Capel Bangor Show

I wrote half a post about this a couple of years ago and never posted it. The show is now an important fixture in our calendar and we went to this year's show last Saturday. This post covers a mixture of two years ago and last Saturday.

Agricultural and horticultural shows are a major feature of life here. It's possible to spend every weekend of the summer relaxing in a different field, watching horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and other animals paraded around a ring for your entertainment. Any idiot who organises an event in the same week as the Royal Welsh has only themselves to blame when no-one turns up (yes, we've done that). Our local show is in Capel Bangor, a village about ten miles away, and we've attended for the last three years.

Whilst there are sheep...

... and the shearing competition is well worth watching...

... the show mainly features horses.

Unfortunately, I'm not terribly interested in horses.

Not horses, 2014

The lady to the left of the caravan talked to me at great length about peanut butter cookies (her recipe is very rich), ballet (her teacher cried when she gave it up to do A levels), drinking champagne at the Playboy club, and flummery, amongst other things.

I arranged for our friend Keith to drive a tractor for the first time. It went like this: We were chatting to Brython when his son Sion, who's in charge of the vintage and classic vehicles section, came over and spoke to him in Welsh. After Sean had gone Brython said, a little grumpily, I suppose I'm going to have to drive a tractor, then. Last time I did, I got covered in oil. (He was quite smartly dressed at the time.) Then, to me, Would you like to drive a tractor? Me: No, but Keith would. (He'd told me so earlier in the day.) I went off to find Keith, and told him there was an opportunity to drive a tractor if he wanted it, and he did.

Keith driving Brython's tractor in the parade.
Ian is driving the 2CV in the background.

Sadly, the 2CV is off the road at the moment. Well, it's not really sad because she'll be in much better shape when she comes home, but we had hoped she might be back by now. Ian still takes part in the old vehicle display, in whatever vehicle he has at the time.

Ian's Mitsubishi Colt, bought just a few days before the show. I blame Tim Minchin.

Did I mention tractors?

There was a competition to guess the weight of this one...

... and there was even a little one for children to sit on:

There were other stalls as well. Our friend Mavis had a cake stall.

Most excellent cakes at Make or Bake

While Ian gets involved with the old cars, I'm more interested in the produce tent.

In here may be found competitions for all kinds of garden produce, baking, crafts, photography (Most of which had separate classes for children) and - my favourite section - home brew (no children's class).

Garden produce

At the far end is a class for Vase of herbs, which I entered, but I think I misjudged the criteria. I went for aesthetic appeal, but the others seemed to be more about usefulness of herbs. I suppose I should have worked that out from the fact that it was in the produce section. Also, I may have been marked down for including weeds in my vase. How can you say rosebay willowherb isn't a herb? It's in the name!

I had a suspicion that the pickles and preserves were judged more on appearance than flavour, and filled a narrow jar of pickled samphire very carefully (it's the one with the luggage label, which rather hides how nicely all the samphire is lined up), but to no avail. My friend Jane explained to me that jars should show no signs of having been used before, should have white lids, and white labels should be on the lower half of the jar, but this isn't written down. My samphire came nowhere.

My two entries in the wine classes (rhubarb in the dry white; sloe in the sweet red) both won, in spite of poor presentation (I didn't even clean the old labels off the bottles). This led to me being awarded the cup for wines, which was nice. Honesty forces me to confess that the reason was that the entries for wine looked like this:

Two years ago, the first time I nervously entered a single bottle of wine (nicely presented in a clean bottle), I arrived to find an older couple unloading a crateful of homebrew: Three entries in each category. I felt a bit intimidated by this, and was over the moon when my oak leaf wine came first in its class. I haven't seen them since.

I was more pleased that my bog myrtle ale came second, as there was more competition in the beer classes:

I also entered an interesting fir cone ale, which came nowhere, but the judges drank an awful lot of it in coming to that decision.

It's a lovely day, and very relaxing because there's almost nothing to do apart from mooch around and chat to people. Relaxing, that is, apart from the excitement of the produce competitions!

