LPR Mortgage Services LTD, 75 Durrell Drive, Rugby (2026)

31/10/2024

When life starts feeling too hard to bare, just listen to Francis Albert

"God didn't make little green apples
And it don't rain in Indianapolis in the summertime"

27/10/2024

That evening, back in the comfort of my family, I had an overwhelming sense of mortality. I was overcome with what I can only describe as some sort of premature grief. The tears streamed down my face as I contemplated the eventual loss of all the beauty of the world. The intense awakening in me of the realization, that even though the mountains and the trees and the streams and the whipping stone and the tombstone would carry on, I in fact would not. There would come a time when I would not exist and that thought terrified me.

My parents consoled me of course, but only in the shallow reassuring way that parents do. It wasn’t like they could change the reality of the coming blackness. It was coming and there was nothing I could do or say to stop it.

As a child I could not understand the concept of utter nothingness. I would always be “aware” of that state, as if an outsider looking in on oneself. To stare into the abyss and have the abyss stare back at you, as Nietzsche said.

The sensation I felt was as if all my nerve endings were on the outside of my body. A sort of panic took over and I truly thought I was dying. Childhood angst at its worse, but it is a feeling I have had many times, over the years. Anxiety, depression, stress. Some sort of Celtic melancholy. I really don’t know what to call it.

In myth, Pan is said to have had a stentorian voice that could instil fear and panic into the enemies of the Gods. Plus, he would sometimes cause mortals to suddenly feel over come or awestruck. I had certainly felt that way in his presence. This however was a feeling of panic and of being confronted with the immeasurable scale of time and the universal.

Had my recent audience on top of Llanrhidian hill sparked this new distress?

27/10/2024

Pen blwydd Hapus

25/10/2024

Much as I adored my friends, and still do, I was always drawn into my own company. A safe space, which was wholly mine.

Wales was not only my nationality, but it was also a cultural landscape of imagination. The sign entering Wales on the A40 says “Croeso i Gymru” (Welcome To Wales) This was to me, as Dorothy leaving her black and white tornado spun house, into the multi coloured universe of Oz. The grass in South Wales is greener. It just is. The mountains rear up in front of you as warriors of old, breathing in Celtic air and puffing out their precipitous chests. The valleys cut deep, not only through the panorama, but deep within every Cymry’s soul.

This was my place, my home away from home and ever since I can remember and probably before, I have longed for it. In Welsh, that longing is hiraeth. Its meaning is tattooed onto me, indelibly inked, as the Wye is sketched onto the map of Wales from the Cambrian mountains in the North to its southern mouth and out to the sea. Wales drips with poetry and song and around every corner is a myth.

We had a home in Llanrhidian. A picturesque village with a church and post office, and an old Celtic cross that had been used as a “whipping stone.” With mountains surrounding one side of the village and the salt marsh out towards the estuary, I had the run of the place. Stories were told from my Uncle Gareth of a plague ship that landed in an inlet at Llanrhidian, and the villagers of the “lost village of Llanellen” went to rescue the sailors and bring them back to their homes and unwittingly brought death to the entire village.

Our house (Bluefields) was on the opposite side, of the one road to the Norman built church, which itself was just further along from the village green and the whipping stone. When the tide came in from the sea, and the salt marsh dunes submerged, the Llanrhidian marsh ponies would amble their way up the road, past the pub and into the farmers field, where they stayed until the tide went out and they returned. You could tell the time by the comings and goings of those ponies.

One spring morning, I rolled out of sleep and into the dazzling day with all the vim and vigour of my youth. I would bound across the one road with my mother’s voice eternally in my ear “Now you take care.” Onto the green, I would leap and climb, high up on top of the Celtic cross that had long since lost its pinnacle. Some say that Pagan’s had broken off the cross in defiance of Christianity and the new God; others that Mrs Thomas’s little Billy had done it one night coming back from the pub, four sheets to the wind.

