So this week I’m doing work experience on the Edinburgh Evening News, and having a great time. They have a big shiny building near Holyrood Palace with a terrifyingly open-plan atrium. Here it is by night.
Johnston Press in Edinburgh
The Princess Royal cuts the ribbon on a new welfare office for families of soldiers at Dreghorn Barracks
The city is a lot colder than Cardiff. My fingers are still recovering. And why? Because today I shadowed a reporter on a royal visit by Princess Anne. In ten years on the job, it was her first royal story. The reporter, not the Princess. And in one day here, it became mine.
The main lesson to be learnt (and the reason I’m still cold) is this: reporting diary events takes a long time. A really long time. First order of the afternoon was to wait on a slab of tarmac at Dreghorn Barracks. Following this, we waited in a car through traffic to nearby military housing. We then waited in the brand spanking new Welfare Centre. Finally, we waited while the princess arrived, cut the ribbon on the place and took a tour, because if we didn’t have cameras we weren’t allowed in (it was too small). Then she left and we talked to people about what she was like. Good thing I’m all new-media then. Just check out the pics.
But what was odder was that it was just another story. A nice one, too. I met people like Jemma Joyce, 38, who has lived in military accommodation in the city for four months. Her husband, Major Paul Joyce, was serving in Ireland when their eldest daughter Hermione was born. The newly-revamped centre is there to provide support and a mug of tea on those long, lonely days.
She said: “A newborn baby doesn’t really notice. But when they’re three and five like they are now, it’s harder. When Paul’s out there he misses the home comforts – home cooking, putting your feet up in front of the telly. But it’s the milestones too, the little things people take for granted like first steps and starting school.”
Expect updates throughout the week. Today a princess – by Friday an interview with a monarch. That’s not too ambitious, right?
The Princess Royal takes some flowers from a young girl, Lily
Merry Christmas everyone! Our course ends today and tomorrow I begin a long trek to Edinburgh to work on the Evening News. Until then, enjoy our pub podcast. By me and James Franklin.
Carol services, for Christians, are a time to celebrate new life. But after a while, it becomes easy to forget what this really means.
This was not the case for the congregation at the Church of St John the Baptist, Cardiff last Tuesday. They were there to give thanks for organ donation.
Singers from Côr Aelwyd y Waun Ddyfal
As the youthful crowd fumbled over Welsh versions of old hymns and shifted in their pews, choirs and celebrities from all over South Wales came together to acknowledge their struggle.
BBC TV presenter Sian Lloyd gives a reading
Singing in Welsh
Away in a Manger (I Orwedd Mewn Preseb)
I orwedd mewn presed rhoed Crëwr y byd,
Nid oedd ar ei gyfer na gwely na chrud;
Y sêr oedd yn syllu ar dlws faban Mair
Yn cysgu yn dawel ar wely o wair
Tryd, lesu, i’m hymyl, ac aros o hyd
I’m caru a’m gwylio tra fwyf yn y byd;
Bendithia blant bychain pob gwald a phob iaith
A dwg ni i’th gwmni ar derfyn ein taith
Many of the congregation, such as 31-year old Cardiff University medical student Allison John, are only alive and well because of their families. The kidney she received in 2006 from her dad David, 60, was the fifth major organ she had replaced. It put her in the record books, with the most major organ transplants for a British woman – she had already had trouble with her liver, heart, and both her lungs.
Five-time transplant recipient Allison John, at home with her dog Rocky
Talking about her experience is gruelling. Just telling the story takes nearly an hour. She said: “I think the only reason I got through it was because I had very strong people around me. My mum and dad are very positive. I had a reason to want to fight.”
Allison John talks about her experiences.Music: Côr Aelwyd y Waun Ddyfal and Alun Rhys-Jenkins.
The service was curated by the charity Kidney Wales. Founded in 1967 to spearhead research into renal (kidney) failure, its team of five full-time staff now run the charity out of an office in Cowbridge Road East, Canton.
Over 1,600 kidneys have already been donated in the UK since 1 April this year, according to statistics by UK Transplant. Yet only around half of those eligible are registered donors, and there are nearly 7,000 people still waiting for a kidney.
Singers from Côr Aelwyd y Waun Ddyfal
Nearly all of them are on dialysis, a lengthy process which takes away a lot of the freedoms of a normal life. A machine is used to perform the vital task of ‘cleaning’ the blood which a diseased kidney cannot do.
Chris Connell, 34, has worked for the charity since he came to Cardiff University to study five years ago. He said: ”As I was about to leave, I got involved with the charity to do a little bit of volunteer work. And before I knew it, I was a full-time member of staff.”
