#forever love wales

[bibleofficial]

met a VERY drunk welsh boy trying to find his way back into town & im SO happy for him as a person bc he’s … we were on the same page …. ENGLAND HATERS FOREVER

[queenkatescourt]

True love's kiss can break any curse ❤️

[thepastisalreadywritten]

💙🫶💙

[breitzbachbea]

I think my friends tend to forget that my Sophie lass is not a Human OC, but was originally conceptualized as Northern Ireland. And I think as I have been writing IP again, I actually inadvertently slip more and more into an overlap between her Hetaverse Nation counterpart and the LFLS AU character.

Not only is she plagued by always only ever being seen like an extension of her brother, unable to escape his shadow and be her own person (either because people expect her to be like him or see her only through the lense of the relationship they have with her brother), but godfuckingdamnit, is she ANGRY. And don't tell me an Northern Ireland that you don't believe to be Ulster (I don't) wouldn't be ANGRY. Whether you believe them to be born at the time of the Plantation in the 1600s or at the time of Partition in 1921, they're born out of violence and conflict. Search for the Steelboys and the Oakboys, not to mention the Defenders if you want something Catholic. Belfast was a hotbed of protest and dissent to the British government, for various different reasons throughout the centuries.

In LFLS, Soph is 17 and lonely and so fucking angry underneath all the hopelessness. Angry at how her family burdened her with this bullshit, angry that it is her cross to bear to worry for them, angry that she has no fucking agency. Angry to always be the little sister, the little O'Connel, never her own person because the entire past looms so large over her future. She was born into violence and no one ever let her have her own hand in it.

[luna-gemini]

Exploring with you, is my favourite thing! 🥹❤️@overthinkingismyhobby1

[the-gentler-gamester]

I'm perfectly fine.

About ALL of this.

😭😭😭

[crockettmarcel]

the place i'm staying at on holiday is apparently near dobby's beach and although i have literally negative interest in harry potter (have not even seen one (1) movie) i so badly want to see his grave. there is a grave. covered in tributes. i need to see it

[randommusicvid]

I Love You Always Forever - Donna Lewis

[celestial-kestrel]

It's that time of year again where Mari Lwyd starts to be talked about and shared around and an INCREDIBLY misleading post gets shared a lot. As someone who grew up with Mari Lwyd I wanted to clear some things up.

Also hello, if you are unaware who Mari Lwyd is. This is about the Welsh tradition of the horse skull who visits houses during the Christmas to New Years period in Wales asking for alcohol.

First off and probably the most important one:

Mari Lwyd is not a cryptid!

I can not emphasise this enough. She. Is. Not. A. Cryptid. There is no story or mystery about a ghost or zombie horse roaming the Welsh valleys. She's not even supposed to be a ghost or a zombie. It's just a horse skull on a stick with a guy under a sheet. She's a hobbyhorse and a folk character used to tell Welsh stories and keep songs alive. When people spread the misinformation that she's a cryptid, it's the equivalent of saying Kermit the Frog is a cryptid.

She is actually only one character in a wider cast of characters who go door to door or, in more modern times, pub to pub. The cast of characters can change town to town and village to village but there are some common ones I see time and time again. The Leader, the Merryman, The Jester and The Lady are just some I see regularly. Punch and Judy used to be more popular a few years ago but I haven't seen them in a while as their tradition has mostly fallen out of popularity. In most cases, almost the whole cast will be played by men. Even the characters are considered and referred to as female. Though this again depends and varies by which group is partaking in the Mari Lwyd tradition.

This point also goes onto my second point,

Mari Lwyd does not rap.

I think this comes from a very common misunderstanding of what rap is vs spoken word. Rap is a very specific style of music originating from the African American communities of the USA and has it's own structure and motifs unique to it. It's a lot more complex than people give it credit for as a style of music and just flippantly assign anything similar to it as being rap. If someone is talking fast or reciting poetry, it is not rap. Or anything that is an exchange of words between two people is not a rap battle. Mari Lwyd does not do rap, actually something that gets left out of these posts is the fact Mari Lwyd does not even speak. It's actually the Leader, who does all the speaking and song based banter between the house/pub owner for entry. Mari Lwyd just clicks her mouth, bites people and bobs her head around.

I think Mari Lwyd is a really beautiful and unique part of Welsh culture. She's not actually as wildly celebrated as a lot of the posts make her out to be. Actually, I think most Welsh people themselves learn about Mari Lwyd through the internet as well. Her popularity is increasing thanks to the drive of local groups wanting to keep the traditions alive and a renewed desire to document Welsh traditions before they're gone. Which is why it's such a shame that she's turned into something she's not to earn horror points on the internet. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see the misunderstandings of the culture and the folk tradition. Mari Lwyd's origin is very hot debated as well as how long it's been going on for. But I think it's thanks to a lot of traditions like this that the Welsh language and our stories weren't lost forever. Welsh culture is recovering as is the language. But it's still in a very fragile place. I think it's why it's important to document and correct information when it's spread.

