Category: random quotes

Disco for the Eyes: NME’s review of Star Wars

I stumbled on this last week whilst reading through the NME’s incessant hatred of Christmas songs. The NME thought it was far too cool for its own good but this is unusually perceptive.

“Star Wars is the only movie I’ve ever seen which captures the unique feeling of reading comic books while stoned. … The ‘70s are a time of coping with psychic defeats and the deadening of our collective nerve ends, and Star Wars is an entertainment built around spectacle: it tickles, dazzles and delights the senses while leaving the intellect and the emotions as undisturbed as possible. Finally, it’s disco for the eyes.”

New Musical Express 24 December 1977

Ought we to feel bitter against the English now? (1910)

If you and I had lived in the time of Llywelyn the last, no doubt we should have felt very bitter, when we saw our friends killed, our lands torn from us, and our families cruelly treated by a nation that could not excuse themselves by saying they were bringing us the gifts of civilization.

Ought we to feel bitter against the English now? If you will think of this carefully, you will see the answer is “No.” Englishmen are no longer free to harm our friends, or take away our lands, or treat our families cruelly. The law protects a Welshman from a bad Englishman in exactly the same way as it protects an Englishman from a bad Welshman. In law, Welshmen and Englishmen are equal.

William Glover, Stories from Welsh History (1910).

Wasn’t she a tyrant ten times worse than Miraz?

While reading my kids a bedtime story tonight I came across this passage. It seems rather apt for recent events.

“They say she ruled for a hundred years: a hundred years of winter. There’s power, if you like. There’s something practical.”

“But, heaven and earth!” said the King, “haven’t we always  been told that she was the worst enemy of all? Wasn’t she a tyrant ten times worse than Miraz?”

“Perhaps,” said Nikabrik in a cold voice. “Perhaps she was for you humans, if there were any of you in those days. Perhaps she was for some of the beasts. She stamped out the Beavers, I dare say; at least there are none of them in Narnia now. But she got on all right with us Dwarfs. I’m a Dwarf and I stand by my own people. We’re not afraid of the Witch.”

C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (1951)

In Narnia there were more beasts than dwarfs.

Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!

 

1950-lion-witch-wardrobe“The White Witch? Who is she?”

“Why, it is she that has got all  Narnia under her thumb. It’s   she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”

CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).

 

Kenneth Williams on the Rhondda & Afan valleys (1950)

Monday, 4 September 1950

Went with Glyn by car all over the Rhondda and Afan Valleys. Mist shrouded everything – purple heather, black slag heaps, disused pits, grim wet stone houses, uniform rows of drab streets. Occasional water-falls cascading with pure music down the mountainsides. Rain dripping steadily off of leaves bent with the pain of it. A brooding sadness.

 From the brilliant but tragic, Russell Davies (ed.), The Kenneth Williams Diaries (London: HarperCollins, 1994).

Welsh rain

Welsh rain… It descends with the enthusiasm of some one breaking bad news. It comes down in a constant cataract. It blots out sea, sky and mountain. Vast shapes from the beginning of the world that tower to the clouds are as if they had never been. The rain is like a separate element. A man can lose himself in it as if lost in fog. It flies, abetted by its companion the wind, to the left and to the right. It even blows upward over the edge of high places. It runs around corners with the wind.  It finds its way up your sleeves and down your neck. It sings a song on the roads as it runs, a miniature stream, to join other rivulets until it forms a little mountain torrent. In the hills it comes rushing through the heather-stems to fall in hundreds of tiny waterfalls – hundreds of Lilliputian Bettws-y-Coeds – over stone walls upon the mountain passes. And a man looks at it in amazement and thinks that Owen Glendower must have been at his tricks again. In such wind and rain was the tent of Henry IV blown down when the English armies were seeking the Welshman. And no wonder the whisper went round that he could control the elements; for rain in Wales can seem directed by some malignant producer, some one bent on drowning the earth and wiping from the mind of man all memory of dry places.

From H. V. Morton, In Search of Wales (1932).

There’s decentralisation for you!

London is more get-at-able than Cardiff for us in North Wales. It is, therefore, with interest that we read of the new Secretary of State for Wales, Mr. James Griffiths, establishing himself a Welsh Office in Whitehall.

Half a dozen civil servants have already gone up from the Old Office at Cardiff (there’s decentralisation for you!) and reinforcements are expected at Paddington hourly.

Will Wales, North or South, benefit as a result? Certainly the experience of Scotland under the Scottish Office would not lead one to think so. In Cabinet, Scottish business always tended to be taken after the affairs of England and Wales were disposed of.

This was even though the Secretary of State for Scotland had statutory powers which Mr. Griffiths does not possess. Mr. Griffiths, in fact, has neither the power nor, now, the backing of a substantial Department, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. He is a lone voice, and one can only hope for the best.

Editorial in the Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald and North Wales Observer, 23 October 1964

Some angry comment on bilingual motorway signs from 1977.

Some rather angry comment on bilingual motorway signs from The Economist, 25 June 1977. 

As you barrel along the M4 motorway, heading towards Newport with the Severn Bridge at your back, a giant road sign leaps out from the verge and screams … what? At 70 mph, with the children fighting in the back seat, you search the lines of bold lettering for a clue. There is none, until farther along the road an equally large sign – in English – reveals that the first one instructed Welsh-speaking drivers of heavy lorries to keep to the crawler lane.

How many drivers of heavy lorries speak Welsh? The question of numbers is irrelevant and that of road safety nearly so. The government is spending £10m to cover Wales with bilingual traffic signs, having decided that the opportunity to give the Welsh language a place of importance and dignity in national life is worth it, even though the language may be on its way to extinction by the year 2000 and the signs may keep drivers’ eyes off the road for longer than is strictly necessary.

Advice for motorists in rural Wales 1955

The road surface varies from county to county, but on the whole is hardly up to the English standard. In the remoter mountain districts the roads are narrow, tortuous, seldom tarred, and with breakneck gradients, providing the adventurous motorist with the maximum of thrills. Garages and filling stations, which are often closed on Sundays, are few and far between in some districts, and ample supplies of petrol and oil, besides a spare inner tube, should be carried.

H. A. Phiehler, Wales for Everyman (London: 1955)