Under pressure

Work was busy this afternoon, with scheduling preparations for next Monday and Tuesday's network radio upgrade to prepare for. Yesterday I got up early and spent a couple of hours on scheduling before going over to Bristol. I sent an email about what I'd done to the office, but omitted to send the file attached, and also omitted to save it in any other place I could access the data. So, as soon as I arrived I had to turn around and go home and recover the file from my desktop machine. Lately, I've been conscientious about emailing in work done at home or storing in in Google Docs, but on this occasion, absent mindedness wreaked havoc.

Thankfully, Jason and Ashley were on their way in together by car, and were able to collect me from a bus stop and take me home and then back to the office. I couldn't find the file at first because I'd forgotten that the work had been done on one of my two portables machines, so the search got me in a right flap. By the time we got back to the office I had only two hours to work before returning home to eat early, then ferry Clare to Dinas Powis for her study group, before going to Penarth for a double session of Chi Gung and Tai Chi. I was glad of the workout, but found it more than usually demanding, after a stressful day. By the time I dragged myself to bed, I felt like I'd swum a couple of miles.

News came in during the day of workers trapped by flooding in a small drift mine at Cil-y-Bebyll in the Tawe Valley up behind Swansea. The news triggered off memories of my father, and the sombre mood at home associated with accidents up at Penallta colliery. The eerie untimely hooting of the pit's siren would announce a crisis that got off-duty emergency responders into their boots and heading out up the road back towards work, just as fast as their tired limbs could take them, just in case they were needed.
 

Although the large nationalised coal mines are long gone, small privately run drift mines still operate, mostly at the Western side of the South Wales coalfield, where lucrative anthracite coal, known as 'Welsh gold', is abundant. This is a region suffering from tens of thousands of mining job losses three decades ago, on top of the impact of the current recession. Anthracite is a high energy low smoke coal costing around £130-150 a tonne in today's domestic market. Small mines using traditional methods in difficult conditions, lacking the benefits of modern equipment, are unlikely to be highly productive, but they still offer men an opportunity to work for a living, albeit for meagre rewards, with high risks attached, as we are reminded by the headlines once more.