Latest news with #Rhys
Business News Wales
4 days ago
- Business
- Business News Wales
Regeneration Project Receives £477,285 to Tackle Empty Homes in Wales
A housing regeneration project has received a substantial funding package to address the high number of empty properties in Wales. Community Impact Initiative has been awarded £477,285 by the Pen Y Cymoedd Community Fund to continue work regenerating empty properties in the upper reaches of the Neath, Afan, Rhondda and Cynon valleys through its Building Resilience in Communities (BRiC) project. There are more than 120,000 unoccupied homes in Wales (about 8.2% of all dwellings) according to the Office for National Statistics. Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council says there are currently 2,704 known empty properties in the local authority area. Through the BRiC initiative, long-term empty properties are purchased, often at auction, refurbished to a liveable standard and returned to the housing market. Established in 2016, the initiative also offers a volunteer working programme to anyone over the age of 16, enabling people to learn new skills, adapt to a work life balance, and develop confidence in the construction industry. Rhys Kedward, 16, became involved with BRiC after looking for opportunities to build his hands-on experience in construction while studying in college. 'They teach you the way you're able to be taught,' Rhys said. 'I prefer to be shown how to do something rather than told. For some people it's the opposite but they adjust to you. 'I wasn't the best in school but here it's helped me learn.' Paul Gall, 49, moved from Bristol to Treforest and began working on the project last year. 'My partner was diagnosed with epilepsy ten years ago, so I stepped away from the trade to care for her around the clock,' Paul said. 'I worked in Germany as a plasterer, became a qualified carpenter in Bristol, and I was a project manager, too. But being away from the site for so long has knocked my confidence. 'Working with different people again has been beneficial for me. You'd never see me raise my arm in meetings and make suggestions on projects a few years ago.' Volunteers can sign up to assist on a project at the Community Impact Initiative website. Kate Breeze, Executive Director of the Pen y Cymoedd Community Fund, said: 'The Pen y Cymoedd Community Fund is delighted to support a project that addresses such an important issue within the area of benefit. BRiC does inspiring work reducing empty property numbers while empowering people to learn new skills, develop their sense of community pride, and provide support into further employment.'
Newsweek
11-06-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
Homeowner Rips Up Carpet During Renovation—What She Finds Stuns Viewers
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A video of a homeowner making a "jackpot" discovery beneath a carpet during renovation works has gone viral on TikTok. The clip was shared by Seren and Rhys (@our_edwardian_reno) and has garnered 513,000 views since it was posted on June 9. The short clip shows a woman peeling a carpet off the floor to reveal what appears to be Victorian tiles underneath it, according to a hashtag shared in the caption. Each tile features a blue star shape against a white backdrop, overlaid with a patterned centerpiece. "Oh my god," the caption simply says. According to another video, the tiles were found on the day the poster was adding a new doorway to their hallway. The discovery in the viral post comes amid a broader trend of Americans investing in home renovations. According to a recent survey by Houzz, a home design website, the median renovation spending in the U.S. surged by 60 percent between 2020 and 2023, rising from $15,000 to $24,000. Seven out of 10 renovating homeowners were reported to have invested in interior room remodeling in 2023, according to the report. The viral video also comes as the global flooring market was estimated to be valued at $360.7 billion in 2024 and projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6.8 percent from 2025 to 2030, according to a report by Grandview Research, a market research firm headquartered in San Francisco. "Increasing demand for aesthetic, superior, and durable floor covering solutions and changing consumer trends in floor design have aided the growth of the flooring industry over the past few years," the report said. 'Dream Find' Viewers on TikTok were amazed by the incredible surprise finding beneath the carpet in the viral video. Claud said: "Holy shiz. dream find right there!" and MGW wrote: "Absolute perfection." Landstack noted: "You just hit the jackpot," and Eymer Creates said: "I would lose my life if i discovered that!" Bh_London 🇬🇧 noted: "I'd be beyond happy, just stunning." User samspam29 said: "Omg why would somebody cover that beauty up!" User Caravandays said: "What a find will look fabulous." User O'Neil noted: "ohhh so perfect, so many memories stepped over those tiles xx." Matthew Cobb called it an "amazing find," and silvia said it's an "unexpected it." Annette Whitehead wrote: "That's beautiful lucky you," and @nadine_x_13 said: "I'm so jealous." Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment via TikTok. This video has not been independently verified. Stock image of a woman removing tape from the edge of a floor during a renovation. Stock image of a woman removing tape from the edge of a floor during a renovation. Getty Do you have a home renovation-related video or story to share? Let us know via life@ and your story could be featured on Newsweek.
