Awr y Blaidd

Nefyn TV provided Wales with 24-hour sports, and sometimes the best of it - coracle races, slateboarding, the grudge-bearing sprint.

Despite its adherence to the state's offical policy of ruthless egalitarianism, Nefyn TV had spawned a star. Rhowter Hers presented the Sabbath afternoon Sport Ffantâstig programme, filled with top billing Hillman Imp rallies, cliff-face soccer and women's custard slicing.

The lads liked his lively bratiaith splicing of North and South dialects, the ladies keened for his slack shawl. The station managers booked their caravans in Mwnt months in advance on his account alone.

Everyone loved him, except the staff. "I's had enough of them," Hers told his boss Aelwyd Hongian one sweet and windy afternoon. "You can see them on the big screen behind me when I'm ap-dressing the nation. Are they hard at work filing reports on Caersws Giant-Killers? Are they ffyc! They's slobbing in Big Leaves t-shirts, eating half pies, skulling Brains, smoking Embassies and reading the papers. Tell them to shape up or I's off to Al-Jazeera, mun."

So the word went out to the newsroom: "Look tidy, boys. No messing about. He may be a Kinnock, but he's our Kinnock, like Eisenhower used to say."

The crew smartened up and lagered down. They pretended to type on their computers and answer phones while Hers flashed his anthracite crowns at the housewives of Carmarthen. The studio floor was a tent of understanding. Then along came Iago.

Iago Anffawd, fab Sieffre Siomedig, fab Gwil Goll. That's what his staff card said. No one remembers hiring him, he just turned up one afternoon in a wolf mask and mitts.

"Bit of a Bergman boy, are you?" laughed Lol Fach, the literary editor.

"Hrhaïng!" replied Iago, which no one understood but simply took as a Solva accent.

Iago spent a few hours dragging planks around the Management Suite, hammering nails into fire alarms and generally being handy. Then he decided to take a short cut through the newsroom.

The nation held chip to lip in bewilderment then mirth as Rhowter Hers read out the Bethesda League Friendly Fight results while a bloke in a wolf mask and "Bollocks to the Poll Tax" t-shirt stood in the newsroom right behind him, waving hairy mitts at the camera before settling down with a can and The Daily Post.

The newsroom high-fived, the people as one pressed "record" on their dvd players, and Rhowter's career blanched in the flash of two million mobile phone cameras.

He was very upset.

"I wants Scooby-ffycinn-Doo out, and out today!" he yelled at the editor.

"Right, Rowter, I'll give him his cards this evening," soothed the foam-flecked hack.

Iago was tannoyed to come to the editor's office at six, when his shift ended. Aelwyd Hongian stood by his window, watching the sun set over the moors. A shadow blocked the glass door, followed by a soft but heavy knock.

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Inspector Pumsaint of the Tangnefeddwyr Murder Squad looked around the office in horror. "Pardon my English, but what the cock happened here?"

The forensics officer pointed to the slick of blood that coated the wrecked room. "That's all that's left of the victim. Journalist he was."

"Still, it's not right," muttered Pumsaint. "OK, motive? Theft - anything missing?"

"It's been badly turned over, but there's nothing missing apart from the solid parts of the late Mr Hongian," said the forensics man, pushing his glasses back up his nose. "Oh, and this." He picked up a sodden card index.

"It's where the station kept all the staff details - national insurance, home addresses, that sort of thing. There's one card missing. It belongs to Rhowter Hers."

Cyfres Y Ceirw IV: Diotwyr Y Sul

Who knows who this young Celt is, but from inital cheeky "arright?" to his immaculate disposal of some Rioja he and his followers displays all the qualities that Glyndŵr and his chums invoked when they raised the banner at Sycharth.



Let all us Holy Drinkers raise a vase of Plovdiv Red and hope to follow in his unsteady footprints.

Gebe Gott uns allen, uns Trinkern, einen so leichten und so schönen Tod!

Black pointy hat-tip to Harry Hutton.

Bambule Babe

Valentine's Day is not marked in the House of Boyo, as we Welsh have our own Dydd Santes Dwynwen on which to shower our loved ones with oats and cockles.

Mrs Boyo resists this practice, and rejects International Women's Solidarity Junta Day on 8 March on the grounds that the Soviet mafia grew out of Chechens' cornering the flower market. I suspect that the commercial failure of her "Deny the Floral Compradors!" range of Socialist greetings cards may have played a role, but this suspicion I keep to myself.

