I thought I would write something terribly clever, oohing and aahing over my own magnificence. Oh yeah, I thought to myself, come out with a kicker.
But it didn’t happen.
Swansea has seen some snow this season.
And when I wrote that I decided that I was being a bit too clever. Consonance and assonance and all that. But I don’t owe this cleverness to myself. No, I owe it to Mrs. Nathani of school, who set us exercise after exercise of metonymy and synecdoche, made us go through entire chapters of the ubiquitous Bose & Sterling book of rhetoric and prosody.
I did not know that some seeds were being sown.
But there I go being clever again.
Cynghanedd and englyn- what Nigel, my poetry tutor calls Welsh S & M. Singing in chains. Singing songs in chains of silk.
I was not trying to be clever, honest.
In my own roundabout, half bureaucratic way, I suppose I am thanking Mrs. N- wherever she may be, for instilling a love of language into me. Not literature- although it was she who introduced me to Keats- but language. Sounds. Phonetics. Ejukashun.
Creating links between rudra and red; me and mein. What’s mine is mine; what’s yours is also mein. English as an absorbent, evolving entity.
There I go again- and without even trying!

Diolch I Mrs. Nathani.
I owe you so much.