Coronavirus diary, Wednesday 30 September

BBC Cymru Wales' new HQ, Central Square, Cardiff

I have just watched a programme on BBC Wales' new headquarters in Cardiff central square. Very impressive. All 'state of the art' technology, space and airiness, right in the heart of the city.

What a difference from more than 60 years ago when I started my very modest, short-lived  career in broadcasting.

Princess Margaret opens Broadcasting House, Llandaff, 1967

It was a few years before broadcasting in Wales moved on from being almost a cottage industry with the opening of Broadcasting Hose in the fields at Llandaff on the site of the demolished Baynton House mansion.

The BBC site in Llandaff

The original home was a rather elegant house in Park Place - I don't know if it had a title -  a few hundred yards from city hall.

No parking, as far as I can remember, although there was probably plenty of space in the road in those days. It might as well have been called Radio House as that was its main purpose.

The earliest BBC Wales television studio I remember was in a converted church in Broadway about two miles away.

The Park Place building was always bustling, its small, cramped, studios producing the daily news bulletins and even variety shows. 

I remember one radio - a variety show - from there featuring a man eating razor blades! You could hear him chomping.

Chain smoking Mai Jones, composer of the alternative Welsh anthem 'We'll keep a welcome in the hillside', was a key figure.  International rugby players flitted in and out of the 'sports department'.

My visits were for the evening news bulletin or News Extra, broadcast on Sunday mornings.

In those days BBC Wales had a tiny reporting staff, three I think, for the whole of Wales.

I was one of the freelances they relied on for news reports and short general interest pieces.

My area covered the Rhymney Valley where I was the South Wales Argus district reporter.

My first radio interview was with the manager of the recently opened aircraft engine maintenance works in Caerphilly.

I was given a bulky recording machine, told how to switch it on and off and was on my way.

The first of my few outings as a television reporter included a prelude to the Aberfan  disaster, the 'moving mountain of Blaina', when I stood, knee deep in black sludge interviewing a frightened housewife. 

I remember my first radio studio report - about an afforestation project on a Bedwas coal tip.

 I was quite proud of the intro - 'Did you know  there's a desert  in Monmouthshire?'.

I would sit alone in a studio, listening  to the newsreader, waiting nervously for my cue.  I concentrated on breathing steadily and getting the intro right. After the first sentence I was away.

There was no training, just one half-day listening to tapes of interviews that had gone embarrassingly wrong.

Laughable but worrying.

I was fortunate in having someone who gave me confidence, Tom Richards, BBC Wales news editor, a former news editor of the Western Mail.

On any Sunday morning I might get a call from him, 'Have you got a couple of minutes today, Bob?'. I would hurry down to Park Place.

The fee was a guinea a minute, two thirds if repeated on the BBC World Service.

When I gave up reporting he was kind enough to say he hoped the BBC would not be losing me.

Television reporting was more demanding. Not just me and my recorder but accompanied by a producer and cameraman. Interesting and I might have improved with practice. 

When the news bulletin ended we would gather at a pub next to the studios in Broadway for an inquest, a debriefing.

I had a lot to learn.

Then it was all over. I was a local government public relations officer. 

My first experience of robot broadcasting - an interview 'down the line' from a blank studio in London from Cardiff - was in 1971 when I was  appointed the city council's public relations officer and was asked how I would 'sell Cardiff'.

It was not the end of my links with the news.

Over the yeas I was interviewed many times, in studios and in the streets I began to enjoy it.

I never  thought that many years later I would be on Good Morning Britain talking about coronavirus.

Coronavirus diary, Tuesday 29 September

Stiff upper lip: Churchill inspires Londoners in the Blitz, 1940

What on earth is happening to Britain?  Where is our self esteem, our dignity, our once famous stiff upper lip mentality?

Killed by coronavirus, by the look of it.

This morning's headlines tell it all. Nothing but woe. Breast beating and wailing. 

Top news of the day - the pandemic - global death toll reaches one million.

Agonising, says the World Health Organisation.

Not a word of comfort or encouragement. No, 'Come on, we will  beat  this'.

Just wallow in it. And our colourless, faint hearted political leaders issue more warnings, more instructions.

We have assumed an unhealthy mawkishness about death.

The BBC news prides itself today on marshalling a whole battery of family tributes to those who have died in the pandemic. 

For days we have been hearing tributes for the equally tragic victims of the Grenfell Tower fire disaster. 

Sad of course, Tragic for the families, but, come on.

Life goes on.

This is no false bravado on my part, having learned I have been tested positive and am locked in my room for two weeks. 

There is no use moaning about it.

We have  always had to take the rough with the smooth in life and mine has been remarkably smooth.

I  have no complaints. I am grateful that I have been so fortunate, and still am. 

I don't want sympathy and I am so glad that my family realise this and give me such loving, unfussy support.

