No Good Boyo

A Drunk Welshman Looks at the Thistle

2012-01-18T11:38:00.002Z

One of the many services The Daily Mail provides is a sort of rave environment for excitable Tory historians. One minute we have Dominic Sandbrook deriving a little too much pleasure from the prospect of another European war, the next it's "Max" Hastings and visions of China clattering its rice bowls through the Outback.

The latest and best comes from shiny-faced Kiplingite Andrew Roberts, who lives up to his flummery-stirring Welsh name with an nightmarish vision of horror that is an independent Scotland.

Dr Roberts certainly puts the Pollyanna Picts in their place with a trim timeline that takes Scotland from the uxorious bosom of England to a freezing Chinese fiefdom in five paragraphs, shedding Shetlands and Highlands as it sinks into satrapy.

Unlike his beef-cheeked stablemates, Roberts allows himself the odd jocularity: He coyly wonders why the Scots should scramble for freedom in 2014 before blithely slipping in a mention of "Britain's Prime Minister George Osborne".

Nonetheless, the good doctor is clear that the only people in the world who might want an independent Scotland are the Scots and the rest of Britain, so that can never be allowed.

This idea of "divide and rule" has been cropping up everywhere since the Romans tried it on with the Greeks, and we in Wales know it well. The English have at various time essayed:

The artificial division of Wales into North and South, whereas true tension teems between land-dwellers and amphibians;
Irridenta in Monmouthshire and the Welsh Marches, while the English Marches have little enough room for footpads and rustlers in Shrewsbury jail as it is;
The settlement of Flemings in Pembrokeshire and Normans in Radnor, Trustafarians in Trawsfynydd and Scousers in Rhyl, only for us to assimilate the first pair and couple the second to our rude ploughs; and
The cunning portage of BBC Drama to Cardiff. This, in a manner similar to the move of BBC wireless to the rickets-racked slums of Salford, was meant to sweep the Cambrian capital clean of tar-footed locals on a four-wheeled wave of WC1 mediocrats.

But our own glorious S4C television channel pre-empted this move through two decades of nurturing staff capable of braying about raclette grills in three degrees of Welsh, thank you very much.

So Wales endures, though Westminster still covets our petrified forests and access to the gods.

The poor Scotchmen face a tougher task, for the English have noted that, like Lincolnshire, Scotland is divided into three geometric parts:

The Lowlands, or "Lollards" in the ancient Scotch tongue, are a truculent plateau of reeking cities and broken vessels, inhabited by the descendants of the more enterprising Geordie tribes;
The Highlands and Islands, or "Mickle Rourkes", make up a twilit thanage populated by giant flying insects, suicidal English "downsizers" and the scions of Irish clans keener than most to share their religious disputes with deserving neighbours; and
The Northern Isles, or "Breeks", were a guano-caked graveyard for Viking longboats until John Knox expelled the entire female population of Scotland there for the sin of knitting ("whereby they have weaven tootwixt the phibres of sheepe and fyshe in Babylonnian gaudie"). These mated endlessly with Knut Baumann, the remaining Norse watchman, to produce a kelpie brood of peat-dowsers.

A crypto-Celtic creature like Roberts has read a book or two as well as writing them, and knows the English can play the Teuchter tectonic plates to their fey advantage. "You, I say, you there!" they will wave in the general direction of the Highlands, "These Lollards will swap your skirts, offal and homebrew for 'track' suits, fried 'tatties' and opiates. They've done it to us - don't let them do it to you."

This may not succeed, as Highlanders, like the Welsh, are suspicious of human contact. England may be on firmer ground, albeit not literally, with the Orkney and Shetland islanders - or "Arcadians and Shedsevens" as they put it in their putty-lipped pretence at Danish.

The Northern Isles have historic links with Norway, in that the Norsemen got rid of them as a dowry for one of the pallid child brides their royalty would send Scotwards in leaky boats. And the Roberts Gambit is based entirely on the Orkneys and Shetlands' escaping from the clutches of Fu Man Salmond into Oslo's rollmop embrace.

This all depends on whether the Norwegians want the Isles. After all, they already have enough oil to provide a tugboat for every troll, and more crinkly coastline, gamey sweaters and bad-tempered fish than modesty requires.

Nor do the Northern Isles have much else to recommend them to prospective conquerors. The modern Shetlands and equally unappealing Orkneys are little more than a dreary pointer for bum-crazed Russian trawlermen that Aberdeen and its ample supply of raw spirits, non-seagull-based cuisine and bipedal womenfolk are not far away.

The nearby Faroe Islanders have virtually no booze or telly, speak a cleft-palate form of Norse, and club whales to death with their own weirdly misshapen members for entertainment of a rare summer evening. Yet they have a government and distinct culture.

What do the Northern Isles have? Single nostrils, the odd auk, swan-guzzling tunesmith Sir Peter Maxwell Davis and the occasional burning boat. Their habit of voting Liberal-Democrat hasn't looked so cute since the coalition government took over in Westminster, either.

Before applying for admission as Norway's second overseas empire, the Isles might ponder why Norway can't be bothered to wrest the fun-loving Faroes from Danish hands in the first place.

In short, there is little evidence that Oslo would want to take on Scotland's dangliest archipelago.

My guess is that an independent Scotland would hold together fine. Bear in mind that, however inept its government might be, all Europe, much of Britain and some of the larger beasts will lend Scotland every assistance for the sheer devilry of annoying the Tory Party. Who knows, Scotland may one day rival the Isle of Man as the Celts' least chaotic polity.

As for the Orkney and Shetland, despite the disadvantages that geography, eugenics and the fickle Christian god have rained upon their salty skulls, they will always find a way of using that direct line to Ragnarǫk.

A friend once told me of a government decision to start charging schools in the Northern Isles postage for sending their examination papers to Edinburgh for marking. There were complaints, so the Scottish Office agreed that they could send the papers to the nearest city for free and then the government would pay postage from there.

So the local schools posted all their exam papers off to the nearest city. Bergen.

