Sian

Look at me! I'm celebrating my Welsh Heritage.  Okay, so maybe I'm celebrating the Welsh Heritage I would have gotten, if meiosis had gone a little differently.  I have no musical talent, whatsoever.  Most of my old music teachers are still in therapy.  Spent about three years learning to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the piano, and about the same reducing the Junior High Choir master to rocking back and forth in a corner, and muttering about the birds.  But I did finally find a musical instrument that suits me--the CD player.  It requires very practice, and no talent, whatsoever.  Here is a picture of actual Welsh people(not me) singing actual Welsh music:

Let's get things straight here.  There are Northern Welsh People, and Southern Welsh People.  Northern Welsh people are all things beautiful and good, and Southern Welsh people are pretty much just English people moved farther west.  We must, in no way mistake people from Swansea or Glamorgan for being real Welsh people.  I was dragged to Wales as a small child, and the thing I remember most about it was the Wimpy's where I got a cheeseburger with some funky, Brit-substitute for Ketchup.  Nothing in Welsh will be spelled in any way phonetically:  instead of "TH" we will spell this phonem "dd"  for v, we will substitute f, and for f, we will substitute ff.  You should practice with smaller words like Neadd, and Efans and work your way up to really hard words like Eisteddfod.     Here is a picture of a Welsh sheep.  I already showed you a picture of Welsh people singing

Eisteddfod means sit&sing, which is more or less what Welsh people do for entertainment.  Seriously.  It's the national pass time, and there are several competitions.  Guess what they're all called.  They really do write incredibly beautiful music with exquisite minor chords.  Then, they sing over the top of it, which woudn't be such a bad thing, except that Welsh sounds like Klingon.  (Incidentally, Minor music is something that my music teacher tried to teach me about... but basically, when the Beaver gets into trouble on "Leave it to Beaver" that's Minor music.  It's also used in most horror movies when someone is about to to get chopped into little bitty peices. )  I can't show you a picture of people being chopped into peices, so here is a picture of Lake Vyrnwy--your guess is as good as mine. 

Not bad, I must say.

They also tend to be very poetic.  (They admit to this one.)  I asked a Welsh cousin for directions, once...  And I really think he described, in graphic detail, every house, tree, rock, and pebble between me and himself.  This was in English, of course...  "And you come to a beautiful apple tree, which forks in three ways at the crux, and is ever so beautiful a sunset blush pink, with absolutely perfect leaves, and just a little tiny wooden lady bug by it's foot.  And a robin's nest about 2/3rds of the way up, with exactly 4 eggs in the nest and a little fluff of a feather off the right hand side... and you go right on past that.... and you come to a beautiful, gun-metal grey pebble, which is just slightly off oval, and perfectly smooth, except for the tiniest pit at the wide end, and you keep on going past that."  A little hard to remember which land marks you were supposed to actually turn at, but all in all, the best description of any six blocks I've ever heard in my entire life.  Here is a picture of an ex-abbey in ex-Neadd before it got over-run by Englishmen and had to change its name to Neath.

They use the word "English" as a verb.  It's derogatory.  Things may be "Englished" which is to say, completely fucked up, or "dis-Englished" which means "perfectly clear and sensible" but somehow, the above paragraph manages to fall into the "dis-Englished" category.  (I'll talk about the way meiosis actually did go, later.)  Here is a picture of a coal miner being very grateful that he is not English:

Oh, yes... and they have some very fascinating archaeolgoical sites, with the general tendency for these to be laid out along absolutely straight lines, accross miles and miles of Welsh country side.  Spring, burial, temple...  sacred site after sacred sight, and all arranged on ley lines.  Here is a map of that: ________________________________________

The link that I added goes to the largest collection of Welsh-language materials in North America.  Books which have been shipped from all over the world, on all sorts of topics.  I'm not entirely sure about the lending policy, but I'm sure that you can make arrangements, if you feel the need to have something shipped to you.  There's an index in both Englished and dis-Englished formats (yes, Welsh language index.) They also have recordings of the old settlers singing and speaking Welsh and a vast assortment of other artifacts.  So, that would be my quirky, almost entirely solipsistic little library for the day. 

posted by: SianNorah at 03:47 | link | comments

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