Monthly Archives: January 2024

Manchester United survive FA Cup scare against Newport County

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It wasn’t to be. Lowly Newport County came back from 2-0 down against footballing royalty Manchester United, but it was the Premier League side that will play in the fifth round of the FA Cup next month, winning 2-4 at Rodney Parade, Newport.

Photo via eBay

Perhaps justice was done. Almost half a century ago, the Manchester club gave Newport a helping hand in its fight for survival. Tommy Docherty’s side played a South Wales XI at Cardiff’s Ninian Park. I presume Dad went to the game, as I have a copy of the programme somewhere in the loft. As I blogged in 2013, County’s desperate plight in 1976 was headline news, and BBC Wales Today filmed the club chairman Cyril Rogers playing the piano (rather well, as I remember) to ease the stress of the survival battle. The Welsh X1 won 1-0, as the BBC noted this week, and Newport lived to play another day, narrowly losing a European Cup Winners Cup quarter final to Anderlecht five years later. But it was a case of fate postponed: County went bust in 1988, three years after my only visit to their old Somerton Park ground, when I saw them beat my team, Cardiff City, in a league cup tie. (I started my very first job, in Newport, the previous day.)

Newport County was reborn soon after that 1989 collapse, but the Football Association of Wales forced them to play their games in a different country. The FAW reasoned that it they wanted to play in the English league they should play in England. So the phoenix club had to play its home games in, of all places, Moreton-in-Marsh, an English town better known for its Cotswold charms than football. Eventually, as the BBC reported this weekend, County won a High Court case against the FAW, after the judge concluded that the FAW’s imposition of exile was “unlawful and an unreasonable restraint of trade”. This BBC report explains how County’s rebirth was down to one man, David Hando, the club president who died last year.

He would have been thrilled so see his beloved club give Manchester United such a scare.

It’s a story that even Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, Hollywood owners of Welsh rivals Wrexham, might have found too far-fetched…

No longer sharing my thoughts with my dad…

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When I started blogging 18 years ago I chose a tagline: ‘Rob Skinner shares his thoughts with the world’. Then I reflected that seemed rather boastful – the world wouldn’t care what I thought. So I added a tongue in cheek qualification. The final line read, ‘Rob Skinner shares his thoughts with the world – or his dad’.

It proved a fair reflection of my limited audience. Dad and I often discussed my blogposts, and I was delighted when he started his own blog as the first Covid-19 lockdown began in 2020. (We later turned that into a Kindle book, as the BBC reported.) One of his own last blogposts, the month before he died, about cinema, was prompted by my reflections on childhood cinemas.

After Dad died last February, I occasionally thought the old tagline was poignant rather than apt. But I was reluctant to remove it. But now, 11 months after Dad passed away, and a year after that father and son blogging double act, seems the right time to do so.

Dad (Bob Skinner) in 2005 outside the house he moved to when war broke out in 1939

Like most people who have lost a parent, I miss the chance to ask Dad a question about a hundred and one things. For example, when I blogged recently (Echoes of 1939) about his evacuation from London to stay with his aunt in Splott, Cardiff, at the outbreak of the second world war, I realised I had no idea how he got to Cardiff. Train? Coach? Alone or with his mother? Sadly, I will never know. But I have a lifetime of memories, not to mention Dad’s written memories and archives.

PS: for the record, a screenshot of this post with the old tagline, before I retire it.

Postscript

Ahzio’s lovely comment on this post – that I should keep the tagline mentioning my father – prompted me to change it to a dedication to both Dad and Mum, former journalists who inspired my love of writing.

Giro Escape helmet: a safety risk

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You wear a bike helmet to keep safe. So it is a shock to find a faulty helmet design that could actually make things worse in a crash.

I bought a Giro Escape urban helmet in 2022. I wanted a lid with integrated lights for my weekly commute across London. After a few months, the strap came loose, and the helmet fell to the ground as I got to the office in the City of London.

Giro were very good, refunding me without quibble, and I bought a second Giro Escape, assuming the first helmet had a manufacturing fault. I loved the fit and the bright LED lights – just what I needed cycling home along dark country lanes after getting off the London train.

Yet after six months the same thing happened to the replacement. As I set off on my commute the helmet felt very loose, and I wondered how I could have forgotten to do it up. Then I found the two sides of the buckle were firmly attached: it was the strap that had come loose.

I contacted Giro, and was surprised by its response:

This is not something we have had reported to us often, especially 2 in a row for the same customer.
 
We would recommend that you reattach the clip and set the strap to the correct length. A small stitch through the loose part of the strap may stop this from happening.

Giro customer support by email, 16 january 2024

In other words, we expect you to redesign our helmet to make it safe to use.

