Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, has died in the Netherlands aged 100.

She and other employees of Anne Frank’s father Otto supplied food to the family as they hid in a secret annex above the business premises in Amsterdam.

Anne’s diary of their life in hiding, which ended in betrayal, is one of the most famous records of the Holocaust.

It was rescued by Mrs Gies, who kept it safe until after the war.
……………….

I didn’t know what to say. The only thing I could manage was: ‘That ought to be interesting.’”

Mrs Gies also remembers the day the Franks were taken away and how she went up into the empty annex to find the pages of the diary lying on the floor.

Removing the pages, she did not read them immediately, telling herself at the time: “These may belong to a child, but even children have a right to privacy.”

Miep Gies died in a nursing home after suffering a fall just before Christmas.

source http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8453331.stm Date 12/ jan 2010

Farewell the man who told me I could do Art.

He wrote more than 30 plays including The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. His film scripts include The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

His style was so distinctive, “Pinteresque” entered the Oxford English Dictionary.

I loved some of his works.

One of the UK’s most celebrated writers – he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005 – as well as a respected stage director and actor, Harold Pinter’s influence on a generation of playwrights can be measured by the speed with which the word “Pinteresque” entered the vocabulary.

It was first coined in 1960 and, in the decades that followed, Pinter stamped his mark on the cultural and political scene as an observer of suburban brooding and as an irate iconoclast.

Born in Hackney, in London’s East End in 1930, Pinter suffered what he called “the pain of separation and fear of an uncertain future” when he was evacuated twice during World War II.

Attacked by fascists

He later spent an unhappy two terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

As confrontational in his youth as he would later be on stage, Pinter became a conscientious objector in 1949 and was fined for refusing to undergo National Service.

For a while, Pinter acted, under the stage-name David Baron, as well as writing. But when his play The Room had its debut in 1957, his long time friend, the director Henry Woolf, hailed it as the start of a new era in British theatre.

“The audience woke up from its polite cultural stupor and burst into unexpected life,” he said.

The Birthday Party soon followed, which despite initially poor reviews, was championed by Nöel Coward.

By the time The Caretaker, The Homecoming and The Betrayal had been performed, Pinter was celebrated for his distinctive way with words and embraced as a major modern talent.

Some of his plays were adapted for the big screen, and his screenplays for The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981 and Betrayal in 1983 both earned him Oscar nominations.

The scripts for The Servant (1962), and The Go-Between (1969) and The Comfort of Strangers (1990) were among his most celebrated works.

And he kept his acting skills polished, recently playing the seedy criminal Sam Ross in the 1997 film Mojo.

Pinter’s own words had as much impact as the ones he gave his characters.

He aimed his strong opinions at different targets over the years, including Nato’s bombing of Serbia, and more recently the US and UK’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the vice-president of the English branch of Pen, the worldwide association of writers, Pinter befriended the then Czech dissident Vaclav Havel and petitioned for the liberation of those writing under oppressive regimes. He fought fiercely for freedom of speech.

He was awarded a CBE in 1966, later turned down a knighthood and became a Companion of Honour, an exclusive award in the gift of the Sovereign, in 2002.

Criticised by some as a champagne socialist, Pinter sealed his movement from London’s East End to the heart of the establishment with his marriage to Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980.

A passionate advocate of unilateral nuclear disarmament, he spoke out againt US involvement in Central and South America and was a high-profile campaigner against torture.

In protest against a strike at the National Theatre in 1979, he once voted for Margaret Thatcher, an act he later described as the “most shameful of my life”.

But he kept quiet about his acrimonious first marriage, the death of his alcoholic ex-wife and his estrangement from his son.

As was true of his characters, the writer’s suffering was evident in his silences.

A rich life of words

In 2002, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and, after having undergone treatment, announced that he was on the road to recovery.

Three years later, he announced that he had given up writing for the theatre in order to concentrate on political work.

But in October 2005, a frail Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for uncovering “the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.

too ill to attend the award celebrations in Stockholm, he recorded the traditional laureate’s lecture at a London television studio.

Speaking from a wheelchair, a visibly ailing Pinter repeated his earlier call for George W Bush and Tony Blair to be prosecuted for war crimes over Iraq, meditated on death and gave a masterclass in writing.

“When we look into a mirror,” he said, “we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes.

“We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.”

While observers analysed his work in minute detail, Harold Pinter himself nursed a lifelong aversion to over-interpretation.

“I can sum up none of my plays. That is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did, he said.

