I love the idea of random acts of kindness, but so many of the lists are full of things which would push me so far outside my comfort zone (free hugs, turning up unannounced on a stranger's doorstep with food they could hate / be deadly allergic to, you know the type of thing...) that it just totally overwhelms me. So I wanted to put together a list which concentrated on much more manageable, doable, and anonymous acts that could still make a real difference.

Where I've already written posts explaining the idea in more detail, I've simply linked them up here. :)

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★ Send a card. That link has plenty of organised schemes to help you out if you're not sure where to start.

★ Donate to your local foodbank.

★ Get yourself a reusable water bottle and help save the planet from waste plastic.

★ Support awareness days by wearing the colour, posting with the hashtag, buying the cupcake, or whatever else the desired action might be. You can keep tabs on upcoming days via sites like Awareness Days or Go-Givers.

★ Gender doesn't matter, be a gentleman and hold the door open.

★ Donate your old prescription glasses. Specsavers, along with thousands of independent opticians, have collection points for Vision Aid, a charity which distributes them across Africa.

★ Like - and share and comment. A little positivity on social media can go a long way.

★ Return your trolley, or even someone else's, to the collection point.

★ Send someone a care package. It could be someone you know personally, or via a scheme like Support Our Soldiers.

★ Leave a nice note in a library book.

★ And if you liked the book, review it on Amazon and / or Goodreads.

★ Don't want anything for your birthday or Christmas this year? (Or have the kind of annoying relative who insists they don't no matter how many times you ask?) Get charity donations in your name, or a present that will help someone else - eg. Good Gifts offer everything from toys for children in refugee camps to the planting of ten metres of hedgerow in the UK, plus a little keepsake as a thank you.

★ Take your unwanted stuff to a charity shop.

★ Clear your nearest footpath of snow / wet leaves / litter / whatever else might be blocking it at this moment in time!

★ Do you love to knit, sew or crochet? There are so many great causes looking for crafters, just check out all the info on it at Loving Hands and Making For Charity.

★ If you drive, stop for someone to cross the road, or let someone out at a junction.

★ Offer work(wo)men / sales(wo)men / post(wo)men / etc a hot or cold drink, depending on the vagaries of the British weather system.

★ Share your sweets. (Maybe even your last Rolo...)

★ Post your old mascara wands off to Plastic Freedom in Southport. They're sorted and redistributed to animal charities who use them for removing fly eggs and larva from animal fur.

★ Let your better half have a lie in.

★ Help out a noob on your favourite online game.

★ Channel your inner Greta Thunberg and use public transport.

★ Test your vocabulary with freerice.com; for every correct answer the World Food Programme will donate ten grains of rice to people in need.

★ Compliment a stranger - online or in person.

★ Save water. Turn the tap off when brushing your teeth, don't overfill the bath, and check out your water provider's website - chances are they offer a range of freebies like save-a-flush bags and tap inserts to help you in your quest.

★ Leave a few coins along the edge of a wishing well so others can make a wish.

★ Tidy up a neglected grave or memorial spot - it might be breaking someone's heart that they're no longer well enough to do it.

★ Give a busker some change.

★ Raise money for charity while you surf the net. If you use Chrome install the Tab For a Cause extension which raises money with every new tab opened, and on any browser you can use charity focused search engines like benelab, everyclick, and goodsearch.

★ If you find something that's missing, hand it into lost property.

★ Carry an extra pen so you can lend it out when needed.

★ Get involved with the kindness rocks project - paint a rock and leave it for someone to find.

★ Smile!



★ Donate your old towels and bedding to an animal shelter.

★ Go on a litter pick. Or just pick up the first piece you see and bin it.

★ Run (or walk) for charity - from fun run to marathon.

★ If you see someone snapping a group pic, offer to take it for them so they can be included.

★ Leave a positive message on a mirror - post it notes are your friend.

★ Talk to the shy one in the room.

★ Improve morale at work - an anonymous packet of good biscuits or decent hand soap in the loos can make a surprising difference.

★ Enjoyed the service? Tell the boss and / or write a positive review online.

★ Help secure the next scientific breakthrough - by donating your computer power. BOINC runs harmlessly in the background while you're browsing the net or streaming your favourite cat vids.

★ Offer shelter under your umbrella next time it rains.

★ Make your favourite person breakfast in bed - even if that's yourself!

★ Let someone go ahead of you in the queue.

★ Don't allow gossip to go unchallenged, if you've something nice to say - say it!

★ Help a small business out and buy local.

★ Write a letter to a soldier, or a prisoner, or anyone who could do with knowing somebody out there is thinking of them.

★ Give blood.

★ Play to your strengths - if you're tall, help someone reach the top shelf at the supermarket. If you're strong, help someone struggling with their bags. If you're tech savvy, give the person jabbing helplessly at the self serve a hand... You get the idea!

★ Put some loose change in the charity bucket.

★ Tell a special someone you love them.

★ Make a Morsbag and give it away.

★ Say thank you.

★ Take a deep breath and hold off posting that angry email / social media comment. You might think differently once you've had chance to calm down.

★ Give someone the benefit of the doubt.

