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Episode 5

Embracing all things Welsh means you start dreaming about the country, which has something to do with the author's grandfather Bert and an atmospheric house at Carmarthen.

"You have to pay to get in. The current cost, if you're in a car, is 拢5.30. Pressing a note into a fleshy female palm, I deploy the lone word of conversational Welsh in my locker. 'Diolch'. Thanks. Then I push my right foot down and accelerate into the land of my fathers. I'm not really sure where I'm going."

Author and journalist Jasper Rees rises to the challenge of embracing his 'inner Welshness'. His grandparents on his father's side were Welsh. So it's partly in recollection of times spent at their house on a hill in Camarthen that he opts for full 'immersion'. This means learning the language and putting to paper to some of his grandparents vivid stories about Wales. It also means travelling around, setting himself various tasks - singing in choirs, sheep-shearing, coracling, coal-mining. Some tasks are accomplished with deftness, others not, in his wry travelogue, which is abridged in five parts by Katrin Williams:

5. Embracing all things Welsh means you start dreaming
about the country, which has something to do with
the author's grandfather Bert and an atmospheric
house at Carmarthen...

Reader Ben Miles.

15 minutes

Last on

Sat 13 Aug 2011 00:30

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  • Fri 12 Aug 2011 09:45
  • Sat 13 Aug 2011 00:30

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