I’m going to cast your mind back four years. It’s 2019.
That year began with an appalling family tragedy - the death of my nephew Sam, aged 25 years and 20 days, on February 21. That knocked the whole family for six.
But in the wake of this, something happened. I had been a volunteer with my local cemetery - yes, I worked in a cemetery, the year a member of my family got added to one - and, for a time, my volunteer job was upgraded to a fully-paid one.
That job did not last long - from early April to late August, before the scheme was wound down abruptly following a budgetary review - but one delightful decision changed my life for the four years following, right up to the present day.
One perk of the paid work was that my employer could sponsor me to enter a college Welsh course to refresh my knowledge of the language.
I began the Hyfedredd (Proficiency) course that September. They’d paid the money. It would have been a shame to have let it go to waste.
Five Levels
Back then, there were five levels of Welsh:- Mynediad (Entry Level), Sylfaenol (Basic), Canolradd (Intermediate), and Hyfedredd 1 and 2 (Proficiency).
Based on my application email, they pushed me straight to Hyfedredd 2, with the intention of getting an exam and certificate in 2020.
Of course, that didn’t happen in 2020 - but we’ll come to that shortly.
I joined the class, and went through the lessons, learning as I go. I spent the time building specialised lexicons for topics from history to the Periodic Table to LGBTQIA+ terms. Summer 2020 came along, but no exam - we’d been struck by covid-19 and the Great Lockdowns from March 24 2020, so the exams had to be called off.
The 2020/21 term saw some changes. The Hyfedredd courses were dropped, and were now Uwch (Advanced) 1 and 2. I was invited to finish Uwch 2, and again there was no exam. They said that the moment the college could open for face to face courses, I would be eligible to sit the exam which had been deferred since 2020. It would be Tystysgrif Uwch (Advanced Certificate), but it would effectively be the long-awaited Arholiad Lefel Hyfedredd (Proficiency Level Exam) I had been waiting for.
I did get a partial exam in June 2021 - an oral exam, conducted over Zoom. I got a Distinction for that, which, considering the circumstances, was pretty cool.
I was invited to join a new course, Gloywi (Refresher) for 2021/22. A course for everyone who’d completed their Hyfedredd and Uwch courses, and who just wanted to continue to polish their grammar.
My written, aural, and spoken exams were to be held in 2022. I was given the option of submitting a verbal recording online, and I did so - roping in my Mum, a native Welsh speaker, to ask me interview questions on one specialised topic, and a general knowledge quiz.
I sat the written and aural exams in a class on the CAMU site of the Coleg Cambria campus in June 2022. It took all day, but that ordeal was over before I knew it. A few hours to write down a story, listen to someone’s recorded conversation, and ask some questions? It was hardly any effort.
And so we came to 2022/23, and I was invited to join the classes at Coleg Cambria, Wrexham - this time, for a course without a final exam, Gloywi Parhad (Extended Refresher).
So. Four years, and I went from Hyfedredd to Uwch to Gloywi to Gloywi Parhad. I survived a change of tutors, a change of venues, and an entire year spent online: 2021/22 was spent partly online with Zoom meetings, and partly face-to-face in CAMU Coleg Cambria, about once a month, circumstances permitting: more than once, a face-to-face lesson had to be held online due to somebody catching covid in 2021/22, and the whole college having to shut down for weeks.
But nothing lasts forever.
Tragedy Strike
So here’s where it gets sad. Around the start of the 2023 Summer Term, a short term after Easter, we were given the worst news.
The class which had been running continuously, in some form or another since 2019, was to be wound down.
I’d joined the course in the last year that it was called Cwrs Hyfedredd, and I had no idea how long ago it had been called that. All I knew was that this course was part of a national scheme to bring Welsh to students of all ages; but there are changes taking place in Coleg Cambria, including its acquisition by the big University next door (formerly NEWI, later Glyndwr and then Wrexham Glyndwr University, and who knows what it will be from September).
So it looks as if not only will there be no more Gloywi course from September in the form we know it - but CAMU and Coleg Cambria itself may cease to exist as an entity, and be part of the Wrexham University.