Dydd gŵyl Dewi hapus

Happy St David's Day! (That's what the post title means, by the way.) To mark the occasion, I'm going to attempt a bit of Welsh:

Es i i dosbarth Cymraeg heddiw. Yn ystod amser cinio, aethon ni i'r caffe yn y Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru. Clywon ni cerdd telyn a bwyton ni picer y mân

I went to Welsh class today. During lunch time, we went to the café in the National Library of Wales. We heard harp music and ate welsh cakes.

Even in that little bit, I'm sure there are mistakes. It's very frustrating having just a little bit of a language, so that you can start to say something, then get stuck for words almost immediately. I'll keep trying, though. Corrections welcome!

Image pinched from our local chocolatier.

A sunshine and bara brith sort of a day

There are bad days and there are good days. Today is a day of sunshine without the icy north wind that came with it at the weekend.Today is a day for seeing the first crocus buds in the garden.

Today is a day of the steam train going past, and the driver waving while I'm hanging the washing out on the line. Today is a day of a firewood delivery in weather that's quite pleasant to be out it (but only because Ian deferred it from yesterday, when it was chucking it down).

Today is the kind of day when some firewood is just too pretty to burn.

Today is a day of home made bara brith (literally 'speckled bread', this is half way between bread and fruit cake).

Today is a day when I might feel able to face the greenhouse, which is in dire need of a clear-out.

I'm not promising anything, though. I have a cup of tea and a slice of bara brith, and a cat who's just started kneading my arm.

A walk in the woods

The sun was shining this morning, so I abandoned the housework, ignored Ian's sensible advice to get some firewood in before the forecast rain this afternoon, and drove out to some nearby woodlands. These are mostly coniferous plantations, but there's an area of beech trees where I've found oyster mushrooms before, and I was hoping I might find some today.

As well as recent logging, some trees have blown down at the road edge of the woodland. Not all of them actually fell over.

The ones that were down have been tidied up, and I see that they've cut one of the stumps into a seat.

The view from this seat isn't great at the moment, but I'm sure it will be in time.

Walking through the conifers, I catch my first glimpse of the beech trees.

Now to start looking for oyster mushrooms, and any others I can identify. These might have been oysters once, but I don't fancy them now.

These are not oysters...

... which is fine, because they're all the way up there.

This is more like it!

They're not in the first flush of youth, and are a little nibbled round the edges, but they'll do nicely.

After this, my finds were of photogenic, rather than of culinary value, and no, I don't know what most of them are.

The unbearable lightness of being in Aberystwyth

I had my first Welsh class today, which I enjoyed, and it finished at 3pm. As I left, I caught sight of the sea, and on impulse, drove towards it so I could go for a walk on the prom. I found a parking space right opposite Charlies, walked round the corner to the wholefood shop to buy a bottle of kombucha, because I've never tried it and I'm curious, and oats, because I'm running low. I then popped into Charlies to enquire about seed potatoes (main crop not in yet, not sure if they'll be getting Sarpo this year, so the convenient parking space wasn't quite as valuable as it might have been) before going down to the sea.

It was incredibly beautiful. The sea was calm and the sky was flecked with clouds, lit gold by the low sun. I walked along for a while, then headed back before I exceeded my one hour parking. By the time I left, there was no sign of starlings. This was a little disappointing, but you know what that means? No starlings at 4pm means that we are no longer in the dead of winter. The nights are drawing out and, though there may be plenty of cold weather to come, spring is on its way.

I drove home with the sun behind me and the golden light on the hills ahead. Now, it has been dark for some hours, the sky is clear and the moon is bright. All is beautiful.

I'm sorry I don't have photos to show you; I didn't have the camera with me in town and I don't know how to use it well enough for moonlit phtotography.

The title of this post, by the way, is taken from a book by Malcolm Pryce. It's a very silly book, and very funny if you happen to like his sense of humour.

Dysgu Cymraeg

I've intended to learn Welsh since we moved here, but somehow didn't quite get round to getting started for the first few years. Then Brython, a friend of ours who Ian knows through the community bus service (he's a volunteer driver and committee member), started running a group for Welsh learners. Since he was willing to give his time, I felt it would be churlish not to go along.