Away with the Numbers

2012-01-04T12:49:00.007Z

The eclipse suffered by the ideas of Carl Jung can be attributed to the toxic endorsement they received in the album "Synchronicity" by rock albatross Sting and his chums The Police.

Like all youths of the time, I knew someone who had heard the album and decided that it spoke to them in a new and urgent way. In the case of Andy Summer's Psycho tribute "Mother", this was true. Otherwise it was simply Singa-Longa-Steppenwolf.

This pained me, as I'd been introduced to Jung by an avid female practitioner from Argentina. Her husband was a German dwarf called Klaus, with whom I sang bass-baritone in an amateur Swansea choir.

Klaus had a crisply deprecating manner about others and a robust attitude to questions of social and political order that enlivened our post-practice collegial chats, rather as if a wolverine had been released at a Quaker meeting.

"I will send our son Reinhardt to military school!" he barked thoughtfully after a bumpy run through "Beata Viscera".

"We don't really have them here, except for the Sandhurst prep school," I ventured after a common-room silence.

"The results on the British society of this omission are evident!" Klaus added.

"Letting military men teach toddlers hasn't done Argentina much good, though, has it? I mean, the Dirty War and all that," countered our choirmaster.

"The Dirty War? I salute the Dirty War!" Klaus sprang to his feet and bumped his head on the coffee table, bringing the evening to an end.

Klaus was a man of disarming candour and principle. Despite his itchy politics, he had a droll and trusting manner.

Mrs Klaus was a slut. Once her husband had left for a long day countering Communism at the local cattle-feed plant, dropping Young Reinhardt at a glumly pacific playgroup en route, she would shake out her edible underwear and await gentleman callers on the couch.

Like Klaus she was of unavoidable German extraction, but her mitteleuropäisch malady was not militarism but The Mind. I had a liaison with her that verged on the Platonic, in that we exchanged snatches of philosophical intercourse between raw bouts of hog-eyed rutting.

"So, do you find Jung's calibration of the Erotic over-schematic or compelling in its teleological drive?" she exhaled one dusty morning.

"Dunno," I replied. "I'm a student in early 1980s Britain, so in terms of politics I'm either going to be a Bolshevik booster or a date-rapist in a 'Hang Nelson Mandela!' t-shirt. Either way I'm not going to have much of an opinion about some Chinaman. Now, can we get any more mileage out of this corset?"

Mrs Thatcher's retrieval of the Falkland Islands soon toppled the Argentine junta and ushered in a government committed to electrifying the popular imagination rather than trade unionists' sphincters, so it was only a matter of time before the Man from Interpol came calling for the Klauses.

Mrs Klaus (we were never close) left me a PO box number in Asunción and a copy of "Das Gesetz der Serie" by Paul Kammerer. This slender volume formed her second and more successful attempt to turn me on to Jung.

The hapless Hapsburgian Herr Dr Kammerer is known for an experiment on salamanders that suggested the theory of natural selection was missing a link of two. Although lionised by the Lamarckian opponents of Darwinism, he took his own life when it looked like the salamanders had been interfered with - albeit not in the 1950s News of The World sense.

There is still debate as to whether he forged his results, some Nazis tampered with them to embarrass the Communist Kammerer, or he simply drew the wrong conclusions. My own view as an arts graduate and lover of the Gothic is that no good ever comes from meddling with toads, as panfuls of Lancastrian witches' ashes might testify.

Kammerer's work on coincidence in "The Law of the Series" is more interesting, dealing as it does with chin-stroking strangeness and charming anecdote rather than rubbing newts against your trousers, if that is indeed what he did.

Non-Teutons can read all about Kammerer in "The Case of the Midwife Toad" by fellow Danubian oddball Arthur Koestler, as "Das Gesetz" has never been translated. But its gist is that coincidences tend to bunch together, and may be manifestations of some as-yet-undefined series of phenomena.

Koestler provides a neat selection of Herr Doktor's notes and some of his own - he said he was subjected to a "meteor shower" of coincidences while writing the book - and Jung drew on it for his own book "Synchronicity".

I thought little more about it until we went on holiday to Sardinia last autumn. Over dinner at a local Gastronomia I recounted MR James's "Number 13" to our daughter Arianrhod. This ghost story concerns a spectral room in a Danish inn and its alarming inhabitants, who disturb the repose of a pernickety English antiquarian.

Arianrhod was taken with the tale, sharing as she does the taste for the macabre that spices all good children's literature. On the way home, as lightning darted through the pines, she retold the story in her usual way, replacing the protagonists with her little chums and adding elaborate costume directions.

But there were some more novel alterations. She moved the scene to China, and the leprous room became Number Four. The telling took us all the way home to count the rooms carefully before retiring to bed.

The following afternoon I found a quiet half hour to relax on the roof terrace with a six-pack and a paperback, in this case Philip Kerr's "The Shot" - a pungent chunk of shamus Stilton about JFK, Castro and Da Mob. While leafing along I wondered why Arianrhod had chosen China and that particular number. She has a Chinese friend, it's true, but why Number Four?

Then I turned the page and read how the assassin had marked a copy of Time magazine bearing JFK's portrait with the character 四. This, it emerged, is the number four in Mandarin and Cantonese, and highly inauspicious too. Hotels and blocks of flats in China avoid allocating rooms that feature it, just like the number 13 over here.

The reason for its unfortunate associations is that it sounds rather like (死), the character meaning "death". And so, to summarise:

I told my five-year-old daughter a story about a cursed room, number 13.
Without any knowledge of oriental numerology on either of our parts, she then retold the tale in a Chinese setting, replacing the number 13 with the Chinese number four.
The next day I picked up a thriller and almost immediately read that four in China is as unlucky as 13 in the West.

Arianrhod says she and her Chinese playmate never discuss such esoterica, being content with the mundanity of unicorns, fairies and minor royalty.

I read a little more about Chinese numbers when we returned home, and was startled to find that the number seven is often associated with ghosts. The Ghost Festival (鬼月) is held in the seventh month of the traditional calendar, for example.

One of the further oddities of Arianrhod's story had been that the room next to number four was neither five nor three, but specifically number seven.

