Unpacking Leap Year |  

Great stuff and Cymru am Byth

Wait, so is this "please don't come to Wales, we don't want tourists"? I personally only ever really go to Powys and I love it, not remotely touristy anywhere.

Cŵl!

Neis wan! 😂😂

Ah, don't be too salty about those wily Irish-Americans who are so good at merchandising my hometown of Boston. It's a fairly limiting stereotype, as the Beantown micks are usually portrayed as either gangsters or cute-but-dumb working-class stiffs. The cinematic prestige of Harvard and MIT is generally reserved for the WASPs and the rare Kennedy type. Of couse the reality is both and neither. It is no longer legally mandated to blast the Dropkick Murphys when driving through Southie. The sizable South Asian community didn't care much for that. Also, Boston Irish think they're famous the world over, and so they are. However, when I was in Kilkenny, I was talking with a couple of guys who gave me a vicarious drubbing for all the "plastic Paddies" of Bostonian origin who show up in town thinking they're hot stuff. It didn't even help when I explained to them that my own origins are Welsh. Ah well. Have a happy St. Davey Day. I plan to have a leek-slapping good time.

Why does my comment always get deleted on your channel. Is it RU-vid? Wales always has the dirty done on them, We are related to the English one day, and then the Irish the next. They can’t make up their mind can they? When in reality We are unique, The real (G)aels-(W)ales. This is why Our name Is Galles or a form of it by nearly every European nation other than England. Our history is recorded well by nearly everyone except The Anglo.

Anglophone ideas of 'Celticity' do us no favours. We're not a second rate Ireland/Scotland and rejecting that does not make us essentially English either. Our story is perhaps too complicated, subtle and nuanced and it doesn't fit with the grand official narrative about what Britain is. I think we should promote our own music more, our language obvs and unique aesthetics - pennant stone buildings, slate, portcullis pattern stuff, the weird surreal vibe of our indie music, eisteddfodic chairs, coelbren etc juxtaposed with post-industrial grittiness. Wales is weird. We are like a tiny obscure European country similar to say the Basques that became an Anglophone colony but the results were madly different to Ireland. Perhaps we should just embrace the weirdness - we're not going to be mainstream like England/Ireland/Scotland.

You're just not as interesting as the Irish sadly.