A Welsh High Tea

A sunshine filled September day,
the dining room doors framing a view of a few fields
leading us to the expanse of sea that is Rhossili Bay.
The room filled to overflowing: standing on the deck, the grass,
against the field fence where the ponies graze.
Families – the sisters, nieces, aunts and uncles,
the friends from a lifetime of 80 years to the day.
Gathered for High Tea.

A much extended table laid with precision.
Competing aunties’ Bara Brith and Welsh cakes.
Tiny shells filled with lemon cream atop with raspberry, singular.
Sandwiches, definitely for an occasion,
narrowly cut, stuffed to overflowing,
trimmed of crust and neatly laid.
Remembered recipes of jam dipped sponge squares,
coated with coconut shreds,
finished with cherry jam and a cream blob.
Scones, by competitive sisters this time:
small and perfectly stuffed;
or ready to break yourself and indulgently fill,
with more cream and home made jam.
And, more, too much to see, too much to eat.
Celebration for every sense.

In the centre the cake, the birthday cake.
With the champagne, the wishes
“Penblwydd Hapus” by most,
plain “Happy Birthday” the rest.
But the “iechyd da” felt hollow even as our glasses met.
No shared joy blotted out unsaid thoughts.
We knew: no tea would ever be as bitter sweet,
however bountiful or lovingly made.
The sun would never fall on her so radiantly.
The wake, too soon it was to be,
would be no match for her High Tea.

Doreen Page 12 September 1930 – 5 November 2010

©Peter D Cox 2010 all rights reserved

Peter Cox talks about changing Cardiff at PechaKucha Photograph: Hannah Waldram/guardian.co.uk

I got my blooding at the PechaKutcha in Cardiff on 27th May when the Guardian kindly blogged:

Peter Cox from Cardiff Civic Society gave a compelling insight to how Cardiff is changing and what elements have been lost along its development. He said:
“Cardiff’s growth has been both sudden and exponential. The city of 1891 is barely recognisable as apparently unstoppable expansion consumes whole communities.”
Cox praised the design of Chapter Arts Centre, where the event took place, for being inclusive, community focused and putting society at the heart of the building.

On that occasion it was 20 slides and 6mins 20 secs to complete – a pretty rapid fire.

But last week’s IGNITE#5, part of the Swn Festival, held at Chapter Arts was down to 15 secs a slide – and no messing, they advance relentlessly. Unlike the PechaKutcha, Ignite had a theme – Music not surprisingly. A good opportunity I thought to extoll the virtues of hospital radio, and of course, Radio Glamorgan in particular. The other presenters were amazingly diverse: a bluffers guide to Bollywood, rock t-shirts, my first heavy metal festival. Great fun and entertaining. Well I was off first (partly because of the inevitably complicated presentation, but I wanted to include sound and video – off course). But all was well in the end.

Snippets included some of my interviewees (click to hear the full length interviews on my web site): Tim Rhys Evans (Only Men Aloud) Joan Armatrading, James Dean Bradfield, Kevin Brennan MP (in his guise as part of MP4) and Rebecca Evans. All ace.

Technically for the nerds: the video comprises the original slide show with a soundtrack taken from a live recording (using an Edirol R-09 miniature digital recorder with integral mic) mixed to sound tracks that were used on the slides. I used Amadeus for the sound editing, QuicktimePro (v7) to slip the tracks and merge the new sound track and exported to YouTube as Mpeg-4.

There’s been good advice given since Ocober 2008 that Cardiff’s Local Development Plan wasn’t any good. Amongst others, Cardiff Civic Society (disclaimer, I am it’s chair and have worked with the team who produced the society’s LDP submission) identified that the recession (and global warming) would blow a hole in any estimates made previously.

CCS executive member David Eggleton told them at a ‘stakeholders meeting’ at County Hall on the 22nd October 2008,”regrettably, it seems to me that there is an elephant in the room that we are studiously ignoring. We are entering a financial crisis, the worst for a century and an environmental situation that could require drastic action; would it not be appropriate to have a contingency plan in the event that the LDP is not found sustainable by the inspectors”. The council’s answer to this? “We carry on to produce the LDP, no contingency plans”. This objection amongst many others was re-voiced in June last year in CCS’s coruscating submission. Now the council is claiming global events have taken them unawares.

