Cymru a Cymraeg

I got back from a lovely weekend in Wales on Monday. I've never been in a freezing cold monsoon before, so it was quite an experience. Luckily we had Super Scrabble to keep us entertained so we didn't have to venture out into the elements too often. I lived in Penrhyncoch for the first 13 years of my life, but I still wasn't expecting such shit weather. Grandad said it was relatively normal. Ummm, wrong. Normal is not pretty much ice-skating down Great Darkgate street because the wind was blowing me down it. Normal is not putting on a raincoat and wellies to pop out to the car. Normal is not suddenly being cast into darkness in the middle of a tense Scrabble match because the fuse has blown due to the hurricane raging outside. But then, I didn't ever assume I was going anywhere normal (this is a country where you get words with no vowels, after all).

It was ace to see my cousin R, though. She lives half the time in Santa Cruz with her lovely boyfriend (jealous? not for a second) so I don't get to see her very often. I shall just take this opportunity to plug her art - I think it's actually amazing, and even better when you see one of her paintings in real life. Grandad had one up in his living room; he's one of our only relatives with a wall big enough to house one of her pieces. Have a spy through her stuff at http://www.rheaoneill.com/ if you fancy it. Anywho, yes, so I hopped on a train to Reading on Friday afternoon and spent a couple of hours at Uncle K and Aunty S's place in Earley, getting drooled on by the massive bear-dog and eating cheese and pickle sandwiches, then we headed off on our epic quest to West Wales. It is well far away, and you don't realise till you drive it.

Grandma and Grandad live up the hill from Penrhyncoch, which is about 15mins drive inland from Aberystwyth. Their north-facing windows look out over the valley and you can see sheep and foxes (sometimes) meandering about on the opposite hill and red kites riding the air currents in between. Grandad's also got a swimming pool in his garden. Before anyone gets overexcited, it isn't heated, and this is WALES. When I lived up the lane from their house, I'd cycle down on hot days with my swimming costume and hop in. Flea has, on several occasions, exchanged an extremely swift run and jump into the pool during January for copious amounts of money, a prize - or compensation - for being the first person to go in the pool that year. But no-one ever swims in it anymore, except the odd beetle and a lot of leaves. I could see it out of my bedroom window, rain-spotted and wind-rippled, the coloured paving beginning to lift and fade. Ah well.

So - Welsh. I thought I had a pretty good grip on the Welsh language, you know, but then I was thrust into the Celtic whirlwind that is S4C. For those not in the know, this is what you get instead of Channel 4 in Wales, and involves a lot of Welsh singing, dancing and soap opera-style gallivanting. There was some bloke stood in front of a group of kids and a sheep and talking in a manner that I sort of subconsciously knew I should understand, but I thought for a moment he was speaking Martian. Turns out he was in fact speaking Welsh after all, very fast and with a funny northern accent. I think my grasp of the language since leaving Wales eight years ago has been reduced to purely comedic properties; I often get asked to say 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgoerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch' like I'm some kind of circus performer, and even Uncle K spent much of the journey once past the Severn Bridge asking me to pronounce the names of the villages we were going through. No-one does this to people who are fluent in French; there's really nothing that funny about a French man in England saying "Bonsoir!", but a Welsh girl in England saying "Nos da" when requested apparantly holds enormous entertainment value. You should hear Grandad speaking Irish. That really does sound funny.

The interesting thing is, I only learned any useful Welsh (i.e. swear-words) when I left Wales for England's green and pleasant land and my manager at work was Welsh. Whereas I had learned Welsh by going to a tiny little Welsh-speaking primary school and living in a village with no pub (due to the fact that until very recently, Ceredigion, or Dyfed as it was then, was a dry county), he hadn't really bothered to retain anything of conversational Welsh; just the profanities. My favourite is definitely "carachw bant", meaning "to fuck off", because no-one else can actually process in their brain what it is you're saying. That's the simultaneous beauty and curse of Welsh; it's completely infathomable to anyone who doesn't already know it because to an English-speaking mind, none of the letters are arranged into what usually look like words. So no-one ever bothers to learn it, unless they happened to have been born there, in which case you're forced to learn it until the end of secondary school, whereupon you move somewhere better and forget it - remembering only on request various amusing snippets.

My favourite of these is the word for five. It is spelt "pump" and pronounced "pimp". Fabulous.

