It may sound like the activities of a mini-gap year – albeit confined to a 60-mile stretch of Wales – and, in a way, the former fly-half has ‘found himself’. It’s all been for the sake of learning the Welsh language.
The last series of S4C’s Iaith ar Daith (‘Language on Tour’) saw big names like Scott Quinnell, Ruth Jones, Adrian Chiles, Colin Jackson and Carol Vorderman challenge themselves to learn Welsh. Series two sees the likes of Hook, wildlife expert Steve Backshall and actress Joanna Scanlan all doing the same. Hook’s episode of the show is available to view here.
“It was really good fun and very intense in terms of learning,” explains Hook, who benefited from having the ideal companion on the tour. “I had Nigel Owens with me, who was brilliant and helped me a lot. He had so much patience and never complained about having to repeat a lot of things to me over and over. It must have been quite stressful for him, but it was great for me!”
After 14-odd years of playing top-flight rugby, it’s unsurprising to learn that Hook favoured the intensive approach. “I wasn’t sat in a classroom. It was total immersion for four days, meeting various people who would speak Welsh to me. On the first day we went to Nigel’s farm in the Gwendraeth Valley where I got involved with mucking the cows out and all sorts, while Nigel taught me different phrases and words.”
From there the duo took to Pembrokeshire, staying in a cottage in Lydstep. “We went down to the beach in Tenby and picked seaweed for a brewery that uses it in their products. It was all explained to me in Welsh, as was the history of Tenby that was told to me by one of the locals. Nigel was there to help me with things I couldn’t understand.”
Different areas meant different accents, which posed its own set of challenges for the man who is now part of the Ospreys Academy coaching set-up. “The farmers in St Clears had really strong accents, to the point that even the Welsh-speaking crew struggled to understand them,” says Hook. “We had a great time visiting a nice family there who had won a lot of competitions at the Royal Welsh showing sheep. Me and Nigel had a go at it ourselves, with one of the children judging the winner.” He maintains that it was purely down to an agricultural conspiracy that Owens, the world’s most-capped referee, won.
The tour also allowed Hook to visit some rugby locations that were important to both him personally and to the game itself. The aforementioned haunted hotel? That was none other than the Castle Hotel in Neath, where the Welsh Rugby Union was founded in 1881 (or, as Hook recites, “un-wyth-wyth-un”).
“A woman called Manon gave us a bit of history about the WRU meeting, and about the hotel itself,” says Hook, who made his name as a fly-half prodigy at the nearby Gnoll. “Apparently it’s one of the most haunted places in Wales.”
The final port of call on his language adventure came closer to home: Aberavon Quins, where Hook started his rugby journey. “I met Jiffy [Jonathan Davies] down there and did a bit of a challenge for his Welsh-language show. We ended up on Aberavon Beach, a place where I spent a lot of my childhood.”
By this point, Hook had surprised himself with how much he had learnt in such a short space of time. Did his fluency in French, gained from three years in Perpignan, help? “It’s funny because when I was trying to grasp a word in Welsh, a French word would immediately come to my mind. I had three languages jumping about in my head.”
He admits that the seeds of his desire to learn Welsh may have been sown on Wales’ summer tour to Argentina in 2004, about which he has previously spoken. “The locals in Patagonia came up to me assuming I could speak Welsh,” remembers Hook. “I could only apologise and say ‘Sorry, I can’t speak Welsh’. They were quite bemused and must have wondered why someone from Wales didn’t speak Welsh. It was a little bit embarrassing, but at same time I grew up in a place that wasn’t a hotbed of Welsh language.”
It’s now something he’s looking to add to an impressive list of recent achievements which includes the publication of a well-received book (“school children have been doing online projects about it – the feedback has been brilliant”) and the launch of a new coffee company.
As for keeping up with his Welsh, not only does Hook have regular access to a tutor thanks to Iaith ar Daith, but he’s using his commute to Llandarcy wisely. “There’s an app called SaySomethingInWelsh, so I’m in a routine on the way to training where I put it on in the car and learn it that way. There aren’t many people I know in the Mumbles I can converse with in Welsh, so I’ll carry on doing that.
“It’s been a wonderful experience and I would encourage anybody to start learning the language.”
Episodes of the second series of S4C’s ‘Iaith ar Daith’ are available to watch now.