I was going to make this my Christmas ghost story, but the tale of Prince Llywelyn and his premature ressurrection came first. I made a start before the New Year, and took it up again on returning home from work last night.

In the meantime a late greeting card had arrived with a Swansea post mark. Klaus is back.

Uneasy rolls the head

2011-12-22T15:55:00.007Z

This week saw the anniversary of the Penmachno Document, by which the True Prince of Wales and Owl of Aberffraw, Madog ap Llywelyn, granted a sod to my crested ancestor Ystlum ap Llewpart Goll, four rods below the forest of Calahir just off Ynys Seiriol.

Because of accretions of mulch and poetry since 1294, it is impossible to dowse our plot's exact location, although each year the local, decayed branch of the House of Boyo proceeds there bearing a kinked Radix Jesse to beat the imagined boundaries around what is now the Trwyn Du lighthouse.

In truth, December is a typically cruel month for Welsh monarchs. Madog had to treat with my leprous forbear on the shortest day, and his stormy predecessor Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was cleaved in two at Cilmeri a week and twelve years earlier.

Llywelyn's grandfather was Llewelyn The Great, a hard act to follow, and the boy had to settle for the dismal title of Llywelyn the Last. Some English types, or possibly their Welsh proto-New Labour hirelings, cut off his head and paraded it around London until its constant arguing and harmonising began to turn the milk sour.

Although there is no evidence to prove this, the royal head was eventually sent to Ludlow's experimental Close-Contact Constabulary College and used to teach Marcher watchmen how to identify a Welshman by palpating his crown.

After catastrophic casualties and a few scandalous elopements, the sheriff reverted to the more reliable method of having watchmen ask the suspect "how are you?". If the answer continues beyond the 20-second mark, pike him.

On the 700th anniversary of Llewelyn's royal rending I was plashing through the wintry rain to an early-evening seminar on the Medieval Body Politic at University College, Swansea. I was in a sombre and thirsty mood, as both the weather and the hour cried out "pub!", where the college branch of the ultra-nationalist League of the Cousins of Rebecca's Daughters was holding its annual wake for Our Last Rudder.

I went to the seminar anyway because of my admiration for the mind, manner and moustache of Professor Sydney Anglo, its chairman. Dr Anglo spoke Cockney Baroque and looked like Napoleon III with Savoy in his pocket. That surname didn't help my excuses to the Cousins, and sharpened suspicions about my Cambritude already half-aroused by my bald cheekbones and filtered cigarettes.

Young scholars paddled into the room, shaking out fringes and flares (we had a lad down from Lampeter). Dr Anglo scattered slabs of Carolingian minuscule about the table and set off on his anabasis about the tripes and tendons of the early European state.

I was gazing out of the window as scrawls of lightning sketched out mountains in the night sky. Suddenly Dr Anglo addressed me: "And what of the head, Mr Boyo? The head?"

"The Prince is the head of the body of state, the 'corps estat'," I managed "As Christ is head of the 'corpus mysticum'. A subject, as a mere digit of the body, must rise at the Prince's command to defend the regnum, just as Christ, via His Vicar, commands the soul."

"So what duties does the Prince, as head, have to the rest of his body?" asked a nearby blue stocking.

Dr Anglo, with a clear nod to Ernst Kantarowicz, noted "Mr Boyo is racing ahead of the lances with his 'corpus mysticum', which Carolingians would have taken to mean The Divine Host, but he has accurately weighted the seesaw of state, Miss Bensberg. As Christ died for the sins of Christendom, so should the Prince be ready to sacrifice himself in battle for the common weal."

"A simple parallel - Christ and the Church, the Prince and the State?" probed Miss Bensberg.

"Not so," I countered. "What if John of Salisbury had been sensitive to pagan passions still pounding through the P-Celtic pustules below the Saxon surface? Perhaps the Prince is a worthy sacrifice, but must that be in battle?"

The rain beat a steady, ever more insistent tattoo on the frail window frames. Dr Anglo gestured to me to continue.

"On this night the Romans marked one of their Agonalia, to Sol Indiges. With Wales crumbling through his twelve fingers, might Llywelyn not have fallen victim, or perhaps submitted, to the call of the Old Religion?

"As the Sun faded in the wintry sky, did a band of Anglesey islanders seek to summon Summer with a more terrible sacrifice?

Was Llywelyn's last vision not that of an uncomprehending Norman sword, as often thought, but rather a sleek Silurian sliver of slate, a dagger dedicated to the gods of the orchards and the fields?" I concluded.

The thunder passed, leaving a static silence. "A most particular interpretation, Mr Boyo," Dr Anglo noted. "Any sources you might want to cite? Of a non-cinematic nature, please?"

The exchange of smiles around the room stopped when our Lampeter visitor opened his notebook and read "'Fight for your patria and suffer even death for her if such should overwhelm you. Death itself is Victory."

To Dr Anglo's raised eyebrow he added "Saint Dubrick of Caerleon, writing some time after Llywelyn's defeat, or should we say with the saint - 'Victory'?"

Dr Anglo cracked his knuckles and snorted towards the skerried skies. "To summarise, my Gwalian gentlemen, you are suggesting that Llywelyn II did not die in an English ambush, but was happily dispatched by his fellow Welshmen so that through his blood sacrifice Wales might live?"

"Still here, aren't we, despite everything?" I muttered.

"Hmm, a thesis indeed, and with your living evidence before our eyes." grinned the professor. "An historian must not of course let himself be led astray by such, ah, 'heady' speculation!"

On that note we set off for our various digs and burrows. I shared an Embassy under the eaves with Bell-Bottom Boy. "What do you think happened to Llywelyn's body, then?" I asked.

"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that... a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated," he recited.

"Galen?" I ventured.

"Cotton Mather's 'Magnalia Christi Americana', after Borellus," he whispered, before hunching off into the rain.

The following morning I turned on Radio 4's "Today" programme to hear court Welshman John Humphrys relate that, during the previous evening's storm, a fireball had torn down the valley from Cilmeri and skittered out to sea like a wheel of Greek Fire.

"Perhaps a little less saltpetre next time," I noted in my diary, and went back to sleep.

