Pick
of the
Week 2
Barbara Millar
My love affair with Wales
When I was 15 I tried to teach myself Welsh. There was no good reason for it. I was a teenager living in the heart of the industrial West Midlands (we still had some industry there back in the 60s), who made very occasional forays into North Wales on family holidays.
But I’d got it into my head that I wanted to speak this rather exotic, complicated language so I bought a ‘Teach Yourself Welsh’ book and watched a weekly Welsh comedy programme that was, inexplicably, available on the Midlands ATV channel.
The Welsh sitcom – ‘Ryan a Ronnie’ – featured two comedians of whom I’d never heard, speaking entirely in Welsh, with no subtitles. I didn’t have a clue what was going on. But I liked to listen to these strange words, which seemed to be delivered so rapidly and passionately and made such a contrast to the slow, flat Brummie drawl I was used to.
Of course, you can guess that I never learned Welsh. Oh, I can say ‘Good morning,’ ‘Good afternoon’ and ‘Good night’ – but must never encounter anyone in the early evening, I didn’t master that phrase. And I can write (and pronounce, but you’ll have to take my word for it) Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
But, once the book started to deal with complicated matters such as the mutation of certain words, I gave up – and anyway, there was no-one in West Brom with whom I could practise my limited linguistic skills.
I was reminded of this because I was back in Wales last week. And the language still conjures up romance. The Wales I visited was a long way from the Wales that has dominated the red-top media in recent weeks – Bridgend, irresponsibly dubbed and now possibly permanently stigmatised by the cruel tabloid tag of ‘suicide town’. I was far away in the north, indulging in another nostalgia-fest as one of my destinations was Portmeirion, an inspiring fantasy dreamed up and stunningly executed by Welsh architect Clough Williams-Ellis.
Portmeirion is now a hotel but, for those of us growing up in the 60s, it will ever evoke that enigmatic TV series ‘The Prisoner’ with Patrick McGoohan – Number Six – and his yearning cry across the sands: ‘I am not a number, I am a free man!’ ‘The Prisoner’ may as well have been in Welsh because I understood it about as much as I grasped the antics of ‘Ryan a Ronnie’. But I adored the setting – the pretty Italian-style village with an abundance of flowers, quaint cobbled streets, wonderful vistas and mysterious, slightly-forbidding air. I wanted to stay in Number Six’s cottage and truly live out my fantasies but, alas, it is a gift shop stuffed with Prisoner memorabilia, appealing to those of us of a certain age. It is still beautiful in Portmeirion though, even on an overcast, drizzly February afternoon.
The February Essay
Tessa Ransford
Barbara Millar’s
Scot of the Month
Jeannie Robertson
The February Feature
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