To be fair, when I pointed out how unreasonable this response was Giro quickly agreed to refund me. But my second incident showed the dangerous design fault in the Giro Escape helmet. If I bought a third helmet, the same thing would happen again.

The fatal flaw

Let me explain the fault. The right side Escape strap is attached to the buckle by a very loose rectangle of soft plastic. It simply isn’t secure or tight enough to stop the strap working its way out of this loop and detaching from the buckle. I have made a video showing how easily this happens:

Within a day, another Escape user commented that they had exactly the same problem.

I then discovered that the design flaw isn’t restricted to Giro’s Escape helmets. It had recalled Merit helmets in North America, Australia and New Zealand because, in Giro’s words, quoted by BikeRadar, “the helmet strap may detach from the helmet when “pulled with relatively little force, posing a risk of injury to the user in a crash”. That’s exactly what happened to my two Escape helmets, happily without a crash.

So, Giro, how long are you going to continue selling the unsafe Escape helmet?


My Dad and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas

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My father Bob Skinner with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, 1977

I was delighted to discover this photo of my late father with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, one of the most illustrious Welshmen of the twentieth century.

Wynford was a wonderful broadcaster and writer. His first prominent role was as the BBC’s Welsh language commentator at the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) in 1937.

His most famous broadcast was from a Lancaster bomber on a raid on Berlin in 1943, an experience he told Michael Parkinson in 1981 was “the most terrifying eight hours I’ve spent in my life”. Like his BBC contemporary John Arlott, Vaughan-Thomas had an almost poetic way with words, which isn’t surprising given he was taught by Dylan Thomas’s father. He recalled that burning Berlin was “the most beautifully horrible sight I’ve ever seen, like watching someone throwing jewellery on black velvet, winking rubies, sparkling diamonds, all coming up at you.” He went on to compare the Berlin searchlights with the tentacles of an octopus.

The BBC radio programme Archive on 4 devoted an intriguing episode in 2013 to the raid with audio from the original 1943 broadcast, Vaughan-Thomas’s recollections and most movingly the memories of a survivor of the raid who was a Berlin schoolgirl in 1943. She tells how her mother risked death by going back into their collapsing home to rescue her teddy bear. Her interview brought to mind the terrible human cost of the Allied – and German – bombing raids of the second world war.

When I rediscovered the photo that opens this blogpost amongst Dad’s photo collection. I assumed that it was taken at an Institute of Public Relations dinner during the time Bob was chairman pf the IPR (now CIPR) Wales group in the 1970s. Sure enough, I found confirmation in a box file of Dad’s speeches and articles: the notes of the speech he gave that night:

“The champagne voice of Wales” – how apt!

Bob wrote a short history of the IPR in Wales in 1995, which was launched at an event in (I think) Newport. It includes this photo, which shows that my mother Rosemary also attended, and that the dinner with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas took place in November 1977, a day before Dad’s 51st birthday. Arwyn Owen, seen in the photo above, who ran PR for Welsh Brewers, kindly supported my application to join the IPR in 1990.

Wynford Vaughan-Thomas was a leading figure in Welsh broadcasting, and was one of the founders of Harlech Television (HTV, now ITV Wales). Not long before he died in 1987 he co-presented a wonderful television history of Wales, The Dragon Has Two Tongues. His sparring partner was the equally loquacious Gwyn A Williams, and over 13 episodes the two Welshmen argued passionately about the interpretation of the past. By common consent Williams won the debate, and Vaughan-Thomas was reduced at one point to dismiss his fellow presenter as “a Marxist magpie”.

Sadly this entertaining series has never been repeated in Wales for copyright reasons, although it has been broadcast in Ireland. It was accompanied by two contrasting histories, Wales: a History by Wynford, and When Was Wales? by Alf.

Memories of McGuirk’s tea rooms, Wicklow Mountains

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McGuirk’s tea rooms, 1996

Little did I know when I popped into McGuirk’s tea rooms on a 1996 cycling tour from Dublin to Rosslare that I was entering an Irish institution.

I was intrigued by the old-fashioned sign, and the Morris Minor parked outside. (I’ve always had a soft spot for the classic 1948 car.) I enjoyed a pot of tea and snack before continuing over the old military road (the R115) towards Laragh and Glendalough via the intriguingly named Sally Gap.

The route was opened in the early 19th century to enable the British army to subdue any future insurrections after the Irish rebellion of 1798. I cycled from Dublin, climbing out of the city on my audax bike. I was very lucky with the August weather – warm and sunny – but sensed that it would be a wild ride in a storm, especially as the summit is the highest paved public road in Ireland at 523 metres (1,715 feet).