The Three Keiths

2011-12-09T15:31:00.004Z

One of the many serendipitous delights of parenthood is discovering children's television. Not rediscovering - I mean discovering for the first time. There may be North Country funnymen who make a career out of recalling how kids TV "were better in them days", but in my case they are wrong.

In Welsh Wales, children's television consisted of "Miri Mawr" ("Big Fun"), a programme hosted by a yeti farmer, Japanese war criminal and the thing you see at the end of "The Fly II", all cooped up in Osama bin Laden's utility cave. You don't believe me? Then watch:

Apart from a programme about poaching hosted by a cardboard cormorant, that was it.

Nonetheless, there's a lack of role models for children in current cathode fare as well, unless they aspire to be Rastafarians, "mangas" or relentlessly perky Mexican moppets. That's why I've come up with my own proposal for pre-primary entertainment:

"The Three Keiths" are a trio of superheroes, each equipped with special powers to deal out kinetic justice rather than the usual self-righteousness to adults, wrongdoers and those boys in Year 6. And they are all real.

Keith 1 - Keith Richards, alias "Keef". Fashioned entirely from inside-out crocodiles and "Accessorize" tat, Keef is the leader of the pack. His special powers are immortality, demon-summoning riffs and the keys to "The Magic Pharmacy", where he distills potions to ward off squares and help the other Keiths relax - "just take the edge off things with this, man".

He speaks proper English too, not the semi-Canadian nonsense children hear elsewhere.

Keith 2 - Keith Floyd, alias "Floyd". Made out of three old uncles bound together with bow-ties and raffia, Floyd provides the trio with all they need to keep going in the fight against tedium - top tuck, refreshing elixirs from his "secret cellar" ("The steps are a bit steep for you children, and even for Old Floydie of an evening!") and an array of grown-up ladies whom girl viewers can totally identify with.

Floyd's special powers are immunity to weights & measures and indifference to human laws.

Keith 3 - The Right Hon Sir Keith Joseph Bt, CH, PC alias "Sir Keith Joseph". The ganglion that connects the twin synapses of the team, Sir Keith Joseph is often called upon to get Floyd and Keef out of a terrible fix - in all senses of the word. His swivelling gaze can hypnotise reptiles, and he conjures up bad ideas decades ahead of their time to tie up gangs of villains long enough for our heroes to get away in the Bentley.

Sir Keith Joseph also carries a mysterious object loaned to him by the fearsome "Magg Witch". Called simply "The Handbag", it has voodoo economic qualities that keep afloat Floyd's various front organisations for the Three through fire, submersion in lakes and the wretched inflexibility of magistrates.

I chose these three Keiths from a highly competitive field - Chegwin came close - because they alone address the main banes of pre-teen life: bad music, dull food, and inadequate transparency in the management of public finances.

Having got that far during an episode of "Fifi and the Flower Tots" - a sort of nursery take on "The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers" - I decided to celebrate with an amphora of Makarios's Revenge, and so have managed to outline only the following pilot:

At their secret Berkshire base - a picturesque inn-cum-recording-studio-cum-monetarist-think-tank - the Keiths prepare themselves for battle through a training regimen of bushido rigour, designed by Keef and featuring feedback, flashbacks and blackjack.

The lady of the manor, Penelope Keith ("The Fourth Keith"), alerts them to various dangers gleaned from sherry-laced parsonage gossip. Keef immediately cranks up the Bentley, which Floyd has left parked either side of an oak tree, then has a bit of a lie down in the barn while Floyd packs a hamper. Sir Keith Joseph bores a hole through the estate gates with his unblinking emerald eyes, and they're off!

This week, jobsworth music teachers Bono & Sting (frequent villains) persuade the village fête to play their listless ditties over the public address system while a mantis-like Mrs Sting from the cooperative Café Ortega doles out quinoa-burgers with "Amazonian chewy grub salad", thereby compounding the misery of parents who've driven children with computer-withdrawal symptoms 20 miles to meet a pregnant goat.

The Three Keiths lope to it. Keef drops some "magic pirate potion, man" in the eco-punch before plugging the PA into his amp and launching a 12-bar open-G rasp through "Rocks Off" that paints the village green a bluesy shade of black.

Meanwhile, Floyd has set out a trestle of truffled turkey and trifles to tempt teen and termagant alike, as the punch works its wonders on the mums and dads. Everyone's having a good time by now, but - oh no! - Bono and the Stings are complaining to Ms Polly Tecnick the Headmistress and Mr Spendthrift the Mayor. This is a job for Sir Keith Joseph!

Quick as a slide-rule, Sir Keith delves into "The Handbag" and whips out a brace of Magg Witch talismans - one in Mrs Sting's name for employing non-unionised Paraguayan waitresses in her cafe, and another in recognition of Mr Spendthrift's discreet acceleration of a council house sale shortly before the local ban.

"And how is your holiday companion Fräulein Proll settling in there?" Sir Keith asked of Ms Tecnick, before handing over a Krugerrand pendant for her elegant redrawing of the school catchment boundary just short of the Reg Varney Estate and that Irish tinkers' site. He then let the Invisible Hand of Recrimination go to work on the gruesome quintet.

The Three Keiths slip away from what is now a seriously happening free festival, their work done for another week as rainbows, brandy butter and sink estates light up the Chilterns - but not before offering the Paraguayan ladies a gallant lift home or somewhere.

I believe "The Three Keiths" will inspire, educate and alarm in the correct proportion, thereby forewarning tots of all the gluten-free golems out there who want to keep them in locked-rhythm serfdom.

My Universities: Restauranteur

2011-11-30T11:43:00.008Z

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react when they pass a deconsecrated church.

The demise of Soviet Communism means that 150 million previously cheerful Slavs now wave their hands around their torsos as if swatting away a lustful giant bumblebee whenever they survey some of Stalin's finest handiwork.

British town planners used to think "bank!", but now that we all know what happens in such establishments they prefer to mumble "er, supermarket or mosque - is there a way to combine the two?"

The average Welshman thinks "the wages of Episcopalianism is being turned into an XXX porn cinema, though but".

