The Dollar Glow, which is of course Welsh for Merry Christmas.

Yes. Well, no, I mean, what's written down on the page is Welsh. The way I said it may

not be Welsh for Merry Christmas. I have a good friend who's a real brilliant comic

advocate for the Welsh language and he will want to kill me now.

But there we are. And talking about you catching up on Gavin and Stacey.

I haven't seen it yet. It's on the Sky Plus.

Central Christmas viewing in the Holland Household. I have to say. Anyway.

Yes. So today, I am reading the Unwomonly face of war by Svetlana Alexovich.

And this is, I think this is really fascinating. I came across this book because, as we've already

discussed, for next year's Chalk Valley History Festival, we have got a T-34 tank.

Yes. And we are training up an all-female crew because they really existed.

Yeah. And what's brilliant about the Unwomonly face of war is this is Svetlana Alexovich has gone and interviewed

lots and lots and lots of female veterans of the Eastern Front who were fought in the Red Army

and they fought as competence. And they were snipers and they were infantry women and they were tankers.

Not cruees. And they were knight witches. And what she does is she just recalls them and then

pubs is huge extracts, huge tracks of these voices. So what I'm going to be doing is reading a number of these

female Red Army competence and their thoughts on the war and what happened to them.

So what Svetlana Alexovich does in the Unwomonly face of war so brilliantly is she doesn't try and

put words into anyone's mouth. She doesn't paraphrase. She just writes out what she was told.

So I'm going to read a few extracts from three different female Red Army competence.

And the first one, and I'm going to have to try and pronounce this, is Alexandra Semianovna Popova.

And she's a lieutenant of the guards and a pilot. Our regiment was all women.

...