older possibly wiser

Recent events have rekindled interest in the family tree my mother and paternal grandfather started and pretty much completed, the hard way, by visiting libraries and record offices and searching graveyards and parish records. Now there are online websites, which take you down rabbit holes, but can also take you further. My aim is to log what we have and create a map of significant places.

Dark Angels is a wonderful organisation,  https://darkangelswriters.com/ They run courses and help people find their writing voice and develop a writing habit.  There's an informal gathering on Tuesday evenings.  "Join us for a lovely hour of reading, writing and communing led by Neil Baker. Everyone is welcome; in fact invite a friend along. We meet at 7pm UK time. To join us,  click here on the night.  There’s no need to register in advance and we’ll be using the same link every week from now on." I've put my output in a Dark Angels tab above, and try to keep it updated.

Spring How can we fight when Winter turns to Spring? The Sun like a searchlight should stop War in its tracks Shaming us to drop our weapons. How, when the snow thaws and the birdsong fills the trees can we strike and shoot  and blow up the land and its people? Hate and Fear should melt away and Love for everything should poke up its head in the secret belief that it will grow true and strong once more.

I gave a brief address in an event on Campus last week as part of a solidarity with Ukrainian colleagues - here's what I said: We’ve been working with LNAA, the Lviv National Academy of Arts and PPV Networks (also in Lviv) for 4 years on a British Council Creative Spark project. The project has been about embedding entrepreneurial skills in the curriculum and latterly about developing their strategic plan. The Ukrainian people are naturally entrepreneurial and we are seeing the strength of their innovation and resilience right now.  The project has included their staff visiting Cardiff Met on two or three occasions, and their new Rector, Vasyl Kosiv attending the Enterprise Educators UK conference in Oxford with us, and staff and student trips from CSAD to Lviv. Our staff tell of the welcome they got in Ukraine – we are treated like family. They have been in continuous contact with us on what’s app and email keeping us informed of how they’re doing and reassuring us that they’...

It was quite a task organising and orchestrating a celebration of a challenging and interesting life journey. I knew that I'd need help and had been to a couple of Humanist led celebrations, which felt right.  Lynn was a Quaker, and the Friends wanted to have a memorial meeting at another time as she held office at UK and nationally in Wales. I searched the Humanist UK website for a celebrant and found Tim https://humanist.org.uk/ timothyleyshon/   Here's the review I wrote about him. I knew when I first contacted Tim that I wanted a very specific, unconventional memorial for my parent. He/she had had a remarkable unconventional life and I wanted to tell the story in a sensitive but honest way. It was a bonus that he spoke welsh, although the event was mostly in english. I'm not sure that a celebrant would usually expect so particular and ask and so controlling a client! It could all have gone horribly wrong. From the beginning, Tim was a joy to work with, he was a rock, pr...

Visiting Lynn during the last six months of her life, and witnessing her decline into dementia, was hard. My way of navigating the journey was to write about those visits. I hope that the tragic sadness, the bittersweet moments, the humour, and most of all the love shines through.  I have shared them in the tab above called The Visits

 I recently wrote a tribute to my father Lynn Moseley, you can find it above, in the tab Lynn