I’m now at an age where I can say ‘I’ve long thought’ and it has some meaning, so when I say ‘I’ve long thought where you’re from, meaning ‘grow up’ has an irreversible and lasting effect on you’, know it isn’t a brief train of thought that’s having its spotlight in my culture adaptive brain.
Yet describing that place, that former home, is still something I can’t get into words. Do I tell you of the crackling gravel underfoot mixed with shattered glass from derelict shop windows and cars that met their insurance-related ends?
Or are the forever open and welcoming doors of neighbours in an area where ‘community’ still clings on what I should tell you about?
Let me try to explain Wales to you, or better yet what it feels like to be Welsh.
Watch and Support the Welsh rugby team, just for one game.
Never will you experience such an underlying dread, that despite having the individual talent to beat the best in the world, the team will undo itself. Wales will lose as opposed to being beaten. A lack of communication, no depth in squads reserves for key positions when a star is injured or a moment of insanity from a veteran player trying to do too much by themself, instead giving away a penalty.
Not being able to succeed entirely because of untouchable fate, is to feel Welsh. The passionate cheer in the pubs and rugby clubs of ‘Come on boys!’ is laced with a Beckettian seasoning of doom as everyone that is screaming knows, there’s nothing left after it.
There’s a belief that the Celtic people are constantly battling on the edge of a dark precipice, some kind of internal or extra personal doom. When you grow up, as I did, with mist every morning creeping along the walls of the valley and slowly approaching your village, it can very much feel like doom as our wake-up call.
That’s why the cheers for the rugby team cry so loudly, it keeps the mist away and sends it back into the old barren mountains for another season. Gives warmth to the chatter in the pubs and clubs and gives people a reason to smile as they pass on their way.
Then summer comes and we can see clearly down to the coast from most tall hillsides and we fear no doom for there is light and yellow lining our fields. And we don’t need there to be anything after it.
In a countryside that changes as dramatically as the Welsh valleys, season to season, it can be hard to describe where I’m from. It changed and shifted as much as we did as children dipping in and out of our former miners’ houses. Taking steel alloy caps to sell for a couple of quid down the scrap yard.
Surviving and waiting for the day when the Welsh Rugby Team beats the world and reminds it of our indestructible language. That’s being Welsh.