He said: “I chose them because they were Christmassy – and everybody loves them. The most important thing of all was that it was for a great cause. It was a great night and thankfully I think they managed to sell quite a lot of tickets as well.”
But the most emotional moment of the night came when two young transplant recipients went up to speak. Robert Edwards, 14, and Lewis Akrill, 15, each had a kidney replaced when they were younger.
Young kidney patients Lewis Akrill (left) and Robert Edwards (right) give a speech at the service
Fifteen-year-old Lewis, from Caerphilly, plays hockey constantly – only because he is not allowed on the rugby pitch. Mum Tracey, 37, gave him one of her kidneys when he was just 10 years old.
She said: “He was sent home from school with stomach pains, but the GP couldn’t see him straight away. It was September 2003. I’m not a neurotic mum, but I decided to follow the receptionist’s advice and take him to A & E.
“When we got there, Lewis was running around the hospital. The pain was gone and I was thinking, ‘I’m wasting their time here’. But then they took him for a scan. They discovered his kidneys had not developed since he was born. As he was growing, they were failing.
“It was like somebody had punched me. Later, Lewis said something that no parent wants their kid to say. He sat with us on the settee and looked at us and said: ‘Am I going to die?’”
Fifteen-year-old Lewis Akrill thanks his mother for a kidney she donated to him five years ago
Mrs Akrill was able to donate a kidney to her son, with help from the charity. He made a full recovery, and two months ago, he even went to do his school work experience at the charity. He said: “It was brilliant. I loved every minute of it.”
But he wants to be a physiotherapist, or a paramedic. He would even like to be a doctor for kidney patients.
“That would be something cool,” he said. “I could tell them exactly what it was like because I have been through it.
“I just tell everyone straight up really. They don’t ask at school any more. But if I make a new friend, I tell them exactly what I have been through.”
You all know what it is. Sir Peter Viggers’s duck house was iconic, and at the centre of the only event in recent history that’s made journalists more trusted than politicians, surveys say.
But the fact it was a great scoop is not the only reason this story was good for journalism. It also made use of a technique already well in place in the US – Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR).
I first heard about this while on work experience for the Times in 2008. While Heather Brooke was quietly slogging to get the MPs’ expenses published (before they got leaked to the Telegraph – she must have been gutted), I sat in on a lecture from a very excitable journalist who’d just been working in small-town USA.
He raved about hyperlocal sites like this one in Portland, Oregon. But his point wasn’t that they gave local information. What he loved was how sites like these could deliver information. By delivering the raw information on the local community, and making it searchable.
All this is CAR. Give people the information: then all race through it to find the stories. It’s difficult. It requires maths – oh God.
From XKCD, a very good, very geeky comics site
And most of all, it takes time. Why else did the expenses scandal take so long to come out? Why did the front pages span across months? The cynical will say ‘to sell papers’.
But the truth is more pathetic than that really. It took so long because the information, whether on a leaked CD-ROM or official (redacted) documents, took hundreds of work experience minions like myself forever to shift through.
I was in the audience earlier this year for this edition of Question Time (below). The video isn’t online, unfortunately, but the most interesting part of the show was when Lib Dem MP Ed Davey waved his expenses documents in the air, and said his local paper was publishing them – unredacted – with his permission. A local organisation opening up local information for local people to scrutinise. Isn’t that what news was always meant to be?
On Friday, through a mixture of luck and illegal drugs (joking), I passed my 100wpm shorthand exam, making me an automatic figure of hate in our class. But before I did so, I made this video about how much I love it. Hope you enjoy.
Dan Bloom – Why I love Teeline shorthand
I thought you might like to see the efforts of some of my colleagues, too. The best video gets a bottle of bubbly – our tutor’s idea of getting a spirit of competition going. Who deserves that prize Cava?
Three facts for you, which will get their context later:
1. Many journalists, particularly older journalists, have been renowned alcoholics.
2. Like defence lawyers, hacks need to alter their style and tone to whoever they’re writing for.
3. The British press, with its clear tabloid/broadsheet distinction, is one of the greatest proponents of our stiff class system.
Now let’s begin.
Columnist Alexander Chancellor
Back when I was one of those Guardian-readers, I used to go for the weekly G2 column (left-wing) by former Spectator editor (right-wing) Alexander Chancellor.
So how surprised was I to see his Daily Mail column today complaining about the police – who should be “fighting violent crime or terrorism” – who took away his licence for being pissed as a fart at the wheel?
I always thought he was a bit of a grumpy-old-man, and enjoyed it. So I’m trying to blame the article’s tone and message on the fact it was published in the Mail. This one by him in the Guardian a few weeks ago, for instance, makes similar points but does it in a less hard-on-the-ears way.