I was following a scenic route to Rosslare in Brendan Walsh’s Irish Cycling Guide, and found it a delight. I hoped to stay in historic Glendalough, just off the military road, but couldn’t get a room there, and stayed at Laragh instead. By coincidence I bumped into people I worked with at the pub that evening.

Over the following days, I enjoyed making my way down the coast to Rosslare, staying at Courtown and then getting the ferry back to Wales. I carried on my bike the colours of Wexford’s hurling team, who were about to win the all-Ireland hurling championship. Wexford was en-fête when I stayed there on my way up to Dublin to start my cycle tour, and I got into the party spirit. I even bought a t-shirt with the legend What’s the Glory, Martin Storey?, twisting the title of that year’s Oasis hit with the name of Wexford’s captain.

But back to McGuirk’s tea rooms. It obviously made an impression on me as I still remember the name 28 years on. Sadly, it has long since closed down, but an internet search shows what a legendary place it was. A new book, Tales from a Wicklow Tea Room 1898 – 1960 by Michael Fewer explains how the author found eight volumes of the cafe’s visitor book, which featured signatures and comments by many influential Irish people, including the founder of Sinn Féin Arthur Griffith, playwright JM Synge, and the journalist and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien. This lonely building had become a famed meeting place for writers, poets, artists, politicians and lawyers.

Judging from this Google Maps image, the old team rooms are now a private house. For such a legendary place it’s curious that there’s so little about it online, apart from Michael Fewer’s recent book. I wonder if the residents are aware that their home once hosted some of the most famous names in 20th century Irish society?

Our repeatedly faulty Apple AirPods

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Are we just unlucky?

When my Apple AirPods Pro started playing up, I blamed Microsoft Teams. (An online search suggested compatibility problems.) Then I was told I sounded like a different person on a call. And I got a painful feedback noise when I used them.

Undaunted, I bought a pair of AirPods for my son for his birthday. But he soon reported that he couldn’t hear anything in one of the pods when listening to music or videos.

We took his pods into an Apple store in Orlando, Florida, when on holiday last August, and were delighted when Apple replaced them – although, as they were barely a month old, I expected no less. Yet within two months the new ones were playing up in the same way. I got them replaced at another Apple store – this time in Newcastle Upon Tyne – but the same fault emerged, again in under two months. This time I demanded a refund rather than a third replacement. Giving Apple one last chance, I bought a set of new AirPods Pro for Owen, telling him if it happened again we’d go for a more reliable rival product. Apple also replaced my faulty three year old AirPods Pro at the same time.

Were we unlucky? It seems not. Friends in Switzerland tell me they’ve had three sets of AirPods replaced and have now switched to Shokz headphones, which I also recommend. (They’re brilliant for cycling, as you can hear approaching traffic as well as your music.)

AirPods are ubiquitous, but you’d think it in Apple’s interest to solve the inherent problem that we have experienced rather than keep replacing faulty ones.

Battling the English language

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The English language is constantly changing. New words and phrases reflect evolving lifestyles and new technology. Back in 2000 no one had heard of the words podcast, vape or selfie – or the phrases post-truth or carbon footprint.

Some changes are more subtle. Take this headline in a column on 7 January 2024 from the Observer’s chief political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley. Until recently the headline would have talked about fighting, not battling, the Tories. But now the verb ‘to fight’ seems in terminal decline, at least outside the literal context of a street brawl. It’s a classic example of a noun becoming a verb.

I confess to feeling irritated by the verbal triumph of battle over fight. Yet I don’t bat an eyelid at hoovering or Googling, or reading that a strike is impacting commuters – and countless other examples of nouns becoming verbs. The difference, I think, is that ‘to battle’ has become almost ubiquitous in place of ‘to fight’. It is a linguistic example of groupthink, which is surprisingly common amongst professional writers and communicators. People who dislike a phrase often find themselves using it once it has grown commonplace.

Here’s another example, from The Times (Robert Lee, 22 December 2023). In the past, reporters would have written that ‘Britain and Brussels agreed to delay’… But for some reason the simple word ‘agree’ was usurped by the phrase ‘signed off’. In time even that was seen as too simple and became ‘signed off on‘. It’s hard to see any reason for this. In the past, sub editors would have ruthlessly cut any superfluous words. No longer. Executing [a plan or strategy] is now executing on. That extra word is completely unnecessary: pure padding.

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Echoes of 1939

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Some years are associated with tragedy and the horror of war. For example,1914: the year the lamps went out all over Europe (in the poignant words of Sir Edward Grey) at the start of the Great War; 1916: the year of the cataclysmic battle of the Somme. And in Wales 1966: the year of the tragedy of Aberfan.

Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport

Over the past few days, I have been reflecting on another of those ill-starred years: 1939. Yesterday, we went to the cinema to see One Life, the brilliant film about the life of Sir Nicholas Winton, who played a key role in saving 669 children from the murderous Nazis in Czechoslovakia. He helped arrange for them to be brought to Britain in the spring and summer of 1939. Tragically, the very last Kindertransport train was halted on 1 September 1939 after Hitler invaded neighbouring Poland. The 250 children on board, so close to salvation, were seized by Nazi thugs, and only two survived the war.

The film is heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure. Heartbreaking because it highlights the agonies that so many people, especially the Jewish people of Europe, suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and because we are so aware that similar hatred is causing misery once more, especially in the Middle East and Ukraine. But heartwarming because good people like Nicky Winton, his mother Barbara, Doreen Warriner, Marie Schmolka, Martin Blake, Beatrice Wellington and Trevor Chadwick went to extraordinary lengths and (for those in Prague) considerable personal danger to save others. It was especially poignant to see the recreated scenes at Prague’s railway station as parents waved off their children, knowing they themselves would probably never see them again.

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Cycling into 2024

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Memories of 2023: the Portugal End to End

As another year begins, I’m looking forward to new cycling adventures, including my first bike tour in Ireland since 1996, and my longest ever ride.

But first, a few reflections of my cycling year in 2023. Life events (notably the death of my father aged 96 in February) meant I didn’t get out on the bike as much as I’d have liked. But I beat 2022’s modest total of 2,278 miles: my very wet ride on New Year’s Eve brought the total to 2,648.

As I recounted at the time, those early months were a struggle, as the weather in the weeks after Dad died was awful, and I was also struggling with a persistent throat infection. It wasn’t the best training for a very hilly cycle tour of Portugal, but I coped, helped by Goldilocks weather: almost perfect temperatures after the end of an Iberian heatwave a couple of weeks before we arrived.

The Tâmega valley

I fell in love with Portugal during our 11 day adventure. (You can read my day by day account of the tour starting here.) As always, Peak Tours arranged a wonderful route, which was a perfect introduction to this special country. The first five days were very hilly, and my lack of training showed on the steeper, longer climbs. But I loved the stunning Douro valley, followed by the quirky hill towns of Monsanto and Marvão. And the Portuguese people were delightful hosts.

Marvellous Marvão

It was a special moment when we reached the Atlantic coast at Tavira in the far south of Portugal, after a freewheeling descent from the mountains. It was my second ‘end to end’, after Land’s End to John O’Groats – but a lot hotter and drier! If you are interested in the tour, you can find out more on the Peak Tours website here.

Back to Ireland in 2024

I’m really looking forward to cycling in Ireland again in 2024, 50 years since my first visit, with Mum and Dad in a lilac Hillman Imp. Back in 1996 I cycled solo from Dublin to Rosslare (for the ferry home to Wales), and loved the quiet roads and magnificent scenery, especially over the old military road over the Wicklow mountains south of the capital. (I smiled to find a Morris Minor parked outside Mrs McGuirk’s tea rooms near Sally Gap.)

My 2024 trip is another Peak Tours holiday, from Mizen Head in the south west to Malin Head in County Donegal. We’ll be staying one night in Lahinch, a small coastal town that I remember from 1974, where we bought a bar of Irish chocolate. (Human memory is a remarkable thing…) I imagine Dad had chosen the scenic, coastal route between stays at Ryan motels in Galway and Limerick. I am sure Lahinch has changed in the past half century, as Ireland has cleverly carved a prosperous living since joining the (now) European Union the year before that first visit. I just hope that the weather is kind – but will be prepared for the worst the wild Atlantic can throw at us!

Cycling to Wales – and back

I should be better trained for Ireland than last year’s Portuguese tour, as the previous month I will be taking part in London Wales London, a 400 kilometre ‘audax’ endurance ride. The name is slightly misleading as the start is almost on my Buckinghamshire doorstep in the village of Chalfont St Peter. (But you can hear the traffic on the M25 London orbital motorway from St Peter, so it’s not too misleading.) The ride does enter Wales, briefly, at Chepstow, before heading back into England over the old Severn Bridge.

Crossing the Severn Bridge into England, 2013

It will be my longest ever bike ride, more than twice as far as my previous 103 mile record, so I will need to train my body for the challenge. And my mind – cycling over 250 miles in 27 hours will require resilience, and the ability to keep going no matter what setbacks come my way. I’ve already started keeping a list of the things to take and things to do in preparation.

I’ll report on these and other 2024 adventures in the coming months.