Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus pawb! No I didn’t just have a seizure, that was welsh for ‘Happy St David’s Day’

For the uninitiated St David is the patron saint of Wales and March 1st marks his saint’s day. Here in Wales we’re all a little patriotic and so St David’s day is celebrated throughout, from kids dressing up in their national costumes (if you didn’t go to school in Wales you really should Google this and feel grateful that you never had to wear 500 layers of petticoat) to baking welsh cakes to mark the occasion (guilty as charged)

So anyway, to celebrate Dydd Gwyl Dewi I had intended to share a short piece of mine that I’d written in Welsh a few months back. The piece is a Game of Thrones fanfic called O dan y Graig translated as Beneath the Roch which, incidentally is where you’ve been living if you don’t know what Game of Thrones is. Now, one thing I must make clear is that ordinarily I hate fan fiction. Literally hate it, it’s like stealing someone else’s characters, settings and ideas and using them to write your own crappy story, I don’t enjoy reading them and I don’t enjoy writing them. So a was a bit of a Little Miss Hypocrite when I wrote my Game of Thrones one but in my (weak) defense it was written more as a way of practicing my Welsh language skills rather than as a legit fanfic.

The story, for those still interested, is a little flashback scene. It’s only a few pages long and it features Jaime and Cersei Lannister as children living in Casterly Rock, without giving too much away it’s my interpretation of an event briefly described in A Dance with Dragons. I wrote it in Welsh and it just flows so well, there’s something about the Castles and Dragons in the world of George RR Martin that really lends itself to the Welsh language and I had a load of fun – yes fun – translating place names and character names into their Welsh equivalent (hey, I’m a language student, what can I say?)

All this is why I was super excited to share the story with you, whether you understand Welsh or not, but as it’s also Ash Wednesday I really feel I ought to confess an error of mine: I hand wrote the story and currently, currently it’s sitting somewhere among literally hundreds of sheets of paper at my desk. By the time I find it and type it up as well as translate it back into English and type that up too not only will St David’s Day be over but I will have also lost the will to live.

This is one of the most irritating things to have happened to me this week, and this is a week that includes burning my first batch of welsh cakes and finding zero new books worth buying in the chart (fyi, ‘The Unmumsy Mum’, if you have the need to state the fact that you’re ‘un-mumsy’ then it probably means you are!)

Well.

This is pretty awkward.

I’ve promised you all a much, much anticipated fanfic and failed to deliver, such is life.

There’s a lesson to be learnt here – keep your expectations low and you won’t be disappointed. Granted, I don’t do this but we’ve already established I’m a hypocrite (see above).

So to apologise, here’s an here’s an extract from the bilingual play I wrote last year called ‘Y Gwobr’ which roughly translates to The Reward. No synopsis – I’ve wasted enough of your time already…

Y Gwobr Extract – Act 1, Scene 15