that inspired and the loss of hope its subsequent suppression created when the Church turned from truth and justice to an obsession with sex. Something that may now have been reversed – with a Jesuit from Latin America; Laudato Si’ marked a turning point for me.

Thanks to Mary Condren, when we both worked for the SCM, I met Berrigan on a retreat in the Glencree Centre back in the 70s. I remember a debate on Just War Theory (I have never been a pacifist), discussions on the conflicts in Derry and Belfast, prayer around a large open fireplace with a wonderfully peaceful Irish Wolfhound at his feet. He was a gentle, passionate, committed and above all morally consistent private individual. I was privileged to be allowed those three days with him. The title of this blog comes from one of his famous quotes: If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.

I finish with one of his poems, not the best in my memory, but the best that I could find online:

A DARK WOOD

As I walk patiently through life
poems follow close —
blind, dumb, agile, my own shadow;
the mind’s dark overflow, the spill of vein
we thought red once but know now, no.

The poem called death
is unwritten yet. Some day will show
the violent last line,
the shadow rise,
a bird of omen

snatch me for its ghost.
And a hand somewhere, purposeful as God’s
close like two eyes, this book.

I landed at Heathrow this morning to pick up a message from my sister attaching this photograph. He had found some old black and white negatives and had been digitising them. She rightly thought I would want to see this one without delay. I posted it on social media as I was walking to customs and throughout the day have been amused and to a degree surprised by the number of people who didn’t recognise a platen press.

Invented in the 19th Century the press allowed for a sevenfold increase in speed in printing. Basically you compose and lock cold metal letters (the font trays are on the bench to the right in the photograph) into the press, place printers ink on the circular metal disc at the top and then treadle. The ink rollers take ink from the plate and spread it over the type and the operator has to insert paper into the press in precise timing with the overall movement.

When I was at school the local printing works was moving to offset litho so we got their old press and the fonts as part of an arts project. I was involved in that selection as I was not a part of the school magazine production. Creating an illegal one had got me a temporary suspension for breaking the rules and then I was coopted by power on my return. I fell in love with that press. Composing was an art and after the proofs there was intricate work with tissue paper to make sure everything was even. You crossed your eyes to check for runs of white in the text and generally looked not just at the accuracy of the text, but the overall look and feel of the page. Then the joy began, a form of meditation as fresh paper slipped into the press and was drawn out freshly imprinted. I never crushed my hand, although that was a common injury if the safety bars were not properly set.

Over the course of my two sixth form years I think I produced most of the club cards for the school, timetables, concert invitations and the school magazine. It occupied my lunch breaks and hours after school. There was a sense of completion, of draft in the symbiosis of man and machine. Later after University I pushed through the purchase of an offset litho machine for the SCM but while fun, it was never the same. That was a task to be completed, and pleasurable enough, but it never gave the same satisfaction.

It's funny how specific objects trigger complex memories.  I changed trains in Chester station today on the way to Bangor University for an evening event and I saw the sign pictured in the header of this post.  I'm not sure when I first saw it, probably in 1965 when we had a school trip to London.  A long steam driven train journey followed by a bus tour and a visit to the top of the Shell Building, then the tallest in London if not the UK.  But it might have been one of the many times we took the branch line from Mold before it was hit by the Beeching Axe.  You can't really read it but it is the best I could find on the web.  It says London 179 miles on line one, then on line two 85 miles to Holyhead.  Neither the sign or its surrounds have changed much in over half a century and the station is still much as I remember.

Chester was our nearest city, over the border in England and the only place with a Cinema when I was growing up.  The last bus home left before the end of most films so you faced a choice which normally ended up with an 11 mile walk back if you couldn't hitch a lift. &nbnbsp; It is one of the longest garrisoned towns in Britain and was a legionary fort in Roman times.  It is larger than the norm, and the speculation is that it was to be the base for a planned invasion of Ireland.  It was at the heart of Anglo-Norman interaction with the various Welsh princedoms and is a border town in all senses of the word. 

By the time I was 18 it was the transition point to go back to University, often lugging more books than I could really carry.  That journey also involved a change at Warrington Bank Quay memorable for the smell of the soap factory.  I bought a coffee and sandwich at Costa's (that is new) and then settled bank for a sentimental journey along the Welsh Coast.