Chicago Tribune
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Biblioracle: Jess Walter's latest novel, ‘So Far Gone,' has echoes from his earlier books
Jess Walter, author of the just about to be released 'So Far Gone,' is one of my favorite contemporary novelists. He's been something of a shapeshifter over the course of his career, first establishing himself as a crime writer, including in the Edgar Award-winning 'Citizen Vince.' 'The Zero,' from 2006, uses Walter's base in crime fiction set against the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the service of a kind of hybrid noir that, through the lens of one character, brilliantly captures our collective disorientation in those first weeks and months post-attack. 'The Financial Lives of Poets' (2009) is a medium-dark domestic comedy about a journalist who (sort of) turns to crime to make ends meet as his profession collapses around him. 'Beautiful Ruins' (2013) is my favorite of Walter's novels, a sprawling tale across time, the 1960s to the present, and place, the glamour of Italy and the glitz of Hollywood. 'The Cold Millions' (2020) explores nascent labor activism in the logging industry of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century. The DNA of 'So Far Gone' has elements from across Walter's oeuvre. Like 'The Financial Lives of the Poets,' the central character, Rhys Kinnick, is a journalist who has left the profession, retreating from it and his family to a hermit-like life on some ancestral family land in a cold-water cabin in Washington state. Rhys is drawn back to the world when his 9-year-old and 14-year-old grandchildren (Asher and Leah) are brought to his door and he finds out his daughter, Bethany, has gone missing. Rhys has retreated because his profession, his marriage and his relationship with Bethany all appeared dead, the separation kicked off by Rhys punching Bethany's increasingly devout, increasingly radical second husband (and Leah's father), Shane, in the face over political stances entirely divorced from reality. Rhys thinks he's a failure, a drag on his loved ones. Bethany feels as though he's abandoned his family. This psychological baggage and the way it defines the characters are the center of the novel. Rhys brings the kids to what is supposed to be Asher's junior chess tournament, but quickly loses his grandchildren when they are confronted by members of the Army of the Lord, a radical sect to which Shane sort of belongs. Rhys now needs help, bringing him back into the lives of others. Walter taps into his crime origins to bring us his penchant for snappy dialogue and expert quick establishment of these secondary characters, including Lucy — once Rhys' girlfriend just before and just post-divorce, and still an editor at the paper Rhys left — and Chuck, Lucy's ex-boyfriend and an ex-cop who is looking to get back into Lucy's good graces while also having a particular enmity toward the Army of the Lord. The story careens on from there as different characters are lost and then found throughout. This is, as expected, a very well-done novel. Rhys is winning and interesting even in the midst of a pathetic moment. Walter delves straight into strange territory, asking how some significant portion of people can choose to detach themselves from reality in the name of trying to find solace in a hostile world. There are laugh-out-loud moments of comedy and dark incidents of violence. It's not clear why, ultimately, I wasn't more satisfied by this book. I think it's me, and these times. Walter is trying to paint a route through what seems to be a kind of collective madness to reconnection and a return to community and dignity. It's a story I want to be true. But right now, I don't trust it. I hope someday it does come true. John Warner is the author of books including 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.' You can find him at Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read. 1. 'Antarctica' by Claire Keegan 2. 'Dream State' by Eric Puchner 3. 'Table for Two' by Amor Towles 4. 'Just Mercy' by Bryan Stevenson 5. 'Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets' by Burkhard Bilger'Eat the Document' by Dana Spiotta is a great character study rooted in two eras simultaneously, late '60s early '70s political radicals, and the suburbs of the 1990s. 1. 'Middle of the Night' by Riley Sager 2. 'Think Twice' by Harlan Coben 3. 'The Quiet Librarian' by Allen Eskens 4. 'James' by Percival Everett 5. 'Presumed Guilty' by Scott TurowAnybody who looks like they enjoy a good twisty thriller is a good candidate for one of my favorites of the last several years, 'Who Is Maud Dixon?' by Alexandra Andrews. 1. 'The Sympathizer' by Viet Thanh Nguyen 2. 'Crazy Brave' by Joy Harjo 3. 'Parable of the Sower; Parable of the Talents' by Octavia E. Butler 4. 'Braiding Sweetgrass' by Robin Wall Kimmerer 5. 'Born to Run' by Bruce SpringsteenI think Adele is a great candidate for Lorrie Moore's strange and powerful 'I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home.' Get a reading from the Biblioracle Send a list of the last five books you've read and your hometown to biblioracle@