Anyway, if you want to see the tradition in action, here's a lovely video from the Cwmafan RFC going to one of the pubs for charity. It includes the song exchange with the pub owner for entry and the whole pub singing and joining in once Mari Lwyd and the rest are inside.

As well with another video from St Fagan's showcasing the more traditional and door to door form with the larger cast.

[epicallychrissy]

Dw i'n caru y ddraig goch

they can't do a best world flag bracket because Bhutan would destroy every other country and it would be too embarrassing

[idyllicbarb]

FOREVER MY LADY, AARON PIERRE.

pairing: aaron pierre x actress!reader

summary: feelings rise after you and aaron co-star in the same film.

warnings: slow burn, slight angst, eventual smut, fluff.

music:

forever my lady by jodeci

safety net by ariana grande ft. ty dolla sign

georgia peach by latto

make it to the mornin’ by partynextdoor

bad by wale ft. tiara thomas

belong to the city by partynextdoor

next to you by bryson tiller

desert eagle by beyoncé

the matrimony by wale ft. usher

hey daddy by usher

love on top by beyoncé

one.

two.

three.

four

five.

six.

seven.

eight.

nine.

ten.

taglist: comment if you want to be tagged for this story, k bye!

[invisibleicewands]

Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon’: how Michael Sheen got sucked into a forever chemicals exposé

An opera-loving member of high society turned eco-activist who was forced into police protection with a panic button round his neck. A Hollywood actor who recorded said activist’s life story as he was dying from exposure to the very chemicals he was investigating. Throw in two investigative journalists who realise not everything is as it seems, then uncover some startling truths, and you have “podcasting’s strangest team” on Buried: The Last Witness.

On their award-winning 2023 podcast Buried, the husband and wife duo Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor dug into illegal toxic waste dumping in the UK and its links to organised crime. This time, they focus on “forever chemicals”, specifically polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and set out to discover whether one whistleblower may have been decades ahead of his time in reporting on their harmful impact.

“It’s amazing how big the scale of this story is,” says Ashby, as we sit backstage at the Crucible theatre, where they are doing a live discussion as part of Sheffield DocFest. “With this series, we don’t just want it to make your blood turn cold, we want it to make you question your own blood itself.”

It all started when Taylor and Ashby were sent a lead about the work of former farmer’s representative Douglas Gowan. In 1967, he discovered a deformed calf in a field and began to investigate strange goings on with animals close to the Brofiscin and Maendy quarries in south Wales. He linked them to the dumping of waste by companies including the nearby Monsanto chemical plant, which was producing PCBs.

PCBs were used in products such as paint and paper to act as a fire retardant, but they were discovered to be harmful and have been banned since 1981 in the UK. However, due to their inability to break down – hence the term forever chemical – Gowan predicted their legacy would be a troubling one. “I expect there to be a raft of chronic illness,” he said. He even claimed that his own exposure to PCBs (a result of years of testing polluted grounds) led his pancreas and immune system to stop working. “I’m a mess and I think it can all be attributed to PCBs,” he said.

However, Gowan wasn’t a typical environmentalist. “A blue-blood high-society Tory and a trained lawyer who could out-Mozart anyone,” is how Taylor describes him in the series. He would even borrow helicopters from friends in high places to travel to investigate farmers’ fields. Gowan died in 2018 but the pair managed to get hold of his life’s work – confidential reports, testing and years of evidence. “I’m interested in environmental heroes that aren’t cliche,” says Ashby. “So I was fascinated by him. But then we started to see his flaws and really had to weigh them up. My goodness it’s a murky world we went into.”

The reason they were able to delve even deeper into this murky world is because of the award-winning actor Michael Sheen who, in 2017, came across Gowan’s work in a story he read. He was so blown away by it, and the lack of broader coverage, that he tracked him down. “I got a message back from him saying: ‘Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon,’” says Sheen. “I took a camera with me and spent a couple of days with him and just heard this extraordinary story.”

What Gowan had been trying to prove for years gained some traction in 2007, with pieces in the Ecologist and a Guardian article exploring how “Monsanto helped to create one of the most contaminated sites in Britain”. One was described as smelling “of sick when it rains and the small brook that flows from it gushes a vivid orange.” But then momentum stalled.

Years later, in 2023, Ashby and Taylor stumbled on a recording of Sheen giving the 2017 Raymond Williams memorial lecture, which referenced Gowan and his work. Before they knew it, they were in the actor’s kitchen drinking tea and learning he had conducted a life-spanning seven-hour interview with Gowan before his death. So they joined forces. Sheen isn’t just a token celebrity name added for clout on this podcast; he is invested. For him, it’s personal as well as political. “Once you dig into it, you realise there’s a pattern,” he says. “All the places where this seems to have happened are poor working-class areas. There’s a sense that areas like the one I come from are being exploited.”

