Mur i'r bur

You will all be familiar with the joke about the first Jewish President of the United States. He invites his retired mother up from Florida for the grand tour of the White House and Capitol Hill.

She's reluctant at first, what with shifty Miami taxi drivers, the likely impact of the flight on her ready reckoner of ailments, general concerns about humidity, shvartsers, etc. Mr President reassures her that it'll be Air Force One and limos all the way, and she'll be back home for bridge on Thursday.

The trip passes with less kvetching than expected by either party, and the First Mother is serenely seated at the green baize as Mrs Mandel deals the cards.

"Where did you go, Golda? We haven't seen you all week!" asks the hostess amid the rustling of perms.

"I stayed with my son," replied the Matriarch.

"Your son the optometrist?"

"No, the other one."

We've all been there. When my mother announces to the Cerigrafu branch of Merched Y Wawr (Provisionals) that she's spent a few days ironing wallpaper at her son's house, they always gasp "Your son, the War Mongrel?". Instead she dismisses her weekend at Casa Boyo with a "No, the English one".

I was brought up in the shadow of my younger brother, Steffan ap Morthwyl fab Boyo, years before he was born. There were omens on the witch-gaunt hills, you see - goats jabbered Psalms at passing Land Rovers, a girl in Rhydymain was delivered of a five-fingered child - that sort of thing.

Morthwyl, as we call him, was born smoking a roll-up in 1969, and again in 1970 by popular demand of the midwives.

Readers of Mrs Pouncer's diary will know that he has since acquired a "van, a chainsaw, a doberman and a selection of self-crafted tattoos in no known language", and that "his favourite words are 'Duw, fuck, aye, but', in that order. They are also about the only thing he's said for 35 years".

At some point in the 1980s he joined the Army. When asked why, he simply replied "Dykes, mun" and winked. Whatever discomfort Europe might have been planning for itself in that dayglo decade, Morthwyl was always there to make it worse.

On his occasional visits home he would appear in Emma's nightclub, stuff his kitbag under a table and go to sleep - on the understanding that all the VG Stores checkout girls, district nurses and gym teachers would have found some edible underwear and formed a queue in ascending order of volubility by the time he'd woken up.

I never stood a chance, especially after I disgraced the family by moving to England by bus and not armoured personnel carrier. Morthwyl has never entered a sovereign state without challenging its armed forces to at least an arm-wrestling match. Turkmenistan declared eternal neutrality in the early 1990s just in case.

But Morthwyl's finest moment came on 9th November 1989. A continent realised that Communism was doomed when East Germany showed it could not even disembowel itself efficiently. Sagging Stalinist Günter Schabowski told the half-nation that they could cross the borders in search of stone-washed jeans and decent beer whenever they liked.

His leering chief Egon Krenz had planned the Great Leap Over for the following morning, so that he and his lovely wife Erika could snap up the bargains in West Berlin that very evening, but failed to pass this detail on to Schabowski.

Within hours The Wall was no more, Germany got bigger without killing anyone for once, and John Le Carré began his entertaining descent into student politics.

It could have been very different. Morthwyl was on guard duty with the Royal Welch that evening, walking the line near Checkpoint Charlie. He loved patrolling The Wall, for it was as close as he could get to East Berlin - a city that reminded him of what Wales might one day become.

He saw crowds surging towards the barriers on the Eastern side and remembered his training - the Warsaw Pact will probably start the invasion by creating an incident. And suddenly here were masses of poorly-coiffed youths in drop-shoulder sweaters milling around like touts at a Bonnie Tyler gig.

One word formed in his mind - "fuck", by which he meant an "obvious smokescreen, behind which the close-shaven ranks of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment will shortly march into the barracks and nationalise my boombox. Fucking Frenchies!"

By 1989 the Soviet Union was in no shape to conquer a waitress at the Mumbles Pavilion Café, let along West Germany, but international relations were something that passed Morthwyl by without stopping to check their trouser pockets.

He was fixing his bayonet - to what exactly the court martial never revealed - when an officer tapped his shoulder and ordered him down to the checkpoint. There he spent the night handing out cups of coffee to ecstatic Ossies, who in return plied him with East German cigarettes. "What were those like?" I once asked. "Fuck," he replied.

I often wonder what might have been if my brother had carried out his one-man infantry charge into the ranks of distracted Volkspolizei. Would the hitherto disappointing Cold War have flared up around his ammo boots, taking the West by surprise and leaving the Ostblock in charge of the cinders from Bristol to the Baltic?

