Bred of Heaven by Jasper Rees

Nor just the regular ones I’ve had a crack at myself. Jayne claims to speak Irish fluently. Another likely story. Matthew pipes up that he’d like to learn Irish too. I suspect he fancies her, although learning Irish seems an odd route to the heart of a large woman from Ohio. By Lesson 4 I find I can take no further interest in the lives of these characters when the actors voicing them all seem to be the wrong age. Matthew is clearly in his twenties but played by someone who sounds like my great-uncle Bob. I keep on expecting him to holler, ‘Shut the door!’ So I just learn the Welsh instead.
    By the end of one term of Welsh 1, Module 1, I duck out of the City Lit course. Others have preceded me through the exit, but not for the same reason: they can’t stand the heat. I’m so far in front I’m actually in the future, in that thanks to DIY Welsh I can now say how I will do something as well as how I have done it, not to mention how I was doing something and how I did it. Do something (and that’s an order): all is being covered in my afternoon study. I no longer exist in the continuous present of the entry-levellearner. I have shown a clean pair of heels to Alpha Pete and to the rest of the class who never liked me anyway.
    Vocabulary intake is now officially a compulsion. I know the Welsh words for the parts of the body, the weather, the professions. If I meet a lawyer with a thick moustache on a windy afternoon, I am now equipped to report back in Welsh. I start to make regular visits to the BBC Cymru website, where there’s a handy button you can turn on (
troi ymlaen
) and suddenly have tricky words highlighted. If you hover the cursor over them, a translation will ping up on the screen. It’s a rich new seam to mine. As well as learning the clichés of news (
newyddion
) and sport (
chwaraeon
) in Welsh, there are articles on Welsh culture and heritage full of handy buzz phrases that I’m going to need as I make my way towards Welshness – things like coal mine (
pwll glo
), National Assembly for Wales (
Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru
), hospital appointment (
apwyntiad ysbyty
) and motte-and-bailey (actually I decided I don’t need to know that). The website has a vocabulary page which, for someone with my pathology, is as addictive as crack.
    As the pages of my red booklet fill, I come across a number of problems. The first is that, Welsh being a largely insular language, give or take the odd cross-fertilisation with Latin and, more recently, the invasion of English, words have a habit of melding. It takes a more agile and adhesive brain than mine to sift and label
llaw
,
llawn
,
llawr
,
llawer
,
llawen
,
llew
,
lle
,
llo
,
lleol
,
llem
,
lled
,
lles
and many more. And then there’s something curious going on with a lot of the adjectives. The friendlier ones are short and manageable:
hen
= old,
braf
= nice,
gryf
= strong, etc. I’m mildly concerned about some of the longer ones:
difrifol
, for example, which means serious, or
hanfodol
(essential); or
priodol
(appropriate),
ddelfrydol
(ideal),
annhebygol
(unlikely). They all more or less merge. And they all sound like pharmaceutical applications. Rub this
difrifol
on your bunions. If you take three
priodol
a day that rash’ll clear up in a trice. A spoonful of
annhebygol
…
    There’s no cure for galloping mutation psychosis. The BBC Cymru website actually supplies a mutation checker, but I discover in due course that it’s virtually useless because it acknowledges only one trigger for mutations. I am now making the acquaintance of some truly obnoxious rules about when and where and indeed why to deploy the mutation. I read somewhere that you use the nasal mutation for days and years if there are a certain number of them – specifically five, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-nine and one hundred.
    Sometimes you get a whole conga line of mutated words, as if