… day when I have lived up to the efforts of my namesake the mathematician and done “three fifths of five eights of … errr … absolutely nothing”.
And that’s with an alarm going off at 07:30 too, And that’s nothing like usual for a Sunday morning, is it?
But having signed up for a weekend Welsh course, the least that I can do is to take full advantage of what is on offer. The Cyndeithas Genedleithol is having a huge push with its target of a million Welsh speakers by 2025 so I may as well make the most of it and learn the language of my grandmother, and what should have been my father’s and our language had my grandmother not been so concerned about her descendants being on the receiving end of prejudice and hatred.
Such was the thinking in the 1920s and 30s and there are still vestiges of it existing today.
Anyway, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not a morning person by any means. I’m a night own. So I’ve no idea what on earth possessed them in sending me first for my mock oral at 09:30.
And it started off as badly as it could be. I was given an advert with gaps in it and I had to ask questions so as to fill in the gaps. And the first gap I could make absolutely no sense of it whatsoever and in the end the examiner had to help me out. Be sy’n digwydd yn Llanaber? – “What’s happening in Llanaber?”. Dw i ddim yn gwybod – “I don’t know”. “So why don’t you ask?”
OK – be sy’n digwydd yn Llanaber?. Easy, wasn’t it?
During the speaking park I gradually warmed up although I did say that I went to watch my friends rather than see my friends, and when it was my turn to ask questions of the examiner apparently I did very well with that. In fact, what should have been a 10-minute oral exam ended up being 25 minutes.
Getting me talking is never a problem. It’s more of a problem getting me to shut up.
Having got that out of the way I joined my class and that’s how I spent most of the day. During my lunch break I nipped off for a trip around the headland.
After lunch we carried on again right through to the end with me fighting off wave after wave of sleep and even the tutor was struggling, setting us tasks that weren’t on the worksheet and expecting us to know the answer.
When we finally finished, I had another few jobs to do. No more bread and no more pizza dough so I had to make another pile of stuff. And I’ve gone back to using processed bleached flour for the pizza because it’s easier to manipulate and makes a much better pizza. IN fact it was delicious.
The bread was wonderful too but all of this meant that I didn’t have my tea until very late.
So I haven’t transcribed the notes on the dictaphone and I haven’t done the photos. I’ll have my work cut out tomorrow at this rate.