The poverty, grime and poor dentistry of the German Democratic Republic are largely forgotten by pigeon-chested progressives, but less talk and more action from Morthwyl might have brought its benefits to the New Statesman's subscribers in a way they'd still be thanking him for today, on this 20th anniversary celebration of his rise to power.

Comrade Chief of the People's General Staff Generalissimo Field Marshal S.M.Boyo would modesty acknowledge the stormy and protacted applause, rising to an ovation, from work collectives across the continent with a wise and watchful "aye".

A Starry Ticket

Snoopy the Goon (not one of the Ludlow Goon-Squads, I'm glad to say), has presented me with a mimetic challenge. Thus:

• Write one superpower you would like to have and what you would do with it.
• Write why you chose that super power over everything else.
• Tag and link lots of people and write why you think they will have an interesting meme.
• Fix your broken links.

I'll not tag any individuals as I don't want another cat fight for my favours unless it involves real cats, or selected female followers acting out the Bardot-Cardinale encounter:

And as for links, Madame Boyo keeps my chains well-oiled and secure, thanks.

And so to business. The only superpower I'd ever want is the Unbreakable Union of Free Republics that was the USSR. "Why not the Goddam' United States of these Americas, then?" you might ask, switching the 'baccy plug from one ingrown cheek to the other.

True, the USA would be a more pleasant entity with which to share your life, and therefore one that needs little guidance from me. Apart from giving up The Philippines and failing to flood Cuba with cheap TVs, it's hardly put a foot wrong.

Soviet Russia, on the other boot, missed chance after chance to make the world a cheerier place during its 70-year drunken lurch from feudal demense to oligarch's doormat, and now it's gone.

We Welsh have never let mere dimensions of time and space bother us before, so here's what I'd have done with the USSR and why:

1. Got Poland to Invade Germany. I may have made it up, but I'm sure I read somewhere that in 1933 Marszałek Piłsudski proposed to send some uhlans to Berlin and hang Hitler by his mono orchid, no questions asked, as long as Britain and France promised to go fishing that weekend. He got no answer, and the moment passed.

If he'd contacted me, Comrade General-Secretary Premier Boyovich in Moscow, I'd have applauded this initiative, offered him the rest of his homeland Lithuania, and thrown in a brace of Belarussian bison swamps as a gesture of Slavonic socialist solidarity.

A Europe without Herr Hitler would have been a more elegant and populous place, and my kind of Soviets could have made it happen. Also, there would be something deliciously kinky about the Poles marching Unter die Linden.

2. Banned The Beatles. And Oasis too, if they and the Soviets had been mutually unlucky enough to overlap. Why? I like The Beatles, but they made string arrangements, bad poetry, sitars and Lord Paul of the McCartneys acceptable to generations of Russians. The ensuing descent into Pink Floyd cultism was inevitable.

Pale loiterers sat around in frumpy housecoats pondering the meaning of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" while picking lice out of their Buryat girlfriends' matted hair. The Kremlin happily let Beatles albums through customs once in a while, because this epic, Armenian bang-fuelled self-indulgence left the Young Guard with little time to organise counter-revolution.

I'd have kept the Northern monkeys out and turned Red Youth onto The Stones. Ripped-off blues, elliptical drumming, a vocabulary of 15 words, smack, proper birds like Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg - that's a national curriculum for the sort of strutting, street-fighting little scuzzballs needed to keep a proper superpower on its toes.

And, above all, no one would have sat next to me at parties, pointed at the 8-track of "Gimme Shelter" and asked "what is Mick really trying to tell us here?"

3. Sold Guns to Israel. Big ones. Just to watch George Galloway's head explode, in a good way.

No tags, as I say, but what would you have done with the Soviet Union if you'd had the chance? Nazis and members of the House of Romanov need not apply.

Plant y Cerrig

"Nid yw hi'n amhosib yn yr oes sydd ohoni i ailddarganfod hen ysbryd meddylgar y derwydd a'r dderwyddes. Ie wir, mae'n hanfodol".

Some fireside Phalangists have complained about a plaque recently unveiled on Primrose Hill, London, in honour of Welsh poet, antiquarian and geezer Iolo Morganwg.