Maximum Bob Friog and I were making steady if bow-legged progress past the Methodist Church on York Road, Reading, after another lesson on why The Moderation was the least appropriate name for the given pub. I noticed the church had recently been closed down, and admired the way its Gothic twin steeples parted the red clouds.

Bob looked it up and down, took one of the cigs out of his mouth, threw his head back and bellowed "MEAT!!!"

We proceeded to The Hobgoblin, where Bob elaborated on his new kind of cuisine.

Prospective diners arrive at MEAT! - a deconsecrated church in the Caversham borders - guided by the Frankenstein sparks that leap from one tower to the other thanks to the Van Der Graaff generator that long replaced the bell.

The bone-studded doors of solid Boerewors swing open to unleash a mounting barrage of timpani rolls that turn out to be a fusillade of evangelists catapulting into the giant tureens of nutty slack that dangle across the dining hall.

You are welcomed by Bob's then girlfriend, a comely Persian with a degree from Shiraz University in Advanced Mindfucking (egregia cum laude). If your clothes please her, she passes you on to a friendly Hells Angel who rides you to your assigned place at the sole, endless table. No, not a Harley. He rides you.

Any remark about anything at all, and she sorts you. Your young lady is propelled into one of the many kickboxing-movie-surplus dancing-girl cages to win back her freedom through tearful hip-gyrations, while Sir joins the vagrants, lepers and endangered species down in the larder.

MEAT! dispenses with the outmoded restaurant system of menu, crockery and service, opting instead for a guided dining experience.

Your place at the table comes complete with hollowed out tree-trunk stool - there are no toilets - meat trough and booze dimple. Every ten minutes or so the pig-iron doors to the kitchen fly open to reveal Gran Maître Bob Friog, naked apart from a bloodsoaked leather apron, framed in flames.

His trademark cry of "MEAT!!!", fedback through the over-amplified speaker stacks under the table, releases a phalanx of bikers with hunks of half-cooked beast impaled on their Pickelhauben. You get what you're given and are vocally grateful, in unison.

The meat is real meat. Fish and chicken are classed as vegetables and dropped live through grills to the Vegetarian section in the Crypt. Salad is provided throughout, for use as ashtrays. Smoking is not compulsory, and the righthand side of the table is reserved for lungcoddler weaklings.

In order to keep MEAT! the right side of at least one law, tobacco is banned.

MEAT! is ecologically aware, so drink is served by the bottle it comes in. Brown Booze = ale, Red Booze = wine, Yellow Booze = scotch. All booze is selected by your designated Hells Angel, Filthy Al, in line with the meat you got and whatever he hasn't already necked or poured down your date's cleavage.

Vodka, lager and all other mixers are banned, except in the Snakebite Express takeaway outlet in the Vestry.

MEAT! works with the local community, and encourages the pupils of the nearby primary school to befriend the animals on its Great Beast City Farm at all stages of their furry odyssey from pallet to plate. This culminates in the Imbolg Wolf Cub Challenge, at which lucky children compete to see who can eat their way out of a boar revolving on a spit before the flames take.

Dessert is more meat, served with a pineapple on top. And leave your wallet at home because you won't be presented with any bill. Instead Al and his mates will ransack your house and sell what they need to cover your meal. For a perfect end to a perfect evening, they may still be there when you get back.

I was impressed by this vision, and set to designing an advertising campaign. Readers will recall my previous attempt at promoting Start, the world's least appetising breakfast cereal, through guerrilla TV shots of Dennis Skinner MP yelling "Eat Start, it's Shit!", not to mention my promotion of Matthew Ward's Robo-TEFL Teacher screenplay.

I decided that MEAT! required something a little more sophisticated, and came up with the three following ads:

1. A man is driving through a grey London late afternoon. The wife at his side is droning on about some new restaurant with "to-die-for" goat's cheese crêpes. He stops at the lights, and a squeegee-merchant starts soaping his windscreen.

From the driver's point of view we watch the sponge circle hypnotically, as the wife's adenoidal litany of lettuce recipes fades away into steady crescendi of pounding timpani. Almost imperceptibly, the sponge turns into a raw, red steak, smearing blood all over the windscreen, and the woolly-hatted merchant morphs into a gurning Bob Friog, naked apart from his sanguinary leather apron.

The driver turns to his wife and screams "MEAT!!!"

Cut to a black screen, with the simple caption "Bob Says Eat My Meat".

2. A wife sits in her underwear at the dressing table of a well-appointed bedroom. She puts on her make-up and jewellery as her husband chats from the en-suite bathroom about the restaurant they are about to visit - steamed fish and sustainable samphire a speciality.

His prattling fades out in the mounting march of drums, the bedroom door bursts open and in stalks Bob in trademark déshabille and clotted apron. The wife turns, mouth open. Bob draws a raw steak from his crotch and rubs it bloody in her face before flinging it against the cream silk wall. He leaves.

The husband's voice fades back, asking "So what's it to be, darling, tipila linguine?" He wanders into the bedroom and drops his towel as his wife shrieks "MEAT!!!" through bloody teeth.

Cut to black screen etc.

3. Whitechapel, the autumn of 1888, and Old Jack is at his exercise. A petticoated figure is slumped in a grimy midnight doorway. Over her hunches a top-hatted figure in black, a Gladstone bag by his side. A blade flashes in the guttering gaslight. Two policemen advance slowly on the scene of slaughter. We hear only their panicked breathing - "at last! at last!"

A uniformed arms reaches over and grabs the killer by the shoulder, spinning him round. In a crash close-up we catch only the bloodshot eyes, the stubbled, sweaty cheeks, the rotten teeth twisted into a grimace.

The policeman releases his grip. "Oh, sorry, Bob," he mutters. The two officers salute, and move on down the cobbled alley.

The camera pans up to a killing moon as the Victorian London skyline is torn by a cry of "MEAT!!!!", slowly subsiding into a bestial snarl. And fade to red.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The York Road church is now sheltered housing for the bank managers who heard our initial business pitch, but Boyo-Friog Associates are still in talks with some East European investors and actively seeking unhallowed ground.

