Only Bob Hughes's Bridge and Yoga 1 led by Edna Jones come from established members, the rest are newcomers. That in many ways is sufficient justification in itself for the expansion, but how many will go on to become the long serving Convenors of the past, the likes of Barbara Brimstone of Local History, Margaret Hammond of Politics & Citizenship and Research, Margaret Winter of History, Margaret Massey of Gardening, (funny to think my sister is another Margaret) and Marjorie Vanston of Welsh. (I'm bound to have missed someone and hold my hands up in advance of the storm!).
We of the more recent joiners often with family scattered across the globe have got used to extended and frequent holiday travel, that's a trend particularly obvious in yours truly who is off shortly for the second warm winter in a row in India. My spoilt new generation will need enthusiastic stand-byes to plug the gaps or Swansea U3A will have difficulty getting anywhere near the continuity of the past.
Being purely parochial Any Volunteers for a spell doing the Slides for Wednesday Lectures should please approach me, remembering the vital part they play in feeding up to date information to the web-site and the Group Newsletters. Traditionally the Wednesday Lectures formed the sole point of formal and informal communication between members. As we grow larger aided by advances in technology we are a very different animal today.
Rosemary Brangwyn 202029 has taken over from founder Gerwyn Thomas as the convenor of Members on Their Own (MOTO) and although with numerous potential new members from the Open Day she would like to handle it as a single unit for the present.
ARMCHAIR TRAVEL
To Brian Davies who with Mary will celebrate their Golden Wedding this year, Congratulations and Welcome to the club. He who has run the Armchair Travel smoothly for several years but has indicated to me that he will not continue after September 2011 and that we will need a new venue (possibly near-by Hazel Court?) which was always a private arrangement. He was distressed that his church hall has been subjected to severe vandalism recently - not by U3A members I hasten to add. How nice it is to get such timely advance notice so I hope the group will themselves elect a successor - but if there is someone with a burning desire then please come forward to Brian or me. Enthusiasm and energy are the key ingredients of the job for I doubt Brian has ever been short of group members willing to share their photographs and memories. Come to think of it I am down for South India on 3 December, but I have passed that one to Joan! It's only fair they she should have the task of deciding which 50 of the 1000 or so photographs to fashion the narrative around - we only have one camera these days; and it is her's!
Their next meeting on Friday 5 November is titled Transit Panama Canal by ? Edwards. In passing I note that on April Fool's Day Sue Johnson is down for Antarctic Adventure.
Talking of Sue some of you from the French and Travel Groups may not realise that her husband Steve has at last had the heart bypass operation (and artificial valve) he so badly needed. When we saw him in Singleton about 10 days ago he looked on the way to a good recovery and is probably now convalescing with his son across the other side of the country. I am sure we all wish him well. Ill though he was even then he did his bit for us being the first to rescue a failing French Group, a task now carried seamlessly by Beryl Edney, Jean and Gilly Jordan.
YOGA
Last week saw the very first meetings of these new groups and I went to them both. It was my first session with Edna Jones who is a fully qualified teacher of Yoga, there were 10 of us which was near to capacity for the Exercise Room. All I can say is that they are both very good and both use routines well suited to our age group. Edna was better in watching critically and correcting her group and offered to stop touching anyone who objected - which no-one did, and even took her trousers off so we might better see the positions required!
Christine on Thursday had phoned around to get maximum attendance, including two teenagers!, because she was being assessed during that session. There were 13 of us luxuriating in the much larger downstairs room, a few beside me had been to both sessions. Christine has built up a good following a summer in which she took the last Tai Chi slot of Friday morning for Yoga. Yoga on Wednesday, Yoga on Thursday, or Tai Chi on Friday that's the choice you have, I can personally vouch for the fact that all are fabulous, all are morning classes and all are in Hazel Court.
CHANGES to LAWMARY'S CLASSES
Both have changed venue compared with the original summary of Group Activities which will have accompanied your membership card.
CARDS for FUN is now at the Dragon Hotel on the second and fourth Tuesdays and starts at 11am
LITERATURE is now in the Newton Village Hall on the first and third Tuesdays at 2pm.
WELSH
Tuesday 10am has moved away from St Mary's Church Vestry to a downstairs cafe room in Starvin' Jacks, where they get not only a free room but half price coffee.
