Croeso y Gymru*

Anglesea cottage with view below

The pride of Mynydd Cerig -
the Working Men's Club comes later

We’re booked for Wales, one week on the island of Anglesey jutting out into the Irish Sea, one week in rural South Wales (Mynydd Cerig to be precise;  you did know they speak a different language there, didn’t you?). Fantastic view of mountainous Snowdonia at the former, while the latter village has a Working Men’s Club! That won’t mean much to Americans I fear, but we’re already taking bets about who will have enough moxie to enter, waving a tenner and saying (tremulously), “Drinks on the house.”. Bearing in mind the traditional Welsh song:

His lance is long but yours is longer,
Strong his sword but yours is stronger,
Strike once more and then your wronger,
At your feet lies low.

The “his” are of course the English.

For those with dull imagination there will be lava bread (made from boiled seaweed), a plethora of community choirs with tenors predominating, a philosophical male populace whose muscles were exploited by the British government while the coal-mines existed and who are now largely ignored, a rock-climbing paradise even if, now, I may only look on, and long, long unpronounceable names on the road signs

THREESOME, a novel (4196 words)

Dark wood dominated Gladys’s bedroom. The heavy wardrobe doors were ripple-framed with grooves, ridges, twists and steps. Milky glass knobs to extract the drawers. A dressing table with a delicately mounted mirror which swung too low for Gladys’s high head. And the pictures – the World’s Ten Greatest Paintings – bought in booklet form from Woolworth when that institution still functioned, the pages torn out and squeezed into meanly dimensioned frames, the subjects occasionally trimmed to fit. “But then they’re only prints,” said George (her father), as reassurance that he would have treated the original oils with greater respect.

* Long thought to be Welcome to Wales. Actually: Welcome the Wales