Ultimate Vanning

I'm not entirely sure where my obsession with VW campervans started. I know I haven't always loved them, I just don't I started doing so. Maybe it was a slow and unnoticed thing, a gradually dawning consiousness of their immensity. I always used to watch them stream past as I was waiting for a gap in the traffic to turn out of my road, on their way to the Three Counties show, and thought they were the most amazing-looking vehicles in the world. I once saw about thirty, all parked at an angle along the prom on the beach in Devon somewhere, and decided I wanted one. Here, now, ASAP.

Of course, the first thing I think about when I fantasise about my future camper is what it looks like. I mean I'd love a candy pink one - just look at the absolute sex god of a van in the photo on the right. But, just in case I had to share it with a man, I'd settle for either a shiny cherry red or a gorgeous baby blue or a peppermint green. With a white roof, of course, and chrome fittings. Then I'd do it out all sixties-style inside, with Kath Cidston curtains and cushion-covers and blankets and stuff... Oh lord, I'm salivating over an imaginary campervan.

The way the van looks is of course important - everyone starts with some shambolically rusted heap of junk that they love very much before they sort it out or get a better one - but the things you can do with it are what's really important. It doesn't matter if you're driving the swishest-looking machine you could ever dream of or a buckling hunk of be-primered metal, the feeling you get when you park up at the beach for summer will be the same. Nothing beats waking up in the morning and going straight outside to rub the sleep out of your eyes and feel the morning dew under your bare toes, before tramping off to find somewhere that does a fry-up. Once you're fed and watered you can go wherever the hell you like - and if you get somewhere and like it, you can stay - cos you've got a fabulous retro camper to stay in (and everywhere has campsites, even if you'd really much prefer a secluded corner of beach to park up at, so you'll never be completely screwed). I think I could happily mooch about in Cornwall for an entire summer if I had a shiny van to do it in and someone lovely to do it with. Maybe find a hippy folk band of some form to play my flute with... (maybe I'm getting a bit carried away now!)

And just imagine the fun if you got organised enough and shipped your camper overseas. I would LOVE to take mine to New Zealand and tour around. All hot and tropical and beachy up north, then slowly moving southwards towards cold mountains and snuggling under blankets with hot chocolate and skiing, or snowboarding if I was cool enough. Then leap over to Australia and take it to Bondi, make friends with a load of hot surfer dudes and learn to surf, with evenings spent drinking rum and coke on the beach with my new mates the surfers. That's before even thinking about Thailand.

Ahhhhh I want to go now! Now now now. Where's the nearest bank, I need to rob one! (They're not sheap, you know, campers.) Although, taking into account the current climate, it's probably not even worth robbing a bank... Any get rich quick schemes anyone would care to mention would be gratefully received! All that Cath Kidston ain't cheap either, come to think of it...

Wires Unfathomably Tangling Themselves

I'm back in the library once again. I feel rather at home here now, especially when I make the effort to bring my laptop so I've got my iTunes and stuff. It's just a warmer version of my house. I'm actually currently having a musical theatre party in my ears; I had no idea I had so many musical soundtracks in my possession until someone pointed out that the only things that ever appear on my 'listening to' bit of Windows Live are Rent, Spring Awakening, Les Miserables and occasionally Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony or a nice bit of James Galway.

I love my headphones, right. At night time they allow me to block out the sounds of sirens, helicopters and planes and replace them with a soothing bit of Pachelbel. On the bus, I can forget that I'm in a hot, stuffy box on wheels with forty other people I neither know nor like and get lost in the soaring distortion of Muse. If I'm in the house when everyone's in and want to listen to guilty pleasure music at top volume then I can do so. But WHY oh WHY do headphones, as soon as you put them down somewhere, become a tangled mess of disappointment?!? Do the two ear bits and the plug bit play hide and seek with eachother when I'm not looking? Or do they just think that my favourite past-time is disentangling wires that are already slightly broken, therefore requiring a certain amount of gentility in untangling rather than just picking two ends and pulling until something happens? I swear they do it on purpose to annoy me. Even if I put them in the front pocket of my bag where they can't move they come out like Medusa's head. It's the most ridiculous thing to get annoyed by, but I mean, really. It's not natural.

