Way back in the mists of time, when people still referred to Wales as ‘the Principality’, civil servants in London treated it as a region of England (sadly, some still do!) and the Sons of Glendower were busy burning down every holiday home in Wales owned by the English they could find, I jokingly mentioned in these columns that nationalised British Rail (you know, like now, only better organised without all those consultants and advisers) was using up all the spare ’f’ ‘l’ and ‘y’ letters on its sheets of Letraset (remember those?) to adorn Cardiff Central station with Caerdydd Canolog signs, all in green. It’s Welsh for Cardiff Central, and no, I don’t know why it was in green.
Back came a furious letter from the Welsh Language Society, which had clearly suffered a corporate sense of humour bypass, berating me (in Welsh, obviously) for mocking the Land of my Fathers, me being a Williams and that. I couldn’t read a word, of course, but my grandmother could, so I was tempted to despatch a suitable response in whatever is the Welsh for ‘get a life’ or something worse, only to be advised by said wise grandmother that if I continued to irritate the fiery Welsh dragons I would end up in a picl (Welsh fo…