In a touching display, Mr Malcolm Kafetz of the Friends of Regents Park feat. Primrose Hill blustered that a crook and forger like Iolo deserved no such memorial on his manor. In our Welsh world it is precisely because he crooked and forged with such panache that Iolo deserves to be remembered.

The Welsh language lacks native words for "private", "honest" and "locked car-door", so the narrow Saxon mind takes this as a Sapir-Whorf sign of our leanings towards larceny. On the contrary, it indicates our 360º altruism - not only are we generous with our own goods, but we are also ready to share the credit of others:

• Classical Colossus Ralph Vaughan-Williams said he never had any conscience about cribbing intermissions and riffs from other composers;
• An entire suburb of Chester woke up in Flintshire not so long ago; and
• The list of warlords, public gatherings and geographical features claimed by Cambria includes Marshal Timoshenko, Johann Sebastian Bach (but not the other Bäche), the Mandan tribesmen of Missouri and England itself.

It is therefore quite in keeping with our national sacra for Iolo to have shared the wealth of his imagination with the pinched world of Primrose Hill. Mr Kafetz might call him a "bankrupt and a forger. A bloody criminal", but Iolo dealt in a currency more choice than the Hanoverian ha'penny, and what he forged was not merely a sheaf of sprung rhythms but a complete Celtic cosmology. All Welsh, all ours, and all made up.

HP Lovecraft wrote that slobbering sacks of brackish bile created our world just for jolly, and would tramp through a crack in the firmament one day to stamp us back into the brine. So did Iolo Morganwg dream that our own Druidic Elders had outlasted the Roman and his troubles, weaving our own era into the oak garlands of theirs as if Marcher Lords and monks had been a passing parson's fancy.

This web blog is more Gerry than Benedict Anderson, but the latter got it right with his "Imagined Communities". Iolo could have sliced a swathe through the Silurian sludge by concocting Owain Glyndŵr's last Will and Testament, or claiming a Tudor lineage for some clubable drone with a couple of hundred arces near Harlech.

But instead he had the class to base our national story on the Druids - skirted dope-fiends who organised military resistance to Caesar by getting naked and talking tactics with a space badger they met while chomping their way through a field of fly agaric.

Many modern nationalisms are built on the exterminatory ecstasies of paper-lipped professors, so an epos propped up by a few pagan porkies is all right by me. While some celebrate invasions, conversions, displacements and defenestrations, we have an annual toga party and give one another big wooden chairs for the best poem.

All this was thanks to Iolo and his Fitzrovia drinking pals, and they first tried it out on domed Primrose Hill.

As Danny Abse said of his fellow bard, "He was a great, great scholar, and he fooled everybody. I don't know if he was a drug addict, but he was certainly the best poet that went to Cardiff jail."

And that's a worthy plaque inscription if I ever heard one.

(Pointy black hat doffed to The Dog of Deceit (and Hypocrisy), who found the copy of the Camden News Journal in the Dutch Window public house and brought it to the Cymru Rouge Historical Grievances Department that I may get a better look at it.)

My Universities: Socialist Gigolo

Dolphin-herder Gyppo Byard has tagged me to come up with a list of things I regret doing. Such is my innate poise that there's nothing I really wish I hadn't done, or else my as-standard Memory Hole has excised it.

My life would have worked out differently if, say, I'd opted for Italian instead of Russian at college. I'd be mooching around the semiotics department of Bologna University in a shrug of Nazionali fumes, biker jackets and impatient young ladies, having arrived for a few months as a professore d'inglese 20 years earlier. But then this web blog wouldn't be half as fascinating:

"Il 27 settembre: Woke late, had a cornetto and a corretto. Off to college on my reconditioned East German moped. Taught 1970s football chants to the children of my colleagues. Lunch with one of the Gabriellas. I think she's seeing Donatella at three. So am I..."

Yes, my life has been one slender, Silurian step to Sartori after another. A career I'm glad I didn't pursue too far, however, was that of buffed boy toy for bored Tory ladies.

"Why on Earth not?" you ask. An attentive reader of this journal would conclude that this was my one true calling. The answer is that, like many pleasures in life, it can lead you into literally dark passages.

In 1980 the British left unbuttoned its collective dungarees in relief. James Callaghan, statesman and stevedore, stepped down as leader of the opposition Labour Party to be replaced by Socialist fantasist and trainee Welshman Michael Foot.

For the benefit of North American readers, Michael Foot looks like the scientist in 1950s B-movies who tries to reason with the monster before it pulls his Hush Puppies out through his nostrils and plays his scrotum like a banjo.

