FASTEN YOUR SEAT-BELTS

Some Air-travel Snippets
I suppose that, in ways, one of my most significant air encounters was actually on the ground. The EBRD annual meeting was in St. Petersburg and I booked myself and my Minister, Bertie Ahern, on Aeroflot, the Russian Airline. Well, Aer Lingus didn't have direct flights to there then and still may not have for all I know.

Serious Hell broke out when the Minister's Office copped on to this. The Minister was immediately rebooked onto a "more reliable airline". I knew that Aeroflot internal flights were crashing all over the place but had been assured that international Aerflot was up to international standards.

Anyway I held my own booking on Aeroflot and, after meeting a most interesting Russian lady mathematics professor on the flight, landed safely.

Bertie had a different problem on the ground in St. Petersburg and in Dublin during the meeting.

You can read about it here.

I have to admit to getting a fright on the way home.

There I was in my seat on the plane which was waiting to taxi when the hostess announced that we would be landing in Helsinki in half an hour or an hour or something. As I was going to London and not Helsinki I went straight into panic mode. Out of my seat, up to the lady to inform her I had got on the wrong plane.

I couldn't figure out how that happened but it does sometimes.

Imagine my relief when she told me that we were simply touching down in Helsinki on our flight to London.

Now I said it does happen, and I happen to have personal experience of this.

For about a year, I used to fly regularly to London for meetings of the EBRD Board of Directors.

One time, I was sitting in the plane on the Dublin tarmac waiting to taxi when I struck up conversation with an elderly lady sitting beside me. She told me she was flying over for her daughter's wedding.

"And where in London is your daughter living and getting married?"

"Oh no, she's not getting married in London, she's getting married in Manchester"

"And you're flying to London"

"No, I'm flying to Manchester"

So I called the hostess and the lady was sorted, fortunately before we got the call to begin taxiing.

Another time I was flying, I think, to Budapest and had a chat with a guy who was flying over from London to tune Beethoven's piano, which was to be on display in some celebration/commemoration or other.

You can read about my Budapest adventures here.

Yet another time on the approach to London Heathrow, I saw the same carpark twice from the same low height. On my way off the plane I asked the hostess to compliment the captain on his second approach. She looked a bit startled.

By far the most significant meeting I had on a plane was with Hywel Morris. I was on my way to spend some time with a Welsh-speaking family on a farm at Llwynpiod, near Tregaron in mid-Wales. Hywel worked in RTÉ in the design department.

He persuaded me to come along and look in on the Dublin Welsh Male Voice Choir when I got back. The choir rehearsed in Mr.Quinn's Central Bar in Aungier St.

That was the start of a brief career with the choir in which I ended up singing three of the four parts - not simultaneously - I graduated from top tenor through second tenor and then to my true home, baritone.

I suppose my most unusual flight was being the only passenger on the larger Government jet coming home from Luxembourg after an ECOFIN meeting.

I had been abandoned at the meeting at around 6pm by Bertie and Seán Cromien, and it was looking like I wasn't going to get home that night. There were no direct flights from Luxembourg so I'd have to go through Paris or London and it was getting very late by the time the meeting ended.

Then an angel came along in the person of Pat Hastings, the Department's representative at our Mission to the EU. Pat told me that Joe Walsh, then Minister for Agriculture, had come out in the jet and the plane was going home empty.

He arranged with the Ambassador for me to be taken to the airport in the Ambassador's car in time to catch the plane. I was driven right up to the steps of the plane, was saluted as I boarded and had a magnificent meal on the way home to Baldonnell.

I was a bit mean and decided to ring Seán from the plane to report on the outcome of the meeting, half hoping I'd get him out of bed in revenge for leaving me to make my own way home.

I also rang home, to tell them I'd be home after all, and I spoke to my sons and told them I was flying at 50K feet or something and it was -50 degrees outside. I gather they got some mileage out of that in school the following morning.

I wonder did the flight crew think I was a Minister. I was certainly treated like one.

I'll finish with my most challenging flight ever.

I should explain that when it comes to planes, I was terrified of flying. This arose out of my first flight ever in 1960 when I suddently realised, as the plane sheddered down the runway, that it was heavier than air, just like the No.47A bus, and was unlikely to leave the ground.

Well, against my expectations it did, and eventually rose to quite a height.