Yet even I was shocked to read this article, and the offensive class assumptions that underpinned it. He starts by justifying his being “well over the limit” by giving it a nice, Daily Mail middle-class tint:
I’d been to a Sunday lunch birthday celebration in the country near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire and got a flat tyre driving home to Northamptonshire in the afternoon. While waiting at the side of the road for the AA, I dozed off at the wheel and a passing member of the public called the police.
What’s wrong with that, dear reader? For a start, he couldn’t change a flat tyre. But that’s not the point. The point is he so firmly believes he’s not part of the crime classes, he shouldn’t be punished, as a later paragraph shows:
After a while, the policeman reappeared and asked if I would like something to read. When I said ‘Yes, thank you’, he gave me a couple of explicit pornographic magazines. Is failing the breath test now seen as evidence of depravity in every area of life?
Failing a drug test is not like failing an exam. You have to commit a crime in order to do it. His claim that drink-drive deaths are only a “fraction of the total” is hopeless – they are that way because of the way the police crack down on boozers.
But the real sting is his cavalier selfishness. As if 11 months without a licence, higher insurance premiums and three hours in a cell would be too great a punishment for putting the lives of innocents in danger.
Whether you’re drinking red wine or white lightning, the crime is the same. And the more sure the person is in their convictions, the more likely they are to reoffend. Should we expect this guy – who tries to cut to below three wine bottles a week, and can’t – to change?
Last week’s online journalism lecture was by Rob Andrews of paid-for advice site paidcontent.org – just as Johnston Press makes the news for introducing paywalls on stories likeGuide dog is Heanor woman’s lifeline – Premium Article! (I haven’t linked to it. Guess why.)
What he showed us was a depressing array of statistics about paywalls. It seems like the comments on this pro-paid content piece by Tim Luckhurst in the Guardian, which I actually lost some sleep and sweated a lot over, do reflect public opinion. A poll of 1,800 consumers found 91% of people don’t want to pay for their news. 72% want to pay less than £10 a year if given the choice. And newspapers are making a third less than this time last year. That’slast year. Recession year.
I met up with a good friend on Thursday and he said, “So what’s the deal with newspapers then?” It was then I realised the truth of what Rob Andrews, and all our previous lecturers, have been telling us. We, the twentysomethings, are the ones who have to work it out. And fast.
Rob Andrews, digital guru, and kitten: proof of what the internet holds
So what tips do I have for the next generation? Am I going to save news, singlehandedly? Not quite. But I do have three not-quite-original ideas which could help soften the eventual blow.
1) Stats change. At the moment, only 9% of people say they’ll pay for news. But polls like this are misleading. Say to me: “Would you like to give me some money,” and there isn’t anywhere near a 9% chance I’ll say yes. Nobody wants to pay for anything. But the market might force it on them, just as it’s forcing it on us. If the Times goes behind a wall, others will follow.
Even the Guardian, big shouty standard-bearers of free (gratis) speech, might go too. Last Friday I asked Peter Preston, its editor for 20 years, when it would cave. His answer was: “Thankfully, I don’t have to have a say on that any more”. And as perceptions change, so do the number of people resisting. Just look at Itunes.
2) Ads could be better. This was a recurring theme among comments on the Guardian article (see above). Not a surprise – as Guardian ads particularly are the least targeted on Earth. Most are for Guardian-sponsored events. They need to take a leaf out of the big book of Facebook, which offers me (‘Interested In Men’) extremely targeted ads – ‘M2M Dating in Cardiff’, 50 times a day, anyone? While it’s extremely irritating, bills need to be paid. I’m sure even the ivory-tower (and trust-funded) Guardian could stoop that low. Software analysing peoples’ reading habits would be a piece of cake to build, and wouldn’t be Big Brother, yet.
3) Lure people back to paper. Nobody’s so tech-savvy they don’t still appreciate the beauty of a paper copy. It’s just too much effort, that’s all. So make it easier. The single ray of light in those surveys was 48% of people would pay for online news if it included a free or discounted paper subscription. Hello! I think this is people trying to tell us something. You need more brand loyalty than ever to do this – but it would be worth a try. And the possibility of keeping half the readers? That’s better than anyone’s daring to dream.
Apart from the Queen’s Speech, the golden hour on Christmas Day is when that steaming turkey comes out the oven.
But Cardiff’s veggies and vegans share a different story. The nut roast is the classic staple, but it doesn’t give you the same sense of wholesome satisfaction. You can’t baste a nut roast. You can’t pour its own juices over itself. You can’t put your hand right up it and stuff it with oranges.