We passed the site of the old Shotton Steel works and the De Havilland Factory.  We were taken around both on school trips to be shown their apprentice schemes in case we failed to make it to University.  That source of employment for skilled labour is now one although the factory now makes wings for the airbus.   It is also the stepping out point for by 60@60 walk around Wales and the train follows the path up the Dee Estuary.  I plan to start that in February on the tenth anniversary of my Father's death with the intent of reaching Moelfre ten days later for my the tenth anniversary of my Mother's death with many a memory and tribute between the two.  The estuary path is bleak and in February beautiful in consequence with views to the Wirral and beyond.

By the time we turned the corner and headed west along the coast we were nearing Prestatyn which will see the end of 60@60 as I come back north along Offa's Dyke.  Prestatyn is a bleak place but has a faded gentility to it.  It is followed by the brashness of Rhyl full of memories of sand blown winter walks and sand strewn sandwiches that had to be protected from marauding seagulls.   One of my favourite pictures of my daughter has her perched on the car in a sea shore car park wrapped up against the winter cold at the age of one or so.  I really should not have stepped back to take that photo, but I did manage to catch her as she was picked up by the wind …

From there the scenery becomes less flat as you approach Colwyn Bay, remembered as the last stage before we got to Llandudno every Wednesday evening and Sunday during the summer to go sailing.  The train only gets as far as Llandudno junction before it crosses the bridge to a station by the Castle.  A truly awesome entry as the walls loom over you.  I used that station from time to time when I came back from University to help my parents launch or recover the small cruiser that replaced our two dinghies.  My main memory of that is mud and small inflatables having to be rowed through a tide race!

Conwy of course used to have the best fish and chip shop in the world and was a favourite castle and shore line walk for us as children and for my children in turn.  The town was saved from an ugly bridge by the fact it was a three way marginal seat so it got the investment to put the new A55 in a tunnel.  That road itself pioneered new engineering techniques to stabilise the slate mountains near Penmaenmawr that terrified Victorian travellers.  I could see the Carneddau to my left and Aber, home of the last true Prince of Wales.  Then shortly after I arrived in Bangor.

That too has many memories, mostly painful in recent years with two death certificates and funerals within ten days of each other.   I hadn't been back for a long time but then thanks the Welsh Audit Office I returned to give a talk and from that we are developing a significant relationship with the University that may see me return frequently to what is a key part of my own history.   I used to go there a lot with my father when he was a Vet as he was linked with the University projects and then in 1975 I went there as President of the Student Christian Movement with an interesting confrontation with Welsh Calvinists.  But that is a story for another day.

It will take a bit of time to get to my twist of Marx's famous comment on Religion, and a tirade against Dickens.  The clue is in the picture – one of a series of statutes which commemorate the so called Newport Riots arising from the Chartist march in 1839.  Newport is a town with a history and rather like Warsaw it wears that history on its sleeve and with good reason.  Its located on the River Usk, bypassed by the M4 and the Brynglas Tunnel of traffic report fame.   I was there to use the Passport Office's same day service as I  had to surrender an old friend for clipping.  I could have taken the risk and posted it but that always seems risky, especially as I will fly flying out to Halifax Nova Scotia on Saturday.  So, as I have in the past, too the early morning train down to Newport, handed over the form, two semi-representative photographs and £137 (which I hope is tax deductible) and then had four hours to kick my heels in Newport.

I'll keep it in the drawer in my desk with the other expired passports that tell the story of peripatetic decade and which I thumb through from time to time.  That small drawer also has my Mother's passport from when she studied in Germany immediately after WWII with some wonderful stamps from the occupying powers.  She won scholarships to both Grammar School and University and ended with a First Class degree confined immediately to the role of a housewife; a double symbol of a period of change.   Its not something she ever really complained about and after our return to Wales she found an outlet in a reborn political activism which was as much a part of my childhood as bed time stories.  I was on the first Aldermaston march in 1958 in a push chair and I am told that somewhere there is a picture of me on Bertrand Russell's knee!   I grew up in the context of a radicalised South Wales working class and it shows too this day.  My heroes were Nye Bevan, Lloyd George and Dic Penderyn; Churchill was remembered for, as Home Secretary, ordering troops to fire on the Miners.  Uncles who had volunteered for, and died in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War were held in great honour and George Orwell was bed time reading at the age of 5.

