Boats
Water waiting
Sticky stranded seals
Cold as frozen rope
As abandoned as the night
Netted masts under skull shell sky
Breathless blood, salty seagull mud
Beached boats, beached boats
Sardine stained wood
Hollow hope
Boats
Taken from Dave Lewis’s first poetry book – ‘Layer Cake‘.
Filed under Poems
How refreshing it was today to hear that the wealthy south-east have water shortages, whilst we in Wales, the north and Scotland do not!
London Mayor and complete bastard Boris Johnson has offered his fascist take on things by saying ‘…use the principle of gravity to bring surplus rain from the mountains to irrigate and refresh the breadbasket of the country in the South and East’.
No Boris! If you want our water then you can buy it! I’m thinking about 1p a litre plus £1.35 tax – the same price we have to pay for petrol maybe?
Frankly, I thing this Tory loudmouth has a cheek to ask the sodden and jobless people of the ‘wet’ areas of the UK to help repair the damage that his idol Meryl Streep did when she sold off the ‘water’ to foreign companies under her massive privatisation share scam in the 1980′s.
Of course, London could just use less water. Not everyone needs a swimming pool, sauna & jacuzzi after a hard day in the city do they?
Anyway, the problem of drought is not going away. Currently, swathes of the country from Lincolnshire to England’s south coast are either officially in drought or heading towards it, depending on the next few months’ weather. In some places, extraction of water from rivers, lakes and aquifers is already judged by the Environment Agency to be beyond what is sustainable.
But, Thames Water is Australian owned, so what do they care?
One aspect of the situation that is often ignored is this: people live elsewhere in the world with a lot less water than southern England receives and in London alone leakage accounts for a quarter of all demand!
Bloody great I say! About time the people from the south-east realised ‘we’re all in this together’ 
Filed under Columns
Made my first poetry collection – ‘Layer Cake‘ – available FREE on Amazon kindle yesterday and within a few hours it made the Top 10 - Wow!
More on my books here.
Filed under Uncategorized
St. David’s Day –
Eve has two daffodils
one for her doll
the seagulls battle
with the gale
until they agree with it
students of the East
walking
through the green wood
Filed under Poems
It seems everyone is talking about bankers (with a capital W) and their bonuses this week, so here’s my take on it all. Firstly, everyone is keeping on about a million pounds here or a million pounds there and we all say ‘Yeh, it’s too much etc.’ without really thinking about how much that actually is.
So, let’s compare two jobs. One pays minimum wage (i.e. the sort of job the posh school educated CEO of a bank would be doing if he hadn’t gone to said posh school), we’ll say £5 an hour. He (or she) works 40 hours a week. So, that’s £200 a week, or £10,000 a year. Now lets compare it to a typical top bankers package. He (it’s always a he) gets £2 million a year, which at 40 hours a week is roughly £40,000 a week or £1000 an hour. Now those are figures we can relate to!
But come on, let’s be honest, as all these ‘experts’ keep saying ‘It’s such a difficult job‘ and ‘They work so hard‘. So it must follow then that these ‘experts’ must also believe that all other jobs, like nurses, fireman, teacher etc. must be ‘easy jobs’ and ‘the people don’t work hard’.
And yes, I suppose we’d all have to agree. I mean running a bank – an organisation which has literally millions of people running up to you (day and night, even when you’re shut) and giving you their ‘not-so-hard-earned’ cash to gamble on the horses, opps, sorry, stock market, is just such a difficult job. Oh, how do these bankers sleep with all that cash blocking their path to the Slumberland?!
Compare this difficult job with the ‘easy’ job of being a heart surgeon. I mean, that’s child’s play. You turn up to work, a nurse thrusts a scalpel in your hand, you slit someone open, grab a heart (make sure it’s the right way up), slap it in, connect up those fiddly little blood vessels and Bob’s still your uncle, not a corpse.
And a fireman, dragging the burnt remains of children from houses whilst they are still clutching their teddy bears, ah such an easy job that one. Not like being a banker!
Of course I blame Blair, because whilst pretending to be a socialist he actually presided over a greater widening of social mobility in Britain than occured under Thatcher! So until we abolish the class system, and create a country where real talent and hard work is rewarded, the bankers, footballers, royalty and media-created celebrities will continue to laugh all the way to their country homes.
Filed under Columns
I used to be a member of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, you name it. If it involved pretty girls in baggy sweaters, lentils and tree hugging I was in! But since graduating I’ve been far less active, or have I? I turn off my energy efficient lights, I’ve sold my car, I hardly ever watch TV (why would I?) and put on jumpers in winter to save on the gas bill but all these things are as part of earning too little amidst rising energy costs as they are part of my green intentions.
