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.