I would stand on top of this monolith and call out to the day, and through the veil would come my company of fairy and sprite; the small Gods that lived in the trees and the mountains; the old folk from the woods and the elves who could just appear out of thin air.

My day would be filled with adventure either on the green itself, when my mother wanted me within sight, or within the churchyard, where the oldest tombstone was dated 1664 and surprisingly belonged to one Margaret Lloyd. (A very Welsh name). Through the cemetery and over a stile (or Camfa in Welsh) and I would enter the domain of Pan.

The forest is mainly scrubland now, dominated by the impressive Llanrhidian hill that looks out over the estuary and is home to the very rare “Marble White” butterfly, or as I like to call him, “Fred.”
Grassland and Wild Thyme mixes with patches of Elder, Hawthorn and Ash. The slightly damp air of the morning was scented with the bluebells as I made my way up the hill, encouraged by the familiar piping in the wind. Reaching the top and facing out over the village, the air was bracing, and those pipes played on from directly behind me. Then, the music stopped. The wind died down instantly. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. Rooted to the spot, I could not turn around. Nor did I want to as I felt the embrace of the divine.
These words filled my mind
“I did not die, I only slept, as man looked on and did Pan forget.”

24/10/2024

Pop stars didn’t just hang in posters from our bedroom walls, they lived among us. A year or two older than us, there were a group of friends who took their music seriously, even before they could play an instrument or sing in tune. The dedication to their cause was admirable, and their imagination knew no limits.

They designed their own cardboard guitars and paper-thin drums. They painted them with bright blazing colours and practiced in the top floor bedroom in their parents houses along Horton Crescent.

They had a toy vinyl playing record deck that came with its very own microphone and stand. It did not matter a jot, that the sound coming from its built-in speaker was the tinniest of tin; we were from the beginning their fans. They treated us to bedroom concerts, as they mimed to song after song.

The momentum picked up speed as the band’s desire to hit the big time grew. Cardboard cut out instruments went into the bin, and from out of the Rugby School woodworking department came the most wonderfully crafted wooden guitars. Still no strings, but they really looked the part and if you were lucky, you might even get to hold it, for a short time.

Even this was not enough, as toys were replaced at last with the real thing. Hugh’s electric guitar was a sky-blue thing of beauty and a joy forever. Chris’s drum kit was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life. Miming was replaced with writing their own material and the top floor bedroom was replaced with regular rehearsals in James’s parents’ cellar.

The noise coming out of that tiny rock and roll basement was already legendary among our friends.

Rehearsals replaced hanging out with each other, and if you weren’t in the band, and I wasn’t, you were often disappointed when you went round to see if someone was at home to play. The music coming up from the cellar was enough to tell you that, they were unavailable that day.

The name of the band was a moveable feast; “The Rage”, “Blaze” and my personal favourite “The Green Felt Wake.”

The bands first gig was in the Town House dining hall ( Mike’s dad was Housemaster at the time ) It was the early 1980’s and I remember big hair, leather boots and the stage was a number of the dining tables pushed together. A classic concert. And more, as they played at the Benn Hall in a battle of the bands.

I have such great memories of these times. Standing at the front of the stage as the band ripped into a cover of Echo And the Bunnymen’s “Do it Clean.” The closest I ever got to being a groupie.

Time took hold of the band and other careers were made in the City, in Archaeology and in the media, but to me they will always be rockstars.

21/10/2024

So much of my time was lived outside, in the company of friends and ancient folk, but I was also being introduced to what would soon become a lifelong passion.

Poetry. I guess it was the words of the psalms and the hymns we learned for the choir that first sparked my interest in language and the rhythm of words. The most obvious example being “Jerusalem” by William Blake. The imagery contained within phrases like “ancient times” and “clouded hills” blew my young mind wide open. It would be some years before I really studied Blake, but even in my youth I already felt that this was visionary poetry.

As a child in London, Blake had seen God peering in through his window; he had walked on Peckham Rye and seen angels in the trees “bespangling every bough like stars.”

