My passport confirms I am a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As an aside, I have discovered that since 1983 I am no longer a British subject but a British citizen. Concealed in all that complexity is that fact that qualifying people in Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland all have the status of British citizen and there is no mechanism to become a naturalised citizen of just one of those three nations or one province. This is all beginning to get very complicated and I recommend you take five minutes out to watch The United Kingdom Explained. It’s a fun piece but beware of some inaccuracies such as Anglesey, the Isle of Wight and the Scottish islands NOT being part of Great Britain and England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland being “sovereign nations” with their own “Parliaments”. Ah, that it were so!

Anyway, I digress. This is all about me being Welsh. Was I born in Wales? No, sadly. I entered this world six weeks after the creation of the National Health Service (Architect: Aneurin Bevan – a Welshman) so I was free at the point of delivery which was Battle Hospital, Reading. My father? Born in London to English parents (with Irish and French one generation earlier). My mother, however, was born in Cilfynydd, a coal-mining community in the Rhondda Valley, to proud Welsh parents with many generations of North and South Welsh ancestry.

I loved our visits to South Wales as children and our times with our Welsh family and in the 1980s and early 90s I always felt at home when I travelled in Wales in my role of Wales Liaison Manager for the British Tourist Authority. The tipping point came when our elder son Mark moved to Llanberis in 2002. We visited regularly and both fell in love with North Wales and moved here in January 2007.

I realised almost immediately that for the first time in my life, I felt as if I’d truly come home. Some people scoff at the Welsh concept of hiraeth – a deep sense of longing for, and connectedness with, the land of Wales to its people and to its history. Hiraeth is probably the most tangible and real explanation I can give for my Welshness as it’s nothing to do with the more conventional Welsh icons all of which, other than the Red Dragon, are recent inventions.  It’s only slightly connected with rugby – that’s only been the national sport since December 1905; it certainly has nothing to do with thick woollen shawls and silly tall hats – an invention of Lady Llanover in the 1830s;  daffodils only became a Welsh emblem in  1911, courtesy of David Lloyd-George, and the Welsh flag was only officially recognised in 1959!

No, I’m a Welshman because I know I am. I cry when I sing Calon Lân or Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. I’m profoundly moved when I hear Katherine Jenkins, Bryn Terfel or Cerys Matthews. I am joyously transported 1400 years into Celtic history when I sit in Penmon Priory and think of St Seriol and St Cybi in their daily meeting at Llanerchymedd after a 20 mile walk. I long for their connectedness with God and with the land.

It’s all summed up in a line from our National Anthem (also found on the edge of Welsh £1 coins) – Pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad – True am I to my country. 

Dw i’n Gymro balch.

Steinbeck was clear about the guilt of the bankers in the Great Depression. As he prepared to write the novel, he said of them,

“I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects].”

He made a statement in chapter 5 of the novel, published in 1939, which is even more true in 2011:

“The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

Then in chapter 14 a passage could have been written for the “We are the 99%” of the Occupy movement:

“This is the beginning—from “I” to “we”. If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I”, and cuts you off forever from the “we”. “

In 1962, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature despite the New York Times vilifying the award the day before,

“The Swedes have made a serious error by giving the prize to a writer whose limited talent is in his best books watered down by 10th-rate philosophising”

However, the Nobel Prize committee cited Grapes of Wrath as a “great work” and as one of the committee’s main reasons for granting Steinbeck the prize.

The saddest thing for me as I leafed back through my old copy of The Grapes of Wrath was that we never seem to learn the lessons of history. The Second World War that came hard on the heels of the Great Depression prevented social unrest arising from the poverty and anger from finding expression against the privileged few who prospered. We have fought two world wars and are still embroiled in military action overseas. People are finding expression for their anger and frustration through the Occupy movement. Let’s learn the lessons this time.

Footnote: Three unrelated Steinbeck facts.

• Despite what most people think, “I know this… a man got to do what he got to do” was not said first by John Wayne, it was a quote from The Grapes of Wrath.
• John Steinbeck Toured Wales in 1959 whilst researching The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights which was published posthumously in 1976.
• He used George Borrows’ wonderful book Wild Wales: Its People, Language and scenery for background for his first novel, Cup of Gold, about the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan.

Two of the four lectures were in a room that was too small (six students had no seats), with a non-working projector. I trust this chaos is purely timetable teething problems but we will see next week when seminars start. It was an exhausting week!

It’s going to be hard getting in to the practice of note-taking and I’m terrified about finding and reading the interminable list of books. One module asked for 11 hours lectures, 11 semininars/workshops and 175 hours of reading. Multiply that by four, add the Welsh lesson homework and I obviously have to give up sleeping. So how do students find all this drinking time I keep hearing about?

I do want to join some social activities but as I always have to drive, my options are restricted due to most society activity involving alcohol. The Welsh Learners’ Society was a big disappointment as they are all complete beginners. I was hoping to fnd people at a similar, or more advanced level, for conversational practice.

I do plan to talk about what I’m actually learning in my blogs but this week at Bangor has been largely administration. My abiding memory will be the warnings about the dire consequences of plagiarism and the ability of the University to spot it at 50 paces. All essays must be submitted electronically and they are crunched through software called MaeBrawrMawrSpioChi.com (BigBrotherIsWatchingYou.com).

Dolbardarn Castle

However, the ‘Images of Wales’ module was great. One example was how Wales was seen up to about the 16th century as wild and untamed, so too its people were similarly portrayed as savages. Through contemporary art the lecturer showed how that image softened and matured. When Turner painted Dolbardarn Castle, Llanberis in 1802, the image was very dramatic. It’s a bit gentler now. The spot from which Turner painted his masterpiece is now a car-park and the background is now the terraces of Dinorwig quarry. Looking forward to next weeks’ Images of Wales lecture.

None, however, affected me as much as the events of 21 October 1966 when the news was of a colliery waste tip which collapsed on the Pantglas School in the South Wales mining village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults.

Somehow, I can identify more with Aberfan than all those other tragedies, because I knew Aberfan well as my family are from Cilfynydd only six miles away, several still there today. Many of those relatives worked at the Albion Colliery, the next colliery to the Merthyr Colliery which had produced the slag heap that moved and wiped out so many lives.

Earlier this year, as part of my Bangor University course I had an assignment to produce a website using the techniques we had learned. I decided to produce a website to tell a new generation about the loss of a generation of young children in Aberfan. Had I realised how emotionally draining it would prove to be I probably would never have started the project but now I’m so glad I saw it through. I discovered that nowhere on the web is there a list of those who died so I made it a project to research local newspapers and I have listed all the names of the children but not all the adults yet. As I transcribed the witness accounts in their own words of parents, survivors, rescuers, miners, police and ministers, I kept having to stop because of tears.

You can see the results of all the work on my website www.hiraeth.org.uk/aberfan and I’d love you leave your comments on this blog. Over the summer I’ll be adding to the other headings you can see on the Hiraeth site and I’d be pleased to have any contributions on things Welsh, particularly under the headings I’m using: Industrial history, Llanberis area, Walking, Castles, Dramatic events, Culture & language, Religious heritage, Snowdonia and Where to stay. This blog will form part of the site later. In my heart-of-hearts, I don’t really believe it’s going to be a ‘barbecue summer’ so my August will be writing a lot of web pages!