JIVE
Still in the Monkey Cafe but now starting at the slightly later time of 11am to oblige their wonderful staff who now have to work late the preceding night. They too get the venue free of charge but with a professional sound system and a wooden dance floor upstairs thrown in. Their standard white coffee is excellent value for money.
BEGINNERS WATERCOLOURS
Due to an earlier problem with room availability they had no where to go from January to the end of April 2011. This room time slot has now been released by Hazel Court so it is up to the group itself to fashion a way to continue and hopefully one of our painters to come forward to help guide whilst Brenda Sweet is on a lengthy visit to visit family and travel in Australia. Like me she is aiming to escape to sunnier climes during the worst of our winter.
BEGINNERS BRIDGE
With just one meeting (Thursdays at 10am) under their belt they seem well set under Bob Hughes 363875 and a tutor from the Mumbles Bridge Club. The existing Bridge group has long been full so this new group offers a renewed outlet for the many who seem keen to learn this game.
A NEW CAREER IN AUTOMATIC CONTROL for ME
Leaving Politics aside the Politics and Citizenship group had a discussion about Alternative Technology led expertly by Roger Knight. Not surprisingly he focussed the discussion on the Generation of Electricity which is the nub of the problem.
The first problem arises from the fact that there is no known efficient way to store electricity.
Because of that the instantaneous generation of electricity has to meet the demand. Demand for electricity is something we change every time we switch a kettle on or off, or the cooker, or the lights, or the central heating, and in huge amounts every time electricity intensive industrial production fluctuates, such as the rolling of another of coil of steel strip. Though major system problems are caused at the time household changes in demand are synchronised, for instance when all over the country the kettles are switched on during an advertising break in a popular program such as East Enders.
Stop to think now about the new problems that much of the modern green generation brings.
Older solar panels produced hot water to help with your tap water but the future lies with solar cells which produce electricity, the rate of generation is completely independent of electricity demand for instance as it depends on the sun, luckily we do need more electricity during the day than the night, but what about those dark cold summer evenings.
Windmill generators depend on the strength of the wind, again with no correlation with demand.
Straight tidal flow generation depends on the speed of the tide which varies throughout the state of the tide with periods of slack water on approach to high and low tide as well as the phase of the moon which leads to Spring (large) and Neap (small) tides. Though these changes are very variable and very significant they can be predicted by mathematical models and some degree of evening out can be incorporated by the use of dams strong enough to store water above the tide line as is the norm with hydro-electric generation, though that is minimal in the UK compared with say Canada and Russia which in the fifties were in a competition to build ever larger stations.
As a young man I worked as a commissioning engineer for Westinghouse at Chute des Passes, the world's first million horse power hydro station in the wilds of Quebec, built to feed electricity to Alcan's aluminium smelters in nearby Chicoutimi. But we knew it was just a question of time as the Russians were working on the world's first million kw station, 34% bigger. Canada then was almost entirely served by hydro-electric generation, except in the prairies, but fast but running out of potentially big hydro sites and so were fast overtaking the UK in development of techniques of atomic power at their new research establishment at Chalk River.
But the cost of producing electricity is a vital consideration. For instance Nuclear Power stations are very expensive to construct but once built are a very cheap source of electricity, for that reason they are usually run flat out day and night thus producing the so called base load below which demand never falls. You can say the same about all the green power, in that case the energy comes for free thanks to the sun and the moon, in which case they would take price precedence even over nuclear.
Thermal coal fired stations are much cheaper to build but coal is a more expensive than nuclear fuel, so the coal stations were traditionally were used to fluctuate with demand. Both are used in the UK to produce high pressure and temperature super heated steam and produce electricity via Steam turbines. But although steam turbines can be used to fluctuate one reaches a time at which there are either too any or too few turbines running to match the demand. But massive steam turbines expand by a matter of inches when they come into service, they have to heated up gradually before spinning to do otherwise would be to write off expensive precision built turbine wheels with small gaps. Gas turbines come into their since they can change power rapidly, think of the rapid increase in thrust required on take off of a jet aircraft.