I understood this immediately, not to be the hallucinations of a lunatic, but the visions of someone who had also glimpsed through the veil.

I began carrying a small pocketbook of his poems with me everywhere I went. Not to flaunt or sound off to others, quite the opposite. I kept him to myself. Just as I kept Pan and his world a matter of confidence.

The sheer joy that was brought into my life by reading the words of this incredible genius burst forth with such lines like:

“My mother groaned; my father wept
Into the dangerous world I leapt;
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.”

My young sponge-like brain soaked up these images and stored them, only to hear their influence again in later poets:

“And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the wooly cotton brains of infancy”

Jim Morrison didn’t just sing Light My fire.😉

20/10/2024

And so it was for the next decade or so, that I would return to the stream on a regular basis. My own private church, solitary and at the same time I felt totally at home in the company of Fae and Sprite alike.

The fields around were populated by Centaur. Not the wild, untamed beasts that Greek myth would have us believe, but wise and discussive beings contemplating the world around them as they moved magnificently around the open grassland.

I would move trouble free from Pan’s world to my own and back again. I kept my duality to myself, and childhood continued. It was to me a lifting of a veil and if anything, I felt a little sorry for those that could not see.

School only informed my understanding of the path I trod, even more. Sylvanian stories hypnotised and beguiled me. A weekly Latin lesson shed more light on the origins of certain names and places. If Pan was the Greek God of the woods and forests, then Sylvanus was his Roman counterpart.

Our daily break and lunch times, revolved around an old Willow tree in the playground of the school. Here we played innocently enough, and as we got older “kiss chase” became slightly less innocent, as boys and girls explored one another. “British Bulldogs” was an institution of rough and tumble, which could sometimes get carried away into actual bone breakage. The remedy to any sort of scratch or scrape or break was always the same. A shout from the teacher on duty at the time would forever be “Rub it, rub it!”

Right in the centre of the playground was a statue of the Greek God Hermes, the cleverest of the Olympians and one that served as a messenger to all the Gods. A fitting symbol for a place of education and learning.

For me however, the most relevant fact was that in many stories, Hermes was said to be the father of Pan. Even in my daily life, it seemed to me that my two worlds were getting closer and closer.

19/10/2024

From that moment on, I always had half an ear open for the piping melody in the far corners of the church. It really should have been no surprise that the echoes of the ancient God’s still pervaded this sacred place; after all, before the Anglo-Saxons worshipped here, the Romans had brought their divinities with them; and further back still, when Rugby was no more than a small settlement, Britons passed through and stopped to commune with their ancestors and call out to many Godlings.

On this site, where a holy place had stood for millennia, I found myself half in the modern world of choir practice and cassocks, and half in a world of folklore and fairy-tale.

From my vantage point during choir practice, I would often look beyond Arnold Pugh, furiously conducting us, toward the shadowy corners of the church. Every so often, I felt I could just make out the shape of a being, leaning on one of the columns. Left leg, firmly grounded on the cross patterned tiles and right leg, bent at the knee and foot (if it was indeed a foot and not a hoof) planted behind on the column itself.

Yes, the Great God Pan was very much alive to me at this time, showing himself to me and only me.

His piping led me one weekend to the top of the hill on Barby Road. The Hospital, so familiar to me on my left and Springhill and its beautiful wide-open spaces further on. Halfway down the hill on the right-hand side were fields that I had never explored before. Yet, the music beckoned me and soon I was climbing over the fence and into undiscovered territory. Undiscovered to me that is. There were children playing in all areas of the field. Some on their own; others with parents and assorted dogs of all shapes and sizes.

I wandered for a while, taking in the sights and sounds, with no particular destination, when I found myself drawn to a stream, almost in the centre of the field. It ran right across, almost in a straight line, dissecting the field in two. At its centre was a small enclosure; a shady bower of three or four trees and a thicket of bushes. Here I sat and all the world disappeared. No more children. No more adults. No more dogs. Just myself and the stream. Its cool, clear water running over rounded pebbles. I placed my fingers into its current and felt the lumps and bumps underneath.