I didn't know Brython very well when the group started, a couple of years ago, but he was very pleased that I'd turned up, and was keen to encourage a new Welsh learner. He expressed this by looking straight at me for a lot of the evening, whilst talking Welsh. This was quite terrifying. Other members of the group were sympathetic and said things like, Don't worry, just listen out for the odd word that you know. The trouble was, I didn't know any words.

After that evening, I had a choice: I could give up and run away, and either avoid Brython or feel awkward every time I saw him, or I could put some effort into learning a bit of Welsh before the next meeting a month later. As you may have guessed by now, I chose the latter option.

There are lots of resources available online, as well as at the local library This is great if, like me, you're too skint to pay for actual lessons. Having got over the first hurdle - living smack bang in the middle of Wales, do I go for the North or the South version? (South, I think) - I quite enjoyed the BBC's Big Welsh Challenge*. After spending quite a bit of time with this over the following month, the next time I heard Brython speak Welsh, it sounded quite different - it sounded like language.

This was an indication of quite how low my starting point had been. Unlike French or German, I'd had no prior exposure to Welsh at all, so my brain didn't interpret the sounds as language. We have specialist language-processing areas of our brains, so that language is treated differently from other sounds, and these just weren't engaging for me when I heard Welsh. No wonder I found it terrifying!

That was almost two years ago, and since then I've continued to work away at learning Welsh. It's certainly not an easy language because it's very different from English. I found a very encouraging article on Quora that included the advice:It's not difficult to learn a language, it just takes a lot of time. As to how long, he gives the estimate of 600+ hours of study to reach fluency in French.

Now, I think Welsh is rather more difficult than French, but on the other hand I'd be happy with something less than fluency, so I'll take 600 hours as a guideline figure. Suppose I were to study for 20 min a day, six days a week, for 50 weeks a year. That would be 100 hours a year, so 600 hours in six years. Twenty minutes a day feels doable, and I'd be very happy to have a reasonable grasp of the language in six years, especially bearing in mind that I took three years to even get started.

For an English speaker, Welsh looks difficult. For a start, there are all those consonants - The villages of Ysbyty Cynfyn and Cwmystwyth are both a few miles from here . Then you learn that Y and W are vowels, most of the time, and it looks a lot easier. Then you notice the vowels: They're often strung together, just one after another with nothing to break them up. Lliwiau (colours), for example, has five of them in a row. Here I think it is essential to have a Welsh speaker to learn from, then it's just a matter of getting used to how it sounds when vowels are pronounced one after the other.

The next big hurdle is mutations: The first letter of some words changes in some contexts. For example, the village I live in is called Pontarfynach, which is three words run together: Pont (bridge, same as French) ar (on) Fynach. The name of the river is Mynach (which means monk), so that M is mutated to F (which is pronounced like an English V unless there are two together) in the middle of the name. Then if I want to say that I live here, the P at the beginning mutates, too.

It's all very confusing, but I've found that if I don't expect to learn the mutations as I go, then it's not that bad. In fact, I started with just trying to note, Oh yeah, that'll be a mutation, if I spotted one. My learners' dictionary has three pages of rules on the subject - there is no way I'm ever going to learn that lot. In fact, I'm pretty sure that native Welsh speakers do not learn the rules explicitly. For this reason, I'm aiming to expose myself to as much of the language as possible, in the hope that correctly mutated words become familiar and so feel more right than incorrect words.

I'm focusing on reading, because unlike listening, I can go as slowly as I need to. This endeavour got a great boost when I discovered that the library has Roald Dahl books translated into Welsh and available in electronic format. Since we have a set of Roald Dahl books on the bookshelf, I can read the Welsh and English versions side by side.

Charlie a Ffatri Siocled
(click for a bigger image if you want to actually see the text)

This way of studying is lots of fun, and the motivation to learn (rather than just checking the English all the time) is that I can read the story much more quickly if I can understand more of the Welsh. I'm not worried about getting every word, just enough to follow the story. The goal here is exposure, remember.