Los Angeles Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Jess Walter's sublime ‘So Far Gone' finds redemption in exasperated Pacific Northwest exile
Jess Walter's searing and sublime eighth novel, 'So Far Gone,' is a wistful elegy — some might say a eulogy — to a kinder, gentler time. Its compelling antihero, sixty-something Rhys Kinnick, has spent seven years in self-imposed exile, occupying a cinder block cabin in a remote region of Washington state. His attempts to improve the home his grandfather once envisioned as a thriving sheep farm have stalled, but he has managed to read more than 900 books during his stay, and to write 2,000-plus pages of a still-unfinished metaphysical volume ambitiously titled 'The Atlas of Wisdom.' He reassures himself that in becoming a hermit — leaving behind his daughter, Bethany, and grandchildren, Leah and Asher — and eschewing most creature comforts, he's modeling Thoreau's 'Walden.' In the rare encounters he has with other humans, he enjoys quoting favorite passages from it, such as: 'A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.' And he's let alone quite a few. His 'step aside' was in part sparked by a 2016 Thanksgiving altercation with his daughter's dangerously sanctimonious husband, Shane. He's a born-again Christian whose adherence to increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories have him believing that even the NFL has been infiltrated by 'globalists.' Rhys has been subjected to Shane's rants for years, and distills his son-in-law's worldview down to this: 'a Satanic liberal orthodoxy whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare in which people pooped in the wrong bathroom.' Rhys tries valiantly not to engage with Shane during this holiday gathering, but for years he's hopelessly observed the 'long sad cultural decline' that led to 'the literal worst person in America' getting elected president, and he can't take it anymore. What's more, he's been laid off from his job as an environmental reporter for a newspaper, and his girlfriend has told him she doesn't ever want to see him again. When he mutters aloud what he is thinking about Shane — 'Daughter married an idiot' — all hell breaks loose, prompting Rhys to flee without explanation or apology. At first he has no idea where he's going, but, impulsively pitching his cell phone out the window, he steers his car toward the cabin, where he'll take permanent refuge. Among the many melancholy pleasures of this novel is that Walter synthesizes that desire many of us feel — and mostly resist — to crawl under the covers and not reemerge for a few decades, to nurse a 'bone-deep sorrow.' Rhys luxuriates in his solitude and lack of responsibility, detaching to such a degree that, in 2020, he's largely unaware of the COVID-19 pandemic until his barber insists he don a mask. He's startled out of his oblivion a few years later by a knock at the front door. On his porch stand a boy and a girl he at first mistakes for strangers. 'What are you fine capitalists selling?' he asks them. 'Magazines or chocolate bars?' 'We aren't selling anything,' replies the boy. 'We're your grandchildren.' It's then that Rhys comprehends that in protecting himself he has failed to be there for his beloved ex-wife, Celia, who's since died of lymphoma, or for his daughter, who has mysteriously run away, leaving a note to a neighbor instructing her to take her kids to stay with her estranged father. 'He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor,' she writes. Reading her words, remorse hits like a ton of bricks. He asks himself: What have I done? Having spent the last seven years in a state of self-absorption — or, as his ex-girlfriend Lucy later puts it: 'You've just been up there pouting?' — his new quest is simply to atone. Throughout the novel, Rhys references Kant, De Beauvoir, Sartre, Virginia Woolf and Epictetus, among others, using knowledge as a balm and escape hatch. He mourns the collapse of culture 'into a huge internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit.' But into that cauldron he must once again dive, as his daughter's whereabouts remain unknown, his 13-year-old granddaughter has been promised by her stepfather to the 19-year-old son of a radical church pastor, and his grandson is late for a chess match in Spokane. He starts up his 1978 Audi 100 — 'half car, half garbage. Carbage' — and the three take off. Rhys awkwardly rebuilds bridges with friends and family in a series of adventures and misadventures, and slowly registers what he's missed during his absence. 