In a rare example of a science-fiction insight , this also summed up Mr Foot's approach to dealing with the Soviet Politburo, Argentine generals, the Mighty Mrs Thatcher and Trotskyist moles in his own ranks.

His tenure as Labour leader was rather like a model giving a handjob to a dying war veteran - noble but brief. Nonetheless, it excited Labour cadres who had long been frustrated by successive leaders' insistence on trying to win elections and then govern the country.

Now, at last, they could write prolix resolutions, hold old-school public meetings and march around colliery towns to their hearts' content and still win the 1983 election, because it was inconceivable that the British public would vote for Mrs Thatcher again. Foot was a codger, but La Thatch was Caligula in a corset.

We Welsh have survived so long next door to the World's most successful imperialists by developing a talent for mimickry. There's no mistaking a Fenian or a Scot, but who'd say that Michael Heseltine or John Prescott were Welsh? I therefore spent much of my sixth-form years preparing for power and influence by impersonating world leaders.

I had Brezhnev, Helmut Schmidt and Giscard d'Estaing ("Je voudrais remercier tous ceux et toutes celles qui ont voté pour moi"), but came into my own with Michael Foot. Once I got to university what had been a party piece became a nice little earner.

I got invited to Labour fundraisers as the warm-up act. I'd do some of his classics - "I am a peace-monger", "The Guilty Men", "A seraglio of eunuchs" - and sign off with "This Great Party of Ours" to the anachronistic strains of Shaky's "This Ole House". The workers, peasants and progressive studentry loved it.

Fortunately for me, so did the Labour Party machine. A couple of heavies from Ebbw Vale Labour Party dropped by my digs one day. "Mr Foot hears you're a funny man, but you also show him respect. Mr Foot likes that. Says you're a credit to your family. Knows where they live, does Mr Foot. Very clever, he is. You should try it, sometime."

I took that as both an imprimatur and a drawing of a red line in the sands of satire. No pratfalls, no donkey jackets, no mention of Mrs Gandhi and her State of Emergency. Kept it clean, I did, and everyone was happy.

But there's always someone who wants more. After a gig at the Llantwit Major Young Socialists, who threw their corduroy caps on stage in delirium after my "Mrs Thatcher should fly at once to the United Nations" high-wire finale, a young woman came to my dressing-room.

Despite her monkey boots and baggy t-shirt, there was something forced about her hectoring tone. She scattered a few too many "actualies" around the ends of sentences, the CND badge was inverted in homage to Mercedes-Benz, and her underwear seemed to fit.

"Do you do private performances?" she asked.

"You mean for Fabian Society home-reading clubs?"

"Er, yes, that sort of thing."

We agreed my standard fee for non-party-members/waged, and I turned up at the address the following evening with my boom-box and valise of props. My suspicions were aroused by the maid who answered the door, and could have bored through a safe by the time I was ushered into the drawing room. It was all too neat to be the home of a Bohemian Bollinger Bolshevik.

This was suburbia, and my hostess was a Tory.

She reclined in her Karen Millen on a récamier, pointed with lacquered nails to a mug of orange tea on the side table and whispered "Do his last Party Conference speech". I was rummaging about, already in character, for the spectacles and cane when she moaned "Do it in the donkey jacket".

"It's not a donkey jacket, it's a rather smart car coat," I snapped.

"Take me into public ownership!" she yelped, with a detonation of décolletage.

Word soon got around the Women's Institute, Rotarians and Monday Club luncheons. I sank into a literally seamy demimonde in which twinsets and pearls were hurled at my suede-shod feet in avalanches of Lawn Tennis lust.

"So you made plenty of money, but weren't you dying inside?" one might ask. Was I fuck. Imagine me up to my apricots most nights in a pavilion of Cheltenham Ladies' College PR gals, and I could justify it as some form of class warfare. Excellent.

And that's the way it would have stayed until 1983, when an ungrateful electorate opted for another Thatcherite handbagging instead of building a Britain fit for type-setters and treacle-miners to live in. Foot quit, and my career as international ladies' man would have followed him into the duffel bag of history.

But I had already abandoned this line in Tribunite temptation and returned to my studies. It happened after a cinq à sept in an episcopal palace, during which I'd been obliged to read from Foot's introduction to "The Martyrdom of Man" while pleasuring a matron clad only in a Benedictine wimple.