Sheen even goes to visit some contaminated sites in the series, coming away from one feeling sick. “That made it very real,” he says. “To be looking into a field and going: ‘Well, I’m pretty sure that’s toxic waste.’” Sheen was living a double life of sorts. “I went to rehearsals for a play on Monday and people were like, ‘What did you do this weekend?’” he says. “‘Oh, I went to the most contaminated area in the UK and I think I may be poisoned.’ People thought I was joking.” Sheen ended up being OK, but did have some temporary headaches and nausea, which was a worry. “We literally had to work out if we had poisoned Michael Sheen,” says Ashby, who also ponders in the series: “Have I just killed a national treasure?”

The story gets even knottier. Gowan’s findings turn out to be accurate and prescient, but the narrative around his journey gets muddy. As a character with a flair for drama, he turned his investigation into a juicy, riveting story filled with action, which could not always be corroborated. “If he hadn’t done that, and if he’d been a nerdy, analytical, detail-oriented person who just presented the scientific reports and kept them neatly filed, would we have made this podcast?” asks Taylor, which is a fascinating question that runs through this excellent and gripping series.

Ashby feels that Gowan understood how vital storytelling is when it comes to cutting through the noise. “We have so much science proving the scale of these problems we face and yet we don’t seem to have the stories,” he says. “I think Douglas got that. Fundamentally, he understood that stories motivate human beings to act. But then he went too far.”

However, this is not purely about Gowan’s story – it’s about evidence. The Last Witness doubles up as a groundbreaking investigation into the long-lasting impact of PCBs. “We threw the kitchen sink at this,” says Ashby. “The breakthrough for us is that the Royal Society of Chemistry came on board and funded incredibly expensive testing. So we have this commitment to go after the truth in a way that is hardly ever done.”

From shop-bought fish so toxic that it breaches official health advice to off-the-scale levels of banned chemicals found in British soil, the results are staggering. “The scientist almost fell off his chair,” says Ashby. “That reading is the highest he has ever recorded in soil – in the world. That was the moment we knew Douglas was right and we are now realising the scale of this problem. The public doesn’t realise that even a chemical that has been banned for 40 years is still really present in our environment.”

To go even deeper into just how far PCBs have got into our environment and food chain, Ashby and Taylor had their own blood tested. When Taylor found 80 different types of toxic PCB chemicals in her blood it was a sobering moment. “I was genuinely emotional because it’s so personal,” she says. “It was the thought of this thing being in me that was banned before I was even born and the thought of passing that on to my children.” Ashby adds: “We’ve managed physical risk in our life as journalists in Tanzania and with organised crime, but more scary than a gangster is this invisible threat to our health.”

In order to gauge the magnitude of what overexposure to PCBs can do, they headed to Anniston, Alabama, once home to a Monsanto factory. “As a journalist, you have an inbuilt scepticism and think it can’t be that bad,” says Ashby. “But when I got there I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I hate to use words like dystopian, but it was. There is a whole massive school that can’t be used. There’s illnesses in children and cancers. It truly was the most powerful vignette of the worst-case example of these chemicals.”

It’s bleak stuff but instilling fear and panic is not the intention. “Obviously, we’re really concerned about it,” says Ashby. “And although the environmental crises we face do feel overwhelming, it is incredible how a movement has formed and how individuals are taking action in communities. The lesson to take from Douglas is that the response doesn’t have to be resignation. It can be agency.”

[h0pesanddr3ams]

Good morning 🌞

Good night 😴

Good evening 🥳

You made it to another day!

My name is Hope Lupin! My son is the very special Remus Lupin!

A ladies never tells her age 💚

Everyone is welcome I love you all!

This is my son's account! :

@werewolf-of-wales

And my SON-IN-LAW:

@forever-sirius

That should be it! I love you all!!! 🤎

[ohporcupine]

[image id: the first is the flag of Wales, an intricate red dragon on a background with a white top half and green bottom half. the second is the flag of the Qing Dynasty, a blue dragon with green hair, a red belly and white claws, on a yellow background facing a red sun.]

Dragon Flag Wars: Finals

[hope-ur-ok]

Surprise Song Master post ~ European Leg

5/9 Paris, FR: Paris + LOML

5/10 Paris, FR: Is It Over Now?/OOTW + My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys

5/11 Paris, FR: Hey Stephen + Maroon

5/12 Paris, FR: The Alchemy / Treacherous + Begin Again / Paris

5/17 Stockholm, SE: I Think He Knows / Gorgeous + Peter

5/18 Stockholm, SE: Guilty As Sin? + Say Don't Go / Welcome to New York / Clean

5/19 Stockholm, SE: Message In A Bottle / How You Get The Girl / New Romantics + How Did It End?