That rant over (bit still simmering away in my mind), I move on to... something else. Doodle just brough me a cup of tea, which is rather fabulous of her. Bit hot, though. And having an fantastic chat with the Lady (we're online at the same time so rarely that this deserves a medal) and J, so my library time is passing rather enjoyably. Of course, I'd rather be eating Sunday roast (beef or lamb) in a nice pub somewhere, but what can you do. Well, start sticking to some sort of budget for a start, but where's the fun in that? I definitely wouldn't have a lovely new jumper dress if I'd done that. (It is lush though, it's grey and sort of ruched and has buttons down one side :-D)

I literally don't know what I'd do without Doodle sometimes. On top of making me cups of tea a lot, she doesn't think I'm weird when all of a sudden I have a slight breakdown about things and cry for no apparant reason (usually because Fate's timing is spectacular, and when things go a bit tits up I'm always already exhausted/grumpy/ill and just become an angry harpy). She didn't even mind when I got home from ballet in a small rage, lay on her bed in a ballet leotard, tights and a hoodie, whingeing and uttering expletives, and smudging mascara all over her duvet cover. In fact, all my mates have been amazing at looking after me - the prize probably goes to Lady and Fairy for not absolutely shitting their pants when I collapsed in Lady'd bathroom for no apparant reason (I wasn't pissed for once). I'm still not really sure what that was all about, except that I fell asleep on the sofa, woke up at about 2.30am because Lady and Fairy actually were pissed, went upstairs to the loo and collapsed onto the floor whilst muttering unintelligibly. I don't actually remember this, but apparantly my temperature shot up to worrying levels and if I hadn't have randomly recovered after about 10mins they would have called an ambulance... anyway, they put me to bed and in the morning I was fine, and I'd like to apologise unreservedly here and now for scaring the shite out of them both. Sorry guys...

How did I get onto that??? Meh, oh well. The point is, after asking J for a completely random topic (and discarding the unconfinably random 'the problems with roofing felt'), I have successfully included the way wires unfathomably tangle themselves into this post... High Fiiiiive.

Are you alluring in bedsocks and a hoodie?

I feel as though I've neglected my creative energies a little in recent days (not to mention neglected those poor people who await my next blog with eager anticipation... ahaha), but this is definitely not my fault. Due to the trampy and scavenging way we get internet in our house, we no longer have any, so I have had to haul myself up the hill to campus to write this. Well, technically I should be researching either George Balanchine or Malorie Blackman or both for upcoming presentations, but what the hell. I will do that too. And I was away all weekend with better things to do so I mean, really, what do people expect?

I've pretty much moved into the library actually. It's nice here. It has the basic essentials required by a student: heat, internet, food and opportunities for socialising. My house has none of these things, except for maybe a bit of food, with the added bonus of the next-door-neighbours starting their DIY projects at 8am every morning, the absolute bastards. It's not a happy way to wake up, you know, with what sounds and feels like (and is) someone drilling into the wall behind your head. A happy way to wake up is warm and snuggly, knowing you haven't got anything on to bother waking up for. I'm becoming a massive fan of sleeping in a hoody and bedsocks as well as pyjamas though, although it's not a particularly alluring look. But then, if perchance I was in bed with someone I wished to seem alluring in front of, there wouldn't be any need for such measures, and hopefully I'd have asked if they have a working heating system and then suggested we go back to theirs when they said yes.

ANYWAY. I was meant to go and see Chris Moyles's new TV show being filmed on Monday night, but the reprobates at Channel 4 overbook all the civilian tickets so we didn't get in. However, we should be able to get priority tickets for the next one as a refund thing so it's all good. Me and Doodle just fannied about in central instead, which was rather lovely. It's rare to get to just wander around without crashing through crowds of tourists or businessmen. Plus, it wasn't raining. We had pizza on the Southbank then walked over the Golden Jubilee bridge to Embankment, where we found Cleopatra's needle. (Did you know it was abandoned in the Bay of Biscay during a storm??? How could you abandon something that massive?!) Then all of a sudden we found ourselves at Charing Cross Station, which was a bit weird and unexpected, then skidded through some puddles up to Trafalgar Square, where Doodle nearly got us arrested/asked out on a date by two lovely helmeted policeman by saying "'Ello, 'ello, what's going on 'ere then?" at them, but unfortunately they just smirked at us and carried on past us. Trafalgar Square is really pretty at night time, though. They light the fountains pretty shades of pink and blue, and the National Portrait Gallery is lit up so that all the pillars and stuff along the front of it cast amazing shadows. There are also no pigeons flapping about and shitting everywhere, which is a bigger bonus than finding a Malteaser in your packet made of solid chocolate.

