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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello everyone, it's been a while. It's nice to be back on you. I do apologize for the little break I've had and I hope you're all doing well and look whether you're in the best shape of your life, just starting, maybe you've been putting the weight on slowly like I have you know let that go for today let it go focus on what you're gonna do from today to the end of the day and be grateful for having another day of life and I know sometimes that sounds cheesy but it definitely helps. But today's podcast is a bit of a different one I want to lead you down a bit of a historic route a community angle and really an appeal. So we know community has been a centerpiece of British culture for a long time.
Speaker 1:The pubs have a lot to do with this but also just in general and sports team. Football and rugby and tennis and cricket. All of these sports are invented in The UK and spread across the country and they form these little villages and teams and everything. And then when it comes online a lot of you guys have been members of PowerPal members and we've seen in person how amazing community is. It's so strong, so powerful, it can really take you out of a bad place and we're gonna be doing a big event soon guys and I want to bring everyone back together.
Speaker 1:But when we look at the history and we look at what people went through to give us what we just take for granted today is actually phenomenal. Right? So as an example, my village back in Wales, Tumble, small village built by the coal miners. 4,000 people live there. It was literally formed because the coal mines were there and essentially that's where the workers came.
Speaker 1:In the early eighteen hundreds they did revolt against, well, the farmers had to pay a toll every time they used the roads. So their profits would go in and usually the toll booth owners were like English or like, you know upper classes and then there was riots called the Rebecca riots where a guy from Tumble and a few others dressed up as women and burned them down. They caught the guy from Tumble, a statue of him and they sent him off to Tasmania. After that unfairness and the trying to extinguish the the Welsh language as well, the the the coal mines opened and the the miners wanted a place of their own to have a drink and have a chat and they pitched together from their wages to build this place, right? And the government was against it, the breweries were against it, everyone was against it.
Speaker 1:They have fought fifteen years to get a license but they built it with their wages which is not much. And when I grew up and I would go to this place, it's big pub in the front, big back room in the back. I'd go to this place, I'd go to the back room and do karate, I'd then go to the front room, my mother would there with all her friends and all the people of the village. Then we'd have football, rugby, then we'd wait outside on rugby days to get picked up and football days, we'd go back there. There'd be events on, music, birthday parties, all sorts of stuff going on there.
Speaker 1:As a kid you just assume the world just exists, this just exists, it's just there. Right? And as you get older and you realize someone's volunteering to do the football club. Right? Di Williams, legend.
Speaker 1:He used to drive around the village, pick us up. When I was, like, young, like, six, seven years old, he'd drive... Remember it to this Car outside, I started to remember that, Paula, Scott's coming to play football. We're gonna play football today. We're gonna go down Kamala.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna play football. Let's get in the car. Got in the car, picked up other people who maybe the parents weren't just on it with the sport, didn't know what was happening, and he did this all of our our lives. We used to then meet outside the working men's club to get picked up and then he would pick us up if people weren't awake and he'd be the alarm clock you know and he did that off his own back. Same goes for the rugby, they got like nine teams.
Speaker 1:It's been going since the late 1800s and it's quite a well known team in Wales. Then you've got the youth clubs, again volunteer led. Then you've got the working men's club, lot of volunteers. Everything is other people putting their energy and soul into something for no benefit financially but because they love it and they know the importance of it. So you wake up, you grow up one day and you walk around and you're like this thing didn't just exist for the sake of it.
Speaker 1:People built this with their own energy and that to me is what the community is all about. It's like how much do you give in and you're not expecting anything back and how much of an impact it has on people's lives, you'll never know. Right? So there's a tremendous amount of effort amongst you. And when it comes to the coal miners, sixty one of them died down the mines.
Speaker 1:Sixty one of them. Tragic deaths. My grandfather's... I'm sorry, my great grandfather's brothers died down there. A lot of people had horrific deaths.
Speaker 1:You know, people have messaged on a on a Facebook group saying, oh, that was my grandfather in the story you shared. And one of the stories is tragic where one of the guys shouted, no, it's going the wrong way. Other people escaped, but he he didn't manage to escape. He just shouted shouted one and he died and the other person escaped was this person's grandfather. You know?