The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings

2011-11-06T11:31:00.008Z

Unlike Wales, plain women and his BBC paymasters, I like Jeremy Clarkson. The obsession with motor cars and himself does not move me, but I enjoy his unmasking of lettuce and willingness to wander around in public looking like Jeremy Clarkson. His facial tributes to John Carpenter's The Thing (mid-transformation) never cease to please.

News that he had taken his first wife as a mistress - a lady who must be an echoing cavern of self-loathing - ushers him into the Alan Clark Waiting-Room of Caddish Eminence. The time has come to drop the sports jacket and jeans for a gap between the front teeth, trim 'tache, cravat, blazer and personal tankard behind the bar of a country pub near Maidenhead - where they call him "Major" and keep a room upstairs in case the Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaag breaks down and he needs to comfort his secretary.

Jeremy also puts me in mind of a niche Christmas gift market for unpopular men that has not yet been skewered by the axis of socks and cologne. I call it "The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings".

The target buyer is a recently-divorced woman. She has the house and most of the money, but there's one thing she can't take from the noisome octopus to whom she was lately wed - his puerility. And divorce gives him the chance to rediscover it.

He's already kitting out his batchelor hutch with all the apparel of midlife adolescence:

a water sofa-bed
a fridge with easily-distinguishable bacon and lager sections
a PC with patent "Plasterer's Radio" self-degumming monitor
a compact recording studio, still in its box, and, above all,
a giant flatscreen HD television on which to wallow in the films of yesteryear.

What he least expects is such an apparently-thoughtful gift as "The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings" from his ex-wife. This bangs all the right gongs:

It look like a Ladybird book, evoking teary memories of childish thumbing through the "Kings & Queens of England" in search of good beheadings
It is endorsed by Jeremy, which guarantees wit as dry as a Martian Martini, and
"Happy Endings" reminds him of something that happened to Mike on a golfing holiday in Bangkok, which would have been alright if the girl in question hadn't turned out to have been a chap.

Plus the fact it's a book means that, alongside his car manual and bound volumes of Viz, he now has a library.

And so he settles down in the director's chair with his feet up on the boxed set of Japanese import "Wacky Races" DVDs and opens "Clarkson". On the right-hand page he sees a picture of a Turkish gangster shooting up a seraglio. Excellent. On the left he reads the following text:

Kevin Spacey is Keyser Söze in "The Usual Suspects".

The nightmare begins. The picture lured him in, then the words delivered the coup de grace. Before he can cover his eyes, the film is ruined. But he cannot stop. Jeremy beckons. In misery he turns the page. A sweaty man in a baseball cap stares at him.

Soylent Green is people!

He blinks back the tears as his fingers flick across to the wheaten features of a brown-suited child, receding down a Georgetown sidestreet.

The psychiatrist is dead. Obvious since the scene with his wife in the church, when you think about it.

On he goes, through the wreckage of his film archive. Merry is the widow, for she has understood and overcome a fundamental male survival technique.

Men have no long-term memory. That's why we compile lists - not only because we believe in wasting time better spent shoe-shopping or listening to women, but because otherwise we'd forgot your names and where the kids' schools are.

This is a true blessing, and proof of the existence of a genial and thoroughly clubbable God. It means that we rarely reflect upon the essential shallowness of our own existence, have no problems with enjoying football and will, after a shandy, chat up your sister at a christening once again.

It also explains why we watch the same films over and over. I for one can never remember that Stapleton's sister is in fact his wife, despite the mundanity of such arrangements back in Wales, and therefore approach each reading/viewing of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" with a lamb-like skip.

Women, on the other hand, need to know. This is why they read the last page of a book first, to assure themselves that it is worth reading. This is also why they ask what men are thinking all the time. Men, like my near namesake in "Under Milk Wood", are either thinking of wet corsets or nothing.

And so the divorcé looks forward to evening after curry-stoked evening in his celluloid back catalogue, with the flicker of the cathode reflecting his rapt gaze of amazement as the Mafia and entire US Government kill JFK from all possible angles, some gunman takes out Carter on a charcoal Geordie beach, and the Christian copper dies at the setting of the pagan Summerisle Sun.

"The Clarkson Book of Happy Endings" is the ex-wife's silent revenge, for her former spouse can't stop reading on despite the horrors it holds. Men are all addicts, and if it's bad for them they just can't stop. His meagre interior life dissolves in each acid page, but forward he goes like Scott of the Unconscious, snivelling "Why Jeremy, Why?", until the last page.

There Edgar Allan Poe meets his red-rimmed stare, holding a rubber mask in his ivory hands.

And you would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.

It's "The King in Yellow" for this post-decadent century. Buy it now ladies, and our world is yours.

"Pa vo beuzet Paris, Ec'h adsavo Ker Is."

Sobriety as Spectacle

2011-10-18T12:00:00.009Z

There's a touching Soviet film called "Autumn Marathon", in which a random Dane gets thrown into a Glorious Socialist drunk tank. He returns to his Leningrad hosts the next morning with the sort of look in his eyes that you'd get after a particularly invasive bout of alien abduction. "There were many new words there," he muttered into his kvass.

That Mr Putin is a ghastly man by any standards. When not punching bears or switching off Belarus, he's throwing away the good bits of the Soviet legacy and hanging on to the rotten ones.

So Stalinism and screwing up the Middle East are ok again, but the cosy violence of your local yokel bobby is not. Instead the Russians have to put up with armour-plated sacks of steroids with guns that work and a licence to park their giant motorbikes in the crack of your arse.

Most shameful of all is Putin's decision to close the drunk tanks. The вытрезвитель (sobering-up station) predates the Revolution, but the Bolsheviks gave it the lacquer of pseudo-science, priggishness and theft that helped it endure to this day.

