I am sitting on my doorstep staring at my bike. It’s new, serviced and lubricated. I am old, arthritic and discombobulated. It’s not as if it’s some sinister exocet of a machine. It’s a pedal bike. What, as kids, we would romantically call a racing bike with drop handles, but what is now referred to […]
Read More...Beefy Jenkins – Colossus of Cwmaman
Beefy Jenkins, the colossus of Cwmaman, died 18 years ago not long after he turned 40. He had osteogenesis imperfecta – or brittle bone disease and wasn’t expected to live more than four months let alone four years. He packed more into those forty years than most of us manage in one – including more […]
Read More...GIMME SOME TRUTH!
I spent the summer with The Chaingang toiling on the second part of the trilogy WE LIVE. It was supposed to be called Reason To Believe but wriggled onto the stage at The Factory as Gimme Some Truth. All around us things were changing but everything stayed the same. There was a General Election when […]
Read More...A Chance to Get Involved
Future Plans – REASON TO BELIEVE is the second stage of a trilogy of work entitled WE LIVE, inspired by the Lewis Jones trilogy of novels of the same name, that began last year with a production of a play for young people written & directed by Larry Allan, MORE THAN JUST A GAME that […]
Read More...ChainWorks Productions – a new link in the chain
In November 2013, I bit the bullet and did something I should have done 20 years ago. I forged my own company. ChainWorks Productions is a direct legacy of the Mzansi Cymru project building on similar surprising collaborations and rooted to its cultural history, past and present but always looking outward and to the future. ChainWorks […]
Read More...The Forgotten Hero – Arthur Linton – Welsh World Champion
I have been riding a bike seriously for twenty years and up until recently it has been seen as the pursuit of the mad, sad obsessive. But suddenly cycling is the new black and the MAMIL (middle aged man in lycra) is the new mondeo man – seen everywhere and hated by everyone. Cyclists top […]
Read More...THE BELL RINGS FOR LADY WINDSOR
‘Come to Ynysybwl’ said Tony Burnell, ‘it’s twenty five years since they closed Lady Windsor Colliery and we’re having a festival. You can do something with the kids.’ Over forty years ago Tony had organised a bus to take a gang of teenage hippies to see the Pink Floyd at the Afan Lido in Aberavon. […]
Read More...BIKE BLOG 1st June 2013
Why don’t writers look out of the window in the morning? Because they’d have nothing to do in the afternoon. This is the only writers’ joke I know and it’s not really that funny and neither is it true, because I always look out of the window in the morning to check whether I can […]
Read More...Review of Cape Town Production: Torchbearers
“The words are theirs, the dream is ours” the Zulu narrator of Torchbearers calls out. His words reverberate through different generations and across diverse cultures as we piece together the story of two star-crossed lovers from very different walks of life. Last night’s show of Torchbearers at the Artscape Theatre blew me away. Not only was […]
Read More...Chronology
Laurence Allan – Writer Excerpt from: The New Companion to the Literature of Wales – editor Meic Stephens ‘Born 1954 in Pontypridd, Mid Glamorgan. His passionate, humane and sometimes angry concern for the plight of ordinary people is evident in much of his writing. Above all he articulates feelings of disempowerment experienced by those who […]
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