Next week I turn 50 years old. I'm really looking forward to it.

I was born in 1965 - the year Winston Churchill died, J K Rowling was born, the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs escaped from Wandsworth Prison and fled to Brazil, and the year footballer Sir Stanley Matthews played his last competitive match for Stoke City. He was also 50 at the time.

Sir Stanley Matthews turns out for his last game for Stoke City at the age of 50 in 1965

There were just two pairs of breeding ospreys in the UK in 1965, maybe three; hanging on for dear life in the highlands of Scotland. This is less than the population in Wales at the moment, but the 60s was to prove a seminal decade for osprey recovery in the UK. By the mid 70s there were 14 pairs and by the mid 80s, this had doubled to around 30 pairs. The population has increased twenty-fold since the decade of long flares and the Bay City Rollers, with around 300 pairs in 2015. During this century of course, ospreys have started breeding in England and Wales for the first time since the 1840s, with just Ireland left to complete the UK Pandion jigsaw. It's only a matter of time, to be sure.

With the half century looming ever closer, thankfully symptoms and signs of any Midlife Crisis have been rare to non-existent. There's no secondhand Porsche on the drive, the urge to buy designer clothes has yet to materialise and there's no Grecian 2000 on my Amazon wish list (there probably should be). However, I have recently rekindled, with a vengeance, an adolescent past love of mine - snooker.

A few weeks ago, not long after Monty and Glesni headed south for their winter break, I bought a stunning 100 year-old snooker table (or more accurately, billiard table) manufactured sometime in the 1910s. It's a 'Riley Viceroy' made with huge fat chunks of English oak and over a tonne of Welsh slate. It's a shame the old quarry men didn't initial the slates before shipping them to Riley in Accrington, practically all of my male ancestors were "chwarelwyr", quarry men. Surely, there can't have been many Evans' working in the quarries around Llanberis at that time?

 A Riley 'Viceroy' - their top-of-the-range billiard table a century ago

Along with the Viceroy table came an appetite to learn more about it and the history of snooker and billiards generally. With the help of some old secondhand books picked up for pennies on Ebay, I soon became a bit of a novice cue sports historian. Very interesting. Here are two excerpts from 'Billiards and Snooker Bygones' by Norman Clare, page 23...

SAY WHAT????

12,000 elephants EVERY YEAR so that we could play billiards in this country? And what about the additional thousands of young and baby elephants that were also collateral victims in all of this slaughter? Didn't people at the time have any kind of conscience?

Some clearly didn't:

There are approximately 20,000 ivory billiard balls in that photograph above - they're being 'seasoned' at the billiard table maker Burroughes and Watts' inventory room at an optimum temperature, ready for sale and distribution. So, four balls per tusk, times two, divided into 20,000. That's around 2,500 dead elephants that Mr. Burroughes is sitting on there. How utterly grotesque. Lunacy.

Thankfully by the early 1900s, billiard balls were starting to be made out of a synthetic material - cellulose nitrate and these were advertised back in the day as a much better 'product' than ivory and were branded 'Crystalate' balls. Thank heavens for that.

I'm very much looking forward to (and planning for) the 2016 osprey season. I'm sure you are too.

2016 will also be a year to remember for historical importance and significance, being exactly 100 years since the last osprey pair was recorded breeding in Scotland before the species was completely wiped off the UK map following centuries of persecution. I suppose the only surprise, taking into account the complete disregard and disrespect many Victorians and their predecessors had for wildlife, is that the osprey didn't become nationally extinct any earlier.

Am I right in thinking that we now live in an age where attitudes towards the environment have changed for the better? Do we care more now than we did a century ago?

Just last week a load of politicians met in Paris and agreed to try and cap global warning targets to 'just' 1.5°C above current norms. Whether this was an exercise in political PR grandstanding or a genuine effort to try and make a difference to our planet remains to be seen. But surely, it's better than not doing anything and a whole lot better than the way we were thinking about our environment when the likes of Mr. Burroughes was slaughtering elephants quicker than he could pocket the profits. Pun intended.

We haven't reached, or come anywhere near, the promised land yet. Species are becoming extinct by the day and at a rate that is exponential and alarming. Even today, 30,000 elephants are being slaughtered in Africa every year.

At Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust we work each day to protect our environment and the species that live within it. But you don't need to work or volunteer for a wildlife charity to make a difference - here's the good bit...

We can all help, in our own little way, in making things better for the environment including ospreys. Just recently, for example, in England the government started charging 5p for each plastic bag at the supermarket and other shops. Welcome aboard! We've had this charge in Wales for many years, as have Scotland and Northern Ireland. Since its introduction in Wales, we have seen a 71% decrease in the amount of plastic bags bought - a massive result! There's far too much plastic in the world.

Plastic in the environment - it's a killer

And here's the Brucie Bonus: Our ospreys and wildlife benefit twice from this 5p plastic bag charge. Not only is there less plastic in the environment but the 5p charge is funnelled straight back to environmental charities. Wales, Scotland and Ireland have already benefitted from this bag levy and in England, Tesco estimate that it will collect and donate £30 million to environmental improvement projects. Every little helps.

Whether we can recycle just a little bit more each week or catch the bus/train now and again rather than going by car, whether we change our lighting in the house to LEDs or spend a little bit more to buy an A+ rated kitchen appliance, it all helps. We can all make a difference. Millions of small changes over time produce huge changes and outcomes. Mr. Darwin taught us that.

As I look at my Riley Viceroy on Christmas morning with its ostentatious English oak legs and frame, I'm somehow reassured that snooker tables these days are sourced from FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) timber. I'm delirious with joy that snooker balls are not made out of ivory.

I've stopped trying to reconcile having a large percentage of a mature oak tree from the 19th-18th-17th century in my house. A tree that was felled down, and with it the thousands of species that lived on it - including (potentially anyway) a pair of ospreys, to make a billiard table for someone at around the time the last ospreys perished in the UK. I can't change what's happened in the past, and anyways, aren't I recycling the table, rather than having one produced from scratch?

Let's make 2016 a memorable centenary year for the ospreys, a year to remember; 300 pairs in 2016 versus just one pair 100 years previous in 1916. A phenomenal conservation success story brought on by changing attitudes and a better understanding of our living world and certainly a greater empathy for all that lives in it.

We can all make a difference and do our bit - small changes lead to big results. Let's consign Mr. Burroughes and his wildlife-destroying generation to the dust bin of history. Saving our wildlife is a generational process, it takes time, but the good news is that we can all help make a difference. It will make you feel good too - I promise.

Happy Christmas to you all.

Nadolig Llawen i chi gyd.

Monty in a Senegal Snooker Club