5/24 Lisbon, PT: Come Back... Be Here / The Way I Loved You / The Other Side of the Door + Fresh Out the Slammer / High Infidelity

5/25 Lisbon, PT: The Tortured Poets Department / Now That We Don't Talk + You're On Your Own Kid / Long Live

5/29 Madrid, ES: Sparks Fly / I Can Fix Him (No Really Can) + I Look In People's Windows / Snow On the Beach

5/30 Madrid, ES: Our Song / Jump Then Fall + King of My Heart

6/2 Lyon, FR: The Prophecy / Long Story Short + Fifteen / You're On Your Own Kid

6/3 Lyon, FR: Glitch / Everything Has Changed + Chloe Or Sam Or Sophia Or Marcus

6/7 Edinburgh, Scotland UK: Would've Could've Should've / I Know Places + 'Tis the Damn Season / Daylight

6/8 Edinburgh, Scotland UK: The Bolter / Getaway Car + All of the Girls You Loved Before / Crazier

6/9 Edinburgh, Scotland UK: It's Nice To Have A Friend / Dorothea + Haunted / Exile

6/13 Liverpool, England UK: I Can See You / Mine + Cornelia Street / Maroon

6/14 Liverpool, England UK: This Is What You Came For / Gold Rush + The Great War / You're Losing Me

6/15 Liverpool, England UK: Carolina / No Body No Crime + The Manuscript / Red

6/18 Cardiff, Wales UK: I Forgot That You Existed / This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things + I Hate It Here / The Lakes

6/21 London, England UK: Hits Different / Death By A Thousand Cuts + The Black Dog / Come Back Be Here / Maroon

6/22 London, England UK: thanK you aIMee / Mean + Castles Crumbling w/ Hayley Williams

6/23 London, England UK: Us w/ Gracie Abrams + Out Of The Woods / Is It Over Now? / Clean

6/28 Dublin, IE: State of Grace / You're On Your Own Kid + Sweet Nothing / Hoax

6/29 Dublin, IE: The Albatross / Dancing With Our Hands Tied + This Love / Ours

6/30 Dublin, IE: Clara Bow / The Lucky One + You’re On Your Own Kid

7/4 Amsterdam, NL: Guilty as Sin? / Untouchable + The Archer / Question...?

7/5 Amsterdam, NL: imgonnagetyouback / Dress + You Are In Love / Cowboy Like Me

7/6 Amsterdam, NL: Sweeter than fiction / Holy Ground + Mary's Song / So High School / Everything Has Changed

7/9 Zürich, CH: Right Where You Left Me / All You Had To Do Was Stay + Last Kiss / Sad Beautiful Tragic

7/10 Zürich, CH: Closure / A Perfectly Good Heart + Robin / Never Grow Up

7/13 Milan, IT: The 1 / Wonderland + I Almost Do / The Moment I Knew

7/14 Milan, IT: Mr. Perfectly Fine / Red + Getaway Car / Out Of The Woods

7/17 Gelsenkirchen, DE: Superstar / Invisible String + "Slut!" / False God

7/18 Gelsenkirchen, DE: Speak Now / Hey Stephen + This Is Me Trying / Labyrinth

7/19 Gelsenkirchen, DE: Paper Rings / Stay Stay Stay + It's Time To Go / Better Man

7/23 Hamburg, DE: Teardrops On My Guitar / The Last Time + We Were Happy / Happiness

7/24 Hamburg, DE: The Last Great American Dynasty / Run + Nothing New / Dear Reader

7/27 Munich, DE: Fresh Out The Slammer / You Are In Love + Ivy / Call It What You Want

7/28 Munich, DE: I Don't Wanna Live Forever / Imgonnagetyouback + LOML / Don't You

8/1 Warsaw, PL: Mirrorball / Clara Bow + Suburban Legends / New Years Day

8/2 Warsaw, PL: I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) / I Can See You + Red / Maroon

8/3 Warsaw, PL: Today Was A Fairytale / I Think He Knows + The Black Dog / Exile

8/15 London, England UK: Everything Has Changed / End Game / Thinking Out Loud w/Ed Sheeran + King Of My Heart / The Alchemy

8/16 London, England UK: London Boy + Dear John / Sad Beautiful Tragic

8/17 London, England UK: I Did Something Bad + My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys / Coney Island

8/19 London, England UK: Long Live / Change + The Archer / You're On Your Own Kid

8/20 London, England UK: Death By A Thousand Cut / Getaway Car w/Jack Antonoff + So Long, London

[theroyalsandi]

Twenty-seven years ago, on August 31, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, tragically died in a car accident in Paris, France. The news shocked the world and left millions devastated by the sudden loss of the people’s princess. She will be forever loved, always missed and never forgotten.