Welsh Journals

January in Gower by J. MANSEL THOMAS DURING THE FIRST WEEKS of the New Year we have a hard time of it all over Gower. Night after night there are outbreaks of strenuous high jinks known as Village Parties. For sheer primitive bucolic gusto these have no equal outside the peasant paintings of Breughel. There is a practical reason for these festivities, out- side the fact that it is the season for working off the effects of the Christmas pudding. The energetic people of Gower have still got stepping in their blood, and, most important of all, this is the natural pause at the climax of the farmer's year. The poultry blood-bath is over nothing is left of it but the blown feathers on the thornbush and the remains of the giblet soup. Towards the end of January it will be time to put up the rows again for the early potatoes. In the meantime the farm is just resting, and vegetating. What better way of resting than to hold Village Parties ? We know what to expect the pattern has little changed through the years. When the whole parish has been penned, perspiring, into the Village Hall, there is, first of all, a period of all-in wrestling for the under-fives and young devils in general. They are then swept into corners by the teenagers, who try out the latest craze in footwork-cha-cha would it be at the moment ? But then, as the moon rises over Cefn Bryn, the saturnalia really begin. Fired by Ron and his accordion-Ron is a local councillor disguised as a Rumanian gypsy-we hurl ourselves steaming and unbuttoned into an orgy of stepping, reeling, waltzing, minuetting and general stampeding, muscle-binding action-songs and provocative games such as Bigamy, Musical Laps, and Passing the Parcel. This threatens to go on till milking time. Fortunately however there will be a pause for hot tea to cool our desires, and there will be half an hour of small talk. Talk about the past year about the family, the shows, about ploughing triumphs, what a good year it was for corn and hay and visitors, but only middling for swedes. And in a corner there will be one or two earnest progressives discussing automatic tractors or zero grazing, or other ideas of the 1960s. By the next night energies will have returned, and the same crowd will do the same things at the Young Farmers' party, the Sunday School party, the Women's Institute party any excuse for some good stepping. So if you want to enjoy the washed winter landscape of Gower all undisturbed, the first weeks of the New Year are best of all. What you might take for an unseasonable swarm of bees, will probably be the gentle collective snoring of farm families storing