Reducing our carbon footprint to combat climate change seems like a good thing to do even though it’s probably sun spots that we really need to worry about. Yet most people believe it’s all about denying ourselves fun, i.e. less shopping, less travel etc. but I don’t think it has to be that way and believe many changes should come from government and local authority first.
For a start let’s forget Al Gore and his nine inconvenient untruths (High Court,London, 2007), his huge global business empire and his own mansion that uses more electricity in a month than the average American household uses in a year!
We need to reinvent our towns, redesigning the way they work and changing the way we live. Many towns import their energy, most of it not green. The trick is to harness and capture the energy that is already there from the Sun, ground and air, and create local energy distribution systems.
Firstly, the buildings of today will be around for many, many years, so it’s their energy performance that must change. Keeping an even temperature inside a building means insulating them, so there should be grants or local tax incentives available to help people green their homes?
Homeowners are more sensitive to energy costs because they have to pay for them directly. But office buildings are sometimes shockingly energy-inefficient and wasteful. Have you ever wondered how ‘green’ that new primary school is, the new multi-storey car park, new supermarket or offices in town? Are they using windmills or solar panels?
Secondly, how do we get to work or go shopping? Car sharing schemes anyone? Cutting private car use generally means civic leaders being prepared to risk a few brave decisions. For example, when a new suburb was built in the German city ofFreiburg, they ran a tram service from the moment the first resident moved in. This meant empty trams at first, but now nearly half of its residents are car free. Do you have a genuine transport choice in your area?
Is it just as cheap and convenient to go by bus, tram and local train as it is by car? Until it is, heavy traffic will continue to put people off walking and cycling, which are healthiest and greenest. And why aren’t new road developments built with proper, safe cycle lanes alongside?
Thirdly, what about hugging trees? Well, first off we need trees to hug. Are lots more big trees being planted? Are acres of new allotments available for us to grow our own or are local councils looking to sell them off to housing developers? Are parks and other green spaces being properly maintained?
Greenery is critical to counterbalance urban heat from hotter summers, when night-time temperatures remain high because of heat retained by brick and tarmac. Plants only cool the air if they stay green, which means capturing heavy winter downpours instead of letting them just flood the drains.
Talking of water, storage solutions can be cunningly disguised as beautiful water features. And greening a place properly includes the roofs. InSheffield, even bus shelters have green roofs to filter pollution.
There will be something else common to all truly sustainable towns: they will be more prosperous than unsustainable ones. This is because carbon emissions are only one sign of the inefficient way in which natural resources are being used.
As resources dwindle, economic pressure will grow to use them more wisely. Future-proofing a town means creating the markets for green businesses and green technologies, and designing the space and facilities to support them. In a well-designed, sustainable city, most residents believe their progress is linked to its future.
If you are on a low income, you may have little choice about where you live. So with fuel prices soaring, you want to live somewhere served by affordable public transport. You want your local authority to help with home insulation, and invest in local green energy which will protect you from perennial price hikes.
Whether you are looking at London leading on congestion charging, or San Francisco leading on solar power or recycling, it is clear that strong civic leadership matters most of all. We need that kind of vision, backed by serious investment, when it comes to planning and managing the towns of tomorrow. Why isn’t it happening in Wales? Ask a politician to explain.
And remember, making people proud of where they live cuts crime and makes people happier too.
Filed under Columns
It seems that London’s famous landmark, Big Ben, is leaning. And unlike either the Labour or Tory parties, to the left as well
Not to be outdone by those clever little marketing gurus from Pisa it seems that our very own construction workers have been hard at work undermining the foundations of the Palace of Westminster with an underground multi-storey car park and extensions to the Jubilee line.
There was a slight panic when Professor Burland of Imperial College said the lean should not be a big worry for at least ’10,000 years’ but it seems he forgot that global warming will have killed us all by then and London will be well and truly flooded.
So, what best to do? Personally, I’d love to see parliment building and a leaning Big Ben sinking into the Thames but only if we can make sure it is full to capacity with politicians when this happens and all the doors are locked.
Now that spectacle would certainly generate more tourists than Italy gets!