In addition, I'm also listening to the radio, which is much harder to follow due to the speed. While I'm doing the dishes, it's usually Bore Cothi** that I'm listening to. Sian Cothi has such a warm smile in her voice that I feel welcome and included even if I don't understand a word. Increasingly, though, I do understand some of the words, and the regular structure of a radio show helps me, as I get to know what sort of thing is coming up next.

Sorry for rambling on about it, but I'm quite excited to be making some progress with this. Last year, while I didn't feel like doing anything much, I did feel like learning Welsh. Having been fairly terrified to start with, and now I can more-or-less follow a book written for seven year-olds. I'm still too nervous to actually say much, though, so I'm going to start a beginners' conversation class next week.

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* I've also found Memrise very useful for learning vocab. The content is provided by users, so is a little hit and miss, but the way the material is presented and tested is based on very sound psychology.

** Bore means morning, so this is a play on Coffee Morning, which would be Bore Coffi.

New Year Ramblings

As I started typing this post the sun came out and shone in through the window*. This feels like a rare treat and I'm tempted to jump up and go straight outside to appreciate it, but Ian's just made a cup of tea, and it's too wet out for sitting and drinking tea. It's been raining almost continuously since I wrote about the beautiful autumn weather we had in September and October. Apart from three or four days, we've had variations on light rain, heavy rain, and that kind of closed-in weather we get here where it's not exactly raining or foggy, but you get wet when you go outside anyway.

Since I usually suffer from seasonal depression, with my mood strongly affected by light, I'd expect to be feeling pretty dreadful about now. I'm glad to report that it's different this year. I'm certainly not enjoying these dark days, but they're making me feel grumpy rather than listless. I feel like a reasonably active human being who could get stuff done if only it wasn't so cold and wet. And if I didn't have a cat sitting on me.

As I've mentioned previously, I've had depression throughout this year, and I've been working through several issues. That is to say, instead of looking at depression as an illness in need of a cure (or treatment of symptoms), I've tried to find the underlying causes and address them directly. I know that for many people, depression doesn't have identifiable, psychological causes, but I suspected that in my case it did. That's not to say it's a straightforward response to currently depressing events, but that there are things buried in my psyche that are causing me problems. Some of the things I found were well buried indeed, relating to the death of my mother twenty seven years ago.

Without much in the way of responsibilities this year, I had the luxury of space to deal with my mental health. Time will tell how much healing has actually taken place but, cautiously, at this point in time, I feel that I've made a great deal of progress. I feel ready to start again with the garden, ready to reconnect with friends - I've been a hermit this year. If I said to you, You must come and visit! I really meant it, I just couldn't quite manage the necessary to make it happen - and ready to put my life back on the internet in the form of intermittent blog posts. In short, it feels like new year, and that looks a lot like a set of new year's resolutions. That makes me a bit nervous, knowing how such resolutions usually go, but hey ho, let's roll with it and see what happens.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of starlings coming in to roost under Aberystwyth pier, on a day of actual sunshine that we took advantage of, shortly before Christmas:

Here come the first of the starlings

Looking south along the seafront, there was a beautiful sunset

and in the other direction, the moon.

More starlings heading for the pier...

... and down to roost under it.

One more picture of the moon, with lamps and a few late starlings.

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* This event was remarkable enough to make the news. I say news - this is a joke news site, but still, they were very quick to report this remarkable sighting!

Autumn colours and crazy weather

We had cold weather very late this spring, which caught a lot of gardeners out, then a cool, damp summer, which led some gardeners to give up altogether (ahem). After all that, we've been compensated with the most glorious autumn. We've had a lot of sunshine in September and October, and yesterday the highest November temperature since records began was recorded at our nearest weather station. That's not just the highest temperature here, but the highest for the whole of the UK, at 22°C (72°F). We had another fine, sunny day here today, while much of England was buried under a blanket of thick fog. It's more like summer now than it was in July.

The autumn colours have been wonderful this year, so I went out and attempted to capture them this afternoon.