Nonetheless, I decided to persuade Mrs Boyo otherwise by spending a spare morning before Arianrhod's monthly declawing session searching the Intern Net for images that combined dialectical rectitude and diaphonous pulchritude - a pursuit also popular with all manner of non-revolutionaries these days, I gather.

My trawl uncovered some rectitude and much diaphony, but little that combined the two in a satisfyingly Hegelian manner.

Now, we in the Cymru Rouge have little time for the narcissistic violence and poor dress sense of the Baader Meinhof Group, and as Maoists we consider their alliance with the nomadic nationalists of the PLO to be a juvenile distraction from the important work of planting slate and indoctrinating infants.

The smudged faces mooning out of those wanted posters may have driven a generation of over-excited students to abandon sit-ins and advanced smoking techniques in favour of blowing up civil servants and stealing white Mercedes, but they did nothing for The Rouge.

Then I found this:



Ulrike Meinhof the Terrorist may have looked like the sort of yoghurt-skinned drab you bumped against while trying to escape from Bauhaus concerts, but Ulrike Meinhof the 60s Journalist was a Hot-to Trot! A cuddly cushion of Klassenkampf with adorable dimples, plump vowels and a nice line in tailored jackets.

O Ulrike, where did it all go wrong?

The Archdruid of Canterbury

Dear readers,

I would like to take this opportunity, as a Welsh, to apologize to the people of England for the presence of Dr Rowan Williams in your public life.

Now you know why we disestablished him and his kind back in 1914.

And no, we won't take him back.

Cymru Rouge Accepts Rugby Laurels

A Press Release from Cymru Rouge Retrospective Achievements Department:

Attention Welshes!

The Politburo (Angka-p) of the Standing Plenum of the Central Committee of the Cymru Rouge clenches its calloused, six-fingered hands into one screaming fist of indefatigability in acknowledging the total and utter victory of the forces of Welshness, Socialism and Narrow Nationalism on the occupied soil of Boyograd (formerly known as Twickenham), where once the English settlers planted their pagan altars and parked their BMWs.

Rugby, invented by Welsh prepubescent chartist Gwilym Gwe Elis (slave name - William Webb Ellis) at HM Children's Prison, Rugby, has been a potent weapon in the armoury of Welsh resistance to English rule and all intellectual pursuits since 1823.

The Thatcher Regime suppressed the Welsh slate (also coal and steel) industry in the hope that an end to compulsory body-building would turn the Welsh into a nation of football-watching frequenters of hairdressing salons like their lager-sipping oppressors.

The regrettable consequences can been seen in the non-dialectical regression of Welsh rugby post-1979, paralleled by the Kinnockite spurning of narrow nationalism in favour of appearing in musical videos with US agent Tracey Ullman.

It comes as no surprise to students of Lenin, Stalin and Stevens that the surge in bourgeois campanilismo that brought Plaid Cymru into dual power with Labour last year will soon yield, Kerensky-like, to the Dictatorship of the Workers, Peasants and Progressive Studentry (as Subcontracted to the Cymru Rouge Politburo).

The Welsh rugby squad, led by the indomitable [insert the name of the relevant no-neck here would you Griff? Ta, NGB], has felt the hand of history on its tackle, and heralded the advent of the Cymru Rouge by storming the Winter Palace of Englishness, causing a tsunami of spilt gin & tonic to engulf Virginia Water and other female dignitaries of the Brown Junta.

For this, we, the Rouge, accept the thanks of a grateful nation, the admiration of radicals worldwide, and the submission of the English ruling class.

The dialectic, nonetheless, demands its price. Just as a knave would whisper uncouth couplets in the laurelled ear of conquering Caesar, so the Politburo must warn the resurgent workers not to succumb to Dizziness With Success. The English enemy knows that rugby can sap, as well as seed, a nation's sorrel.

Our attention has been drawn by a Maltese plutocrat to the treasonable activities of this rugby personage, whose pebbledashing of our draconian tongue with English fool's gold can be heard on this slouched interview with a member of the Cymric Women's Battalion of Death:



This linguistic loucheness may be acceptable to the Tagalog-tattling trickshaw totos of Manila, but to us and therefore you it is a betrayal of all that is Welsh. Our vowel-free native idiom has adequate words for all the English expressions used therein, except for the alien concept of "shame".

Henceforth, in the brief interval before the abolition of television and all other non-slate-based media, the intrusion of English words into Welsh broadcasts will be drowned out by automatic gunfire and the chanted slogans of indoctrinated child-soldiers.

Otherwise, well done!

Brawd Rhif Un - Paul Pot
Brawd Rhif Dau - Ta Moc
Brawd Rhif Tri - Huw Samphan