26 Fruits

Time spent away always runs to a different reckoning of time. And recently I’ve spent a lot of time away. Last week I was at Ty Newydd http://www.tynewydd.org/english/home.html

for most of the week. Ty Newydd is the Welsh writers’ centre near Criccieth in Snowdonia. Once it was the house of David Lloyd George, Prime Minister at the time of the first world war. He was born there and died there but crammed an awful lot into the time between, when he was away from Ty Newydd.

This gives the house an interesting atmosphere and history. It’s a house filled with books and Doris Lessing’s words came to mind, written in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. “Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.”

I was there to run the latest Dark Angels intensive course. Most people there were based in Wales, some spoke Welsh as their first language. We had an interesting Scandinavian angle too from a couple of the participants. The intensive course is challenging. We try to cram in the content of a week’s course into half the time – but it seems to work.

As we worked through writing exercises there were protestations of difficulty, particularly based around shortage of time. But “six or seven minutes” it was – after all, deadlines are part of our lives – and people produced good writing in very little time. You find that you can write a haiku in a minute. And I discovered that in Wales, this land of ancient legends and druidic poets, there is an equivalent form of the haiku called cynghanedd. Apparently at eisteddfods there is a tent where the leading poets stand up one after another to recite cynghanedd made up instantly in response to the previous poem.

It makes you realise the importance of culture and place, not simply language. In Welsh, and in every other language, there are words that represent a meaning only fully understood by speakers of that language. My favourite from the week was hiraeth, meaning a longing for your native land. In hiraeth you sense something deep and important about Welsh sensibility and history that cannot be translated adequately into another language.

By the end of the week I was feeling a little hiraeth for my own home but the journey was a long drive. It felt like a long time, unlike the rest of the week. We had all, ten of us, spent an intensive few days that were crammed with short, sharp writing activities. We had got to know each other so well, so quickly, and we had achieved so much – how did we do it? And at the same time we realised it had gone almost in the blink of an eye.

PS This was written in 15 minutes in Starbucks, Muswell Hill, north London.