At some point in the dim distant past, someone was given the job of converting the various noises that comprise the Welsh language into written English. The selected person obviously had a very wicked sense of humour. How do you take a sound like CLAN and decide it should be spelled LL. And just to make things even more interesting this linguistic genius decided to halve the usage of vowels and double the usage of consonants while at the same time eliminating a goodly proportion of said consonants namely K, Q, V, X and Z. Maybe that’s why L’s are doubled up so often. Those of you who were educated relatively recently may not know what vowels and consonants are (or commas and apostrophes for that matter). You’ll have to look them up. Is it any wonder Welsh is only considered a legitimate means of communication by Prince Charles and a few dozen stoic leek herders.
Fortunately most signs in this country are written in English as well as in English as a second language so finding your way around is as easyish (ha!) as described in Part 2 of this emerging epic. In fact the four of us – Cuz 1, Cuz 2, the CB and me – managed to get lost while walking through Cardigan today. Cuz 2 is Welsh and Cardigan is as big as a few rugby fields which is probably why, as the CB eventually concluded that the sign pointing to “Tourist Information” was in fact, pointing to a pole a few hundred metres down the road which had arrows on it indicating the approximate location of various points of interest.
And the satnav lady was not at all pleased with us at one point when we were trying to get somewhere with lots of L’s, Y’s and M’s in its name. We were heading south when we should have been heading north. To be fair, we rarely saw the sun but to be doubly fair, occasionally we did, but not for long enough to take our bearings. I used to be able to work out which direction I was going in using a conventional watch and the sun. Impossible to do with an iPhone (because it doesn’t have minute and hour hands) unless you can make it tell you. And the car we are travelling in is sufficiently sophisticated to do all of that stuff but we forgot to consult it.
The absence of sun and the presence of wind that would freeze the Yellowstone National Park geysers, limited today’s activities somewhat. Before embarking on this epic journey to parts of the UK the child bride and I hadn’t visited before, one thing we debated was which coats to bring. In both cases we opted for the warmest we have which is just as well. At one point after visiting Aberystwyth Castle we found a bar which was a converted church (previously called St Paul’s and bearing no similarity at all to the school of the same name I attended somewhere back in the mists of time). It was a sanctuary from the elements in more ways that it was when it was a church, obviously.
I can hear the wind whistling and the waves crashing as I type this, sitting adjacent to the radiator in our room. It’s March which is spring in this part of the world but no one told Zeus. The elements have a much greater chance of keeping us indoors than any flu virus.