In contrast, these days my visits to Newport seem confined to cold and rainy days around Rodney Parade.  More good memories than bad there, but it shows the value of a dedicated Rugby Ground over a shared stadium.   The atmosphere is intimidating, the team less so.  My first visit here was way back before the M4 was built when I forced my father to divert on one of the frequent journeys to Cardiff, so that I could tick of the Transporter Bridge in my I-Spy book of bridges.  He wasn't happy as in those days it could take as long to get along the choked A48 from Newport to Cardiff as it had taken to drive the length of the Marches.  I think on that same trip we drove out the Roman Legionary fort at Caerleon and listened to Larry the Lamb on a transistor radio in the back of the car.  Its funny what you remember, but ToyTown was one of the great BBC Home Service Children's Hour series.  Otherwise Newport was always somewhere to be transited on the way to somewhere more interesting, either home in North Wales or Home at 6 Pencisely Avenue depending on if you were talking to my father or mother.

Returning to the present; at 0818 I left the Passport Office with an injunction not to return for at least four hours.  Breakfast occupied an hour although I got a sense that it was probably a mistake to wear a Blues shirt to the home of the Dragons just after completing back to back victories in the Pro12.  There was a level of hostility in the air.   I then saw a sign to a museum so I wandered down to it.  It was an odd mixture of the display cases of the old municipal museums where I spent a lot of my childhood (in Cardiff, Chester & Liverpool) and the more modern themed exhibits.  Its more than worth a visit, even a diversion from the M4 although the setting – a modern shopping centre – is not ideal.   Newport has a long history dating back to the major Legionary Fort of Caerleon to a modern industrial and revolutionary history.  It was also a significant port in medieval times, contested in the War of the Roses and so on.  All of that is well represented in a remarkable uncluttered display.

I was especially interested in the Chartist exhibit.  This 19th Century movement campaigned for the most basic of liberties, all of which bar one have been achieved in the modern age.   However the early part of the 19th Century was informed in Britain by feat of the French and American revolutions and there were draconian laws in operation.  Two petitions, one of over a million and the second of over three million were both rejected by parliament.  Its worth remembering that the population of Britain at the time was around fiveteen million so that gives you a sense of the strength of feeling.  Of course a million people died in the Irish famine during the same period, all to serve an ideology that found its modern manifestation in Thatcher and Reagan.

This is a period of savagery and protest.   The leaders of the Newport Riot (as it was called) were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered eventually commuted to deportation to Tasmania by Queen Victoria.  This was not an act of mercy by the way, simply a shocked attempt to placate more violent protest.   Later several hundred chartists suffered the same fate.  My own family history includes the legend that two of my ancestors died in Tasmania in that second wave.   I have no idea if its true or not, there are records of Great Grand Uncles being hung for sheep steeling in my family as well so it may have been a cover up for more common criminality.  But it has a sense of truth in the way it has been past down and I went on the pilgrimage to the burial island in Port Arthur when I first visited Tasmania.

The art exhibition (which I imagine is coming to an end) demonstrated the history of protest in greeting cards and that is worth a visit in its own right.   Newport is a town with a harsh industrial history, but a proud history of protest that needs to be remembered in this current generation.  Its all to easy to allow basic freedom's to erode.   As you enter the museum you see a Doctor's surgery with a note of how the vast majority of the population, even if they could afford to see a Doctor could not afford the medicine.  Freedom is not just about the right to organise, its also about the basic provision of health and education which are fundamental to any society claiming to be civilised.  And, for the record, Britain is currently going backwards in that respect at an increasing rate.

Within my living history sections of the British population did not have the vote so its not just a past phenomena.  De facto slavery was a key component of British economic success during the 19th Century, and I am talking about the mines, mills and steelworks of Wales and the North here.  Victorian values were hypocritical to an extreme and the thing which really, really infuriates me about writers like Dickens is that they vindicate such injustice through charity.  The sickly pious sentimentality is not a protest, its a be good and some nice kind man will come and rescue you mentality.   Society will be good if only people with wealth  volunteer their help to those inferior to them.

The exhibition clearly shows the importance of charity for survival in those times, something that is mirrored in current American culture and increasingly in British.  In fact the similarity of American politics to Victorian England is marked, in particular the need to be very very rich to have any chance of being elected.  Charity creates dependency and obligation of the powerless on the powerful, its not a matter of rights but of subservience and conscience salving.  It polarizes, it does not unite hence by deep hostility to Dickens for whom charity, but not charitas, is the salvation of the deserving poor.  To my mind, and from my upbringing, their nobility should be enshrined in protest not Dikensian dependency.