Filed under Uncategorized
Salmon-pink
city of the living
teeming, steaming, shimmering
mottled mint tea afternoons
shade seeking shade
arch beyond arch, ‘neath
a cobalt sky
shell-brown beauties
hidden behind black
creep closer, venture on
Past cropped jewels
pale olive
skin craving sunshine
until bats burst
and cobras are
bagged
the signal
for end of shift
and fires grow
and smoke fills the air
and passers-by
can only stand and stare
for a thousand thousand years
or more
Taken from Dave Lewis’s third book – ‘Sawing Fallen Logs For Ladybird Houses‘.
Filed under Poems
When I buy a lottery ticket I do so because I want to win the lottery. Plain and simple. But whilst I know funding from lottery cash goes to various projects around the country I’m only vaguely aware of the ‘work’ that my money does.
Today, yet another news story gave me some insightful information. Five projects across Wales will share in £1,376,049 of the Lottery Fund’s BIG Innovation programme, which aims to specifically support projects that test new ways of tackling social problems. OK, sounds great until you look at what your money is wasted on.
One study is to be carried out over concerns that students in Wales are turning to prostitution to pay for their education. Swansea University’s £489,143 grant will enable it to conduct a study into how many students are now working in the sex industry in Wales and to try to find out why (I won’t say with money like that they could become part of the problem).
Anyway, I’ll tell you ‘why’ without doing any ‘research’ at all. They do it to earn a shed load of money to buy stuff the media tells them they want. And the excuse they’ll use will be ‘to pay my rising student fees’. Right, can I have the £489,143 now please?
Another project, the Ethnic Youth Support Team (also in Swansea) has been given a grant of £169,616 to run the Think Project, which will develop new ways of working with the most disengaged young white people in Wales. The project aims to respond to the challenges posed by the growing presence of far-right extremism in the UK and Europe, and the ‘growing normalisation of racist rhetoric, attitudes and behaviour at the local and national level’.
Mmm? Well firstly, I blame any ‘growing attitudes or behaviours’ on the heaps of politically correct crap we have to endure every day. The BBC, the radio, the news, magazines. Everywhere you turn someone is calling us all racists just ‘cos we stand on the cracks in the pavement.
OK, try this. ‘Oi you bunch of lazy b******s who didn’t listen in school or appreciate the free education you got or the wonderful teachers who tried to help you, get a life, stop moaning or blaming shit on black, fat or ginger people and get a job’. How’s that? Can I have my £169,616 now please?
Yet another super-rich charity, Barnardo’s, has been given £265,572 to develop standardised assessment tools for use with teenage girls who have engaged in sexually harmful behaviour towards others. OK, I give up, what is a standardized assessment tool?
And this one really takes the nicotine flavoured biscuit! Ash Wales has received £197,272 to create an interactive site on Facebook and establish a Twitter page to give young people information about the dangers of smoking.
Now this is fantastic! I’ll do both of those things for them in half and hour so that would put me on £394,544 per hour and make me richer than Rooney!
And finally, Sight Support has been given funding of £254,446 to create a referral contact centre for people with a visual impairment in Wales. Again… how about we use the existing charities and government agencies we already have doing this already?
Is it me or is the only way to make any money in this upside down country these days to work for a charity and get some bright spark to write an impressive ‘bullshit application’ to the lottery or other funding agency?
Right, here’s an idea, how about we get ‘the most disengaged young white people in Wales’ (I’ll be one if I can) to use the cash to teach others how to fill out a lottery grant funding application form and then we’ll never be poor again. Sorted!
Meanwhile, other countries can make things.
Filed under Columns
Apparently, four out of five men confess to being unhappy about their body according to an online survey by Bristol Poly, and the biggest concerns were beer bellies and lack of muscles. Well I never?
Whilst 35% said they would trade a year of their life to achieve their ideal body weight or shape I feel I must point out to these people that because of their laziness, fondness for fatty food and copious amounts of lager that they may well have already lost 10 years off their lives already!
And shock, horror, the research also suggests that it is not just women who talk among themselves about their body image. No shit Sherlock! Men have been talking about their penises for millennia.
In England and the US for example, men have been asking is it too small and will she laugh, for ages. Of course, in Wales we’ve been wondering if it’s too big or how will she cope for the same time but that’s another story…
Anyway the study found the greatest issue men have is with their muscularity, with 60% saying that their arms, chests and stomachs were not muscular enough. Guess what? There is a gym down the road and in school you had PE lessons – remember?
Dr Philippa Diedrichs, who led the study said: “Body talk reinforces the unrealistic beauty ideal which reinforces leanness and muscularity.” But what she didn’t say was that with a little bit of effort, say 1 hour, 3 times a week in the gym and a healthy diet it certainly isn’t unrealistic!