As I brushed my grey wig out over her glowing rump (£5 extra, £3 unwaged), she ventured "My husband was wondering whether you'd do Gerald Kaufman MP for him and a colleague." I made my excuses and left, never to put my privates through their paces for pounds sterling again.

It was time to move on, as thigh-priming passion was becoming raw routine not a delicate delight. I was barely able to recall the faces of the many ladies who'd gripped my spectacle frames in rages of ravishment, until an incident a few years ago brought them all rushing back like an open-mawed octopus of oestrogen.

I was waiting outside a radio studio for the red light to dim and a handsome female politician d'un certain âge to emerge. I had guided her through the workings of headphones, volume gages and the like, and expected to escort her back to Reception.

She appeared, and we juggled some vapid chat as the security guard took her temporary pass."Oh, and I think this might be yours too," she added, pressing what felt like a large coin into my palm. With that she was gone.

I turned the CND badge around in the light a few times, then slipped it into my fob pocket.

My Father Was a Wandering Aramean

Inkspot's mother-in-law is a Bessarabian Warshawski, not to be confused with the frightful Ludlow Warshawskis.

His mention of Bessarabia set me thinking about names that linger after the places that once claimed them have moved on. For those of you who weren't condemned by a rash choice of university course to study the meanderings of East European borders, Bessarabia was a province of Wallachia and the Empires both Ottoman and Russian that played a walk-on role in Greater Romania before vanishing back into the Soviet wings in 1940.

It lurched onto the international stage as an independent country in 1991 only to topple over the footlights into the orchestra pit, where most of it remains today. One county - Bolgrad - is still touring with Ukraine, and another has struck out on a solo career as the proudly rogue state of Transdniestria, of which more later.

Still never heard of it? That's not surprising, as the Bessarabians decided to ditch their good old name and opt to call themselves "Moldova" instead.

I can understand why "Bessarabia" no longer appealed:

• The history associated with the name was grisly;
• It reminded the locals of their erstwhile Jewish neighbours and their annoying dance craze; and
• Anywhere called "Arabia" is suspect these days, whatever fancy adjective you put in front of it.

But there are problems with "Moldova" too. Not only is it already the name of the adjacent province in Romania, but Bessarabia/Moldova was part of that very same province in 1918-1940. Doesn't strike me as a sign of self-confidence or imagination if you borrow the name of the next parish along. Nor has the fancy new name brought the Moldovans much luck.

What it has done, however, is give the Romanian province of Moldova the chance to reclaim the far superior monicker of "Moldavia". This is what the Soviets called Bessarabia/Moldova from 1940 to 1991, when the name came up for grabs again. Moldavia sounds like a real country, as it has the tell-tale "ia" ending that marks out exotic lands ruled by princelings with caddish uniforms.

It also sounds like Moravia, a real place that you might actually want to visit, and this gives the low Romanians a chance to lure yet more tourists to their twilit land of roadkill cuisine.

Transdniestria, a dangling bacon rind of Russian arms dumps, war criminals and lumpy women in knitted berets, lacks the audacity to call itself "The Soviet Union", as it dearly would love to, and missed the chance to claim "Bessarabia".

Instead it has chosen a name that emphasises where it is not, not what it is. "So who are you lot then?" sighs the weary UN admissions mandarin. "Can't say, but I'll tell you where we're not - we're not in the River Dniester. We're beyond it!"

"Jolly good," says Sir Tarquin, steering the Representative from Tiraspol towards the Sub-Carpathian Ruthenians, Cisalpinians and Sahrawis of the West, all playing with glitter and spittle at the special-needs table.

Jordan dropped the "Trans" as soon as it became a kingdom, and Transylania only won the endorsement of demented Nipponese squirrels when it rebranded itself “Sylvania”. Wise moves from countries going places, while Transdniestria can't even persuade anyone to spell it right:

You will find "Transnistria", "Trans-Dniester", "Dniester Republic", "Pridnestrovie" or - my favourite – “Unităţile Administrativ-Teritoriale din Stînga Nistrului”. The gang of onion-breathed spivs who run the place prefer Pridnestrovie, or Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic to be posh. These people are not doing themselves any favours.

Africa, the continent that gave us the Nigerian bank scam, shows these blunt-fingered Slavs how it should be done. Newly-independent colonies were eager to shake off the dreadful titles various moody explorers had given them. Rhodesia was named after an ill-favoured invert, the Gold Coast practically screamed "Come and despoil us, please!", and you somehow feel that the malarial Haut Commissaire who came up with "The French Territory of Afars and Issas" wasn't putting his heart into it.

