dydd dewi sant hapus!

These daffs arrived in the email from Mama Baroque, with an exhortation to be very happy today indeed.

St David's Day is always a wonderful thing, if only because March 1st is so powerful a sign that spring will really come. But in la famille Baroque it does have a bigger significance than that. I might not really wear a daffodil today - and certainly not a leek - this is the big city, after all - but since earliest childhood I've never been allowed to forget where we came from, how proud we should be of that, or what a marvellous thing St David's Day is, to celebrate that. (As I child I was bitterly sad not to have my very own Welsh national costume. It was cruel. Imagine: instilling all that into a little kid and then not getting her the dress! It's just not right.)

Not only that, but where we came from metaphorically. My surprisingly baroque grandfather, and his father, and his father, going back as far as I know about, were all preachers, back to Bishop Morgan, who translated the Bible into Welsh in 1597 - as someone pointed out, probably at the behest of the anti-Latin crown - thereby singlehandedly saving the Welsh language from extinction, and with it other things, like the Mabinogion, which - as everyone knows - was translated into English years later by Lady Charlotte Guest. It sounds whimsical but the effects of all this are evident every time you drive down the road in Wales, and even now there must be a concerted campaign to re-teach Welsh children their own language.

If a language dies out it's more than just words. It's everything. In January this year when the last speaker of the Eyat language in Alaska died, aged 89, it was comparted to the Louvre being burnt down.

I tried to teach myself Welsh when I was about 12 and 13, using a Teach Yourself book brought over by a cousin from Wales. Of course it failed. I was right on top of the mutations, but cases always bother me (I had much the same experience with both German and Russian, where once again I mastered the alphabet no problem... and Welsh and Russian both have very particular non-English vowel sounds), and I had no one to practice with. Long-distance phone calls were far too expensive in those days. So the result is that, although we were brought up to revere this man who did this wonderful thing, and who was somehow our great-great-great-great-x-10-grandfather - and indeed all the subsequent great-grandfathers, though you might well ask where were the grandmothers (and it is mother's day tomorrow) - we can't partake of the fruits of his labour.

Strange to be so ruled by language oneself, and locked out from a language like that. I felt the same two years ago, in bookshops in Paris with my stupid French.

Ah well - Dewi Sant hapus, anyway! Maybe I'll make some welshcakes this afternoon... the Welsh grandmothers would probably love me to do that.