where art collides philosoperontap

December 4, 2024

Filed under: diary — Trefor Davies @ 5:28 pm

If it’s Wednesday it must be, the same as Tuesday. Not much of interest in the news. Another day older. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Watching the clock, hypnotic trance. Hit snooze to hibernate. 

BRRRRRRRRRRR good morning. That was an alarm, not a suggestion it is cold. It is not cold, afaik. 

I remember the first winter after I finished university. 1983. I wasn’t in a hurry to find a job and had an attic flat in Bangor. We rarely had the heating on as it cost money and I remember lying in bed one early morning with just my nose and mouth poking out from under the duvet. It was very cold and my breath froze. Remember it like it was yesterday. Forty one years ago.

Must eventually have forced myself out of bed and gone to visit a friend who might have had the heating on. Or cuddled up.

I think in those days the electricity meter took fifty pences. It might have been a pound. Imagine if it was still the same in 2024. Someone from the electricity company would have to come and empty it once a day, at least. By the time I left Bangor a pint of lager would have cost 50p. Halcyon days except I wouldn’t have had many fifty pees to my name. I was poor.

It got to the point where I reluctantly had to accept a job. With a degree in electronic engineering it was easy enough. That year GEC Marconi alone had enough vacancies to take on every UK engineering graduate.

Used to be that the post would have already arrived by the time we got up for breakfast. This I observed in conversation with THG this morning. Them were the days. Mind you it was almost certainly always a bill. People did write to each other I suppose. Occasionally, in the days before mobile phones. 

At university the only means for a parent to contact an offspring was either to write or to ring the one phone in the hall of residence. This was a hit and miss affair. In the evenings the phone was almost certainly busy with little Idwal or Sian dutifully calling home. If it wasn’t in use then you had to rely on a passing student to answer it. This was not as straightforward as you might think because the altruistic act of answering would almost certainly result in you having to go off and find the student being called. Sigh, urgh, no that’s okay Mrs Jones. Dim problem or dim problemo as it might be in these days of language evolution 🙂. Revolution.

I think I probably rang once a week. Sunday evening maybe. Probs. Dutiful Tref. Sunday was the only evening we were not out in the pub. Maybs.

You would think that the advent of social media might make it easier for parents to keep in touch with kids whilst away at university. Our kids don’t use the same platforms as their parents, ie Facebook. WhatsApp does work.

We now have a variety of WhatsApp groups tailored to each kid. Each one of them has a kidmumdad group and I have a daviesmen group for when we talk cricket n stuff. I daresay the kids have a davieskids group for when they want to discuss their parents. What to get us for Christmas etc I’m sure. Or gawd have you seen what dad’s done now?! We also have a family group natch and an extended family group. All good stuff. Hard to keep track and sometimes very easy to post something in the wrong group. 21st century world problems.

Looking out of the kitchen window the sun is trying to climb over the garden fence. It looks cold out. Feels like 2 degrees Celsius I’m told. Cold enough.

At my desk in the shed by ten past nine. Very slippery deck so watch out folks. I’ve now positioned the rubber mat in the middle of it. It is the one that used to be just outside the door but was removed when I applied the decking preservative during the summer and never replaced. Need a couple more mats really to get maximum anti-slip coverage.

In the shed I am now streaming Handle’s Messiah. Two hours and twenty minutes of non stop entertainment. Sir Neville Marriner with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. I’ve been there. It has been a long time since it was surrounded by fields. Now it is just tourists, taxis and double decker buses. Didn’t realise Marriner had two rs.

Dad always used to put the Messiah on the record player every Christmas morning. Huddersfield Chorale. Must have been the best arias and choruses as you can’t get two hours and twenty minutes on two sides of vinyl. Nor 12 inch anyway and they don’t make 40 inch LPs obvs. This may not be obvious if you are a visitor from another planet but I can categorically tell you that neither any of my Facebook pals nor readers of philosopherontap are such individuals. Well…

An appropriate chunky beef and vegetable soup for lunch with a hunk of sourdough, some strong cheddar cheese and a spicy pickled onion created a year or two ago by yours truly. It’s gone misty out there. Not nice.

Made some slow but good progress with the family tree research. We had a farm called Talgoed on a hill next to the Tyweli river. I visited it maybe fourteen years ago and had a nice chat with the then owner who mentioned that the older farmhouse from my gggg grandfather Daniel’s day (1766 – 1843) was actually a small derelict building at the bottom of the hill next to the road (track) and river.

This time round I’ve been doing some research and discovered that in fact the building on the hill looks like the original and the one at the bottom might well have been built to accommodate David, the younger of Daniel’s two sons with the older John taking the main farm.

Neither sons were at the farm during the 1841 census. I guess they may have gone to work elsewhere or had perhaps just been away at the time. The confusing thing is that Talgoed became Talgoed Uchaf (upper) and Talgoed Isaf (lower). The upper farm is actually physically the lower down one according to two different maps of the time. The confusion may well have arisen from the fact that the entrance to Talgoed Isaf, the main farm, looks as if it was slightly lower and along a bit from Uchaf.

The Talgoed of today has a separate access road that avoids having to traverse the farm and is not a working farm anymore. Talgoed Uchaf is either no longer there or has been renamed Argoed, a dwelling with a visible name on Google street view. There is evidence of a derelict old stone building on the site which could well be Talgoed Uchaf.

Various censuses suggest that John and David each had 80 acres which perhaps suggests that the Talgoed of Daniel Davies had a not insubstantial 160 acres. It may however have been the case that they shared the 80 acre farm. I’ll have to dig into it. My only way of finding out here is to look at the records of the Coedmore Estate. The Davieses at the time were tenant farmers. The records are in the National Library of Wales which will be a road trip.

Their sister Margaret, from whom I was derived, was the oldest sibling and married a farmer named John Evans at Pantyffynnon just over the hill, a mile or so through the fields. Her daughter Mary married Benjamin Davies of Cwmduad which is how I came to have that surname. Pantyffynnon is still a farm today and the farmer is a Davies. I will have to look him up when I visit the area.

That Margaret married such a close neighbour shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It was probably the norm in those days although people seemed to travel a fair way to attend church, particularly for those of a dissenting persuasion (we were Baptists) who might not have had as many options in the early days of the reformation.

More as the story unfolds. It isn’t going to be quick but needs doing.

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