Life will get better, for everyone.

Let's look forward to that instead of moaning, grumbling and finding blame. Get on with life.

Coronavirus diary, Monday 28 September

Sir Harold Evans 1928-2020

With my lockdown giving me more time to sit and think I have been concentrating on my time as a reporter, brought back to me by the death of Harold Evans, hailed as one of the best ever journalists. 

Re reading his life story, I am struck by some of the similarities of our careers.

Not that they are truly comparable; his, meteoric, staying that way.

Mine fizzled out. But I do not regret that.

I went on to a different (and for me even more interesting career), and my experience made me appreciate the importance of accurate, honest, bold journalism, which he epitomised.

Harold Evans began as a teenage reporter on a paper in Ashton-under-Lyne in north west England in 1944.

By then I had been a reporter on the Penarth Times for over two years when I was called to army service.

He learned shorthand at a ladies college; I was taught in few weeks by a lecturer friend of my sister.

Neither of us had any reporting experience; we just wanted to get out and find news. He was paid £1 a week, I got 15 shillings, but money did not matter, we were on the first rung of the ladder.

In those days there was no formal training - the national scheme did not come until the 1950s.

We learned on the job as we walked the streets of our patch, Publication day - for me, Thursday - was  the day to savour, the result of our efforts. No by-lines  - by Harold Evans or by Bob Skinner - in those days. 

I still remember my first front page lead more than five years later.

Among my early day colleagues were five men and one women, Rosemary Preece (above, on reporting duties), who took over on the Penarth Times when I left.

We all went to evening classes at Cardiff Technical College with lessons by an English teacher, not a journalist. 

But all did well - all became national editors or reporters, leaving Rosemary and me to more modest roles. 

There were few women reporters in those days - the Western Mail had just one - and Rosemary might have had a successful career had she not married me.

Harold Evans's career prospered under the Canadian newspaper tycoon Roy Thomson, moving onwards and upwards until the pinnacle, his 14 years as editor of the Sunday Times, which he transformed. 

Those were in some ways the golden years for British journalism, especially investigative reporting, with lavish staffing, time and money to spend -  many years on the thalidomide scandal, broken by dogged, brave Harold Evans.

My efforts were on a totally different scale but life was enjoyable and rewarding as I developed freelancing for national agencies and newspapers, and became a regular broadcaster for BBC Wales and ITV.

After twenty years I decided to leave reporting for a new challenge - public relations, prompted by my interest in local government.

It was  bold and risky, but Rosemary agreed with me and for a time carried on our freelance and BBC work.

It proved the right move, giving me an unexpectedly exciting life with world travel and experiences for more than 40 years, ending with me as a Skinner Public Relations consultant, including a return to BBC work.

I do not miss reporting. I am relieved. In recent years standards in Britain have steadily declined in quality and honesty.

There is still some excellent journalism and reporters, but once influential papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express are a disgrace to their proprietors and to the reporters who write to order.

Harold Evans's career also took a different turn; after an unsuccessful years as editor of The Times under Rupert Murdoch, he moved to America where he founded Condé Naste Travel and became publisher of Random House. 

Quite a contrast with me although another similarity was that we both married reporters. Rosemary and my marriage lasted 66 years.

What would our life have been had I carried on in journalism? 

There were times when I might have gone on to higher things.

Ken Loveland, long serving editor of the South Wales Argus, asked me to leave the Rhymney Valley to be head reporter and a few years later to take over from him. But I preferred my reporting life.

Through all the years Rosemary gave up what could have been her own successful career, supporting me in everything I did. 

And I have many letters thanking and and praising her.

Our reporting life, so modest compared with Harold Evans's, was always interesting and worthwhile.

Coronavirus diary, Sunday 27 September

Life has changed suddenly, in a day. Yesterday I set out on a new, unknown period of life.

But has that not applied to any, every day in our lives?

We assume everything will be normal - what ever normality is. 

A busy day at work, a holiday trip, a quiet day at home with the family.

Life has always been uncertain and never more so than these past six months when any semblance of normality in everyone's life disappeared due to cororanavirus.

The difference in mine is not great, just a further shrinking. 

Sunrise, my home and my world, started diminishing with lockdown in March.

My last venture out of the building was when, huddled against the cold, I drove my scooter down to Roath Park around the lake and to Penylan library to borrow three books (I still have them and have tried to ring the library to ask what I should do with them).

Then onto Albany Road and my first shopping trip, an old fashioned  pleasure.

I have no idea when my next run out will be, but it certainly won't be for six months according to Mr Johnson.

I am confined to my flat, the Turret suite - how  glad I  am to have chosen it. I could not be more comfortable even in solitude.

Life would have been so different if I were alone in 18 Windsor Court.

I now have to get used to being alone all day, no one to talk to, except for the arrival of a carer - it looks as though it will be Alice who has been such a help to me - bringing meals.

