Of course, we’ve all seen the first ever motion picture ‘Train arrives at a station’. The plot is a bit simple. A train arrives. At a station. But did you know that the station in question was La Ciotat station ? That’s Bridgwater’s twin town in France. A first. And another first was the game of ‘Petanque’. Or ‘Boules’. That was ALSO invented in la Ciotat. And for the past 6 years we’ve held an international ‘Petanque’ tournament here in Bridgwater at Victoria Park where representatives (and locally based twinners) (well, mainly locally based twinners) from our twin towns turn up and play a major tournament.  The French won.

Continue reading “Extending the (Petanque) Hand of Friendship”

Following my extremely informative and balanced ReformUK Party article last week many people said to me ‘Bri, tell us more about your early footballing career for Llanallgo 10-year-olds on the island of Anglesey’. But instead, what I thought I’d do was take off any political hat I might be wearing and have a look…. from a historians perspective….which is what I am…at Bridgwater’s politics today.

From a totally neutral and unbiased perspective.

So, we’ll start with the bloody Tories.

Continue reading “That it should come to this…and how it did”

There’s a really telling photo on the front of the new ReformUk leaflet of Nigel Farage pointing at you and laughing. Never was there a more appropriate image. Reform tells you that ‘Britain is broken’. If it is then they broke it. The biggest single harm to Britain these past 20 years has been Brexit. The far right of British politics has morphed between different shape shifting entities over this time, back then it was UKIP, then it was the Brexit Party, now its Reform UK. They’re all the same point on the hard right of British politics and united by the crocodile smile of multi-millionaire commodities trader Nigel Farage who uses a party and its members until he’s got fed up with them and then changes to another one. Pointing at you….directly at YOU and laughing as he does it.

Continue reading “‘Reform’ then….Let’s have a think about this…”

According to the documentary  ‘What it’s like to die on every planet’, on Venus the extreme temperature and sulphuric acid clouds in the atmosphere would get you within 20 minutes, whilst on Mercury solar radiation will destroy your internal cooling system and you’ll collapse onto the planets burning surface within 15 minutes. But the worse by far is landing on Uranus. This colossal gas giant will devour you within 5 minutes. That’s if the hideous winds of Uranus don’t get you first.

Continue reading “Stranger Danger”

I expect it’s not a very common playground game these days but ‘British and Jerries’ was something we used to play at school. Then again it was the 1960’s and we were the generation that all had parents fight in the Second World War. And of course, there were still bomb sites from the Blitz that hadn’t been cleared or rebuilt on. One school ‘playtime’ I remember literally everyone picking sides and recreating the Normandy landings to the Battle of Arnhem in the space of 30 minutes. It was hard enough getting anyone to want to be the Germans and of course when we English suggested it to the Welsh kids they said ‘Get lost! We’re more British than you are’” And they were. Genetically, if not so evident by the lack of bright blue face paint.

Continue reading “So How Exactly Will We Remember Them…?”