AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the previous episode, Short Mat Bowls, ham-hardened tough-boiled jazz shamus. Now, we learn how Caerdydd’s distant past is intertwined with wolves.
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 52

The origins of the River Taff,* whose name is the forebear of our present day word ‘tavern’, are shrouded in heavy fog. According to legend it flowed downhill from what used to be uplands as meltoff from snow. Modern scientific fact tells us that at no time in geological history was there enough snow meltoff in the entire world to account for the Taff, whose breadth and width can only be imagined. The most popular myth is based on an ancient piece of correspondence etched on a stone slate dated 12 B.C.

14:05:22>Samhedrin>12 B.C. GST

Dear Albert and Wilbert,

I think it time that you know the true story of your ancestry. I know this has troubled you much in your lives, or if it hasn’t it should have and soon will.

You have always cherished the belief inculcated in you by your adoptive parents, Frolic-O’Holic and Frisky Whiskers, that you were born to a human family down in the Walley. Indeed, Frol’ ‘n’ Fris’ -- as I am wont to call them even to this day as I myself remember them as mere pups -- believed this to be true.

And why not? You showed up at their den, shivering in your baldness, garbed only in polka-dots, with your great ruffled collars and your long floppy Snoppy bedslippers with their little red felt tongues stuck out. Who but those in the Wale looked like this? nobody. So, my dears, you must forgive them, they did not intend to mislead you. They thought perhaps it was that background that explained your strange powers to not quite catch sheep by the neck, to not quite howl in concert, to not quite lick your gonads. But you had other such endearing qualities it never mattered, above all your ability to entertain and amuse. With your great honking horns, your silly pratfalls, your unicycles, you were a howl, and if you couldn’t lick your own balls, well, you had others you could balance on.

No, my dears, you were always accepted for what you were, what we all thought you were, just what you seemed – a pair of clowns from the Wale of Tears-in-your-pants-when-you-bend-0ver (translator’s note: Literally, Ffailytrwsrwuillrhiponfllechsabersily ).

I will have to continue this later as I am hanging off a cliff.
All my love,
Grandma Chompskee

It is not known at this time of writing whether the tale was ever taken up again by the author, or whether perhaps the rest of it was pieced together by the ‘goofballs’ in the hysteriohoho sub-section of the Off Centre for Contagious Laughter and Communicable Syndromes, or whether an addendum was merely passed down like an office memo by angry cows taking revenge on humans for rustling their young. Indeed, very little is known about this at all. What seems certain is that Albert and Wilbert were not the offspring of clowns but were wolves who had been abandoned as pups outside a gaily coloured tent sporting fluttering banners and festooned with balloons. They were taken in by the circus folk as is the custom, given the traditional clown names that ‘grandma’ Chompskee addresses them by, appropriately attired and taught the tricks of the trade. All this took place over two thousand years ago, which must have been very close to the time of the birth of vaudeville, in relative terms. The significance of the contemporaneity of the two events is lost on no one and regarded as suspicious at least, even by those not actively enrolled in a conspiracy theorism course of any sort. What happened next is not clear. Somehow Albert and Wilbert became separated from their troupe and wound up puling in front of the den inhabited by the kindly Frolic-O’Holic’ and Frisky Whiskers, respected members of the lobo family (technically ‘species’, but there’s no need to be rude).

Raised as outsiders in a community of their own kind, they went on to found the greater metropolitan area that would become known to the Romans as ‘Cardiff’ and later to the Welsh as ‘Caerdydd’ ( and later still to the English as ‘Cardiff’). Needing great quantities of water for this undertaking, Albert and Wilbert are reputed to have established the first freshwater transportation system in history, bringing in the precious liquid from the four corners of the earth, and in one the world’s greatest early feats of hydraulic engineering , they then pumped it to the top of the largest hill. From there it was forced into a gravity-fed channel allowing it to descend into the Wale, where it was pumped back up again apace, thus creating a rudimentary perpetual motion device, the prototype of the one we are so unfamiliar with today.

Hence, the origins of the course the Taff takes and of the illusion that it springs naturally from an area that used to be higher than sea-level are well understood. But while we know we can get water from the Taff, we don’t know where the Taff got its water. Much forensic speculation centers on Luxembourg (once a large inland lake), judging by the composition of trace elements to be found only in the Taff and in the soil of post-modern Luxembourg. Others say the whole concept is bullshit, indicating at least a fairly reliable level of probability that this theory does , if the reader will excuse the expression, ‘hold water’. **

Of late the river Taff had been getting bigger, wider. For some uncertain reason (possibly linked to the large degree of land mining and exportation of topsoil) its banks had been growing at an increasing rate. Those who resided in houses formerly perched on the rivers banks were finding their abodes within the rivers reach. A growing unrest was being voiced as more and more houses were slowly eroded and dissolved by the timeless force of the flowing water.

The usual causes were blamed: global warming, climate change, the Gods, the English. Officials declined to comment hoping the matter would go away. If the matter didn’t go away then, the same officials hoped, maybe the now homeless riverbank residents would.

* ‘Taff’ is of course the English translation of the original Welsh name for the river. As with any translation from one language to another it is very hard to fully capture the exact meaning. Because of this fact, the original Welsh name for the river is also given here: ‘Taf’.

** Crwys, Rhoda (in progress), :One man’s Hoey is another man’s Hooey: an ongoing investigation into the ambivalence of certitude; Woodville, Pub.; Park Street and Downtown Crossing.