58 Scene
ROGER’S RUMINATIONS
TWISTED GILDED GHETTO
Living dangerously
Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus
) Naturally everyone enjoys a walk on the wild side even if it’s just a stroll round the park. Obviously we all need fresh air and some gentle exercise from time to time. But let’s not get carried away. There is a huge industry trying to tempt us outdoors to spend money on new clothes, shoes and hats. Not to mention the guide books and maps.
) St David’s Day was my original experience of the transformative power of donning a costume. My fundamental inkling that an amazing outfit would change who you were – magically. People would act differently, be charmed and amazed and this would give you power and freedom to do things usually not allowed. Admittedly being dressed as a leek by my smouldering Aunt Olga is not Drag Race quality (although a quick dip into H&M or hot gluing paper bags to your ass is setting a low bar…) but that green felt costume, with white crepe paper decorations, was my introduction to the quivering, magical potential of ‘Dressing Up’.
BY ROGER WHEELER
Climbing mountains has always been very popular; the adrenaline rush must be quite something. They call it a sport but it’s a pretty dangerous one. You can face falling rocks, ice, avalanches, crevasses, and the dangers from altitude and sudden changes in weather. Quite why climbers should want to put their lives at risk for no apparent reason is quite worrying. Do they ever give a thought to the mountain rescue teams that have to go and bring them down? There are actual queues to climb Everest. The price for a standard climb ranges from £20,000 to £62,000. A fully custom climb will run to over £84,000. Sounds great, I’ll think about it, but there will be a television programme to save me the trouble. The guardians of almost every famous mountain now want large sums to allow you to risk life and limb to climb it. They say it’s a challenge and exciting, I simply don’t understand.
Today there are plenty of people who are making money from wandering around and disturbing nature. All except of course St David Attenborough, who stated the whole thing off many years ago undoubtedly for the best of scientific reasons and has now become a national treasure. But this genre has turned into a television monster with dozens of attractive, young, mainly male presenters trekking to some extremely inaccessible parts of the world to bring their daring deeds to your sitting room. On most nights there is at least one television programme featuring acres of rolling hills or arid deserts, so you can sit in the comfort of your own home and look and admire and think how lucky you are not to actually be there. Never mind about the many wild animals intent on doing them harm. Of course sex outdoors can be fun, if only for the possibility of being seen. We found a meadow once in, what we thought was, the middle of nowhere, and so started to enjoy ourselves. Within a few minutes the 2.15 Brighton to Southampton trundled past about 20 feet away, we hadn’t noticed the railway line. If they had been looking, the passengers wouldn’t have been the least surprised. Ben Fogle’s television series New Lives in the Wild is enough to put anyone off ever leaving their house. We have always said that it’s great having all that lovely countryside so close, we can go and look at it anytime and then come home. We are constantly told that regular exercise results in a healthy mind and body, you can get both by simply resting quietly and thinking nice thoughts. The call of the wild? It should keep quiet.
BY ERIC PAGE
My Aunt Olga, Russian, magnetic with her waist-length thick black hair, ample bosom and ability to drink anyone under the table at the Oddfellow’s Arms, was very popular in the village most of my family lived in. My parents had moved across to the Ebbw Valley, another world in those days, so our visits to her childhood home, where my grandparents and aunts lived, was always a big day out. Olga had fallen in love when she met my uncle in Libya when they were both working on water pipelines. She’d married him then they chose to live in Pontnewydd and Olga, from the Ural Mountains just outside Yekaterinburg, instantly fell in love with slate grey, damp South Wales, and most of Wales with her. Having been brought up in the Soviet Union she could do everything – weld, tango, backcomb, butcher, brick lay, type and play anything which was put in front of her. My grandmother Ivy called her ‘that lovely raven tornado’. She had toured the USSR playing in an orchestra and also making costumes for the cast and adored making sophisticated outfits for my sisters and I. My St David’s Day leek costume was exceptional, with long starched green felt leaves wrapping up and around my head, my green face poking out from a hole in their curved leaves, which she’d made to look like a caterpillar had nibbled, which I also wore as a knitted moustache. The white crepe paper body of the costume, combined with a daringly long white fringe as the roots, borrowed from her fandango ballgown, combined to make me feel the best Welsh Vegetable in the Valleys. She’d embroidered ‘Cymru am byth’ – Wales forever – on the back, in the 70s a seriously shocking and daring thing to do. Welsh had been suppressed for many years, not taught in schools and was only spoken by my grandmother’s generation. To wear it was provocative, Olga knew that but having married into the Cymru and being fiercely anti-colonial and hating the English for their mono-cultural dismissal of our much older culture had been learning Welsh herself. She already spoke a half dozen languages, including Mongolian and Arabic, so that wasn’t a challenge. Olga not only made the leek costume, but with a plate of huge chocolate ginger biscuits spent an hour teaching me how to Be Leek, Think Leek, to ‘feel the power of the leek in your blood’ while my father looked on disapprovingly, surreptitiously checking out her breasts in her push-up bra. After an hour I was ready to wear and Be Leek, an essential symbol of the Cymru and somewhat confusingly connected to Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus. Now when I put any kind of costume or drag on and feel that electric transformative power surge through me, I remember Olga, standing back, smiling at little Eric-da-Leek-boyo, pushing an extra chocolate ginger into the secret pocket she’d stitched into the costume and telling me as a leek I could do anything, that I would win the Ty-Sign Junior School costume competition (which I did), that I was powerful beyond belief behind the magical folds and fringes of my costume and to step out there, be exquisite and never explain.