So the plucky young kleptocrats gave notice of their relaxed, marimba-influenced attitude to the property of others by appropriating the names of more edifying countries located some distance away in either space or time. Most daring of all was Comrade Nkrumah of the Gold Coast.

The historical Ghana Empire was much further north than his new state, but so generous was Nkrumah's pan-African spirit that he even managed to become president of an entirely different country - Guinea - once he'd spent all of Ghana.

A prime example of a country that got it wrong was Persia. A cloddish Cossack colonel ousted the agreeably sybaritic Qajar dynasty in the 1920s and decided that racialism was the next big thing, so he renamed that perfumed land "Iran", as in "Aryan". Reza Shah seemed not to know or care that the neighbouring country was already called "Iraq", thereby sowing confusion among sub-editors at the BBC house magazine Ariel for some time to come.

Iraq itself, of course, once gloried in the title "Mesopotamia", but that didn’t really work in Arabic and Wise King Feisal wasn’t an Oxford man. Saddam Hussein, George Galloway, the godly but unlettered President Bush and thousands of bearded maniacs have ensured that the name "Iraq" is now almost exclusively associated with beastly behaviour, so I suggest that Mr Talabani and his chums in Baghdad should simply relaunch the country as "Persia".

Bingo! They persuade Notting Hill types to buy their carpets and annoy the haughty Tehranis with one stroke of the legislative scimitar.

In the same over-amplified soundbox of ancient grievances, those silver-tongued charmers in Israel just can't stop their neighbours wishing violent death upon them. I propose that they should drop not only the name Israel but all geographical denominators and simply appropriate the title "Nelson Mandela".

Let's face it, the old boy won't be needing it for much longer, and Friday Prayers won't go down so well with Tristram and Jocasta Trustafarian when they echo to the Federation of Conservative Students' chant of "Death to Nelson Mandela!" C'mon Mr Netanyahu, it's not as if you've got any bright ideas of your own, is it?

And it doesn't stop there. No one takes Poland seriously.Polnische Wirtschaft, "Dude, Where's Your Country?", worst alphabet in Europe, noblemen with no underpants, pickled cabbage, charging down Panzers on horseback, madder-than-average women - it's not a good image. So why not take the long-vacant name of "Prussia"?

After all, Poland at the time of writing (1051 gmt, 16 September 2009) is located on much of historic Prussia. And say what you like about that Millwall of the German Empire, no one found it in the slightest bit amusing when the Junkers came a-calling.

Last and as usual least comes our own beloved Wales. "Wales, is dat the big fish or dem singing bastards?" as a New York cabbie once asked Sir Geraint Evans en route to the Met. I tell you now that we are going nowhere fast if we continue to call ourselves "Nancy Latinate foreigners" in Old High German and risk being confused with Moby Dick - by which I mean the marine leviathan, not the Cornish porn star.

We could insist that everyone calls us “Cymru”, but that would put us back on the blunt-scissors table with Myanmar and places with names that just don't work in other languages. We could go all Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and resurrect "Cambria" and "Gwalia", but my preference is for a stunning bit of thievery.

Just as that gobshite Bono reclaimed Helter Skelter from Charles Manson, when it had belonged to The Beatles all along, I propose that we rename Wales "Britain". The United Kingdom doesn't use the title much since Lady Thatcher was gently steered off to the Whisky Transfusion Clinic, and the English seem to have dropped it in favour of the original Beserker "Ingerland".

For one thing, it'll be difficult for Unionist Tories and Kinnockites to refuse to be "Backing Britain", and since when did anyone "Brit" on a bet? Lovely.

My Heart is in the Marshlands

The quadrant-hatted Polack knows not where his borders lie

He bows down to the Virgin but the truth he can't descry

His dung-breathed Lettish neighbours lead him on a merry dance

While every passing Teuton deftly kicks him in the pants.

This disgraceful quatrain from the Edwardian hymn "God Is in His English Heaven" was penned as a rhyming tool in the sacred and profane education of Marcher youth, but still imparts some poignant truths about the history, culture and couture of the Poles.