Speaker 1:And there's loads of these stories. And the reason I wanna bring it back to you is I'm doing a campaign to save this working men's club. Savetheworkies.com. Two pound a month, £5 a month, whatever you can afford to prove to the Welsh government we wanna keep And this is not an appeal to just for you guys to be, I'll never go there. Why would I do it?
Speaker 1:It's a general resistance against letting these things go that took so much energy and effort and literal blood sweat and tears to build and we're just letting things go in today's age like it's nothing. We've been accustomed to have these things at the tips of our fingers all our lives. The work immense club, the football team, the rugby team, all the other institutions, the youth club, we just go well it's just there. And the moment it comes for us to have the responsibility on our shoulders we go oh I don't know I don't have two point a month, five point a I'm too busy, things are too hard right now, too hard. These guys worked under the mines.
Speaker 1:One of the worst jobs you can have ever. A lot of them died in the mines, lot of them most of them died outside the mines because they had the bloody lung diseases. We need to shape up a bit I think. There's a lot of people saying oh we're gonna lose our British culture, we're gonna lose this, we're gonna lose that. Well where are we protecting it?
Speaker 1:Because we protect it from the villages and the towns. Big cities fine but people go to the big cities and they've grown up in these small towns villages. We need to fight back. I'm not saying this for you guys as in like just the work. I'm saying in your own communities.
Speaker 1:In what you guys are are doing or where you live. Like there's a lot of effort going in to make things. There's a famous Welsh song sung by a a man called Davidewan. He actually did sing in the work he's back in the day. And it's called a Mowheed which translates to we're still here.
Speaker 1:Through everything. Since the Romans to today, we're still here. The Welsh language is still here. The Welsh people still here. Opposite the most powerful force of all time, which is the English Anglo Saxon kind of empire for that way.
Speaker 1:And this is not just about Welsh people, it's that we are still here, as British people, as people, our cultures are still here, our local villages and stuff, they're still there. The pubs in most places are still there. The local shops and stuff are still there for now, but we are letting this slip through. And once we lose community, it's so hard, so so hard to get it back. And I do think in the next five, ten, fifteen years there's gonna be a reversal of we don't want be online all the time.
Speaker 1:I don't want to be online all the time. I want to connect with people in real life. But then there's nothing to connect in real life. There's no building to go to. There's no location to go to.
Speaker 1:So what do we do? Well there's nothing. Then we have to start from fresh and we don't have what it takes. We don't have what it takes compared to these guys what they built back in the day across the entire UK and these men and women. I don't think we got that much will and grit in us to be honest with you, but we've got something and this is really really is a time.
Speaker 1:And I'm appealing to you guys listening if you've listened to this podcast for a while £2 a month if there's if even every one of you did that we would hit our target we got until the September 1 to raise another £450 a month and I think we can do it Just need a little boost. If community means something to you, if anything I've said to you today means something to you, please go to savetheworkies..com, savetheworkies.com, we've even got a new music single and the video on there Pixar style is actually of the Workies itself and what it was like in the eighties when my grandparents would go there and dance together and the backroom would be filled, was 500 capacity like a ballroom essentially, live music, dancing a maze in the front, the pub was bouncing, the snooker tables, the pool tables of course. Will we get back to that? Probably not but if we don't put these things together then they might never happen anyway like you know it's gonna happen anyway because we're not trying but if we do try I do think we can get at least a good community spirit back.
Speaker 1:And I want that community spirit back not just in regards to this but in regards to everything we're doing with Turtle and Parapal. Please engage in the new community tabs in the apps. Get in touch if you want another event and what location you want to do it in. And really yeah let's get a challenge back together. Let's get the troops back in place and let's you know keep improving our health one day at a time especially also one challenge at a time.
Speaker 1:We bring different experts from different places. And I assure you, if we do save this place, we will do some kind of day down there where we bring hopefully some of the Welsh singers and everything together. We do fitness class, we can have a comedian, we can do have the amazing music that comes from Wales and the choirs and everything and we can have a day out and go for a run club in the the in the valleys and it's amazing. So, you know, we can do a lot of stuff and I I promise that will happen if we can save it. So, yeah, that's it for today, guys.
Speaker 1:I hope, oh, And one more thing actually, the the founder of the NHS who pushed it over the line and made it reality, a neighbor in Behrvan. He's from a a minor village in Wales and he actually was a minor himself. And when he came into power, and he moved to Sloane Square, you know, there's a plaque outside the house by the way if you wanna go and see him. He was given the impossible task of the housing minister and the health minister after World War two. Right?
