Yeah Dai Dando by Meic Stephens

Extract ()

Hiya, I’m Dai Dando. From up the Coeca estate in Ponty. Working down year in Cardiff at the Gwalia. We do sell mortgages, see. They do call me Dave in work. Clive Hourahane’s my best mate. Bit of a tosser but e’s ok. I got a poncy brother called Steve who’s a lecturer up England way. Mam and Nanna still live on the Coeca but I got this grotty flat in Landaff North. They do always call me David. I do go out most nights for a few bevvies with the lads, mostly to The Plough in Whitchurch. Then we go on the pull in the clubs. Nah, aven’t ad any since comin back from Lanzarotty. That Eleri Vaughan Jones was somethin else though. Ad an ead on er, she did. Called me Dafydd. Nearly ad it off with er up on the Garth. I dunno about er, mind. I carn make er out, see. Er mother’s nice enough, but a bit posh, like. Er usband was somethin igh-up in the Welsh Office. Speak Welsh they do, like that poxy Peredur, my line-manager, a North Walian git who carn pronounce the letter z. Nah, I don speak it, but I gorra O level in it. An I’m keen on local istory. Lot of Welsh in Cardiff these days, too royal there is. Anyway, this is all about me. It’s a kinda diary for twelve days late last summer. We do all tell stories, don we? Well, this is my story. It’s Dai Dando’s story. Yeah, Dai Dando.

Praise for Yeah, Dai Dando

Here the present in all its hip and contemporary glory sparkles off the page. How can Stephens know so well how the young speak? Has he been trawling the drinkeries of Saturday night Cardiff? Like a present-day Kingsley Amis but with Welsh sympathy he’s written a fiction most 30-year-old wannabes would die for.

Peter Finch

[Yeah Dai Dando] achieves deep seriousness while at the same time being extremely amusing. Dave’s frustrated attraction to Eleri approaches tragedy, but in its extraordinary ramifications it is also comic. …in the end the reader, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, has to laugh. I have read many novels …and have been deeply moved by some of them. The best… leave the reader with an aching heart. This novel is one such. One’s heart aches for Dave Dando and it aches for Wales.

Don Dale-Jones

Meic Stephens was born in Trefforest in 1938. Educated at the University Colleges of Aberystwyth and Bangor, and the University of Rennes, he taught French in Ebbw Vale.  From 1967 to 1990 he was Literature Director of the Welsh Arts Council. He joined the staff of the University of Glamorgan in 1994 and was later appointed Professor of Welsh Writing in English there. In 1965 he founded Poetry Wales and edited the magazine until 1973. He has edited many books, is Literary Editor of the magazine Cambria and writes obituaries of eminent Welsh people for The Independent, a selection of which have been published as Necrologies. He and his wife have four children and ten grandchildren, all of whom have Welsh as their first language. He is a Life Member of the Welsh Academy and holds an honorary MA and the senior degree of DLitt from the University of Wales.