The Soviets scorned the sentimental, bourgeois practice of encouraging doctors to shelter alcoholics and their families until they were fit to return to serfdom. Instead they handed over the drunk tanks to the the police and let them:

hose down random drunks, not necessarily with water,

steal their remaining shoe,

show them a graph correlating the impact of drinking "Natasha" perfume on the output of self-combusting television sets,

kick them in the danglers; and

dump them in a snow drift

but not before billing them two kopecks for the trouble. One minute you're warming up for a midnight Stockhausen serenade outside the ex-wife's flat, and the next some single-cell Siberian soaks are trying to use you as a wind sock. Once you manage to stagger home the first thing you need is a stiff drink and a fight, and back to the tank you go.

This may sound reactionary, but in fact it displays Scientific Socialism at its most exquisite. Capitalists require a professional police force to repress the workers and their annoying middle-class representatives, while feudal rulers intimidated, entertained and sometimes fed the cowled masses with spectacular public punishments.

A Socialist society, requires no such agencies of doom. The Soviet police simply brought members of the drinking classes together and allowed them to exchange teeth, fluids and experimental impregnation techniques in the seclusion of a basement urinal until their anti-people manifestations were spent.

The police then put the given parasite's actions in their socio-economic context, provided "look-no-hands" washing facilities and returned him to society. Seizing items of the visitor's clothing provided him with a tantalising glimpse of the Victory of Communism, when money is abolished and goods and services are simply exchanged.

The two-kopeck fee was a reminder that this dazzling future when, to quote Engels, "state interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself" (Anti-Dühring), had not yet arrived.

The kick in the nuts was free.

President Gorbachev, like all busy little reformers, had no time to sit back with a glass of horseradish vodka and a crackling pipeful of perique to peruse the lessons of history. That's why he thought Prohibition would sort out the problems of alcoholism, falling output and commodity fetishism, just like it didn't in America.

The result was tumbling mortality rates as the man in the stalling trolleybus took to drinking flight fuel, the total collapse of the economy as everyone spent all their time making, procuring and drinking red-eye, and the rise of the Russian Mafia. Oh, and the Soviet Union shrank from super-power status to the back of Gorbachev's limo, which had had its hub caps stolen and fashioned into rather fetching earrings by the eternally drunk President Yeltsin. Cheers!

Putin is so busy that he can't even be bothered to learn from Gorbachev's mistakes, which is why his new big idea is to shut down the drunk tanks and shunt their clients off to the Accident & Emergency ward of the nearest hospital.

Perhaps he's trying to return to the medical as opposed to dialectical approach to sobriety pioneered in Tsarist Russia. If so then he, above all, should know what happened to the Romanovs. Another country that adopts this approach is Britain, whose record on public drunkeness is admired only by dead Vikings.

From a strictly Marxist point of view, there may be some benefits to this. Even if you have never been to Russia, you should be able to conduct the following thought experiment:

Imagine a British hospital that was last equipped and cleaned in 1964
Imagine it staffed by angry, underpaid medics
Imagine it full of know-all hypochondriac grannies.

Now imagine this happy scene flooded with bellowing men in piss-stained brown flares, waving pickled gherkins about their bandaged heads, and draw your own conclusions about Mr Putin's chances of completing his third presidential term.

I never made it to a Soviet drunk tank, despite the best efforts of friends and colleagues, but a couple of my fellow students in Voronezh were once called upon to bail out "Major" Farid Bouaouni, an Algerian Situationist shepherd who looked like Major Easy.

He had refused to pay his bill at the Hotel Brno, prompting a visit from the police. They were minded to let him go with the standard clout and shake-down, but he insisted that he only wanted to "converse with socialists". So off to the tank with him.

The desk sergeant was delighted to deliver The Major into the custody of Her Britannic Majesty's student corps, as the boy had caused major delerium tremens among his cellmates by enacting Berkoff's "Metamorphosis" while swinging from the ceiling with his unusually adhesive palms.

This made Farid the only man to have emerged from a Soviet drunk tank drier than when he went in, and with his genitals largely in the same location and configuration.

He celebrated his release by stealing the wreath from the Tomb of the Unburied Soldier, placing it on his chest and trying to ignite it through an act of gastric acrobatics on Red Army Day. He was deported to Algiers on two separate flights.

The Russians were proud of their drunk tanks, and sought to share their cultural wealth with other, meaner nations. While holidaying in Soviet Armenia I read in the local paper that the first drunk tank had opened in the capital, Yerevan.

I asked my hosts what the point was, as Armenians drink in the Mediterranean style - wine with meals - rather than in the Slavonic traditions - turps with knives. Tigran the Jeans-Wrangler flipped the paper over to the Stop Press column, which noted "Yerevan Police Dogs Congratulate Man From Omsk On Becoming First Drunk Tank Customer".

Readers dismayed at Russia's abandoning its worthy Soviet heritage need not despair, for there is always Ukraine. With their Neapolitan attitude to public service and legal mildew, Ukrainians continue to bask in the Soviet glories of nepotism, unregulated shed building and policing as a form of improvisatory street theatre.

A friend has a wooden summer house in a village outside Kiev, where his good lady wife was spending a pleasant morning grinding chillis into her baby food. A drunk approached, demanding 7.35 hryvnyas for a bottle of monkey juice. She demurred, as had a number of neighbours already. The drunk declared that he would burn the village down, and was still trying to drop lit matches onto his amber stream of urine when the police arrived.

As the coppers dragged the drunk away, the lady of the house asked how long he would get in jail - attempted arson being a serious crime in Ukraine.

"Jail?! D'you think we're going to feed this git for five years? Don't worry ma'am, we'll just take him to those woods, macerate him thoroughly with the help of these excellent new Polish truncheons, point what's left towards Obukhiv District and tell him never to come back again. All in a day's work. A couple of chillis? Why, thank you - they'll come in handy if his attention drifts! Mornin' all!"

British stag parties must have tired of using the Baltic States as lavabos by now, so drunk-tank tourism is one of the many income funnels that Ukraine may yet drain. Russia misses the boat once again. But then Putin reserves the right to sink it any time he chooses.

It's good to be the Tsar.

Untergang heut Morgen

2011-10-06T10:45:00.003Z

Whenever I hear Miriam Makeba my thoughts naturally turn to Spengler's theory of pseudomorphosis.