A sense of quiet and peace came over me, but more than that. I began to feel a presence. A watchful gaze where there was none. The wind in the trees above provided a subtle, nuanced soundtrack to my increasing happiness.

Around the trunk of the tree were the white caps of mushrooms. Their gills, plump and showing. About their stalks I thought I could see the tiniest movement of dancing feet and hands raised upward in joy. Wings, transparent and effortless sprouted from ancient small folk. Then in the stream, with my fingers still dripping, the most beautiful nymphs surfaced and caught the droplets of water and carried them off further down the brook.

The feelings of quiet and peace and happiness grew inside, until a new sensation overcame me. One of awe. I suddenly felt that I was sharing the same space and time, as something sacred. Something older than time. If it hadn’t have been such a wonderful feeling, I would have felt scared. I instinctively knew that if I looked up, I would have stared into antediluvian eyes. Eyes that would have witnessed creation. And so, I bowed my head. I closed my eyes and bathed in the sheer brilliance of Pan.

17/10/2024

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A really good article on all things adverse. The market has changed massively in this area and there is a lot that your mortgage broker can do to help you get a mortgage even if your credit rating isn't the best.

15/10/2024

Sport was just one of my pastimes.

I always had a love of music and somewhere along the way, I found myself in 1975 joining St Andrews Parish Church Choir. I don’t recall ever going to my parents asking if I could join. I don’t think it’s the sort of thing I would do, especially at the ripe old age of seven. Yet, the memories of choir practice, once in the week and once on a Sunday evening are etched into my being.

First of all, the Church itself. The oldest part of the church was the West Tower built sometime in the 14th century, but as soon as I entered through the magnificent carved wooden doorway, I knew instantly that there was a spirit housed in this place, much much older than medieval times.

I walked down the nave with its cross patterned tiles. My too tight shoes echoing footsteps, up and around the grand 19th century construction. To either side of the nave through huge archways were the North and South Ailes. Rows of wooden pews designed with comfort removed led up towards the Chancel, where the choir sat, resplendent in their cassocks and surplices. They were practicing a psalm I would come to know very well indeed, “Zadok the Priest”.

Their voices in harmony reached a part of my Welsh soul, that longed to join in. The choir master stood at the front conducting the choir as if they were an orchestra, and so they were. An orchestra of voices. Trebles sat alongside each other, with tenors behind. On the opposite side of the Chancery, trebles again in the front, with the bass singers booming out from the back.

I stood, watching in awe until Arnold Pugh (the choir master) waved his hands calling out;

“No, no, no. Again, from bar 32.”

Mr Pugh looked every inch the dishevelled physics teacher. All tweed sports jacket and elbow patches. Forever chewing cut up bits of apple. His hair, a few years off complete baldness, had a look of surprise about it. Surprise, I imagine, that there was any hair there at all. He was a great man. An accomplished organist, he ran the choir like a military machine.

I loved the drama of the church. The architecture of the building itself was beautiful, as were the incredible stained-glass windows. I was drawn particularly to the reredos directly behind the main altar. This vision of Christ has remained with me ever since.

There are few things in life as uplifting and moving as a full choir singing these psalms and hymns. Of course, at the time I had no idea what I was singing or even why. I just loved the sound we made.

But not everyone did.

Rugby or Rocheberie is first mentioned in the Doomsday book in 1085 and a parish church in 1140. However, worship had been practiced here for centuries before then, back into pre-history. Before Christianity, men and women had other divinities that they looked to for a bountiful harvest; for a healthy newborn; for life renewing sun and rain. Those Deities remained, even though they were long time ignored and replaced by a new God.

During my five years in the choir, I got to know the inside of the church pretty well. It became yet another playground for adventurous youths, when apple chewing choir masters were late for practice.