It struck me that news coverage of the anniversary of the outbreak of war in 1939 has concentrated on the doings of Germany and Russia, rather than those of Poland - much as did the Second World War itself. This comes as no surprise to Poles, who are used but not reconciled to their roaming homeland being turned into a trampoline, vomitorium and crematorium by noxious neighbours.

I have given some account of my dealings with that splendid nation before, but the anniversary of the war brings to mind the events of 1989 in the swamp full of bison piss that the Poles call their border counties (Kresy) and the people who live there call Lithuania and bits of Belarus and/or Ukraine.

"Lithuania, my Fatherland!" ("Litwo! Ojczyzno moja!") is the stirring phrase that both launches the Polish national epic, Pan Tadeusz, and neatly sums up the problem Lithuanians have with it. They could always counter by writing an epos called Uncle Andrius that begins "Warszaw is my parking space", but I suspect that it would lose them the moral high ground.

Poland has generally prefered the geographical high ground, and sent General Żeligowski to remind the Lithuanians of this in 1920. Most military revanchistes would seize an outlying province or two, but Żeligowski showed the true élan of a Polish Uhlan by capturing the capital, Vilnius, and leaving the Liths with the consolation prize of the rest of the country.

Interwar Lithuania was unlucky enough to be governed by a pair of feuding college professors called Voldemaras and Smetona, whose verbal felicity proved no match for the sabre-gnashing cavalry of Poland's Marshal Piłsudski - a man who escaped German captivity in the Great War by feigning insanity with the greatest of ease.

The Marszałek decided to bury his own heart in Vilnius (his more cautious aides persuaded him to leave it until after his death), and he assumed that Lithuania would find this grande geste unanswerable.

Perhaps they did. History records, however, that the bluff plebian Stalin did not. After overrunning the Kresy in 1939 he gave Lithuania back its capital, only to seize the entire country a few months later in an extreme example of loan-sharking as applied to international diplomacy.

Lithuanian history was on hold for 50 years of Soviet misrule until I turned up in Vilnius in a borrowed Chaika limousine as interpreter for a Vassar-educated dominatrix with a mercantile interest in local ballerinas.

The lady in question earned her living as an impressario, and decided to scour the western bulge of the Soviet Empire in the hope of signing up the talented, underexposed and seriously hot ballet troupes for tours of the filthy West.

This was a good idea in principle, undermined by the local satraps' inability to understand the concept of an exclusive contract or what I was saying. My Russian wasn't bad on the whole, but a combination of cheap beverages and undiscerning company left me fading in and out of coherence, audibility and consciousness for most of the time.

Miss Vassar had tired of negotiations with the turtle-faced bureaucrats of Belarus, and told me to arrange travel forthwith to Soviet Lithuania, its well-regarded national ballet theatre and affordable leather goods.

I decided not to mention that Lithuania had declared independence a few weeks back, and that President Gorbachev had responded by imposing a blockade of the republic. This didn't worry the Lithuanians much, as their only imports from Russia were more Russians.

Their slogan at the time was "Beat the blockada with the lambada!", a marginally more practical approach than the Voldemaras/Smetona tactic of intimidating the Soviet Army with quotations from Virgil, but it wasn't likely to help us cross the border. I could imagine how louche and un-Socialist our reasons for entering Lithuania and, with luck, a few Lithuanians might sound to an austere KGB border guard with more bullets than witnesses.

I decided to go by the book and called the Minsk KGB. "Good morning, KGB," said the young lady in an encouraging display of glasnost. "Hello, No Good Boyo," I replied, before setting out our plans. The young lady said there would be no problem as long as our documents were in order. I hung up in the sure and certain knowledge that several months on a tuberculosis refresher course awaited any attempt to cross the border by normal means, and so had a word with a resourceful local friend.

He was that most elusive of creatures, a cunning Belarussian. He hired us a Chaika limo and liveried driver. "Sit in the back of this baby and it's a brave border guard who stands in your way," he grinned, fondling the fins of the regional Communist Party's favourite ride. And he was right. Our driver maintained the correct speed of measured authority as we trundled past emaciated conscripts in the dank forests of Aschemynne.

His pace faltered through the speckled hills of Vilnius, however, and we realised that he'd never been to the city and had no idea where the ballet theatre might be. "Drive into the centre, my good man, and leave the rest to me," I drawled.

In the hope of a few dollars more I'd bought a Lithuanian dictionary and memorised a few key phrases - "Good day!", "A beer? Why, thank you!", "And your sister is where, exactly?", "I wish to report this female American spy, Comrade Colonel", and "Excuse me, where is the ballet theatre?"

