Rev’d Geraint ap Iorwerth BA MPhil 
(From a Covid19 free-zone ‘near Cardiff’)
4 October 2020
 
Dear First Minister of Wales
As in any crisis, you are doing the best that you can. There was no time to prepare, and I am sure that you are already learning where and how things will be done differently in the future.

Thousands of us have supported you and our PM, even when we have strongly disagreed with some of your directives.

I don’t know who it was that came up with the term LOCKDOWN – probably the W.H.O. – but whether as a piece of advice or propaganda, it was, in hindsight, the wrong choice. Absolutely foolish, especially as we face at least another six months of the same.

I am not a prisoner. I am not a mental patient.

The lockdown mentality is, by now – day after day after day after day- ‘doing people’s head in.’

Locked-down minds produce locked-down slogans.

More and more people are beginning ‘to crack.’

More and more ‘ordinary people’ all over the UK are beginning ‘to revolt’ – and I’m not talking about ‘extremists’ and their weird ideas about the virus. I’m talking about thousands upon thousands of ordinary men and women, of all ages and backgrounds.

People who have always acted in ‘good reason.’

‘Good reason’ - now that would be an interesting court case should I ever end up in a Covid19 one! 

These are people who haven’t had to come up with ‘excuses,’ in order to honour their own consciences. People will not be prisoners in their own homes, streets and communities this long dark winter.

‘Responsible’ people who have had enough.

People who now want a different approach.

They have used, are using, and will continue to use, their own common sense, as they follow the basic steps to stop getting, and passing on, the Covid19 virus. 

It was Kier Hardy who said that “no law can give freedom to a people which is dependent upon some power or authority outside themselves for the necessaries of life. 
 
Keep promoting the ‘lockdown mentality’ and you will alienate many of the people who currently support you.

LOCKDOWN! Let’s do things differently. Let’s come-up with a more positive slogan here in Wales. Let’s be imaginative.

Back in the Spring, with hundreds of Club Security personnel, and Youth workers, for example, unable to work, we could have organised hundreds of out-door activities (in existing parks and playing fields, farmer’s fields, beaches, activity centres, nature trails etc) for our young people. I, for one, would have volunteered.

Nothing was done.

I see today that a major indoor venue in London will be holding events, with albeit limited attendance, but open stadia are not allowed to do the same.

This is totally ridiculous and will further alienate ordinary people,’ who will begin to take ‘the law’ into their own hands.

Christmas 2020? For some of us, not only Christmas but also Advent and Epiphany 2021.

I trust that you have started planning now for our 2020 Christmas in Wales.

Some of us hope to put together a 2020 version of a Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales,’ in the new year. With a bit of imagination, all of us can make it a memorable one.

Please help us make sure that it isn’t a grim one.

Let’s banish those ‘dark satanic mills’ that are spreading like a virus in our land.

William Blake was not primarily talking about dirty factories etc at the start of the Industrial Revolution. He was talking about not being intellectually lazy, not being slaves to our out-dated mental constructs. He was talking about freeing the human imagination.
 
Now is the time for that Imagination to be unleashed on a grand scale. And well-done to our pubs and restaurants for being truly imaginative, as they welcome back their customers.

But the majority of our children, youth and people don’t frequent these places.

Let’s get creative. Let’s get that ‘imagination’ going.

Let’s put the well-being of our children and young people at the top of the list: their mental, emotional and spiritual well-being.

Not just for the 12 days of Christmas 2020, but for the first half of 2021and its 179 days.

How will our family be celebrating Christmas 2020? We, and we alone, will decide, after an informed family discussion on the matter, using our ‘good reason’ and imagination.

William Blake was also aware of the dangers of ‘bad reason,’ and I fear that that kind of reason is also beginning to spread like a virus across our land.

A proud Welsh Nonconformist (even when an Anglican) – how much the poorer Wales and Welsh history would be without this tradition!

I fear that you are about to create many more Welsh non-conformists this winter.

I close this brief epistle with the words of an Englishman, the incomparable John Milton: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

The ‘dark lockdown mental mills’ must be banished, to make way for a new slogan, and more importantly, a new approach, to the Covid19 challenge.

We need a new, positive strategy for the coming six months

Please come up with one.

Our mental, emotional and spiritual well-being depends on it.

“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-u snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night.

I turned the gas down, I got into bed.

I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

Dylan Thomas ‘A Child's Christmas in Wales.’

2020 A Child’s Christmas in Wales?
“I said some words to the close and holy darkness.
And then I wept?”

I hope not.

Yours sincerely

Geraint ap

Correspondence.Mark.Drakeford@gov.wales