On one occasion, I was passing the time at the top of the nave where the old medieval font stood. As I sat in the pew twiddling my thumbs, I heard from behind me what sounded like a recorder being played. I turned round and the playing stopped. The church could be quite dark in its corners, and I strained my eyes to see if one of my friends was hiding behind one of the columns. I couldn’t see anyone, so I turned away. The instant I removed my gaze, the playing started up again. I stood and strained my eyes towards where I thought I heard the music and this time the piped melody kept playing.

I slowly walked into the shadows behind the columns that led to the North Aisle. Although I couldn’t see anybody, there was definitely music in the air and so I followed, until the sound took me to a door on the far side of the aisle. A door I had never really noticed before and it was here that the music stopped. I reached for the handle of the door and just started to turn it, when a loud call from Mr Pugh standing way over at the Vestry door on the other side of the church made me drop the handle and go running off to join my fellow choristers.

On the way home (I used to walk with my brother ) I asked him what that funny old door was in the North Aisle.

“Oh, that’s The Devil’s Door,” he said.

“What?” I replied.

“The Devil’s door. They say that, in the olden days, the devil would live inside the soul of an unbaptised child. So when they brought the child to church to be baptised, this would drive the devil out, but he had to have a special door to leave the church. And that is The Devil’s door.”

“Really?” I asked in a rather panicky voice. “Are we baptised?” I asked my brother.

“Well, I am,” he said with a smile.

13/10/2024

And so, the world turned, and life was good. Full of friends, fun and frolics.

Sport was a huge part of my growing up. It couldn’t really not be with a father that was a Welsh international. I am immensely proud of my Welsh heritage and cannot remember a time when I didn’t wear my nationality like a badge of honour. In many ways, I thought it to be quite exotic to be part of a race that could claim to be the indigenous Celtic people who populated Great Britain from at least the iron age.

All my relatives lived in Wales and school holidays were spent staying with grandparents, uncles and Aunts. In towns and villages that none of my friends could pronounce. Llangyfelach, Llanrhidian, Gorseinon, Loughor and Abertawe to name but a few.

I adored my Welsh family and really felt part of a tribe. There was a time when I thought my name was different in Wales because all my relatives called me “Lloyd Bach”. (Bach, pronounced like the German composer) It wasn’t until a little later on that I realised “Bach” in Welsh means “small.” So, all small children tend to have “Bach” added to their names.

Our family was steeped in rugby. Every male family member seemed to play for their local club. Some even played for the league teams like Neath and Swansea. But only my dad played for Wales. I can’t tell you what that means. The pride is gushing out of my fingers as I am typing this and I look over into the corner of my office where his international jersey is framed for all to see. I have a great tale to tell you about that jersey, but that is for another time.

Back in Rugby itself and the passion for sport was just as evident within my group of friends, even if the shape of the ball was different. We made up football teams with names like “Horton Hotspurs” and “Crescent Albion”. There was even a transfer window when one team was paid £1.00 for the undeniable footballing skills of Michael Barlow. We would cycle up to the fields of Springhill and Far Polo and play out our matches. All taken dead seriously as we pumped each other up with motivational cries of “Play Pro.” ( Meaning, play like a professional) Win or lose, hands were shaken and bragging rights were held, but only for as long as it took us to ride our bikes or walk back home to Horton Crescent.

We were so lucky to have the facilities of the school at our disposal. If we weren’t playing football on empty pitches, we were playing tennis on full size courts. There were three hard courts just around the corner from Colditz and another three grass courts (for those very special games) just at the top of Barby Road before the hill. It was on the hard courts that I leaned a lesson that I have never forgotten.

I must have been about 13 and I was playing my brother, four years older than me. He was a good tennis player, but I was better. Every time I scored a point, or he made an error, he would throw his racket on the ground or smash a ball into the fencing that surrounded the courts. He wasn’t a very good loser and quite honestly, I was just playing for fun and didn’t care. So, I let him win.