Instead, making it feels more like baking a slightly unsatisfying fruitcake. You have to roll up your sleeves and get right into a mixing bowl instead of watching it spit in the pan.
Nut Roast. Yum.
So how can you escape these dry recipes? How can vegetarians use a centrepiece that matches a turkey, but without the ethical worries?
Ten million turkeys are slaughtered for Christmas each year in the UK, according to DEFRA. While wild turkeys can live up to 10 years, those in farms are fattened up and killed when they are up to just 26 weeks old – some as young as eight weeks.
So going veggie or vegan, even if just for the day, is a good idea. But you’ll need to be clued up on how to cook something decent first.
Take some tips from Wayne Thomas. The 44-year-old chef from Llanharry runs the Canteen on Clifton Street, one of Cardiff’s only Western-style veggie-friendly restaurants.
The Canteen was set up as a café in 2007, and with unusual menus that change every three weeks, it is a haven for veggies and vegans. Tables for two back straight onto the tiny kitchen in which Wayne and business partner Tony Thomas, 44, do their work.
It feels like being cooked for by your two cheeky middle-aged brothers. The pair don’t bother turning tables, so come the end of service at around 10pm they step out the kitchen, throw their aprons aside and interrogate the guests. Beware if you didn’t finish your gnocchi.
Chef Wayne Thomas demonstrates vegan pasta
This year’s Christmas menu begins tomorrow and mixes restaurant favourites with an alternative Christmas choice.
The new dish is a mushroom pithivier with cashew nuts. It’s a savoury, earthy vegan pie which mixes conventional nut roast flavours with the Britishness and all-round smile factor of a good hearty pie.
If you’re vegan, a good puff pastry is still easy to achieve. Just substitute egg with potato starch to bind the mixture, and if you still want that eggy taste in your dough, try putting in yeast flakes. This small dried foodstuff is a good flavour substitute and is sold by most specialists.
The restaurant is no stranger to weird flavour combinations. Dishes on the Christmas menu include cheese gougères (pastry balls) with spicy cheese and chocolate mole, and Christmas pudding soufflé.
Wayne said: “You do the same thing week after week after week, so it gets incredibly boring. The customers like it. We’ve been called ‘esoteric’ by one fella!
“We do use the name for the dish rather than the anglicised version of it. But it does mean we’ve got names wrong on the menu – people go home and look them up on the web. And we’re not beyond making up the occasional word.”
When Wayne goes home to his carnivore family at Christmas, he takes the back seat cooking the vegetables. But he does like to experiment, he says, and he has even cooked the infamous “tofurkey” – a huge lump of tofu made to taste like meat.
While this sounds about as appealing as a huge lump of tofu, this meat-cheat could go down well as your centrepiece, especially if someone in the house will be eating meat this holiday. Just put the two side by side and join in the fun.
“You get a load of tofu,” he said. “If you’re not vegan, mix it up with a bit of egg. Roll it onto a piece of cling film and put a traditional stuffing in there.
“Roll it over itself, then wrap it up so it’s watertight and poach it for a quarter of an hour to set the proteins. Unwrap it once it cools and you can treat it just like turkey. It goes well with an onion gravy.”
To get a more meaty texture, try using wheat gluten, used to improve the gluten content of British flours. Mix it with water to make a paste called seitan, a great protein source, which you can then mix with the tofu to take off the rubbery edge.
The Canteen on Clifton Street
The Canteen is always making interesting veggie food, and it is not Cardiff’s only decent vegetarian restaurant – but the problem is, many of the city’s full-size eateries run along an Asian-fusion theme. Curries and daals are not the best bet for that big centrepiece on the dinner table.
But if you do fancy an unusual Gujarati snack to start off your feast, take some tips from the family-run Vegetarian Food Studio in Penarth Road.
Wales’ only fully vegetarian Indian restaurant runs as a café in the daytime. Locals buy huge cartons of fried goods like their homemade Bombay Mix and chatter away under cheerful Hindu decorations.
The number of dishes on the menu will top 200 in the new year, and 28-year-old chef Neil Patel, who lives with his wife in Sully, near Barry, won’t be slowing down soon.
He said: “We started with 42 recipes, on a small A5 page. Now our menu is pages and pages long. But people like the old stuff, so we keep it in to please everybody.”
And for a great alternative snack he recommends masala dosa, a rice and lentil pancake that’s vegan-friendly. The mix is a different animal to British styles of cooking, with the starches from the rice, instead of milk or butter, fermenting to make the mix creamy.
