Muxworthy's Musings

Hiraeth (Here-eyeth) is one of those words in Welsh that doesn’t have a specific equivalent translation into English. The nearest you can get is ‘Longing for ones home’ and frankly ‘Home-sickness’ really doesn’t come up to scratch. An example I remember being told of was an aunty of mine who had married and moved to the outskirts of London in the 1930’s and remained there for the rest of her life. When she was feeling particularly down and missing Wales she used to sit and watch the coaches going between London and Swansea on the off chance of seeing somebody she knew. Funnily enough this was something that I thought I was now immune from having now passed the point in time where I have lived in England longer than I ever lived in Wales. That was however until we went on holiday to South Wales this summer. We stayed on the edge of the Black Mountains and over the space of one week took in some of the most beautiful scenery the UK has to offer. To think this is the same scenery I gr...

When I was employed in the building industry, we were made very aware of the dangers of asbestos in buildings. Whenever it was discovered, it had to be removed by licenced contractors using specialist equipment. The alarming thing was that in its day it was hailed as a ‘wonder material’ and can be found in fireproofing, artex, fuse-boards, brake pads and even toilet cisterns. As I said it was hailed as a wonder material from its introduction in the 1870’s and with its dangers being noticed in the early 1900’s but only finally being banned in the UK in 1999. I have heard stories from people who were working on building sites in the 50’s and 60’s of it being sprayed onto steel beams without any protection for anyone on the site and it wasn’t uncommon to see workers throwing it at each other in snowball fights. All the time unaware to the danger of the tiny particles they were breathing in, slowly shredding the inside of their lungs, causing cancer and death by asbestosis many years lat...

There is some truth in the saying ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.’  When I first met my wife Penny she was working as the events coordinator at St Pauls Cathedral in London (you might have heard of it – big Wren building with a dome!). This in turn allowed me the privilege of going to some of the events she had organised as well as attending other functions. I will not bore you with a list, but more than a few of them involved royalty and the great and good of this land. I’ll be honest with you here and tell you that my upbringing was ordinary, the comprehensive school I attended supplied more people to be tried in the justice system than it ever did Oxbridge graduates. Consequently, I grew up with a that mindset people from Wales are sometimes accused of and that I was not good enough. Despite this, up to this moment in time I have to say the good has outweighed the bad, despite it not feeling like that from time to time. It was this skewed mindset that dogged me whe...

As you might know I hold a train driving licence. It was a very long hard slog to learn all the rules and regulations and ultimately pass my test to be allowed out on my own to drive passenger trains. During the practical side of this training, I was trained to drive during the dreaded leaf fall season. Yes, there have been many derisory comments made about the fact that a mere lot of leaves can wreak havoc with trains. Well, it’s nothing new, even the Rev Awdry wrote a story about it in his Thomas the Tank Engine series called ‘James and the leaves.’ The thing is that you have the two surfaces of polished metal in the wheel and the rail and then you add to that a collection of wet leaves. As the train runs over them it naturally squashes them and leaves behind an invisible residue which caused the wheels to lose traction. Trains have safety systems (one akin to ABS on a car) to mitigate against this as well as sending out specialist trains being sent out to clean the rails. So, how...

Proverbs 13 v12:  Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. I have just finished reading a book entitled The History of the Jews, it’s quite big book as it spans from Abram to the establishment of the state of Israel in the late 1940’s. One of the points the author makes early on is that outside of the Old Testament, Apocrypha and certain Jewish historians there is very little written history when compared with what we have for other civilisations of antiquity. The reason for this being the fact that because of the stateless nature of the Jews up until the 1940’s, added to the fact that because of persecution and being driven from various countries most history was learned orally with only the scriptures being written down. For me though the thing that comes through in this book is the fact that there have been many false messiahs in Jewish history, both before and after Jesus. This led me to consider the fact that when we look at the trial ...