Philip Summers

Hello o Awstralia, Why am I learning Welsh. That is a good question.
I was born in South Wales many years ago, I studied in Wales, served my apprenticeship in Wales, loved and lost in Wales, but never spoke Welsh. This is probably because I had a Scottish father and an English mother, so as you can imagine there was not too much Welsh spoken at home. I had a father that could not see the point in me doing Welsh homework and I agreed with him at the time. Anything to get out of doing homework!
Once I finished my apprenticeship I flew the nest & landed in Oz and have been here many, many years. As these years passed I became more nostalgic for the land of my birth and ‘Mae Hen Wlad fy Nahdau’.
During my school years in Wales I did learn a fair bit of Welsh including the days of the week, the months of the year, how to tell the time, how to count up to twenty and how to greet and farewell with people, also, ‘the chalk is by the blackboard’, (Mae’r sialc wrth y bwrdd du) a sentence that was bound to be very useful somewhere along the line, or so Mr Lewis our Welsh teacher must have thought.
So now in my twilight years, trying to keep my brain cells working, I thought I would pick up the language that I should have learnt while I lived in Wales. I will hopefully be back in Wales next year and who knows, perhaps by then EVERYONE in Wales will be speaking Welsh, me among them. Wouldn’t that be a great scenario.