I am continuing my daily routine; getting ready for the new day, tidying the flat, making the bed before having my breakfast.

I can even slow down on my normal leisurely pace but have plenty to do to keep me as busy as I want to be.

More time for reading - I have three books on the go including a Kindle thriller for nighttime, Harold Evans's My Paper Chase and Appeasing Hitler, both from Robert, my blog and music

Just time  for a nap in the afternoon. 

And time to look back, always a pleasure, and to look forward, like everyone, to a saner world. 

 

Coronavirus diary, September 26 (Part 1)

Nursing homes are back in the news and it is not good. 

Just when we were thinking we were getting out of the woods we are being struck by another wave. Disappointing to say the least, discouraging for us and for our families.

 After the welcome, if sporadic and strictly controlled visiting, the shutters are up again in Sunrise, for a month, after a second confirmed case among our carers.

The diary for the one-hour, garden visits was full with families anxious to see us. 

Karen's long and eagerly awaited trip from Buckinghamshire this week for a chat with me has been cancelled

That and the arrival of more normal autumn weather is a setback but we have to take it in our stride.

In Sunrise the carers are getting on with their job, as cheerful and helpful as ever, reassuring, softening the disappointment. 

It is still incomprehensible to have our lives on hold, almost like willing yourself to wake up from long dream.

However slim the risk it is a unique experience for all of us.

In all my years I think the only physical danger I have faced was in wartime with the blitz, in London and Cardiff, from 1940 to 1944.

My first experience was when, evacuated to my aunt Flo in Splott, Cardiff, bombs fell a few hundred yards along from our street, prompting my mother to recall me to London, just in  time for  the massive months-long bombardment that sent us down our shelter in the garden for weeks on end.

The last air raid I remember was the night before I sat my CWB examination at Cardiff High School in late June 1942

Long, noisy and dangerous nights, but strangely, as as a teenager I cannot remember feeling afraid and my family were the same.

Those years were some of my memorable experiences, almost all benign, so this pandemic, whether it ends in the hoped for six months or goes on even longer, will pass and life will  get back to normal. It needs patience. 

Coronavirus diary, Saturday 26 September (Part 2)

This is one diary entry I did not expect to make but the Sunrise luck has  run out.

After learning a few days ago that two carers had been tested positive Sunrise reintroduced restrictions in the hope it would end there. 

Unfortunately it has not. I was at the art class this morning when a few of us were asked to return to our rooms. 

That sounded ominous, and it was.

I was told that five residents had been tested positive.

I had expected to find that I was one of them as I have not been feeling too well for a few  days; a bad cold and a cough. 

A few hours later I was told that I was positive.

So it's all change. We are all confined to our rooms with a carer looking after us. 

Sunrise has almost shut down, the restaurant closed, activities suspended. What a shame. I feel sad after all the effort they have put in over the months, but there it is. We have to  put up with it.   

I am feeling pretty good which I hope will continue and I will make the best  of the temporary new life style. 

 A happier day at Sunrise!

Being alone most of the time does not worry me as I still  have plenty to keep me occupied. And it is no use worrying. Everything has been so uncertain for so long that a little  more uncertainty will do no harm.

I intend to carry on with the diary as I enjoy it so much. 

So much has changed since yesterday although I had an idea what was  coming as I wrote in what was to be today's diary. Here it is..........

Coronavirus diary, Friday 25 September

The most unsettling and bewildering of the government's efforts to slow down the second surge is the series of on and off decisions, often made with little notice.

The latest, the six months clamp down, has undone the good work done by businesses and organisations of all types and sizes trying  to  prevent a difficult situation becoming desperate.

The hospitality industry is in the worst position.

Hotels and pubs, at great expense, have done everything possible to comply with the rigid rules and, just as the public was feeling it was safe to go out, along comes a curfew, making it even harder for businesses to cover their costs let alone survive.

The very successful bargain meals scheme offered by the chancellor merely emphasised the gap between hope and reality of a reprieve.

Sport is equally hard hit. The ingenuity that has seen many sports preparing for the eerily silent stadiums to come back to life next month has been dashed. 

All types of sport are at risk, with soccer and its mass appeal in greatest danger.  

In the theatre world, the move back to live performances, despite expensive experiments to try to solve the health and audience numbers problem, has left the industry, especially the largest theatres, in limbo.

The government's £1.57m grant to arts and culture has been dismissed by the Theatres Trust as not nearly enough, as has the new jobs support scheme announced by the chancellor.

They say theatres, at 40 percent capacity, are not viable and that audiences of at least 70 percent are needed

Our lives, work and play, are becoming duller from the lack of  arts, entertainment and sport.

The government has an almost impossible task in finding a solution, striking a balance balance between our health and the economic well being of the nation.

They must realise that the lighter side of life is important and make more effort to encourage, not destroy it.