The First Lesson

Something happened to Gaelic learning materials in the 1960s. For a long time all there seemed to be were reprints of text books from the first decades of the century, or earlier: dry, systematic, technical, lacking illustrations, and introducing a vocabulary suggestive of a rural frontier life (man, woman, fire, smoke, wood, cave, hill, cairn, calf, eagle, rat, berry) that hadn't changed since the dawn of time.

Then An Comunn Gàidhealach produced a set of ten LPs with a booklet, whose first page proper is captured here, and which I acquired from my dad who never got past Lesson Four. From the very start, we are invited into a defiantly suburban home, complete with a three-piece suite, a standard lamp, a cake stand, a foot-stool, and - most dramatically of all - a telebhisean.