London's weird though. It's like a big adventure playground where nothing's quite real. Even all the big business workers don't really live in the real world, they think doing business in bars drinking champagne and hardly having to walk anywhere is the real world. It's normal to live in a massive jungle of buildings, breathing traffic fumes, and sitting in a city park during summer, thinking it can't get any better than a picnic in an icebox on a smog-choked patch of grass and trees - even if it is Hyde Park. It can get better. You could be chilling out with some cider next to Gullet Quarry, where the air really is fresh and the water really is ice cold, ven when it's thirty degrees (it happens!) and there's ten people you can see and talk to around you, instead of ten thousand that you don't even know the names of. Isn't it so much nicer in the evenings to go to the pub with your mates and know most of the people in there, and to be able to sit outside by the river and watch the sunset as you drink your pint, instead of being stuck in a hot, busy noisy bar, where the only escape outside is a little cordoned off smoking area? I don't know... maybe I'm being a grumpy country-dweller who hates anywhere bigger than Tewkesbury and anything busier than a farmer's market.

It's taken me about 3 days to write this blog, namely due to distractions such as Facebook, BBC iPlayer and actual university work (!), but I think now it's maybe a lost cause. I've just been trying to think of a title for it and can't, because it isn't about anything in particular... Hmmmm. I shall think of something shortly, and then hopefully write something better soon. Ciao.

Rain ---> Flood

It absolutely pissed it down today. Just as I left the house for Writing Multi-Cultural Britain it started (or so it seemed) and didn't stop for approximately a millenia. Do people understand what a pain in the arse it is to bundle up in two tops, a cardigan, jacket, jeans, scarf, gloves and Ugg boots to tramp up the slippery, leaf-strewn hill to uni whilst carrying the heaviest handbag in the world because it's full of useless hardback library books and ballet kit, to then arrive at a greenhouse-like building that necessitates the removal of nearly every layer? And to then have to put it all back on, tramp once more along slippery, leaf-strewn pathways to the library (stuffiest building ever built) and unsuccessfully search for books that reference Jacobean conventions of casting after returning the aforementioned useless ones? No, they do not. They would tell me to get over it or get a car. And obviously neither of those options are open to me.

Anyway, rainy days are for sitting next to a window, watching the rain outside whilst it's warm and snuggly inside, and reading a good book/Cosmopolitan whilst drinking soup. And is there anything cosier than being snuggled up in your sleeping bag in a tent, listening to the rain hitting the roof? (Although, admittedly, the thought of attempting to get out of the tent - which will eventually become a necessity - without letting rain, mud or nearby wildlife in puts a slight damper on things.)

The problem with torrential rain is that, where I come from, everyone shits themselves that it's going to flood. This is an understandable fear considering Upton is the most frequently flooded town in Britain (I'm sure I read that somewhere...?), and in July 07 actually became an island. Unfortunately I wasn't on that island, I was in my house, which isn;t anywhere, so I couldn't get to work (bonus) the pub (severe problem) or in fact anywhere that sold food without getting on the M50 and going to Ledbury for it. Basically, it happened thus.

It rained for about 3 solid days and nights. By Friday evening, when my sister was due back from Newquay with school and mum and dad from the Channel Islands, my front garden had flooded. I'd dropped G off at the pub earlier and he had to practically swim home. Mum and dad kept ringing to say they were delayed, so could I pick Flea up, but Flea kept ringing to say they were delayed and going the wrong way because of trees in the road and stuff, so she didn't even know where they were. In the end mum and dad banned me from driving anywhere in my little Ka and organised a parent with a four-by-four to pick up Flea. I just sort of sat in the front room with the dog, who spent the evening barking at the rising rainwater in the front garden and asking me for walks that clearly weren't going to happen. Eventually Flea rang me in floods of tears saying the were stuck in Ross-on-Wye, sleeping on a hotel conference room floor, and mum and dad said their train was stuck at Oxford so they were going to stay at my uncle's. So I went to bed, hoping the floodwater in the garden didn't start coming through the front door, taking the dog with me because the roof in the back porch (where he sleeps) was leaking.

Next morning I went to work at the bakery for 8am, and was sold out of everything by 11am what with people panic-buying stuff. Round about 10ish my sister turned up, dressed in a bikini, board shorts, a hoodie and flipflops and looking like she'd just stepped off the beach (she'd actually only just got off the coach). I gave her a free chelsea bun and she went to her mate's for a sleep. Mum and dad got home with my uncle and his massive dog, so her and Monty had fun splashing about in the diminishing lake that was the front garden before we all went for a pint, laughing and joking about the weekend's misfortune. Oh how naive...

