Cultural highlights 2024: Ukeleles, grief, and that thing with feathers……

Tori Chamberlain

A consensus of ukuleles announced my version of New Year in March ‘24. Being a habitual hibernator, I always wait to feel the first skin-prickle of spring before I’ll admit the year has turned.

So, with warmth deepening and daylight longevity stretching, things finally began anew a couple of months into ‘24, and I was there for it all.

It was my old friend, Del Hughes, who hauled me from my seclusion to attend her noisy book launch at Dunvant Rugby Club. As I walked into the crowded bar, at least half the attendees were playing little guitars.

The laughter and cheer in the room was in keeping with Del’s book, A Year of Living Dangerously, which, as many of you know, began its rollicking ride, in these very same Nation.Cymru pages.

Fear

Week upon week, Del had squeezed all possible pleasure from every conceivable fear in each action-packed adventure, and as a result, she not only became 2023s Feature Writer of the Year for the Wales Media Awards, but also winner of the same for 2024! Bravo Del!

These stories, now in book form (for bedtime cosiness), lifted my spirits as the seasons changed. Like the author, loss has been a feature of my life in recent times, so to cry and laugh simultaneously through every mishap and bittersweet moment released something within me that needed to be released.

And when you snuggle down to read this collection, it’s clear why the exuberant sound of ukuleles is central to the spirit of a book that reminds us to grab the best life has to offer.

This jolly book launch and Del’s hopeful, yet hilarious, writing style bolstered me for weeks.

Back home, I read and wrote (and worked my day job) through the summer until, one day, the universe came to me, quiet and undulating, in poetic form: a collection called In Orbit to be exact, by Glyn Edwards. I had the pleasure of reviewing this title for Nation.Cymru, and by July it had become the People’s Choice winner for Wales Book of the Year.

Quite a different ballgame to Del’s romp into experiences of grief and joyful hope, yet a similar stance, I feel, which is why both these books drew me in. Edwards explores grief and loss through an infinite, and intimate, pin-pricked sky with gentle scatterings of meaning, and reassurances at every turn. It’s a powerful read, and as poignant as any supernova, exploding, then dying in space, leaving that thing with feathers in its wake.

Coal-mining blood

These are just two of the many reads I’ve enjoyed this year from books written all over Wales. I’m from coal-mining blood, but it’s only in the last few years that my roots have grown strong enough to break rocks.

Happy now that I live here, and always will, I fell into this Christmas season filled to the brim and sat with contentment in a Cardiff bar amidst Storm Darragh. The red warning alerts on everyone’s phones sounded cacophonous, so while it was not at all like the March ukuleles……it still was, just a little! And when the person sitting opposite me explained he plays the ukulele too, well — a green flag if ever I saw one!

Grateful for the euphoria of ‘24 that helped dampen sadness, and excited for more book cheer and rowdiness in ‘25 — although I’m not thinking about that until next March, of course!