She added that “This is traditionally seen as an issue for women but our research shows that men are feeling the pressure to conform too.” To which I’d respond with you get out what you put in. You feed your body crap and let it lie on a settee watching Big Brother or some other crap then it will respond by becoming a lard magnet. Oh the pressure, oh the pressure of just being a man! For Dawkins sake take responsibility!
She also went on to say “We need to take a collaborative approach to promoting an environment that values diversity in appearance and promotes healthy body image.” Yeh, that I would agree with. It’s no good every man being a fantastic muscle-bound sex god like us Welsh is it now? No, we need other races to devise silly surveys, write stupid reports and generally feel inadequate about themselves. Yo!
Right, where did I put my extra large tape measure? Oh yes, must have left it down the gym last night.
Sardis Road
For those that are interested, nay, rabid, passionate supporters of the greatest game on the planet, and live in Ponty and/or the valleys please find below an online petition which seeks to bring ‘proper’ regional rugby to Wales and top class rugby back to the largest population base / playing base in the country.
P.S. – you don’t have to pay, ignore that page 
Filed under Uncategorized
Happy New Year and Happy New You. Yes, it’s that time of year again when the serial dieters are out in force. All those people who made the same resolutions they broke after 2 weeks last year. The people who clog up the treadmill at the gym, the people who tell you they’re ‘on a diet’ ‘cos they overindulged so much at Christmas and they simply must get those extra few pounds off before Easter. Aaargghh! Give me strength. Strength not to smack them in the face with a banana for getting on my nerves with their constant moaning.
OK, maybe a little harsh, but how about this for a diet – don’t eat as much. There, easy. Can I have my million pounds now please?
And for the really technically minded out there, those who want to go that extra mile – if you want to lose weight, exercise more. Yes, every day or week or month, whatever, just as long as it’s more than you do now.
It’s not rocket science is it? Yet every year we are bombarded with the new celebrity diet for those of us so important we couldn’t possible consider putting in some effort ourselves. Oh, no, we need to buy the new book – ‘Eat Your Own Faeces and Lose Nine Stone in a Minute’ – a bestseller by some old has-been whose just had her stomach stapled after she downed a vat of lard over the festive period.
In Western Europe, sales of weight-loss products, excluding prescription medications, topped £900m ($1.4bn) in 2009, and in the weight-loss capital of the world – North America, a staggering $1.6bn (£1bn) a year was spent on weight-loss supplements.
OK, this next bit is sick, politically incorrect and I apologise lest I be accused of being a pissed fashion designer or a Hollywood Aussie. My great grandmother used to look at fat people who wanted to diet and say ‘There were no fat people in Belsen’. And guess what, she was right. The reason being they’re intake of calories was so low their bodies wasted away.
So here’s my bestseller, no not 300 pages, not even 1 page, just 1 sentence – ‘Eat a bit of everything (not your poo though), exercise 3 times a week (carrying heavy boxes of old dieting books to the skip is a good one) and weigh once a year’.
Right, I’m off to the chippie until the gym gets back to normal.
Filed under Columns
Photoshop drawing
a quiet afternoon
once in a lifetime
- Zanzibar turtle
Filed under Poems
off the rocky coast,
sipping salty beer
the wind grabs my gaze
and hauls me off
across the sea
past Ireland and America
while towing in my
mackerel line
for supper safe
in dunes
by camp fire
sleep
Taken from Dave Lewis’s third book – ‘Sawing Fallen Logs For Ladybird Houses‘.
Filed under Poems
Wow! Oh No! OMG! Stop the press!
When most of us get chest pains we put it down to indigestion, too many lagers or a rather hot curry and get on with things until we die on an NHS waiting list but not the ‘Iron Duke’, oh no. He gets flown to a specialist heart hospital by an RAF helicopter and has an immediate operation. He was due to go to Sandringham where he was looking forward to slaughtering some fluffy animals with his shotgun but that will have to wait now.
Meanwhile in Nigeria 50 people are dead after days of fighting, 6 are killed by a suicide bomber in Pakistan and Prince Philip has had an operation on his heart.
Libya has celebrated independence, thousands gather in Moscow amid fears of rigged elections and Prince Philip has had an operation on his heart.
Kim Jong-un is declared supreme leader and new nutter in charge of Nukes R Us, 44 people have died and 150 have been injured in Syria and Prince Philip has had an operation on his heart.
