A resting day (wow!), with just a short trip back to Barry to pick up the van.
Esther left by train on her way back to Liverpool, and Miriam and Oliver driving back to Birmingham, so celebrations coming to an end … real life soon!
However, this afternoon I had a short interview at Radio Wales on the Good Evening Wales show.
I found the whole process fascinating and very efficient, the gap between being picked up to when I was back at the hosue was barely an hour. At the studio there is a control side and the room with the presenters in. In the control part Louise, who had talked to me by phone eaelier to set up the interview, sat with two others each with two or three computer screen search. High on thew walls large screens showed news stations on silent, the ticker0tape announcing breaking news. I’d have liked to find put more about the different roles, but they were in the middle of broadcasting, and obviously doing various coordination jobs centred around, what I think was, a timeline of the programme.
Nelli Bird talked with me in the studio with Gareth Lewis chipping in.
Nelli had interviewed me by phone at the beginning of the journey in April, while I was sitting on a wooden bench at the back of an industrial estate between Newport and Nash. She is a Newport lass, but I had to admit that I was doing Newport first not because it was the ‘best bit’, but rather I was ‘getting it over with’ first. I should add, that I learnt lots of good things about Newport that day!
We talked mainly about the issues of poor mobile and broadband access across Wales, the impact on education and general inclusion. Garath said that maybe sometimes it is better not to have Twitter access, which is absolutely right in the middle of a wild area. However, the Arab Spring and similar movements elsewhere have shown that Twitter and other social media give people a voice; if people in the Welsh margins do not have effective access, they they effectively become voiceless.
The full programme can be found on the BBC Wales website here (streaming, see 1:15:25), but I have also made an extract of the interview (mp3).