Iestyn Edwards is...what?

By which I mean - face life down with hope.  And I use the baboon and enema analogy because Stacks, Royal Marine, who confronted me in Iraq about not getting my tutu, tiara and self under hard cover quickly enough during a rocket attack, had a way of giving sideway that made him look like said baboon having said enema. I used to face him, stand up to him. At the time he said he thought a bullet with my name on it wasn't big enough and he wanted to chew my name into a hand grenade and lob that at me, but later, he gave me credit for giving him as good as I got.  The world is a challenging place. We have to help ourselves deal with it.  I suggest one thing - that we keep hoping that tomorrow might just bring that bit of luck that changes everything.  You know it can happen. You see it. You hear about it. Go out there and try and attract your bit of luck. Think positive, uncover possibilities, follow up. And if you get to the end of the day and that bit of luck failed t...

I have always challenged Eirwen, my narcissist ne plus ultra mother. And as we often must when dealing with a narcissist, I have fought to be my own whale shark rather than that pilot fish mooching along at the shark's gills. NB - we have Royal Marines Commando, Stacks, to thank for that analogy. Eirwen was unreasonable, raging, physically violent. I read and reread E.B White's classic  Charlotte's Web . One teatime Eirwen, leering, simpering, was telling family friend Connie 'Practically Bedridden' Presland how Charlotte famously spun words into her web. 'Words such as "splendid", Connie, and - ' 'No,' I said. 'Charlotte spins "Some Pig", "Terrific", "Radiant" and "Humble"…' Connie's features shrunk on my behalf. Eirwen shouted at me, 'I'll thank you, you snivelling fatso, not to question your elders and betters about something I spent my hard earned money on buying you in the f...

     RIP Terence David Edwards 6/10/39 - 9/01/26    Country Singer, beloved husband of, father of...et al.  This happening has pushed my 'stop' button.  Sometime in 2019, due to dementia Terry (I always called my father that) forgot who I was. He was absent so much of my life I can't latch onto anything that showed he ever really knew. People said we had a voice in common. They're saying it again now. Eirwen, my mother, always clarified, 'Sadly, Iestyn, you inherited your voice from Terry's side of the family, not from mine. I had my vocal cords officially looked at, and, apparently, they were pure operatic. Terry's were more for the folk clubs and the country and western.' It's a lottery, singing. It all comes down to the little flaps of skin slung across your windpipe. Eirwen's flaps were Fortnum and Mason, Terry's flaps were Poundland. But still he had a residency at The Nashville, West Kensington compering bills that included Slim Whitman...

I went out to look for what I thought must be - judging from its tracks in the snow - a one-legged pigeon. Or at least a hopping pigeon, with an injured foot too painful to walk on.  After a few minutes, I clicked that pigeons walk...er...clue's in the description... pigeon-toed. Which is what this two-legged pigeon must have been doing, in semi-circles on the paving slabs near the incinerator bin.  On the other hand, everything on the apple tree this morning was still. The white cat watching me. The crows in the higher branches. The blackbirds beside their respective apples.  The two apples, on different branches, have their flesh exposed. I've seen the blackbirds return day by day to convulsively munch their way through them. Whereas today, the birds were just sitting, looking at things, listening for things, being.  Because that's what nature decrees for this time of the year. She isn't running on our calendar. She's still, sullen, cold, inner, waiting to start h...

Do we ban AI or embrace it so enthusiastically we end up with sphincter burns? We know it rapes the planet but still we use it. Will it render us obsolete in the work place? I could be resting in smugness here because I might just keep my job - recent feedback from my talk, My Tutu Went AWOL!, said, ‘Well, AI certainly couldn’t replicate this man’s work!’ Though as my talk is about my tours of the military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan in the guise of Madame Galina Ballet Star Galactica, a Sugar Plum Fairy wannabe with a missing dance partner, who she must replace from a selection of likely candidates pressganged onstage from the paying audience, possibly nobody would wish to replicate my work. Might a nuanced rather than an either/or approach to our use of AI be a thing? Let’s agree to rein-in personal use. Not creating more CO2 in the atmosphere in a year than does Delhi posting photographs of ourselves transformed into beetroots wearing Santa costumes; making hyper-realistic porn i...

 

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