★ Call home. Or, you know, a friend or family member.

★ Send someone flowers.

★ Help out the person short of change for their bus ticket / shopping / etc. Not only do you help them, you help the rest of your fellow humans by moving the queue along.

★ Hold the lift.

 ★ Compliment the chef.

★ Share your favourite story by reading it aloud for the net via LibriVox or similar. Or leave a copy of the book for someone to find. If you want to really go for it, you could set up your own Little Free Library.

★ Pay it forward at a cafe or other store.

★ Feed the birds.

★ Make someone laugh.

★ Like your local amenities? Use them or lose them. Okay, that sounded kind of harsh, but your local library, museum, community farm, etc, etc, rely heavily on footfall figures so why not pay them a visit and see what's new.

★ Leave a little extra change in a vending machine.

★ Offer to babysit.

★ Recycle!

★ Endorse a friend or colleague's skills on LinkedIn.

★ Become an organ donor. (Or, if you live in Wales, don't opt out of the system.)

★ Plant a tree. If you don't fancy getting your hands dirty check out online solutions like treedom, onetreeplanted, and ecosia which do the hard work for you - for free, in some cases!



★ Give up your seat on the bus / train / etc.

★ Leave a tip.

★ Signal boost a good cause.

★ Donate your used stamps for charity.

★ Forgive - even if you can't forget. Nobody learns anything from Cancel Culture, except to double down and deny their transgressions at all costs.

★ Do a favour without expecting one in return.

★ Go to a community event. Turnout is often less than stellar - especially if the weather sucks - so it will definitely make the organiser's day!

★ Listen - even if you have heard it all before.

★ Run an errand for someone.

★ Switch to energy saving bulbs.

★ Write a fan letter to your favourite writer, actress, singer, or whoever. If they inspire you, let them know.

★ Buy a raffle ticket.

★ Put the kettle on and make the teas.

★ Have some spare time you don't know how to fill? Check out Zooniverse and help with data classification for all kinds of research projects from improving eye health for diabetes patients to tracking the criminal careers of Australian prisoners between 1850 and 1940.

★ Make someone a mixtape - or, you know, a playlist.

★ Go visit a friend or relative.

★ Have a coupon, voucher, discount code, etc, you're not going to use? Give it away or post it online for the taking.

★ Sign a petition.

★ Donate raffle prizes, baked goods, etc to your next local fundraiser.

★ Take part in a Christmas gift appeal.

★ Give someone a lift.

★ Put your neighbours bins out - or put them back after refuse collection.

★ Sponsor a child.

★ If you spot a problem you can't fix it, report it rather than simply walk on by. This could be anything from notifying the police of dangerous behaviour through to telling the store assistant there's a slip hazard or tweeting the council about a flytipped mattress. You're not heaping pressure on, you're actually making peoples' jobs easier.

★ Local newspaper letter pages are always doom and gloom. Send them a letter outlining what you love about your area.

★ Adopt an animal... in one of those distance sponsorship packages.

★ Save a tree and opt for paperless.

★ Give yourself a break - you deserve kindness too.

The only Welsh language advent calendar I've ever seen was the kind with nothing but little pictures behind the windows. Cute, but not really destined to endear me to a chocolate obsessed four year old! And, I mean, sure I could make one myself from scratch but that requires the kind of organisation and forward planning that eludes me at the best of times, let alone in the run up to the Christmas.

I was psyched, then, to come across the perfect compromise: chocolate advent calendars with personalised messages.



The process was super easy. All you need to do is write a note to tell the recipient who it's from - in this case, llawer o gariad oddi wrth Siôn Corn (lots of love from Father Christmas) - then fill in the message you want spelled out in chocolate. The toughest part was coming up with something that exactly matched the number of available characters. Eventually I went with:

❤NADOLIG★LLAWEN★IAWN★MARIANNA❤

(Very Merry Christmas Marianna)



You get 30 characters as some days have double chocolate allocations. They are the 5th (character #5 + #6), the 6th (#7 + #8), the 15th (#17 + #18), the 19th (#22 + #23), the 21st (#25 + #26) and the 23rd (#28 + #29) in case you want to use any of them for Welsh's double letters - eg. the 'LL' in Llawen.

(As an aside, I went through my entire school career without working out how to consistently make that sound. It wasn't until my mid-20s that I came across the advice to press the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth and hiss. It really works!)



There are three different shipping options so I went for the mid-range 48 hour tracked. Our calendar arrived on Thursday, beautifully wrapped and ready for action. I love that it's kind of narrow, shaped to fit easily through a letterbox, and naturally we had to conduct a little taste test. For science. Thus I can confirm that the top notch Belgian chocolate definitely hits the spot.

Want to try it for yourself? The Morse Toad Secret Message Advent Calendar is available now for £12.95. Or, use the code CHOCPOST15BL to get 15% off, bringing the price down to £11.01. (Yeah, I totally just googled that...)