Speaker 1:Do you imagine how tough our job was after World War two? And the reason they gave him those two jobs because they didn't necessarily like him in the Liberal Party because they felt one, could be in power and be the leader, but two, he was a bit too wild, too destructive for them. He was pushing too much big ideas and maybe they were this will destroy him. If he fails here he's out of politics. That's kind of the rationale of putting two of those jobs on him.
Speaker 1:But what he did? He set up the NHS. Birth death rate dropped. I think a third or two thirds, something crazy since the NHS came in. He managed to get the doctors to agree.
Speaker 1:He managed to get the doctors to agree to do GP for everyone. At this time doctors worked with rich individuals who had money. They didn't want to deal with the working classes. What do you mean the smelly dirty working class? And obviously, don't believe that.
Speaker 1:But, you know, that's what the vision was. I'm not dealing with those people. But he managed... They were fighting against it. The doctors, they were the ones against the NHS at this point.
Speaker 1:Can you believe? Now they're a big part of it and they wanna fight for it. But at that time, they were against it. They didn't wanna change their lifestyle to work in lickety nine nine to five and they had a nice job of just being called up by a by a person with money and then going over and seeing them. Completely changed it but he did that with his will.
Speaker 1:He would spoke to them all, got them together, got them organized, and he did that. And he set up the NHS which obviously today is maybe a bit bloated and has got his own problems but became an amazing place over the years and has been a cornerstone of how it should work. But then one of the more interesting things he said was when he was the housing minister, World War two things are destroyed, no money. Had to build over a million homes. You know, that government built over a million homes.
Speaker 1:And when the Tories before them, I'm not making this between labor and Tories, that's not the point, but they wanted to build council or social housing as cheap as possible, thin walls, back to back, no gardens, squish as many in as possible. Right? That was the rationale we just need to build. But Behr Van knew that, wait a second, if we build houses on top of each other with thin walls, no gardens, What type of mindset is gonna be born from living in such gray, you know, unurban places? Like, what what is the mindset of that person gonna be?
Speaker 1:You know, are they gonna grow up? And he was bang on and that's why he fought against it. And that's why a lot of social housing in that era is very very good. And even the social housing back where I was... Where I'm from, in my village, the street I'm from, is social housing, is there's a garden in the front.
Speaker 1:Every house has got a garden. It's semi detached, not, you know, terraced all the way. And there were gardens in the back are massive, lot of green. And you think, wow. Imagine we didn't have that.
Speaker 1:It's just growing up on on on concrete. It's not a good place to be as a kid and has you free your mind. He was bang on so he was thinking guys without this type of community, without this type of place growing up, this beauty, which by the way all of the other civilizations have known about, the Greeks for sure and the Romans and everyone, the the Christianity, the church knows about it, These grand churches you go to see wow this is amazing you're in this atmosphere you know. If there was just a box of concrete you wouldn't have the same effect would it? So there's these people that will these changes into existence and we don't even know about it cause these stories are hidden, but we benefit from it today.
Speaker 1:Of course, we benefit from today. Some of the most stunning houses in London London from that era. So my thing is about this is that we can can prod reality. We can make a difference. We can...
Speaker 1:You know, if that one person pushed through, obviously, he he had people helping, but he did will it himself. Push it. Push it. Push it. Can we do a change, or do we sit back and do nothing?
Speaker 1:I am convinced if all of us listened to you, popped in, we all came together in multiple different areas. Oh, there's another place to save in another village. Let's get together, help them, boom. We would... It would transform.
Speaker 1:It would start the movement, I'm sure of it, but it requires energy and it does require a bit of sacrifice of that. But that's what our world is built from. I'm sorry. We've just inherited a lot of things that we like and don't like, but unless we're willing to prod it back and give some more, how can anything change? So guys, that's it for today.
Speaker 1:Hopefully you learned a bit of Ash history. Hopefully it was an enjoyable podcast. I don't know. But on the side of turtle and parrot, please get in touch with me, on event dates and where you'd love an event held and we'll get working on doing one in the next few months. So guys, thank you so much for this.
Speaker 1:Podcast will be back fully in September, and I look forward to sharing more wisdom from the experts and all sorts of other places in life with you guys. So speak soon.