Timandra Dyer

And the winning photo is of Milly and Molly. A fabulous achievement to get two cats in Halloween scarfs @tjd19 How cute are these two?

This seems like a great time to reshare my favourite Sir Patrick Stewart performance, ‘What has the ECHR ever done for us?’ It’s just perfect in every possible way … including the ending 😂😂😂 RIP. 🎥 The Guardian

At 9.15 this morning Aberfan went quiet, the way it does every year, and sixty years ago it was the sound of nothing that told the village something was wrong. It had rained for days. The tip above the village, where the Coal Board dumped what it didn't want, had been moving for years and people had said so. At quarter past nine on a Friday, with the children just in from the playground and the register being called, it came down the mountain and through Pantglas Junior School and twenty houses. One hundred and sixteen children. Twenty-eight adults. A whole generation of a village gone before the morning milk. The men came up from the pit still in their helmets and dug with their hands. Mothers stood at the edge in their aprons. Nobody was pulled out alive after eleven o'clock. The inquiry found the Coal Board had been warned and had not listened, and then the fund the public raised was raided to clear the tips that should never have been there. It took decades to put that right. Aberfan has had to be patient with everyone. Sixty years on, the children would be in their sixties and seventies. Their brothers and sisters, the ones who happened to be in a different class or off sick, are the elderly of the village now. They have lived whole lives in the shadow of a Friday morning. They don't talk about it much. You don't, in the valleys. You turn up, and you remember, and you look after each other. This morning the King, the Queen and the Prince of Wales turned up with them. Stood in the garden where the classrooms were. A prayer. The silence. Two wreaths and a posy. Then into the community centre to sit with the parents who are left and the brothers and sisters, and listen. Later William went to the primary school to unveil a tree. Here is why that matters, and it's the Queen's story. She didn't come straight away in 1966. She sent Philip and came eight days later, and a little girl handed her a posy with a card that said: from the remaining children of Aberfan. She said for the rest of her life it was the thing she most regretted, those eight days. So she came back. In 1973. In 1997. In 2012. She paid for the organ in the chapel. She kept coming because she'd once been late, and she never wanted a village to feel forgotten by her again. Her son was there for the fiftieth. Her grandson was there in 2023 with his wife. All three of them were there today, together, which they almost never are, because this isn't an engagement. It's a promise an old woman made to herself in 1966 and handed down. That is what the monarchy is for in a week like this. Not the Sultan, not the tiaras, though those are the job too. This. A family that remembers a village sixty years after the rest of the country moved on, and comes back, and stands in the quiet, and asks nothing. Aberfan did not need a speech today. It got exactly what it needed. Company.