I cast a basilisk eye over the tracksuited trolls on the swollen sidewalks until the ideal couple glided into view. A pair of distinguished pensioners, his silver hair capped with a beret and hers with a pillbox hat, their stately gait spoke of hardback books, antique pianos and a non-predatory interest in the performing arts.

We pulled over, and I tried out The Phrase. "Aciprašau," I bowed, "kur yra baleto teatras?"

The gentleman blinked slowly, turned to his wife and asked "What did he say?"

In Polish.

These heirs of General Żeligowski had lived in Vilnius all their lives, from Tsar to Stalin and beyond, and to them the Lithuanians and their Sanskrit-for-Hayseeds language was no more than a passing irritant, like decimal coinage and Labour governments to my parents.

Being a Welsh I am used to people living in our midst without mastering more than a few curses in our native tongue, and so I switched to Polish and asked again where the ballet theatre might be. They gave me detailed instructions, which I repeated to the driver.

We drew up outside a sturdy Art Deco edifice near the city centre. Perhaps ballet was considered a lewd spectacle among the Papist Liths, but I was still surprised to see no sign of tutus, firebirds or six-foot homosexuals in eyeliner. We sent the driver in to light out the territory.

"It's the registry office," he reported five minutes later. "Births, marriages, deaths, tractor adoptions - that sort of thing. The ballet theatre was here in the 1930s, but it was moved to a new building decades ago."

Decades ago - the last time my Polish guides had gone to the ballet. A time when the dancers still pranced purely in Polish.

You have to admire this dedication to self-delusion, without which no beleaguered people can hope to survive. The Polish national anthem includes the line "Bonaparte has shown us the way to victory". Indeed, we all have much to learn from his fate.

Do You Believe in the Welshworld?

Another year, another notch of recognition on the bedstead of glory. The Welsh people as one have promoted me from Tenth Welshest Blog Ever to 47th Most Currently Cambrian Chatterato. Thank you all.

How the bell curve can that be progress, you ask? The number of Welsh web bloggers has increased exponentially in the past 13 months, as unemployment makes hunching over your computer in a Hong Kong Phooey dressing gown (minus bandana) a credible career option.

To be 47th in this teeming pool of opinions, lists of random things and ineptly-embedded video clips is both more intense and more significant an achievement than, as Madame Boyo put it, gaining plaudits from a baker's dozen of slackers who are probably related to me anyway.

On receiving my last award, I set out the following Two-Year Plan:

• My ambitions for the next two years of blogging? Well, first up, I don't want the celebrity to ruin me. No tabloid rumours about Duffy seen leaving my shed in the early hours, no freebasing Brains and cockles in John Malkovich's hotel.
• I'm happy with Mrs Boyo and her threats of unnecessary surgical procedures.
• Otherwise, I want to clamber up the Wikio Top Ten like a bandwith-drooling zombie until I reign supreme over the deleted comments of mine enemies.

So far so good. With 11 months still to go I've not had any quality time with the Nefyn Nightingale or Big Bad John, or even Charlotte Church for that matter.

Mrs Boyo and I have rubbed along well enough to grace Wales with a masculine child, thereby ensuring that the Line of Boyo will continue the work of Glyndŵr, Mabon and Shakin' Stevens.

And I have no enemies, merely friends I haven't yet annoyed.

So what does the future hold for the Boyo Media Foundation?

I'm not one for senseless dreams, but it's fair to say that my Olympian public profile makes a Senedd, or indeed Westminster, seat on the Cymru Rouge (Round Table - Fuck England) ticket pretty much inevitable.

A busy parliamentary career as the sole true opposition to Bernsteinian ameliorationists, bourgeois nationalists, Tory ponces and that Estonian sex-maniac in Montgomery will not distract me from blogging.

The new emerging media are confounding their critics by playing a pivotal role in the struggle for human dignity, from the live-bloggers of Rangoon to the Twitter protests of Tehran.

As these innovations reach maturity and come to supplement and stimulate the established media, it is more important than ever that there are still some of us out there letting the side down.

I pledge to the people of Wales that I shall not cease from recounting my abuse of Soviet hospitality, fatal cocktail recipes, inaccurate film reviews, scorn for the public-spirited and desire to mate with various fading, and in some cases deceased, 1960s celebrities.

In a very real sense, it is the least I can do.