Soak rice and black lentils together in water overnight then blend them to a paste in the morning. Leave this to ferment for three days at room temperature. Ladle the mix onto a hot griddle pan just like a normal pancake, and eat on its own or filled with curry or daal.
Canteen on Clifton Street
40 Clifton Street, CF24 1LR029 2045 4999Three-course meal for two, with wine (bottle): £40.
Vegetarian Food Studio
109 Penarth Road, CF11 6JT029 2023 8222Three-course thali meal for two, with soft drinks: £15. £7 students (take-away)
RECIPE
Mushroom, cashew nut and tarragon pithivier with mushroom, chive and parsley sauce
Originally from the Canteen on Clifton Street
1 ¼ hrs preparation (including soaking and chilling)20 minutes cooking timeServes 21 small onion1 egg, mixed with a small amount of water (or potato starches)250g Mushrooms, a mix of button and wild varieties100g cashew nuts, ground50g breadcrumbsPinches of fresh parsley, tarragon and lemon thymeVegan puff pastry mix (found in most specialist shops)
Soak the wild mushrooms in a little warm water for 20 minutes. Drain and keep the water aside.
Shallow fry the onion in olive oil until pale. Add the chopped button mushrooms, followed by the wild mushrooms, stirring gently.
Reduce the water used to soak the mushrooms in a separate pan until syrupy. Add to the mushroom mix, cooking until all moisture has evaporated.
Add the herbs and season with salt, pepper and tamari or soy sauce.
Allow to cool, then place in a blender and blend. Leave some lumpier bits.
Add the breadcrumbs and cashew nuts until you have a filling that is easily mouldable.
Roll out the puff pastry until about 1in thick and cut two rounds, the about 6in and the second about 5in across.
Take a handful of the filling and mould into a disk about 3in across. Place this onto the 5in pastry, placing the larger one on top and using the egg wash to stick the two halves together. The enclosed pie should resemble a flat-topped hill. Score a pattern in to top, being careful not to cut through the pastry, and cover the whole pie with egg wash.
Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes and preheat the oven to 200C.
Back to copying and pasting at last! Commuters Britain-wide will have seen this in the Metro today, about a snake who ate himself. The poor animal was kept in a space that may have been too small, meaning in his desperation he saw his own tail and thought it was another snake. The tail tip was about to be digested by the time the vet unclamped his jaws.
This reminded me with warm feelings of the Darwin Awards, a glorious, wonderful site featuring people who have eliminated themselves from the evolutionary chain. ‘Natural deselection’ it’s called.
Ew. But normally I have some issues with this stance. Could be something to do with the childhood lectures around the dinner table. Whatever their effect, I strongly feel animals shouldn’t be paraded around for our entertainment, just because they can’t speak for themselves.
Well – usually. I think in a case like this, an animal which knows that little of its arse from its elbow(!) shouldn’t really need to complain. And it’s only being paraded as much as a human who would do the same thing. Just look at world’s heaviest man Paul Mason in the Sun.
In fact, in my opinion, the real discrimination would be if poor Loopy Reggie wasn’t allowed to enter the Darwin awards. Not that it would win. People have done far stupider things than a snake ever could.
A woman who was brutally raped by a convicted killer after he was released early from prison lashed out today at the minimum nine-year jail term handed to him.
Many former coal mining areas remain among the most deprived in England despite more than £600 million of government support for community and regeneration projects, the National Audit Office (NAO) has said.
Scientists have unlocked the DNA secrets of two of the deadliest forms of cancer. The breakthrough could lead to 'bespoke' treatments tailored for individual patients, as well as better detection.
The 'urgent care' phone number will be set up for sick patients to ease pressure on ambulances, despite fears it could cause confusion and even delay life-saving treatments.
The Office for National Statistics said reclassification of banks including Lloyds Banking Group helped fuel an extra 23,000 workers joining the public sector.
The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police gave his full support to the investigation that led to the arrest of a Tory frontbencher then rapidly withdrew it when controversy erupted, a former senior officer has claimed.
African nations have reduced their demands for compensation from rich countries for the impact of climate change and suggested a compromise that could lead to an historic agreement at the Copenhagen summit.
Snowfalls of up to 20cm (8in) deep are expected over Suffolk, Essex, Kent and Sussex this evening and tomorrow, the Met Office said as it issued a severe weather warning. There will be lighter drifts over East London.
Pakistan’s top court struck down a controversial amnesty deal yesterday that has protected President Zardari and his allies from corruption charges, deepening the country’s political turmoil as it battles Islamic militants.
The complete genetic codes of two human cancers have been mapped for the first time. The move could herald a medical revolution in which every tumour can be targeted with personalised therapy.