By 9pm the main road between Upton and our house was flooded, which is insane considering it's built up like a bridge above the floodplain. By Sunday morning it was 5' under, meaning the actual level of flooding on the meadow was about 10'. We spent some time fannying about at the edge of the water, nosing around at the camera crews and gossiping darkly with locals about food shortages and sewage problems, then went up the lane to the farm where we met a very posh blonde woman in brand new wellies from Sky News. Felt a bit like a refugee comapared to her, with our muddy boots and careworn expressions, until mum and dad announced that they were going away with Flea the next day as planned because they could get onto the M50. Great, now I've got to spend 5 days in the company of a dissolute, hyperactive dog who can't be walked because all the fields are flooded, and a boyfriend who's grumpy because there won't be any cricket for weeks now, whilst you three swan off to Scarborough where it's dry and the cricket is still on. What a fabulous summer holiday. The only thing that got me through that week was the fact that the final Harry Potter book had come out, so I read all seven in a row, and the minor incident where the dog ran away from the car in Tesco's carpark out of sheer boredom and had to be chased and caught by G.

So... yeah. The actual flooded people of Upton had a much better time (initially) with street parties and water cricket and a general wartime feeling of everyone getting along together. Then everyone had to claim insurance and dry out their houses and it stopped being fun. Luckily for me, the only problem was that Upton and its surrounding area smelled like off seaweed for weeks, and the cellar at work was flooded, meaning we had to take off our shoes and socks and roll up our trousers in order to restock the bar.

And there you have one person's brief account of the July 07 floods... I'm sure there are many more exciting stories, like my mates who took out a rubber dinghy on the floodwater and got apprehended by the watre police, or whatever, but hey. They are not meaninglessly writing a blog...

A Weekend in the Country

Tis the end of my weekend in Uptonshire... *sniff*.

I am being melodramatic, it's not like I'm never coming back. It is, after all, the location of the familial homestead. But it was such a lush weekend; even the dog was so excited to see me he made funny noises when he greeted me (although he isn't what you'd call entirely sane; he makes a habit of staring at the invisible man that seems to reside in secret in our house, and if he isn't around he stares at me instead). Me, Fayski and Aunty J went to see Frank, Lady, Fairy and Flea in Our Day Out which was wicked, and pub afterwards with everyone was even better. Interestingly, my mother and sister conspired with M and decided we should get married... I think (hope) this was an alcohol-fuelled decision, but you never know - M keeps calling me Wifey. There just seems to be something about being able to sit in a snuggly pub with the river outside the window, a pint in your hand and a group of lovely lovely people to chattle to that makes me thoroughly content. I'm not an alcoholic or anything, but I could literally live in a pub. (Not run one. Live in one.) Then today I had a lovely luncheon with another old school friend (who came to the pub but not the play, the rotter), where I discovered some startling things about various mutual friends' relationships and spent too much money in HMV before retreating to the Lady's house for tea and gossiping. Good gossiping. I miss the Lady for gossiping when I'm in London, but then I come home there's just so damn much to chat about that it almost makes it worth the pain of separation.

Didn't get to walk the dog though actually (I was too busy watching Hairspray with Flea and scouting phone chargers yesterday) which is sort of a shame, but as I look over at young Montgomery now, drooling and snoring in a runty sort of way on his bed in the corner, I realise he probably doesn't give a shit as long as someone took him out to harass some pheasants and a couple of cows. I think he's just pleased I let him come and have a snuggle on the sofa, something he's only allowed to do secretly when mum is out. Here is a picture of said dog with his new fashion accessory. He seemed to quite like it; at least, he completely ignored it, which made it funnier (and no it is not tied round his neck, just to his collar, before anyone gets all mardy about it). He's still asleep. With his head on the hard wood armrest of his chair, which doesn't look very comfortable. He literally spends his entire life being severely, painfully excited or... asleep. He's not paticularly bright either. Once when he was a puppy and we were walking along the highstreet someone accidentally bashed him over the head with their shopping and he didn't even appear to notice. My neighbour's 10-week old springer puppy is more self-aware than he is.

I should at this point (before I head bedwards, and before I write any more posts) explain that it's not that everyone I know has either a ridiculous name or merely a letter masquerading as a name. Basically I thought I'd better not name people directly in case they wouldn;t like it, and then I started having far too much fun deciding which nickname to use for people... some are more obvious than others. My sister actually has an incredibly ridiculous name (to English eyes) involving too many consonants, therefore everyone will know it's definately her I'm talking about. Anywhoooo... cheerio.