A post on Morfablog from 10 years ago, about a Jan Morris review of Joan Abse’s collection of Letters From Wales, which includes the following gem:
Machynlleth, wretched town, hardly a person could speak English… Welsh seem a pleasant, intelligent race, but I should think awkward to live with… the language is past description.
That was Beatrix Potter in 1885. Plus ça change…
Another quote from Morris’s article which I didn’t include in 2001:
The most telling of all the book’s quotations, to my mind, comes from the Welsh patriot and dedicated European, Saunders Lewis, who wrote in 1921 that it would take ‘many generations, a century perhaps’, for the Welsh people to recover their sense of faith and beauty, stamped out of them down the centuries by Nonconformism and Englishness.
A century, did he say? Twenty years to go.
Ten years now.