'Those changes had a strange quality to them,' he observes. 'Not only did they seem broadly unimpressive, but in some cases, they seemed like steps backwards.' For example, 'not only were there no flying cars, there seemed to be more big pickups and SUVs than ever.' Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken. He's also invested his protagonist with a self-deprecating sense of humor that keeps his pessimism from veering into maudlin territory. If there's hope to be found within this harsh landscape, it's in our connection with one another — an antidote to despair. We all have to live through a dark season now and then, Rhys comforts himself. Or, to paraphrase a Virginia Woolf line from 'To the Lighthouse' that Rhys invoked earlier: What gets us through are 'little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.' Or for that matter, novels like this one. Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah's Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
South Wales Argus
05-06-2025
- Health
- South Wales Argus
A new mental health café and event space is opening in Pontypool
'Grounded Coffee & Wellness' created by mental health charity Tidy Butt is Sebastopol's newest mental health space. Tidy Butt is a mental health charity run by Rhys Thomas 42, Matthew Creel 42 and Keziah Green 38. The charity was formed during lockdown back in 2020 by Matthew and started life as an online group where people could talk through their problems. Matthew and Rhys have an interesting relationship. Rhys himself is an ex-international rugby player whose played for Newport RFC, Dragons, Scarlets and Wales. Matthew, also heavily involved in rugby, was Rhys's captain. The charity was born out of difficult personal circumstances. At only 19 a serious heart condition cut Abertillery born Matthew's rugby career short and because of this he fell into a depressive state. South African born Rhys has similarly has also struggled with mental health in the past. He's battled addiction and also suffered a career changing heart attack in November 2007, caused by a knock during a match between the Dragons and Northampton. The Tidy Butt Team (left to right) Matthew Creel 42, Keziah Green 38 and Rhys Thomas 42 (Image: Keziah Green) Speaking of the café the Tidy Butt team posted online: 'We're thrilled to announce the opening of Grounded – our very first coffee shop and wellness centre in the heart of Sebastopol, Pontypool. 'This has been a true labour of love from our tiny but mighty team of three here at Tidy Butt, and we're proud to have brought this dream to life with the help of kind donations and incredible support from local businesses, people in our community and of course our Tidy Butt Ambassadors. 'Community and connection have always been at the heart of what we do, and now we finally have a physical space to bring people together – to talk, to connect, to just be.' The Tidy Butt Team (left to right) Matthew Creel 42, Keziah Green 38 and Rhys Thomas 42 (Image: Keziah Green) Co-founders of Tidy Butt Matthew Creel 42 and Rhys Thomas 42 (Image: Keziah Green) Tidy Butt's popularity has grown, so much that the group has also been able to provide free counselling sessions for members of the public at their HQ in Sebastopol. Speaking of the new venture Keziah Green Rhys's partner said: 'It'll be a coffee shop by day and an event space by night. 'Rhys and Matt's vision has always been to create a sort of wellness centre of sorts and it's just amazing we are so grateful for that.' Rhys Thomas 42 of Tidy Butt carrying out a cold-water therapy session (Image: Keziah Green) A grand opening party for Grounded Coffee & Wellness will be held at Bevans Yard Unit 1 NP4 5QB. The event will be running from 10am-4pm. There will be a variety of wellness themed activities available including a free sauna and free cold plunges. A live DJ will be playing at the event all day and tonnes of coffee for people to enjoy will also be served. Locals are invited to 'save the date' and join the Tidy Butt team for a grand opening taking place Sunday June 15.
