The Red and the Green

Let me rehearse for you, gentle reader - with apologies to Jane Austen - the Doctrine of the Repeating Genie. "It is a truth universally acknowledged among courier drivers that, if one goes where one has not gone before, or at least has not been for quite a while, one should not be surprised if, in a comparative short while, one goes there again."

Now, this re-visiting may be only hours later, after an absence of a couple of weeks, or the scale may be something considerably greater, but the truth is nonetheless there.  Just before Easter, on the day when our dear Queen was dishing out special coins to deserving old people, I was despatched to an oil refinery near Milford Haven.  On checking my records, I find that the last time I dipped a toe into the Principality was back at the beginning of June last year, when I had been sent to Port Talbot.  And now, this week, I've had a lovely trip to a part of Wales I'd never seen before, between Lampeter and Aberaeron.

I've always been fascinated by languages, before ever learning French, and later Latin, at school.  Since leaving school I've dabbled quite seriously with German and with Dutch - but having virtually no live practice in either, the similarities between them have almost destroyed my confidence in both.  But Welsh ... right on our doorstep, as it were, has remained a mystery.  It looks almost unpronounceable for a start!  One day in my late teens, when I was planning a holiday into North Wales (incidentally, a holiday that never came about because the young lady with whom I was planning to go ceased to be my girl friend, and I opted instead for a cheap week on the south coast,) I bought a Teach Yourself Welsh book.  I abandoned the course around lesson five, and the only thing I have really retained from it is the key to pronunciation.  There are seven vowels, not the five we are used to in English; all letters are pronounced and, once you've come to terms with the fact that 'll' is a separate letter requiring its own mouth configuration, you're away!

I've found that, on the occasions that I go there, I'm intrigued by the bi-lingual road signs, which are a wonderful way to expand the vocabulary.  (I discovered the other year that the same is true in Britanny!)  On Monday evening, while stopped at some roadworks, I realised that I had correctly selected which of the six Welsh words on the bilingual sign in front of me corresponded to each of the six English words beneath them - the word order in Welsh is confusingly different, more like that in French.  I was so pleased with this achievement that the words stuck in my mind for quite a while afterwards: "Pan welwch olau coch seywch ima" - "When shows light red wait here".

This recollection yielded an important (?) revelation to me yesterday, when I realised too late that I had turned into a road where for several weeks men have been replacing a gas main.  Almost inevitably I was stopped in front of the lights, reading a similar red sign in front of me.  This one, of course, was just in English, and refered to the opposite colour, "Wait here for green light."  Until now, I had never realised that there were two schools of thought on this matter!