MJK podcast - Carmarthen/Caernavon/Cwmafon - for Sam

[babybird67]

moved this to Pub where i think it sits better...sorry...can anyone with the powers remove this one please?

thank you

[Sam Flynn]

One day he brought back a friend to stay for Sunday lunch. I was working at that time and my husband picked me up from work around 2pm with the boys in the car. He said, "We just need to drop Gareth's friend back home in Carmarthen."

My initial reaction was, that's quite a long way away to live if he attends school in Port Talbot, but assuming my husband had checked out the address as he usually does on routefinder, i just got in the car and buckled up for the ride. My rationalisation was, perhaps he is from a broken family, and lives sometimes in Port Talbot and sometimes in Carmarthen.

Anyway, off we drove. We were going for absolutely ages. Probably close to an hour and we still weren't there. We saw a sign and thought good nearly there. My son, called Gareth (lovely name! )said to us, how long will it be till we get there, as his friend had just had a call from his mum wondering where he was. We said we are nearly there now. The friend looked really puzzled and obviously wasn't recognising anywhere.

I turned and said, "What's wrong."

He said, "Actually, i dont think we are in the right place at all. I live in Cwmafon."

"Yes, Camarthen, that's where we are going."

"No, not Carmarthen, Cwmafon, near to the school."

Uh oh. We had been travelling in the wrong direction all the time and he hadn't said a word! I think his tea was either burnt or stone cold by the time we eventually delivered him to his house in Cwmafon. We had never heard of it until that day!

hope you enjoyed that little anecdote, as it shows just how similar those places sound when someone is saying them with a (lovely) Welsh accent!

Thanks for that confirmation of my point that "Cwmafon/Cwmafan/Cwmavon" (spelling varies) is pronounced colloquially to sound like "Carmarthen". Of course, the various Cwmafons are nowhere near as well-known as Carmarthen - or Caernarfon, for that matter - so Barnett's misinterpreting what Mary said is all the more possible in my view.

[babybird67]

yes for sure Sam. The two sounded absolutely identical to both me and my husband, and as Barnett was not Welsh it probably would have been very easy to mishear or assume the place Carmarthen was the same as Cwmafon.

I think your point about Cwmafon being maybe a more likely place to look for Mary is also a good one since the Cwmafon at Port Talbot is close to the steel works and i presume the mining industry?

Will be listening to the rest of the podcast later but as usual this one is extremely interesting, so thank you Sam, and everyone who contributed.

[Sam Flynn]

I think your point about Cwmafon being maybe a more likely place to look for Mary is also a good one since the Cwmafon at Port Talbot is close to the steel works and i presume the mining industry?

Indeed, BB - although there are even stronger metal/coal industry links to Cwmafon in Gwent... not far from Bedwellty, in fact, where a whole "nest" of Kellys has been found

[babybird67]

hi Sam

is that the collective noun for Kellys...a nest of Kellys? I like it! Glad it's not the same as the collective noun for crows though!

[Robert]

I think the collective noun would be "a reassemblage of Kellys."