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.)