I've recently joined a choir called Merthyr Aloud/ Merthyr Yn Uchel and we sing world music / cerddoriaeth y byd.
   Felly, dw i'n wrth fy modd!
   It's not as if I have a wide experience of choral music though. I reached the heights at the age of 11 when - the Aled Jones of Milton Road Juniors - I soloed on 'Once in Royal David's City'.
   I was duly spotted by my mother, who had designs on dispatching me to the nearby King's College school in order to make way for her lover, our lodger.
   But I was having none of that.
   In Grammar I was  a choir member ( apart from voice-breaking years)  and we once performed in Coventry Cathedral, having spent the night in the creepy crypt.
   Later, singing bass baritone, I especially enjoyed our carol singing from house to house to raise money for charity. We ended up at the Head's house for mince pies and the notorious 'Twitch' suddenly became human.
   When my children were young I loved singing them to sleep and knew well the ones to lull like 'Witchita Lineman', Randy Newman's 'Marie', plenty of Beatles and the selected songbook of Leonard Cohen; though 'El Condor Pasa' was maybe a little lively.
   I'd like to think that our communal love of the Beatles derives from those early years, though Cohen never made a lasting impact.
   So, in one way or another, singing has always played a part in my life : from our staff choir singing rock spiritual 'Holy Boy' at two Merthyr churches, to annoying those same teachers end of term in a mini-bus with Cor Cochion Caerdydd anthems like 'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika'. Only the pleas of my leftist mate Arwel Davies stopping the inebriated teachers from throwing me onto the roadside!
   My most memorable singing moment came in Merthyr precinct one Christmas during those anti-apartheid campaigning years.
   Cor Cochion were actually being arrested for obstruction when , impulsively, I joined them for 'Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau'.
   I was left standing alone still singing, as they were hauled away into a black mariah!
   With Merthyr Aloud I was wary at first, finding it tricky keeping to the bass parts and switching languages.
   But soon my confidence grew and the director Tanya is so encouraging, enthusiastic and talented.
   Some songs, such as Cohen's renowned 'Hallelujah' are all too familiar , though not the bass part however.
   Others are new to me and after only three weeks I was delighted to lead the way on 'Long road to Freedom' from the Nelson Mandela film ( mainly because the other basses were away).
   This song took me back to the best days of Cor Cochion when Tony Bianchi's booming bass resonated so strongly.
   Soon I'm off to Cameroon with Eric Ngalle Charles and Ifor ap Glyn to launch Eric's anthology ' Hiraeth / Erzolirzoli ' and Tanya told me her daughter did a project on that country and found it had the biggest frog in the world. I'll keep a look-out!
   It's fascinating changing languages and also styles : from rousing negro spirituals to purity of carols, Shakin' Stevens to Laughin' Lennie.
   Some members of the choir ( plus a cameo appearance by everyone) will be on S4C after Christmas as part of a programme about the recording of 'Atgof Angel' featuring opera singer Rhys Meirion.
   On November 24th you can catch us at Pontsticill Xmas Fair in the Village Hall at 12.30.
   When I sing I become that boy again in Milton Road school, standing in a semi-circle around the piano singing folk songs and sea shanties ( though my voice is a little deeper).
   Music can make us ageless.


                                 MERTHYR YN UCHEL
                                     i Tony Pritchard  

We shake off the days
we shake off age
we reach for apples
up in the clouds,
become Tarzan tongue-twisters,
learn to breathe again


we travel by song
from land to land
Zimbabwe, Mexico, Slovakia
returning in our hiraeth
to Cymru and the river :
changing keys of water


standing in a crescent
light from the harmonies
sometimes fractured
sometimes flowing,
touch fruit of Tir na Nog
taste of sound glowing.     

  Walking. So vital to verse : rhythm and breath. Seeking the changing seasons, glimpses of animals never seen before. One day the kingfisher.
   As a teenager in East Anglia those fields of barley and sugar beet ; isolated copses. Transistor radio in hand, listening to 'Pick of the Pops'.
   Or in the flatlands closer to the city , searching for a river-bank to hide from the huge horizon.
   In Aber as a student re-visiting my past daily down the prom, on the half-pier's machines, or over to Tanybwlch's storm beach where I once learnt to swim in freezing, wave-crashing Bay.
   ( Seeing a Cornishman pop up from the long grass, book in hand.....what a place to read, to learn!).
   Pen Dinas bound by paths where I wandered wild as a kid  playing kiss chase and hide 'n' seek till the sun went down and my brother was sent to haul me home.
   Walking. The metre and the line. A forest track or a footpath.
   In Garw Nant in the Beacons all the animals seem to have gone and left their understudies : wooden imitations sitting by the route, fossilized before their time.
   Yet in the Valleys you suddenly discover a place passed many times, some of it reclaimed from the old mine, where waste is kicked up.
   Parc Penallta, Ystrad Mynach : wasteland being slowly taken back and forests of deciduous and evergreen.
   Single spark of a green woodpecker as the sounds compete : buzzards above while, from over the valley, the road-rush of incessant traffic.
   There'll be dog-owners, Nordic walkers and ardent runners later on, but for now this place is virtually deserted, as we tread tentatively on the grass form of Sultan the pit pony, a profiled shape which makes you join those raptors and gaze down.
   Blackberries rot in the bushes, yet gorse flames even as autumn begins its colours of dying.
   Returning to Merthyr over Gelligaer Common, where horses, sheep and cattle wander over the cropped , bare moorlands and a quarry looms on the skyline like a strange, out-of-place volcano.
   The Valleys are full of places like Parc Penallta and sometimes we forget to laud them, living close to cosseted National Parks.
   Walking. Sentences punctuated by birds and squirrels. Burying images for another, hungrier time.


                            GRASS PONY, PARC PENALLTA

                                for Julie, Tog and Debbie  

Scrabbling up the flanks of Sultan,
you'd need to be a buzzard :
in the distance hear them mewling.

Whispering into his wire ear :
'How dark deep down,
how damp in the narrow gallery?'

Standing on a nostril
clinkered with pit waste,
a memory of thick dust.

Walking along the pony's body,
his hair of returning grass
and mane with slag exposed.

With his hooves of coal
and the wind whinnying,
Sultan's a twmp protruding.

With eye of split stone
peering into a clear sky,
come at last into light.