Dear Facebook
I have enough warm socks, sweaters and coats and don’t need any more. Certainly not this season. I also have around five or six woolly hats so definitely don’t need any more of them. I realise you haven’t been pushing me ads for hats/beanies and now will but it is a risk I’ll take and doesn’t really matter in the great scheme of things.
My Wales rugby jersey style Fatface sweatshirt is on its way. It’s been ordered anyway. In a sale. I saw it in Abergavenny but they had limited size options in the store so ordered it online after seeing an ad on Facebook. So some of the ads are relevant!
I’ll be away for the first two weekends of the 6 nations but will be watching the first game at least in a bar. There is unlikely to be a tv at our location for the second game and I doubt I’ll need anything as warm as a sweatshirt. Maybe for the journey.
Temperature is still sub zero outside. Over breakfast THG and I observed that we were fine in our centrally heated double glazed house but our parents’ generation started off in different circumstances. Dad was born in Maesdulais, just outside a mining community in West Wales in 1934. In the family woollen mill to be precise but his father was a miner. The wool industry went into decline after the first world war so the next generation had to find employment elsewhere and locally, coal mining was the main alternative.
On a morning such as this my grandmother would have got up early to light the range and cook breakfast for my grandfather before he left for the pit in darkness. They moved to a small cottage built by her father opposite the pit in Blaenhirwaun so he didn’t have to walk far.
I remember staying in the cottage in winter as a kid. You really had to psych yourself up to get out from underneath the blankets in the morning. Breath would freeze. Don’t really have the problem nowadays although we all like to stay cosy under the duvet innit.
In our kitchen a pan of THG’s finest homemade soup sits on the stovetop ready to be warmed up for lunch. Perfect for this weather.
No milk was spilt in the production of this post.
T-12
PS the pic is of a painting of the Maesdulais woollen mill, known as “y ffatri” picked up by dad somewhere along the way. The artist has applied some license as I’m told the wheel was not originally in that position.
PPS my grandmother survived her husband by perhaps forty years. After his death she got free coal delivered for the rest of her life. Would have made a big difference.