Welsh

Community Action in Practice

~ Cheryl


There has been a lot of talk on social media of late about how communities need to work together to fight the onrushing tide of austerity policies and Fascism, but there has been little idea of how that might be achieved in practice. Well, here in West Wales we have something that is rather special.

My friend Deri Reed runs a top quality restaurant in Carmarthen called The Warren. (I took Kevin there after Worldcon if you need a less biased recommendation.) More recently Deri has founded an initiative called Cegin Hedyn (that’s Seed Kitchen for you English-speakers). This provides a “pay what you can afford” service which aims to ensure that the people of Carmarthen and the surrounding area have “access to nutritious, delicious meals, regardless of financial means.” The service is run by volunteers and relies on donations of money and food from the local community.

Recently Cegin Hedyn has been named as one of the finalists for the Community Food Champion award in this year’s BBC Food and Farming Awards. Consequently it was featured on Saturday’s edition of BBC Morning Live. If you have access to the BBC iPlayer you can watch the segment here (fast forward to 44 minutes). The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Glasgow on December 2nd.

While it would be lovely for them to win, the point I want to make here is that this is very much a grass roots initiative that was set up to benefit the local community in a sustainable way. It is something that we could all learn from. If you would like to help out you can do so via the LocalGiving website.

By the way, Cegin Hedyn serves all of the local community. The BBC video features a couple of people I know from the local queer community. And if you check out the organisation’s website you will see that one of the Directors is my long-time friend, Frank Duffy. Frank provides all of the graphic design for The Warren and Cegin Hedyn. They have also done quite a bit of work for Wizard’s Tower over the years.

Farewell Duolingo

~ Cheryl

I have cancelled my subscription to Duolingo. It has been a good run, and I think it has helped quite a bit in my efforts to learn Welsh. However, I reached the end of the Welsh course some time ago and the app isn’t teaching me much new any more. The course I’m doing through Carmarthenshire Council is now much more useful.

I was quite tempted by the music course, but it turned out to be something like a platform video game. If you don’t have the hand-eye coordination to get it right the course is a waste of time.

Here We Go A-Wassailing

~ Cheryl

Around this time of year I generally post a jolly seasonal ditty from the very wonderful HP Lovecraft Historical Society. However, in recent years I’ve been running out of good ones and didn’t want to repeat myself. So here, instead, is Steeleye Span with a traditional wassail from around here.

The lyrics are great.

It’s me, yn Gymraeg!

~ Cheryl

As part of my process of getting to know the local cultural landscape, I have made friends with a lovely bunch of people called Inclusive Journalism Cymru. They are a group of media professionals who understand that marginalised people are very badly served by the UK’s media landscape, and are seeking to improve things in Wales.

I have written them a little blog post about why trans people, in particular, need this sort of help. Excitingly, they have published it in English and in Welsh. I am not yet good enough at Welsh to have done the tranlsation myself, but I’m very pleased to have it. As far as I’m aware, this is the first piece of writing with my byline on it that has been translated into Welsh. Here’s hoping for a lot more.