Drouthy neibors

The weekend wormwood fumes cleared the shed in time for me to thread the string back through the tin can that links me to my people. At once I was comforted by the chanted nationalist slogans shrilling down the twine from Cymru Rouge cadres the length, breadth and, in one case, depth of Wales.

The fulcrum of today's fury revolved around the axis of one Dr David Starkey, an owlish controversialist who blinks at us from our television screens whenever the Tudor Welsh robber barons are in vogue.

This turbulent chronicler of hose and cannion was recently invited on Question Time, an unpopular television forum that pits three politicians against a jester in a contest to flaunt their dislike of America before an audience of BBC employees' relatives.

He said St George's Day ought not to be a public holiday on the grounds that this would reduce England to the level of a "feeble little country" like its truculent neighbours Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

He gave as examples of alleged Celtic enfeeblement the fondness for sham national costumes in general, and specifically the Scottish enthusiasm for the dialect verse of Hanoverian loyalist Robert Burns and the Highland or "bag" pipes - a bloated form of musette.

It is hard not to like a man who relishes the refined pleasures of life, and none is more exquisite than confusing a Question Time audience:

• They wanted to applaud him for opposing a St George's Day public holiday, as this chimes with their dislike of patriotism and working people having a good time.


• On the other hand he criticized Ireland, which jigs alongside diverse South Africa, vibrant Brazil, embattled Syria, plucky little Cuba and oppressed Palestine on the List of Approved Countries.


• But then Scotland is only a candidate member of the Approved List, thanks to its grim novelists and television presenters, while Wales is a stalwart of the Permitted Pillory along with arrogant America, aggressive Israel, and, er, excessively English England.
  

The result was the sullen lowing of censorious studio cattle caught between the grid and the prod.

Dr Starkey then won the hearts of telephone receptionists and audience researchers throughout the cost-cutting BBC by keeping the lines busy with complaints from Scottish MPs, the Grand Wizards of various clans and, for all I know, Mel Gibson.

But where are the whines from Wales? What of the ire of Erin?

Well, the nouveaux-pauvres Irish are too busy rediscovering their heritage of ditch-digging and emigration to bother with jibes from some gerbil-cheeked invert, not forgetting that the lights now go out across the country at nine o'clock sharp.

And the fearsome Welsh Lobby has been holding itself in reserve now that AA "Routefinder" Gill is back from his holidays, and St David's Day isn't a public holiday anyway.

So where does the Cymru Rouge stand? Our award-winning racialism (Article II of the Cymru Rouge Covenant reads "We is bigots. And?") forbids us to agree with an English, and yet we find much mercurial merit in Starkey's arguments. We oppose all public holidays on the grounds that those leeks do not harvest themselves, and we shake a defiant, six-fingered fist in the decayed face of Medieval clerical fascists.

The dialectic therefore requires us to reconcile the self-proclaimed opinions of this grandiloquent moleman with the demands of the urgent, insurrectionary Welsh peasantry. This may take some time. Meanwhile, here's a personal observation.

The vagaries of employment and some tedious disagreements with Chechen cutthroats meant I've spent much of the past three decades living abroad in small but discreet British expatriate communities.

While enjoying the vibrant, embattled diversity of various republics, I noticed a tweedy thread that ran through all gatherings of the British abroad - no matter where you are, no matter what the occasion, there will be a man in a kilt and frilly shirt swinging his tasselled codpiece around.

I knew one such Scotchman who skulked around Samarkand asking ladies their gusset preferences on behalf of an underground undergarment manufacturer (the broader the better, in case you were wondering).

Despite the dangers of the job he was calm and engaging company until he received an embossed invitation to mark some public event - the reintroduction of random public execution, for example. Then he would dress up like George Lazenby minus the ladies and insist on drinking whisky with neither ice nor water.

While in this over-excited state he once asked me why the Welsh don't wear kilts, dirks and bogardes like our Caledonian cousins. "Because it's 1997 and trousers are no longer the preserve of our masters," I replied, although I could have suggested he ask the suited, booted Frenchmen, Germans and Spaniards around us why they weren't sporting periwigs, Pickelhauben and tricornes.

He then asked why we had a mere National Assembly, while Scotland glories in a parliament. I said the French were happy with their National Assembly as were we with ours, and asked whether this was the parliament that Burns said was "bought and sold for English gold" in 1707. We continued like this for a while until a drunken Italian sidled over and asked Young Lochinvar whether he'd like to dance. Then an ambulance intervened.

The kilt, like the "soul" beard, can bring people together in a way perhaps unexpected by its owner. A dull reception at the British Embassy in Kiev perked up when a pair of pallid calves cleaved a Tartan path through the cocktail dresses and lounge suits. At once business and boulevardier, diplomat and dipsomaniac, Ukrainian and UKanian were united in amusement.

A ruddy three-piece by my side gestured in the vague direction of the presumed Highlander and declared "Izzat th'cabaret?"

We struck up an immediate friendship, and deepened it in the must of many a bottle down a newly-appointed gentlemen's club on Lesya Ukrayinka Street - a club owned, with a pleasing Schnitzlerian circularity, by the Scotchman who had brought us together. He turned up later in modern attire and bought us all drinks.

National costume, like folk music and incest, is one of the cruellest tricks played by the ruling classes on us turbid proletarians:

• Romanticism gave Lady Llanover a broad maquette to work from, yet she insisted on dressing Welsh womanhood in "honest Abe" top hats and triangular skirts. Welshmen were allowed to choose their own costume of stone-washed jeans, check short-sleeved shirts, mullets and love-bites.
  
• The unappealing nature of the Scottish climate, economy and national character left the country open to exploitation by The Quakers - sinister sword-dodging chocolatiers who amused themselves by adorning their pet weavers in cut-down plaid.

• I'm not sure who imposed the tracksuit and bavaclava on the irreconcilable Fenians, but he too stands condemned in the Court of Boyo.

The moral seems to be: keep a Scotchman in trousers and keep the world out of trouble. The Welsh and the Irish can look after themselves, and perhaps the rest of you too.