All of which is somewhat moot, because in the here and now, today, I had my very last gwers Gymraeg Gloywi Parhad (Welsh Extended Refresher lesson).
Last week was bad enough. When I signed up, the college was alive, crowded, noisy. Last week and today, the place was a ghost town. Empty corridors. Empty rooms.
And the silence.
I got to use my college security lanyard to open an electronic door today, for the last time. I’d established myself as a creature of habit for the last few years, always having the same food each week - black Americano coffee, handmade sausage roll, cup of water because I’m taking supplements: but last week, it turned out, was my last week to enjoy that habit.
The Peiriant Paned (Brew Machine) cafe across the road shut down last Friday, and the interior was dismantled this Monday just gone, to be replaced by a student dorm refectory next September.
Two years, I’d been dropping in on that campus in its present form, and I can honestly count the number of times I’d visited that lovely cafe on the fingers of the hands of a cartoon character.
And then there was the college’s snack bar, which I visited religiously for two years to get my handmade sausage rolls and Americano coffees. Last week, it turned out, was the last week they were making those handmade sausage rolls. The cook left the place last Friday, so they just had croissants, sandwich baps, and some cakes.
I went to my lesson with my coffee in my hand. We had a break at 2:30, but the little cafe had already closed for the term.
So today, we went through the motions. We were given our lessons - vocabulary, questions about a Radio Cymru program we were to listen to, and finally some exercises based on words heb and wrth.
Before we knew it, it was 3:30, and that was it. We got as far as page 3 of wrth, and one last question for us to translate into Welsh. And the tutor put down her little handheld whiteboard. “Dyna’r cyfan.” (That’s all, folks).
I looked at the pages I’d been given. There are whole pages left untouched by pen or pencil. Questions and puzzles I would now never have to solve.
I guess you can’t imagine how I felt. How we all felt. You really had to be there.
But perhaps this is for the best. All those printouts are now part of a syllabus which CAMU may never see again. Even if CAMU survives, as part of Wrexham University, no new students will gather in Room E-G-11 (the same room where I’d had my exam in 2021) to look at those pages.
Nor will they gather to listen to Aled Hughes’ recordings on the BBC, since the Beeb have routinely been deleting these recordings off the air after 28 days. So the students who will sit where I once sat will be listening to different recordings, and answering different questions, to the ones we were given this year and last.
The class literally will not be the same.
We cut uncharted territory with our little class. We went into topics none of us had gone into before, and whoever comes to the classes after us will be following in our footsteps. We were there first. We will always have gone there first. And nobody can take that away from us.
So that was it. The end.
Coming Months
I don’t feel like letting go of these courses just yet. I’m emailing the course tutor, Catrin, to see if she can send me the course notes and exercise sheets she’s written, for the past two years. I can collect them together, sort them in chronological order, and tack each week’s vocabularies at the end.
When I joined the course back in 2019, we had to buy a file with the year’s course notes, Ffeil Hyfedredd (Proficiency File). That was dropped in 2020/21, and since that time Catrin has been writing new notes each week, cutting new territory every week.
I’m going to ask her if I can take the summer of 2023 to put together something for her - a Ffeil Gloywi (Refresher File).
In the course of this last year, I bought her two books, suggested course changes including a weekly vocabulary, and surprised her with a Welsh poem dedicated to her. I can guarantee that she won’t have had a student do that. No other tutor in CAMU can say that they’d had someone write a poem dedicated to them.
There had been highlights - such as the lesson where the words included “left handed,” “alien” and “assassin” and I popped out into the corridor and onto the phone, with the students watching, saying “There’s been a breach. My cover’s blown.”
So I’m guessing that it wouldn’t hurt to ask. She can always say no. And this will give me something nice to do over the summer months, if she says yes.
So it’s not all gloom and doom. Though I will admit to a strong feeling of sadness when I walked out of the class for the last time, and stood in the empty corridor, listening to the uncanny silence in the place, and the empty plazas and rooms, feeling like the Monday after a convention, knowing that - like the Monday post-con - I may not be going back to these rooms and corridors again.
Not as a student, at any rate.
Anyway, sad ramble over. As you were.
