´óÏó´«Ã½

If you have ever tried keeping a diary, you will know that getting beyond the first couple of weeks can seem a great achievement. To keep going every day for more than fifty years is staggering.

In "All Things Considered" this week (Sunday 12 October, 8.30am, repeated Wednesday 15 Oct, 6.30pm), Roy Jenkins guest is a man who has done just that.

John Morgans began his first diary as a 12 year old at Tylorstown in the Rhondda Valley. He wrote on through his university life in Swansea, Oxford and America, through his days as a minister in Llanidloes and at Manselton, and through his twelve years as the moderator of the United Reformed Church in Wales.

He reacted to world events from the invasion of Suez to the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And he wrote grippingly of his work as one of the church leaders attempting to negotiate during the miners' strike of 1984.

Some of his most poignant and powerful reflections were on life at Penrhys, the deprived mountaintop estate in the Rhondda where he and his wife Norah led a Christian community which has attracted interest around the world.

The five million words of his diaries have been reduced to a modest 160,000 and they're about to be published in a book entitled Journey of a Lifetime.