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Make sure to sign up to their Smile rewards scheme before you order too; you can earn 'gold toads' for purchases, following on social media, etc, which can be exchanged for free extras or discount coupons. :)

*I moved all my UFO and otherworldly stuff to weirdwales.co.uk - you can find the updated version of this post there.*

Over the years I have heard this story dozens of times, and that's a conservative estimate. Any time UFOs came up as a topic of conversation my mum would tell me about her own otherworldly sighting back in the 1970s. To tell the truth I was always kind of dismissive. Aliens? Yeah, right. And just how good would the memory of a kid on holiday be, anyway? It was far more likely to have been a nightmare that only became more vivid with the retelling.

Later, in my twenties, I first heard of the Broad Haven Mystery. The Dyfed Enigma. Welsh Triangle. Whatever you want to call it, the bare bones of the incident involved over twenty children and school staff witnessing a strange craft and being at Broad Haven Primary School in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. Picked up by BBC Newsround, a news and current affairs programme aimed at children, the story quickly went international.


Throughout 1977 people in Broad Haven and the surrounding area were plagued with sightings of UFOs, strange lights, and weird looking men who inspired feelings of intense terror.

I knew my mum had been on a caravan holiday in the general area when she had her sighting, from memory I assumed somewhere in Haverfordwest, and started to wonder if it had been inspired by the media attention given to the activity in Broad Haven. I even mentioned it in passing when working on research for an April 2016 blog post - 10 Weird Welsh UFO Encounters - though most of our discussion then centred on the Berwyn Mountain Incident.

Anyway, always in need of stuff to blog about, and getting into the Halloween spirit by whiling away a few hours on the Fortean Times messageboards, I suggested back in October that I write up my mum's sighting in as much detail as she could remember. As soon as we sat down to talk about it I was surprised to hear her bring up Broad Haven straight off the bat, telling me that during the 40th Anniversary coverage in 2017 she had seen the children's original drawings of their sighting on the BBC and realised, in her own words, 'that's what I saw!'


Furthermore, the location of the caravan site they were staying at was much closer than I had assumed. In fact, as best as my mum's memory can tell, it was actually at Broad Haven Holiday Park. Less than a mile from the village primary school, the park is a popular static caravan site, today boasting around 175 caravans. Although not quite as neatly laid out back in the 1970s, the general look hasn't much changed, and aerial photographs on the park's website from the time suggest the number of caravans was roughly similar too.

It was in this unlikely setting that my mum had her very own close encounter of the third kind...

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Sometime Obsidian Order spy, sometime space station tailor - and, let's face it, coming on strong to the good Dr Bashir all the time - Elim Garak is the most fashionable man on DS9.

The thought is not a reassuring one.

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In an attempt to retcon the questionable motives behind the miniskirts of TOS, The Next Generation introduced the unisex skant. It was worn in the first season by Deanna Troi and a variety of nameless extras before being quietly retired to the backs of Starfleet closets.

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Less was certainly, er, less when you made a career as a dabo girl.

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Chief O'Brien's expression speaks for us all when it comes to Dr Bashir's racquetball outfit. Bashir was captain of the Starfleet Medical Academy's racquetball team while in training, and won the sector championships in 2368. It really isn't an excuse.

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Jake Sisko channels his inner Bashir in this garish jumpsuit. It was surely a blessing to eyeballs everywhere when Nog ruined it with fake Odo slime later in the episode.

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Commander Riker was duly mocked by his colleagues for deferring to local male custom during an away mission on Angel One.

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Jake Sisko's crimes against fashion didn't end in childhood.

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For Ferengi women, wearing clothing was a daring act of defiance. Here, due to a series of zany circumstances, we have a gender swapped Quark wearing, well, whatever the hell that is. Still, 'Lumba' did manage to convince Commissioner Nilva that female emancipation was the way forward for Ferenginar, ultimately allowing Ferengi women everywhere to make better sartorial choices.

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We can only be thankful the children of the USS Enterprise-D chose not to immortalise this look in papier-mâché for Captain Picard Day. (June 16th, if you're wanting to show your own appreciation.)

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We finish as we began - seriously questioning Garak's taste.

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For more like this, check out:

Our new favourite bedtime story this month is 'Morgan's Magic Moon' by Christopher Parry. It is the super cute story of a little girl who searches high and low for the missing moon, all with the help of her faithful dog Cwtch - a Welsh word for which there is no literal translation, but is basically a cuddly, snuggly kind of a hug.


I absolutely love the stylized illustrations and the bright colour palette used by Jordan Brown. I am notoriously picky about the artwork in children's books - quietly swapping out books for editions with subjectively better illustrations is practically a fulltime hobby these days! - so that's no faint praise.

Marianna tells me the pictures are beautiful because Morgan has red hair just like her. Who am I to argue? :)

The whole book is beautifully laid out, and the text is clear and easy for little fingers to follow.


What really makes this a firm favourite however is the story itself.

So many children's books fall down over awkward rhyme. Even some of the biggest names in the business have problems with sentences which don't quite flow, or inadvertent tongue twisters that have you stumbling over your words. No such problem here! It's a small thing, I know, but a nice even rhythm is an important thing when it comes to a bedtime story.

In conclusion: this is a sweet wholesome story that flows easily and really lends itself to young readers following along.