On returning home our mum and dad asked who won (all three of them were a very competitive bunch) and my brother replied that he had. As we walked past the parents to go upstairs, I whispered to my dad so that my brother couldn’t hear, “I let him win.”

“You did what?” my mother had overheard “You let him win?” she questioned
“Yeah, it’s no big deal.” I replied
My father walked straight up to me and said;
“Sit down boy and listen very carefully. You never, ever let somebody else win. I don’t care if they are gnashing their teeth in anger. If you are better than they are, then you bloody well win.”

As I say, my parents and my brother were all incredibly competitive, but I learnt a valuable lesson that day. Don’t tell your parents everything!!!

13/10/2024

“What you carry deep within, the soul of a star has already been. For I am the great God Pan.”

As those words entered my being, Pan and the universe within him, dissipated and dissolved in front of me. The stars scattered and beamed out from his form into the air around, until all that was left was a singular point of light, no larger than a pin head but so very bright.

“Turn the light off,” came my brothers drowsy voice from his side of the room and in an instant Pan’s light was gone.

I don’t know how long I sat upright in bed, motionless and in awe but Saturday 7th August 1976, two days before my eighth birthday was the first time I came face to face with the great God Pan.

Of course, nobody believed my story and it was all put down to a very strange dream and too much reading of “Men and Gods.” Yet, I knew that for a moment, the veil had been lifted and I had been given access to what lies beyond. My nearly eight-year-old self didn’t question why I had been chosen, but I accepted it with a child’s innocence.

Life continued in much the same way for the rest of those summer holidays. Although I carried with me a reignited notion of the hidden worlds just outside of the corner of one’s eye.

Much of my time was spent at “The Tosh.” An open-air swimming pool owned by Rugby School. Olympic sized and temperatures consistently just above freezing. One of us would “borrow” a sub master key from an unknowing parent; (Remember, all our fathers were teachers at the school.) and we would unlock the gates and enter our own private world.

The pool itself was a monster, lulling you into a sense of security at its shallow end, with gentle ever widening steps welcoming you into its waters. The cold would introduce itself to you from the toes up. Past your knees and up to your waist, until a decision had to be made. Whether to retreat or plunge oneself under and surrender to its glacial embrace.

Getting used to the initial raw biting chill of the water was all part of the games we played. The dare of who could just jump right in, without having to test the water first. Many a young boy (forgive the sexism, but back here we just didn’t have any girlfriends) was elevated to hero status by his willingness to “bomb” into the depths with no warning.

As we swam and splashed and hurled ourselves around, it was easy to forget just how deep The Tosh could get. There would be a point, about a quarter of the length down the pool where suddenly you could not feel your feet. You had to be a strong swimmer and all of us were. In fact, The Tosh is where I learned to swim with the “helpful” shoving hands of my brother pushing me in.

If the freezing cold of the shallow end was our Scylla, then the bottomless nothing of the deep end was our Charybdis. Two mythological monsters that needed to be tamed in our quest for control over the The Tosh.

We could show more of our Olympian courage at the deep end, by virtue of the diving boards. There were three that hung tantalisingly over the deepest parts.

The first, a springboard, where real height and flight could be gained with summersaults and all sorts of shapes made in the air.

The second was called “the middle board”. A hard diving board that stood approximately 15 feet high over the surface of the pool. Standing with your toes over the edge, it looked a lot higher than that. It was one thing to jump off the middle board, but the more courageous would dive. True heroes.

The third and final board, known as “the top board”, stood sentinel like, watching over the entire Tosh. 25 feet high, it towered over all. This was the board for Heracles. The board that made you not just a hero, but a demi-God. Not for the faint hearted, it was enough to just jump off this skyscraper and your introduction to the pantheon of Gods and heroes would be assured.

However, there were a chosen few (I was not one of them) who dove from the top board. We just called them “nutters.”

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