Insufficiently Welsh Read Online Free PDF

“f”s for “v”s, or “yous” insteads of “ayes” emerged, I must leave to others to judge. (Preferably not Welsh speakers).
    Let’s just say that Brian, our sound engineer, was satisfied that my version would have been “OK on the terraces of the Millennium Stadium”. For my part, I was satisfied that Brian was an expert sound recordist and a fine judge of singing. And you will be satisfied he knew how to bury a dismal cacophony of pseudo-Welsh gibberish deep in the tuneful harmony of some expertly jangled handbells.
    It was the anthem. And lovely music too. We should be grateful for that.
    I was. Deeply. But I was no nearer the mysteries of one of the most important and rightly revered bastions of Welsh culture, the language. It and I remain on the shelf. It will have to come, but later, later, later.

–2– B EACONS I NTO T H E GR EEN
    â€“ HAYWIRE-ON-WYE –
    I think Chris, our director, hoped that the market opposite the hotel on the square in the middle of Hay would gradually take on the appearance of a Breughel-like, medieval fete. (Perhaps it will on film.) It felt like a miserable collection of bric-a-brac stalls to me.
    â€œJust come towards the camera,” he called.
    I had to totter through a handsome Georgian door and then stroll nonchalantly across the road towards the bustling market folk, spouting platitudes.
    The first take was abandoned. A 50 foot tour bus stopped in front of me and brake-farted. The second take was drowned by a motorbike. The third and fourth got me skipping around speeding BMWs. The final attempt was interrupted by an elderly Australian who wanted my autograph. I don’t mind Australians. They are a temporary nuisance. It’s the traffic that gets me. Every town I visit would work better if they just shut the bloody place to all the bloody cars.
    Other than that, Hay is, of course, a big success. It is a “book town”. It is said that there are more books per head in Hay than in any other town in the world. I first went there twenty-five years ago to interview the self-styled “King” of Hay, Richard Booth, for a series called “The Bookworm”.
    He told me that he was indifferent to books. (He was teasing me, and the producer, particularly, who started to sweat.) But of course he loves books; it is said that Richard Booth himself has two million books, equating to 10 miles of bookshelves. His battle, however, he explained, was not for books but for the soul of Hay. In the seventies, Hay’s High Street was dominated by unoccupied, rotting shops. Richard was an early campaigner against bypass megastores. He was one of the first to finger Tesco as the great Satan, the massive Moloch, the Miltonic lord of expensive sacrifice. He needed something to keep the town alive and he hit on dead books.
    â€œIt could have been almost anything,” he explained. “I don’t think of Hay as a book town, I think of it as a single commodity town. I reasoned that if all the old books were gathered in one place then collectors would come.”
    I bought into Richard’s big plan. I visualised other towns becoming “diving equipment towns”, or “secondhand art towns”, or “model motorcar towns”. Even then, in the late eighties, Richard could point to two copycat book burghs in the US, and another one in France.
    But I didn’t buy a book. I wandered off into his buckram-covered world in a stupor. Every shop had a damp cardboard smell. Long shelves bent under the burden of slightly-foxed Everyman editions and faded encyclopedias. It looked like home. Faced with such a bewildering choice and no pressing need, I couldn’t make up my mind: the complete plays of J.B. Priestley, an out-of-date restaurant guide to Rome, a ten-year-old history of a Balkan campaign in the Second World War? There was no end to the publications I didn’t really need, so I didn’t choose.