What is sad is that the press is taking the Lib Dem/Plaid party excuses, hook line and sinker. Here’s yesterday’s Wales Online:

“Cardiff council is set to admit defeat in its long-running battle to save some of the city’s last remaining unprotected areas of green open space.”

- just untrue. The council’s policy – which has widespread support, of maintaining green spaces – is only threatened because the LDP was so badly constructed that it failed to present viable, sustainable plans to support the policy. Neither the Inspectors (who have to be neutral about what is proposed as policy), nor the Assembly, are opposed to the policy: but they are saying the plan doesn’t support those policies. The failure is Cardiff Council’s alone. That’s bad enough, but to seek to blame others for that failing is shameful.

Assertion two: “In the papers, officers blame the worldwide recession for scuttling their previous hopes of catering for the expected growth of the city largely through building flats in areas like Cardiff Bay and Butetown with small-scale in-fill development throughout the city.”

- devious diversion. Again, there’s nothing wrong with flats on brownfield sites if they are part of a bigger plan to meet the needs of a holistic policy that includes family and low-cost housing. Until recently it was easy (‘cos they made money) to persuade developers to throw up jerry built apartments and boxy houses for tiny families. As above, the recession was flagged 18 months ago but the steamroller city process rolled on regardless. What was lacking was policy to encourage house building of the right kinds, in the right places. Again, blame anything, and any one, rather than the guilty party.

The final paragraph of the Wales on Line article is breathtaking: it’s not a quote, doesn’t seem to have come from the officers’ report, so one guesses it is inspired investigative journalism, the writer’s own conclusions, or – just maybe – a planted official line from the council: “Asking inspectors to withdraw the plan means the city will be spared a costly and probably futile legal battle in which the council would face widespread opposition from developers and business leaders in a hearing presided over by Assembly planning inspectors who have already indicated they agree with the business community’s concerns.”

- by legal battle, this might mean the public hearings: yes, (see previous) this would have been futile. More importantly, the paucity of the council’s approach and the shallowness of its evidence would had been forensically exposed. Embarrassing, or what?

And again, the blatantly misleading assertion that the Inspectors have ganged up with developers. Actually, if you read the Inspectors’ notes they present obstacles to the get-rich-quick developers. What they do is simply demolish the evidence the council has produced: an LDP, for all our sakes, has to be based on consensual policies, and a viable, sustainable plan to deliver them. It’s neither rocket science, nor too difficult.

But hey, what’s reality around here, this is Cardiff. Let’s keep digging, its saves thinking about how we have failed the citizens of the capital city. And, while we’re at it, let’s throw the mud at others, it might stick and we might hang on to power just a little bit longer.

The problem is not just about having a conversation about Wales’ status it’s also about where! Just look at that front page and compare it an average day in the life of the Western Mail.
First the name – The Scotsman (forget gender issues for a second) identifies with a person in a place and recognisably gives both value: The Western Mail refers to a bit of Britain tacked onto the west hand side – it could as easily be in Cornwall or Devon.
Then the coverage – the top masthead is about one of the largest cultural festivals in the world: where was the Esisteddfod last week – treated like some language centric oddity..
Finally, the quote: ok so copied and cribbed (JFK I think) but name me a Welsh politician who could have written that, let alone said it with passion and conviction – where’s the hwyl?
So, as well as politicians, we need media, and something more serious that the tiny circulation, public sector job-ads dependent travesty of the WM.

Peter D Cox said at 7:24 AM, 19 April 2007

As chair of an arts organisation my questions are simple:
1 – can the nation afford an Olympics without it threatening its cultural life?
2 – do we allow uncapped capital development projects in the arts with 60% contingencies on costs?
If the answer to either is no, then it’s a no brainer – cancel the games.

This is an article that first appeared in the UK teleworker magazine April/May 1996.

Peter Cox is managing director of TMPL Training, which provides training to organisations in the public and private sector and to charities. TMPL are developing telematic support of training. The Company’s consultants are teleworkers.

In the olden days – well, when I went to school – learning seemed a finite requirement. You went to school. If you were bright and fortunate you went to university, or, as in my case, to college whilst working. Skills were picked up at work, either by good design or by accident. And with luck you progressed.

