Chippy Lane is in my ears, and in my eyes – An Irishman’s Diary about Cardiff

A month ago – I’m not gonna lie to you – I knew very little about Cardiff. Then, thanks to the rugby, I had to spend three weekends there in quick succession. And now, I know more than I should about the place, including the fact that “I’m not gonna to lie to you” is a popular local catchphrase, often indicating that what follows will be anything but the truth.

I’ve also learned, for example, that the Cardiff thoroughfare officially named “Caroline Street” is better known as “Chippy Lane”, due to its numerous fast-food joints.

And among my much increased vocabulary of Welsh words, meanwhile, is the vernacular suffix for the city’s rugby team.

I learned that during a prophetic moment last Saturday when entering a pub where Munster fans were watching their province in action on a Welsh TG4. The caption had “Mun” playing “Gle”, short for “Gleision”. And seeing my puzzlement, one of the Irish lads said it meant “Blues”. Sure enough, 24 hours later, we all had them.

Another thing I’ve discovered, belatedly, is the meaning of the ubiquitous Welsh prefix “llan”, whose pronunciation might lead you to think it connected with the Irish/Scottish “clan”.

On the contrary, as I learned in Llandaff Rugby Club, where many Irish fans camped, it means “church”. Thus the nearby Llandaff Cathedral, named for St David, although confusingly, that’s only the second-best-known church associated with Llandaff. The most famous, by far, is Charlotte.

Speaking of singers, one of the many Welsh people I fell into conversation last weekend was a man called Jones. The odds of that happening in Cardiff are high, I knew.

And I also knew that, no matter how much one Welsh Jones reminds you of another you’d once met, you should never, ever ask if they’re related.

But when, after we’d been chatting a while, this man told me his first name was “Aled”, God forgive me, I laughed. Then I looked again, noticed he had fair hair and was roughly the right age, and before I could stop myself, said “you’re not THE Aled Jones, are you?”

Which of course deserved a kick. As far as his mother was concerned, he was indeed the real Aled Jones. He just wasn’t the singing one.

“There are only so many names to go round here,” he lamented.

Another piece of specialist information I now possess about Cardiff is that if you’re from Somalia, and spend a long time in the Welsh capital, you end up with a Jamaican accent. Or maybe that was just one taxi driver I met, who had come from Djibouti 31 years previously and now sounded like he was from Trenchtown. Adding to his Lenny Henry act, he also laughed a lot.

I got to know this driver (or “drive”, as Welsh people would call him) better than necessary, because he got us lost.

We were looking for a “Norton Avenue”, but despite my spelling it, he managed to type “Northern Avenue” (which also exists) into the GPS.

When we discovered his mistake, he laughed at that too, and I agreed the misunderstanding was somewhat amusing, but that it would be even funnier if he turned the meter off while rectifying it.

The address was my temporary home last Saturday night. I didn’t even know the people living there – they were friends of a colleague, who had kindly offered to put up any homeless journalists. And unless you’d booked months in advance, there wasn’t a room to be had within 50 miles.

But these nice people gave me their sofa-bed and hoped I didn’t mind cats, even though it was the cats who were owed an apology. There were two cats – thoroughbred British short-haired silver tabbies both.

One was friendly, I gathered, whereas the other wouldn’t let even family members touch it. So I tried not to tread on the unfriendly one’s toes, literally or otherwise, and in general, made myself as unobtrusive as possible.

But when I went back on Sunday night to leave a thank you gift and collect my case, I ended up staying for dinner and watching Gavin and Stacy (a Welsh sitcom where they say "I'm not gonna to lie to you" a lot), while the supposedly hostile cat sat down beside me and let me pet him.

I was told this was very unusual, and it added to the strange feeling of homeliness that was creeping up on me, and that followed me to the airport. It’s probably just as well there won’t be a fourth weekend in Cardiff anytime soon, or I might have gone native.

@FrankmcnallyIT