In sport today someone has called someone something nasty again on a football pitch and Prince Philip has had an operation on his heart.
Business news, see-sawing shares continue to make millions for those with millions and Prince Philip has had an operation on his heart.
The Queen will address the nation on Christmas Day but no-one will listen because they’ll already be fed up listening to the news that Prince Philip has had an operation on his heart.
What is it with this country that makes our media want to worship a racist benefit scrounger in this way?
Filed under Columns
Finally managed to publish my Facebook, cyber stalking, crime thriller, murder mystery, love story set in various locations around south Wales.
Ctrl-Alt-Delete is now available on Lulu.com as well as on Amazon kindle.
Plenty of great reviews (4* and 5*) on Amazon.co.uk page already but could always do with some more of course. Fingers crossed after Christmas (when everyone has a new kindle for a pressie) I’ll see a big increase in sales in order to buy me some time to write the second in the series Well, can only hope eh!
All I can say is if you like Wales, crime thrillers with a difference, black comedy, the internet, politically INcorrect heroes then you should enjoy this.
More here.
Happy Christmas.
Filed under Uncategorized
After spending $515 billion bombing, shooting, torturing and generally abusing millions of Iraqis the most hated country in the world finally announced that it is to leave Iraq to potential civil war this month, with a complete withdrawal by the end of the year. But the good news is that they only took 8 years (12 years unofficially) to lose this war and totally bugger up a country whereas they took 20 years to lose Vietnam.
Other facts worth mentioning might be the 4.7 million refugees created, the 100,000+ civilian casualties (possibly a million if you include the effect of sanctions prior to invasion) and the $13 billion arms deal signed with the new government.
OK, let’s not be biased. It wasn’t exactly a picnic in Iraq before the invasion when a tyrant like Saddam Hussein was in charge. The streets were safe to walk, the religious factions oppressed and Al Qaeda nowhere to be seen (unlike now) but oil to run Humvees was going up in price wasn’t it so it all made perfect sense to takeover Iraq and its oilfields if only as a means of controlling supply, protecting pipelines and ultimately the price of oil.
During their secret war with Iraq, Blair and Bush were happy to sell Saddam chemicals to gas the Kurds but when they realised someone might find out they decided to pretend to care, declare war on him, and let the Turks do it instead. But diplomacy is such a nice word eh?
Almost as crazy was the 50% of Americans that thought Iraq had something to do with the 11th September attacks! But rest assured that all’s well that ends well and words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘cup cakes‘ can again ring out from the world’s most powerful media liars while the Iraqi people now earn an average wage of $2 a day, if indeed they have a job at all. Oh yes, and President Obama can sleep well at night.
In fact Mr Obama has already been quick to praise the incredible achievements of US troops although he didn’t say for doing what (how could he?), while in Falluja, Iraqis celebrated the Americans leaving by burning the stars and stripes.
And so at this seasonal time of year I wonder what country is next on the hydrocarbon Christmas list? Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria or Algeria perhaps?
I wonder if people like Clinton, Blair, Bush, Cameron, Obama et al have a big fluffy chart with ticks against certain countries like Iraq (invasion, anarchy), Libya (anarchy?), Saudi Arabia (arms deals?), UAE (golf courses, tourism, military bases) or am I being cynical again?
Filed under Columns
Virginia creeper
painting rust
on the old grey locomotive
Pia mater, dura mater –
the clouds above my head
a trillion molecules of consciousness
killed by next door’s cat
while looking for worms -
The blackbird
the hush of bamboo
soothes the roar
of racing cars
Thrush on the ground –
the sycamore branch
still bobbing
Filed under Poems
…incongruous car
alien
shiny-red, carwash-clean
not the usual
sharp edges
not stolen, like glances
not abandoned, like puppies
not torched, like memories
not peeling, like marriage
not rusting, like opportunity
not dumped, like dreams
not burnt out, well…
his coat was left on a rock
overlooking the industrial estate
while drinkers and drivers
leave the Rose and Crown
past farms
and blissful sheep
his purple face
his bloated tongue
the hosepipe and
the kitchen knife and
the stomach wounds and
the shiny-red, blood
he stares at buzzards
catching hot air
from the engine
as the coppers
let the fumes out
they joke about it
concerned as cows
‘What a waste
of leather seats, ha ha’
before they drive home
to tea with the wife
‘Good day luv’?’
‘Aye, usual.’
Taken from Dave Lewis’s award-winning short story, prose & poetry collection – ‘Urban Birdsong‘.
Filed under Poems
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