That was when I made my mistake. I looked out the window expecting to see the land rushing by underneath. But it wasn't. It was just there, stopped.

My brain immediately told me that if it was stopped, the plane was stopped, and as the plane required significant forward motion to stay in the air, my brain, in an instant, now prepared my body for the great fall to the ground and oblivion.

Though that didn't happen, as you will have gathered from my presence here, that moment never left me. From then on I was terrified of flying but did a lot of it in the course of my work, sometimes waking up sweating in the bed up to a week in advance of the flight.

So you can probably understand how I became a backseat driver on all my subsequent flights. I can, for example tell you when we're over Liverpool on the way to Brussels, without looking out the window or consulting watch or map. I simply got to know that the plane did a wee bank over Liverpool, and of course that in turn reassured me that we were on course.

Well, on one very cold and icy day, I was on a plane approaching Brussels. We had just begun our descent which would mean about fifteen minutes to landing.

So far so good. On course, on time, everything dandy. But as the time passed and the pilot maintained his fairly steep rate of descent for longer than I expected, I began to get a bit nervous. I became convinced that the outside controls had frozen over and that the pilot was no longer able to pull us out of our diving descent.

Once again oblivion beckoned. My nerves were at breaking point, but I didn't pray. This reassured me that my unbelief was total, sincere and well embedded. Little consolation in the circumstances but better than nothing.

Then, suddenly, there was this enormously loud sound of what seemed like us crashing and the plane decompressing all in one short moment.

And despite the shock, and me not yet dead, I didn't pray.

Well the reassurance this time lasted as what I had heard was some sort of coffee machine at the back of the plane imitating a pressure cooker at its moment of truth, and shortly afterwards the pilot gently pulled out of the dive and we landed safely.

So, the moral of the story?

Well, flying can be interesting, stressful and reassuring and, at the same time, good training for the final end of life experience.

WELE'N SEFYLL

HERE I STAND !
Click on any image for a larger version

I had never heard of Michael Sheen. Ciarán Casey recommended a tweet from Owen Williams which contained an extract from Michael's Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture. The extract was of that part of the lecture where Michael is forcefully pointing out that the EU was not the source of all Wales's ills and that the culprit lay closer to home. The lecture was in 2017, after the Brexit referendum, where the Welsh voted for Brexit, but before the moment of no return for the UK from the insanity of Brexit itself.

What if Michael's lecture, with all its passion, articulateness, and elegance of style, had come before the referendum and gone viral as it deserved to do? Would the Welsh turkeys still have voted for Christmas? Who knows?

Anyway, the extract on its own, was magnificent. So I decided to check out the full lecture, all two hours of it (including the all too brief Q&A).

It is a magnificent analyitical panorama of Welsh history and of the state of the Welsh nation today.

I am not going to try and summarise it here, even if I could. That would be to do it an injustice. But I would advise anyone with an interest in Wales, and Welsh Wales in particular, to set aside the two hours required and to pay attention. It is not just about Wales, though that is the vehicle, it is about the place of community in an increasingly centralising and alienating world.

It is critical in the best sense of the word, and the spirit soars as well as plunging the depths.

Michael Sheen

Instead I will confine myself to some of the resonances with my own experience that I found in the talk.

One of Michael's rhetorical questions in the EU section of the lecture was: Who drowned Capel Celyn? Cofiwch Dryweryn !

This is on a par with the Irish cry which has endured for some 300 years: Cuimhnigh ar Luimneach agus feall na Sasanach. Perfidious Albion.

Michael's reference is to the building of the Tryweryn dam which involved the flooding of a Welsh valley and the eviction of its Welsh speaking community. This piece of cultural vandalism was done in the interest of supplying water to the English city of Liverpool.

The cry of Cofiwch Dryweryn wrenches the gut of every right thinking Welsh Welsh person. I have mentioned the scandal in a blog post here.

Michael tells us about when he found out that, as a Welshman, he was somehow different. This happened after he had emigrated to London to follow a career in acting. It happened in McDonalds when the lady serving him could not understand his request for MILK. We're talking English language here, not Welsh, bar the accent. This was the start of his quest for his identity, though that was a slow burner over the years.

I should make it clear that the English in Wales, as in Ireland, were determined to wipe out the Welsh language and replace it with English. And so far they have nearly succeeded. Once English became the language of success and advancement the process played itself out on its own. It is commonly held that William Morgan's Welsh translation of the bible was the salvation of what there is left of Welsh in Wales.