So for today's automatic control system design engineer there is an interesting problem, how to match generation to demand minute by minute and to do so at the lowest incremental cost by using the cheapest mix of the quite different generators available. A global network would help to share the energy produced solar generators whose output depends on the sun, but surely we have all seen a little too much of globalisation!
Reheat Furnaces, Hot Mill rebuild circa 1980's
PALESTINE
What an interesting lecture last week by a speaker who had first hand experience of what it is like to be a Palestinian living in the West Bank. Of course it was a biased view, it could hardly be otherwise, but how vividly she portrayed the situation.
I have for a long time been unable to see a satisfactory end based on a Two State Solution because simply looking at the map suggests there is no viable second state. But the rift is so deep now that it is difficult to imagine the re-orientation of mindsets needed on both sides for a One State Solution. A Zionist and many like minded fundamentalist Christians, such as my own wonderful parents and my sister, feel the Jews have a divine right to the land. Those whose thinking is based on natural law will feel the land was taken from the Palestinians. The fact that they are Muslim and do not believe in Christ is barely relevant - they have a very wide body of support across the globe and the denominations - neither does it help to see the settlement as compensation for the atrocities of the holocaust, the Palestinians weren't responsible for that.
CUTS
The Tories have delivered the solution for which they gained the upper hand in the last election, cut hard and as fast as possible to get the interest payments under control and in the going try to simplify and place the accent on individual initiative. The Liberals were courageous to ensure a stable government even where it meant swallowing their words, they had no alternative, one hopes they don't reap a whirlwind at the next election.
Was it brave or was it foolhardy to try such a simplistic solution at a time when we are staring down the barrel of recession? Many concede it is risky but for my money I think it will be a disaster - and that from someone who normally believes the glass is half full. It may have worked previously in Canada at a quite different point in the economic cycle in a resource rich, food rich, country, but here and now - I hope I'm proved wrong.
A lot of today's debate is about fairness. Flat rates and simplified benefits will inevitably lead to winners and losers (though there won't be many absolute winners in this climate). Is it fair to the poor? - it's hard to see how it can benefit help those on benefits. Is it fair to women?- it looks as though they will be losers. Is it fair to poor children? Well they will get priority schooling, but how will that help their parents balance the slashes in the short term.
To my mind the section most at risk are the young the school leavers, for with each redundancy a job will be eliminated, so there will be less opportunities for anyone to join the the workforce. In a de-industrialised society where are meaningful apprenticeships to come from, where are the skilled mentors they were shelved a couple of decades ago. My eldest granddaughter was on the latest version of the Swansea University student paper with headlines emphasising that only the brightest Bio-Chemistry students will get the final years education to best fit them for a career. Twenty years ago when my eldest son left Birmingham University with a good degree in Chemical Engineering only to find the industry was laying off working engineers en-route to the collapse of another manufacturing industry in this country. Twenty five years on it will be another lost generation, one and almost two of our brood was a casualty. Will it be the same poor hand for our grandchildren - I fear so.
ARTS
At the Philharmonia concert recently we were told that even with a full house the Swansea Music Festival would lose £14,000 on this event alone, but that next year they expected to have to suffer cuts in funding from both the Arts Council and the Local Authority. All such events will be in jeopardy go to Jazzland while it is still pre-eminent, see lunchtime theatre before the Dylan Thomas Centre closes. At Jazzland tonight Simon Allen sax and Martin Shaw, professor of jazz trumpet at the Birmingham Conservatoire, will be playing with the Dave Cottle trio, £10 entrance and £7 for members.
Next week 3 November should be the BEST evening of the year from The Alan Barnes Quartet. An annual visitor to Jazzland who has also appeared with his own Sherlock Holmes Suite at the Taliesin. And so it goes on until Christmas. Now is the time to join up with MARION HARRIS 206044 and her outings to support local live jazz. It's non stop top quality jazz until Christmas with Tim Kliphuis Trio (a sort of latter day Stephan Grappelli, with Gary Philips on guitar who briefly shared his childhood with our kids in the Steel Company flats in Bridgend) at the Taliesin on Sunday 31 October, The Tina May Quartet on Friday 19 November and Jazz Jamaica on 4 December, the last two of which I definitely intend to visit as I do this Friday's wonderful play by Chekhov, 'The Cherry Orchard', which Joan and I last saw in London decades ago.
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