I have my moods like anyone else, but my writing life has been, quite simply, one of relish, challenge and excitement.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1805113.stm

A fantastically comical, yet interesting insight into sheep farming in the snowdonia national park pre and during the wars.

It also covers there journey over the 14 13,00 mountains,  and is a great read.

Whilst trying to find the exact location of the farm on google, I came across this article.  dated 2005.

A Snowdonia hill farm made famous in a best-selling book has been acquired by a conservation body.

Dyffryn Mymbyr near Capel Curig was left to the National Trust in a bequest by hill farmer, Esmee Kirby.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_west/4215429.stm

Now why isnt it listed on the national trust web site as somewhere in gwynedd to visit?

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-property-searchresults_2.htm?type=region&target=10

Answers please. As I actually would love to go and see the place!

For more information on the walk, or to donate money, email Dawn at mcfc_76@hotmail.com

Hidden Lives Revealed provides an intriguing encounter with children who were in the care of The Children’s Society in late Victorian and early 20th Century Britain. Find out more

Its really very interesting!

Umm. The play area is currently out of use, so that was a disapoitment, but we went to llanberis for that instead.

It cost £4.50 to buy a pig to paint. Then you pay £1 to paint.

So that was £5.50 to paint a pig which I can buy 6 for £7.58  bakerross

Umm.. Will i be going again? Probably, as Asha enjoyed it.. but value for money? I dont feel it is. If the Play area had been working, and she had been offered the chance to paint a stone or do the pottery wheel I may be more positive about it, but we wernt.

The staff however on the whole were very friendly and helpfull. The cafe was clean and the coffee was o.k.

The DfT said from 2009, new biometric ID cards would be introduced for people who work airside in the country’s airports, “allowing an individual to be linked more securely to their own true identity, helping protect against crime, illegal immigration and terrorism”.

source BBC news- 20th july 08

Prison chiefs have dismissed renewed claims that a biometric identity system at a Scottish jail failed so badly it let inmates have a free run.

The issue was raised in a House of Lords exchange on biometric ID cards.

[Source: BBC News- 20th July 08 ]

The government has already spent £32m preparing for its ID card scheme even before it becomes law.

That means spending rose from £25,000 to £63,000 a day in the last six months of 2005, the Home Office said.

And now for the scarey stuff!

According to no2id,

To begin with you need to get them to come to you.

The government’s solution to that problem is to make

people report themselves when they get a passport.

As part of the creeping move to state identity control in Britain, ID interrogation centres are being set up all around the UK . To begin with there will be 69, on top of the existing Passport Offices. A company called Mapeley, which owns the offices of HM Revenue and Customs

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2263208.stm The Inland Revenue has confirmed that it sold its estate of more than 600 buildings to a company based in a tax haven, and admits it wrongly announced the properties were sold to a UK firm. ………..All are part of Bermuda-based Mapeley Holdings Limited, a company ultimately owned by George Soros and US group Fortress Investment)

(HMRC), was given the job of setting them up. Planning applications were mostly in by the end of 2006. Operations started tentatively in 2007, and by the beginning of 2008 over 50 centres were open.

from 2007 onwards when people as young as 16 apply for their first adult passport, they will* have to attend their nearest interrogation centre. There they will be subject to background checks, questioning to test their story against official records, photographs, and, before long, fingerprinting. Registration on the national ID database(s) – the ‘National Identity Register’ or NIR – will follow.

[Source: http://www.no2id.net/ Accessed July 2008]

Now consider this factor.

GP – medical records on database…

Social services records on data base

HMRC records on database.

Banking records on database.

Shopping records on database – tescos, clubcards

Some shops ask for postcodes when purchasing goods – pc world for vat recipts, Brantamo, for shoes. for example.

Leisure cards ownership = on database.

Library cards = on database.

Every book you purchase from a high street store, with credit cards, can be checked back.

If who you are becomes a problem, then so does your ID.

And I can go anywhere.

I’m a big white van,

And I go ZOOM

I’m a big white van

And I can go anywhere

I’m a big white van

And I’ve been to the moon.

My van is finally gone from my hands, and into a new world. Its done me proud, over 150,000 in three years. Only let me down a couple of times, and kept us all safe and sound.

Goodbye white van.

A search has been called off for a fisherman missing from a boat off the coast of Gwynedd.

The missing man was named locally as Maldwyn Jones, 60, from Nefyn. Coastguards said it is thought he was not wearing a lifejacket.

His boat was found empty on Monday after a relative spotted it going around in circles, off Trefor.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7372528.stm