I came across Welsh Wales's sensitivity to this aspect of English many years ago when I was staying on a farm in Llwynpiod, near Tregaron, attempting to learn a bit of Welsh myself. I have recounted that experience here.

I also had a moment when it appeared that I spoke something less than the Queen's English. It happened in Jersey (CI) in the early 1960's and it really pulled me up short. I have chronicled it here.

Michael makes it clear that all the things the English claimed to be doing in the interest of Wales were actually the opposite. They were using Wales in their own interest, as the Tryweryn example clearly illustrates.

And then there was the 1969 investiture of the Prince of Wales in Caernarfon Castle. Honouring the Welsh? Not a bit of it - undertaken for the convenience of the British government of the day and no doubt welcomed by the Monarchy as the oul bit of pageantry.

A great show was made of showing off Charles's (non-existent) Welshness. He learned the language, aborbed Welsh history, was schooled in Welsh literature and culture, all in advance of the big day. And what for? One day of pageantry and arse-licking by Y Cracach - the Welsh establishment.

So what did the Prince do with all the cultural wealth bestowed on him? Nothing. I repeat, NOTHING. I have documented his subsequent pathetic and hypocritical use of the Welsh language following the Investiture here.

And then the recent TV series The Crown added insult to injury by trying to make Charles out as a sort of Welsh patriot. I have kept an eye on that here.

Perhaps if Charles had had access to Michael's lecture in 1969 it might have ignited some little spark in him of respect towards the people whose "Prince" he claimed to be.

I remember the spirit of that time. I was, briefly, at the "Investiture Eisteddfod" in Flint. It was my first real experience of Welsh Wales and it sparked off an interest which continues to this day.

It seems a little odd to me that Michael did not mention the Eisteddfod, unless I missed it. He certainly didn't labour it.

Now, the Eisteddfod will not of itself save the Welsh language, but in my view it makes an enormous contribution to doing so, and this not just at national level but through its involvement with Welsh speaking communities throughout Wales. Competitions at the National are the pinnacle of a process of competitions at local level in the run up to the Festival. The Eisteddfod itself alternates between North and South Wales and in those towns lucky enough to host the festival there is a two year preparation cycle involving just about everybody in town.

If you want to get a flavour of the breadth and depth of the festival you can check out my report on the historic Eisteddfod in Denbeigh in 2001. The final Welsh cultural glass ceiling shattered in front of thousands of attendees. A moment I will never forget.

Anyway, I digress, and I'm sure you'll be thinking I've forgotten all about Michael in my own self absorption at this stage.

If you want to know why the Welsh voted for Brexit, listen to Michael's lecture in full. It's all relevant - every last bit of it.

Michael is not the first, but he may well be the most eloquent in encapsulating the sweep of Welsh history and the state of the nation today in one panoramic, almost two hour long talk.

I remember the cultural and linguistic excitement in the Wales of the early 1970s. The memories endure particularly in the protest songs of that period.

Huw Jones's Paid Digaloni (Don't Despair) was intended to raise the spirits of those Welsh campaigners encarcerated for their sins. It was also intended to raise spirits generally. A real beauty of a revolutionary song.

Meic Stevens expanded the language campaign into the environment with Mwg a song about pollution. I have the original version where he sings to his own guitar accompaniment but can't find an online version at the moment. There are many inferior versions online, including, sadly, from Meic himself.

And lastly, Dafydd Iwan. Dafydd's songs were not the most sophisticated musically but he hit all the g-spots. Carlo made fun of the Prince. Cân yr Ysgol took a pot at the education system in Welsh Wales. Y Dyn Pwysig had a go at Y Cracach.

But that last mentioned song sort of backfired. In the early 1970s Jac Williams had invited myself and Nora to come and do our Welsh language slide show on the Eisteddfod in Aberystwyth. I thought it would be in the university and was thrillsed but it turned out to be in Jac's house as a pass-the-bucket fundraiser for Plaid Cymru.

Later that night we did the show in Dafydd's house. To the background track of Y Dyn Pwysig, where Dafydd had specifically pilloried those self-important people who join the Welsh Gorsedd, we showed a still of him doing precisely that himself. Didn't go down well

No more divarsion. This is serious stuff. Go listen to Michael. You won't regret it but if you do, it's you and not him, or me.