The Snug

In a comment on my last post, Harry wanted to know what the title of my post meant. Well there’s a story to all of this, as it isn’t the first time I’ve used non-English words for the titles of my posts. The problem that I have is that I can never think of half decent titles for my posts (infact most times I forgot about putting a title to my posts - hence why one post is repeated twice and depreciated in the back office).

Anyway when writing the one about Reverend James I was thinking of a suitable title that celebrated the revelation that the Welsh did know how to brew a very fine real ale. So in the honour of such a fine language I stumped for a Welsh title, which read Parchedig which means Reverend (although I’d managed originally to misspell as Barchedig, as I only knew the pronunciation of the word). Despite a lapse for a couple of posts I decided again to go all out with the phrase R’Heula which means The Sun in Welsh and was connected to the article about the British newspaper that carried the article I was commenting on.

Why the wish to use Welsh words I hear you cry? Well although being a born and bred Cestrian I spent all my formative years being brought up in Farndon, which is a commuter village set on the English/Welsh border (the River Dee provides a natural border between the two countries). The royal watchers (or those who can’t get enough of reality TV and are avid viewers of ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’) will be aware that former butler Paul Burrell is from Farndon and his wife has a florists over the border in Holt (all I can say is that we were residents of Farndon before he was!!). For those who haven’t visited Wales, all road signs are marked in both English and Welsh, our water came via Welsh Water so our bills were in English and Welsh. This has an impact and you end up learning the odd phrase here and there, hence the knowledge of Reverend and Sun.

Now I’m not a fluent Welsh speaker and my vocabulary is very limited, so I began to struggle to think of posts that would allow me to use the words Ysgol (School), Allan (Exit), Ysbyty (Hospital), Croeso (Welcome) or Cymru (Wales). So for my last post I cheated and used the University of Wales (Lampeter)’s on-line dictionary (Geiriadur) to find the word for mobile phone (Ffôn Symudol).

Seeing as now I am on a dangerous path of taking on-line translations as gospel it is probably wise to stop these shenanigans now before I end up mistranslating something and offending the Welsh speaking world.

* Diolch, Iago – Thank You, James