sunbeams

'If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face

like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.'

(Roald Dahl, The Twits)

So today I finished reading one of the many books I've brought from Wales, 'Boy', by Roald Dahl, whom I didn’t know was Welsh before I started searching for things to do in Cardiff this year. It’s a big year for his fans, his centenary, so there were, and are, quite a few events going on in the city. I myself only saw an exhibition of Quentin Blake’s, his illustrator, works at the National Museum (and left it with a beautiful book called Sad Book, by Michael Rosen, which earned its title for a reason I won’t explain here in order not to spoil anyone’s reading - believe me, it’s worth it) and visited what is probably a permanent smaller one at the Norwegian Church, which is actually about the building itself but features a photograph of the author of Norwegian origins who was christened there. I’m still talking about Dahl, in case I’ve lost you. I came back with three of his works, the aforementioned autobiography, The BFG, bought on my last day in the country after having watched the new film (yes, I’d forgotten that other Roald Dahl-related activity) at Vue Cinema with a great friend I’d made on the course I’d done (more on that later), and that classic one about a certain chocolate factory - in Welsh, for the day I’ll be able to glance at a text in that language and not cringe.

This isn’t intended to be a book review site, though. I’m actually not yet sure what this is going to be, I just know it ought to be about Wales, more precisely Cardiff, even more precisely the two months I spent there this year. Knowing myself as I do, however, I can only expect it to touch a myriad of other subjects, with Wales appearing somewhere in the distance at times. You’ve just had your warning, and now it’s up to you whether you want to go on reading these pages or not. No offence taken if you don’t, loads of gratitude if you do. I might even bring you a wee souvenir from my next visit - I love buying souvenirs, as you’ll see if you do continue to read this, this brand new little blog of mine, of my memories of Wales. You’re very possibly wondering ‘Why Wales?’ and you’ll find that out in due time. Now I must record something I remembered while coming home yesterday, as it’s supposed to be a lesson for life, according to the person who shared it with me and the others at our table on the last day of the course.

We’d spent the previous weeks trying hard (well, some harder than others) to learn some of the local language, Welsh, yes. Why Welsh? Everything at its time, we’d say in my mother tongue, Portuguese, let’s not haste and spoil a good story. A hopefully good story, I mean. Anyway. So there we were, a handful of us Welsh learners bidding each other farewell at the Mochyn Du, a famous pub amongst Welsh speakers, apparently, a nice place where I made a couple of good memories but of which menu I didn’t particularly like. It’s very probably not the place’s fault, rather just me being picky about what I eat. I’m not fond of pub food, one of the little discoveries I made about myself on this little trip, or it might be that I didn’t go to the right ones for food, who knows, I certainly didn’t go to many. Oh, and I forgot to mention I’m a vegetarian. An ovo-lacto one, but it does make life difficult sometimes. And I managed to unwisely order, that evening, what I’d had on my first visit (a story for another day) and not fully enjoyed. And I found everything somewhat unreasonably priced, especially considering it was the very end of my stay and I’d already overstayed it in one month, my original plans being to spend four weeks, not nine, away.

Feeling hungry, unsatisfied and, to be honest, more than I should, perhaps, for I do like the company I had that day, bored to death, I decided to, first, kill time in the toilet - peeing, brushing my teeth, taking off makeup, brushing my hair, even listening to music on my mobile -, and then outside, where I found a pleasant spot, or pleasant once the woman smoking on the other bench had gone, with a bench I could sit on and listen to the song I’d been listening to in the toilet (nothing to do with its quality), Chico Buarque’s Roda Viva. I’d been reading about what’d been going on in my country politically, I was finally starting to experience a hint, just a tiny hint, of homesickness (hiraeth, in Welsh), all the while feeling really down at the prospect of leaving Wales, which I was supposed to be doing the following day but ended up doing nearly a week later. That’s how much I wanted to stay. However, at that particular moment, or rather at the ones immediately before that, in the pub, at that table, surrounded by people speaking a language which I was barely able to understand, let alone speak, or by people talking about things which didn’t concern or interest me, I wasn’t enjoying myself at all.

It was Liz who rescued me from the great outdoors (seriously, who stays inside a, as far as I can remember, relatively stifling, dimly lit place - no, that pub isn’t bad, on the contrary; it’s just, well, a pub -, drinking expensive beer while the sun is shining and it’s relatively warm all over the park which is right outside it, where one could be drinking inexpensive wine instead, as we’d done before and I’ll tell you all about later?), and Nye who, perhaps noticing my move towards the newspaper in my rucksack (no, I’m not coming across as a very sociable person, I know), invited me to join in the chat, ‘Have you heard about…, Bruna?’ - I hadn’t, and was suddenly very curious about that, if only, at first, for the sake of politeness. It’d been a truly kind gesture, an intentional or an unintentional one, it didn’t matter, and there we were, five of us, discussing one of the commonest, I imagine, pub talk topics of all, namely men and women. To me, it was actually an enthralling conversation, as I don’t happen to have many men friends, certainly not heterosexual ones, and the only male figure I grew up around was my father, who’s been leading a faithful celibate life ever since the woman he loved, still loves, I suspect, left him decades ago, aka my mother. I had a chance, during that half hour or so, to obtain vital information on a man’s perspective of a relationship, and a complicated one at that.

It was very educational and highly entertaining, that little account of that classmate of mine - not Nye, another one, whose name I won’t use here for privacy reasons. And it somehow ended with the funny idea that, so as to win a woman over, if that’s the word I should be using here, well, you know what I mean, a man should be kind (so, here’s kindness again, yes) to animals in the street. Except for the fact that I didn’t see that many animals in the streets of Cardiff, that might work, who knows? Or was it kind to people in the street, as in homeless people? Probably both. ‘So, it’s not looks, it’s not money, it’s kindness,’ someone said, according to what they’d seen or heard somewhere, and we all laughed, of course. In hindsight, though, and after having witnessed a young-ish man paying for an older man’s lunch at the station in the city where I actually live, before getting on the coach towards the one where I now write these lines and which I call my hometown, I should say that it is, indeed, attractive, a good heart. I don’t believe I’d have noticed that other client at the café had he not been playing the role of a good Samaritan then. He wasn’t my type, but I couldn’t help but watch him, and smile. So here’s Lesson from Wales number one, and I hope you find it, as well as my future posts here, useful somehow, or at least worth reading.