It’s different now. Skills requirements have changed. We need to learn about things that were not invented when we were at school: the computer I am typing on, and the email system that will deliver this article are just two examples. And society’s work patterns have changed too. No longer is there a job for life, we need to be ‘portfolio people’ – more about which later.

Many of us have adapted our work pattern to be teleworkers in some form or another. We no longer necessarily go to an office every day – reducing the opportunities for learning from observation. We may not even meet our professional counterparts, dealing exclusively on the telephone, by email, by video-conferencing. In this isolation we may not even know what new skills our colleagues (if we have any), clients and customers need us to have.

In this series of articles I’ll be looking at the need for continuous learning and the particular difficulties that this presents to those of us who work telematically. To start I want to share some experiences and help you develop a plan for learning. In later articles we’ll look in detail at the impact that technology can make on helping us to learn.

First the basics: what do I know? and what do I need to know?

As a trainer I often carry out skills audits or a training needs analysis for clients. But how often do I review my own training needs? Do you review yours? Most of us do not, certainly not on a continuing basis.

I became very aware of this when helping candidates for management NVQs where a personal development plan is a requirement. If it’s needed for that, I thought, it ought to be a requirement for me as a trainer – which, of course, it is. As teleworkers though, this is difficult to do. Often we have no colleagues to measure ourselves against – a common way of determining our personal strengths and weaknesses.

You could take time out here to do a Myers Briggs Type Indicator – online via the Internet. So we have to assess ourselves, and plan our development, on our own. Here’s one way to start to do this.

Take two sheets of paper. Head one “Twenty things I am good at” and head the other “Thirty things I can do”. Then fill them in. What is ‘good’ is defined by you.

Most people find this exercise difficult, at least to begin with. Don’t just think about work: what do you do when on holiday? what do you say at a party when someone asks you what your interests are? do you manage a household – what skills does this involve?

Think about things in detail. If you telework you almost certainly have ‘computing skills’. But which of these are you ‘good’ at? Wordprocessing, perhaps. Designing booklets? Creating databases? Have you skills in maintaining the equipment – changing a broken part, replacing the toner in a printer, configuring a modem? Perhaps you have helped install a small network, or have added a client to an existing one.

These are all attributes/skills in their own right – not just part of ‘computing’. And if you are not yet ‘good’ at some of these things, but have done them a bit, are they on your ‘can do’ list? When you get stuck, leave the lists and return to them. You’ll be surprised at how many more things you can add.

Now rank your ‘good at’ list from 1 (very best at) to however many down. Then consider whether any of these skills need further development. Then consider your ‘can do’s’. Which of them might be targeted for action, either for personal reasons (I am learning Welsh), or for work (I did a course on ISDN telecommunications). At this point you may want to write all your training/learning ideas into a new list. It’s probably quite long!

See if you can rank your list into groups: Must do, Should do, Could do. Ask: what are you likely to achieve, in what time scale, and how will you know if you have done it? Be brutal with yourself – but also be willing to stretch yourself. Just because you’ve never been good at languages doesn’t mean you cannot learn Welsh, to take my example. Consider too, how your final portfolio of skills might look in, say, two years time. Is it balanced? Will it help your business/career? Is it what you want to be?

Now, and only now, start to consider how you are going to learn. How much time do you have? When MUST something be achieved? How much money can you afford? What support can you get from your partner, friends, work colleagues?

We all have different learning preferences. You might like to look at some of Peter Honey’s publications about how we learn.

You need to spend time thinking about your own learning styles. Are you comfortable with reading, thinking about abstract concepts which you then apply? Do you do something first, then read the manual? Do you like to take things in well-defined chunks, practising each one before moving on?

What have most successfully learnt? Was it a subject at school, a new skill at work, or a recent hobby? How did you learn – in a classroom, from a book, with a friend? With these sorts of questions you will begin to identify a successful route to newskills for yourself. You might find it helpful to read about Learning Styles and preferences.

Of course, there are also more ways of learning now. Interactive, multi-media on your computer. Structured lessons on the Internet. Distance learning supported by organisations like the Open University. Drop-in courses at a College for those near one. Even distance MBA and first degree courses.

In the next article we’ll look at some of the learning options available. We’ll start to plan our time to prioritise and acquire all those the skills and experience we have identified we need to become a portfolio person.

30/04/96