Spengler, a ponderous interbellum Teuton, was not keen on jazz or any other form of "negro" music, so it's fair to say he would not have enjoyed Mama Africa's democratic syncopations any more than the on-beat flow of Ices Cube or T.

Ms Makeba is the name I always associate with the anti-Apartheid campaign, the cause closest to the lapels of my fellow students in the 1980s. And Spengler springs to mind whenever I think of students.

Oswald Spengler's insufficiently underrated book "The Decline of the West" falls into the same category as the works of Ayn Rand, namely philosophy for people who don't like philosophy.

Nonetheless, the old boy died in the happy knowledge that he was the only man in 1930s Germany who could get away with belittling Hitler as an "heroic tenor", thanks to the popularity of "Decline" among damp-palmed Prussian professors and their pimply charges.

"Decline" is an attempt at a cyclical analysis of history. Cultures rise, atrophy into civilisation then decline, because people are basically a bunch of clowns and everything new is rubbish. Egyptians, Chinese, Europeans - none of us stand a chance.

Democracy, hip-gyratin' music and priest-baiting are particular signs that the West is finished. Perhaps a military dictator might help. Spengler wasn't sure, and took two volumes a decade apart to say so.

Anxious youths - the sort who think "Steppenwolf" is all about them - loved this sepulchral sludge. Kissinger gave the already miserable Richard Nixon a copy for his bedside table - proof if ever it were needed that Henry was a Democrat mole.

Still, a book that size can't all be wrong, unless it's written by Quakers, and "Decline of the West" has its moments. Pseudomorphosis rather appeals to me - new, vigorous cultural growth cannot break out of the trappings of senile civilisation, and so turns on it with Oedipal fury.

Antonio Gramsci, up the other end of the geographical, political and coherence see-saw, had a similar insight in his "Prison Notebooks", when he wrote that the "old is dying and the new cannot be born". Gramsci saw this as a mere stumble on the trek to progress.

But when you look at student political engagement since the heroic tenor days of 1936, it's hard not to agree with Spengler that the "morbid symptoms" are really here to stay.

In 1936 the cause was Spain. A few Papal oddballs saluted Franco from the safety of their armchairs as the Condor Legion thundered over their tonsured, straw-filled heads. But the Republic was joined on the battlefields of Málaga and Madrid by Oxbridge's finest poets, Wales's hardest miners and England's better Blair.

It's easy to point to Soviet skullduggery behind enemy lines, as I've done before, but Spain was the opening skirmish of the Second World War. Hitler wasn't truly defeated on the Western Front until Franco died, and anyone who fought the squat Galician is all right by me.

British youth has since had its native Beserker genes blunted by the pacifist bromides of higher education and its rage against tyranny sapped by a spurious sense of pseudo-socialist solidarity with the Soviet. This explains how its epic performance in Spain and Normandy was followed by the shameful slouch towards Aldermaston in the 1950s, and the reduction of Vietnam War protests to grandstanding for Ho Chi Mindlessess.

Things improved in the gritty '70s and '80s - perhaps due to unemployment and the declining quality of smack. Chile, in particular, was a noble and often practical campaign against a squalid dictatorship, despite being tainted in Wales by Dafydd Iwan's neverending "Cân Victor Jara".

But those decades were defined by anti-Apartheid. The movement had its fair selection of heads both hot and soft, but even a strong aversion to Desmond Tutu couldn't stir much sympathy for the Vogon Bothas.

In Wales the political is personal, and the personal is critical. My sympathy with the Anti-Apartheid Movement stemmed from having had to listen to my distant cousin "Uncle Robin", who had emigrated to South Africa to join the Bureau of State Security. The last time I'd seen him was May 1979, when he'd popped back to Britain for the general election in order to see "that Communist, David Owen" lose his seat.

With such sawtooth political sense it's frankly a miracle that Apartheid lasted as long as it did. I was glad to see the sunburnt back of it. Uncle Robin was last heard of in a Christmas card from "Zimbabwe-Rhodesia" before decamping to Bournemouth with a lady from Lourenço Marques.

As May turned to December and Mandela made way for whoever, I would sometimes bump into the anti-Apartheid scarf-wearers of my college days and ask them how they thought the new South Africa was getting on. This sobering but far from sober experience helped to formulate the No Good Boyo Iron Rules of Student Politics, applicable to all causes:

1. The Dana Condundrum: All Kinds of Everything was happening in Africa, but getting rid of Apartheid was the only one that mattered, and somehow made the others go away, even though it didn't.

2. The Ilf & Petrov Thesis : Once Apartheid was defeated, everything in South Africa was ok. Based on the novel "The Twelve Chairs", by the aforementioned Soviet writers, in which we find the slogan "No one can save the drowning but the drowning themselves" ("Дело помощи утопающим — дело рук самих утопающих").

3. The Fintan Stack Amendment: Evidence against points 1. and 2. suggesting that Africa still had problems, and that South Africa was letting the side down over Mugabe and AIDS, were met by a blank look that said "I had my fun, and that's all that mattered".

Very patient readers will recall that my unfinished doctoral thesis concerned university unrest in Tsarist Russia, and one of the reasons I gave up - apart from finding out that some rotter had already written it - was the realisation that politics at the student stage suffers from precocious senility.

The charity-shop shufflers get involved, get laid, get jobs and get lost. They then leave quotidian politics to the dullard dynasties of Kinnocks and Milibands and single-string campaigning to the tone-deaf sectarians of the far left.

Meanwhile, their place in the student trenches is taken by more Home-Counties Hillaries on a three-year stretch. It's like a First World War opera by Philip Glass - slight tweaks to the same theme, with some modulation but no development. And then you graduate.

University College Swansea, where I studied slate maintenance and cockle husbandry (joint honours), was one of the least political campuses in Britain. Seventy year of drunk Labour MPs and the conviction that Mrs Thatcher wasn't really prime minister because she's a "bird" had dulled the already rusty hoe of student activism.

The Student Union was largely concerned with scrabbling around for a quorum, every mention of which prompted a bellow of "scrotum!" from the Rugby Club props who seemed to think the debating chamber was their changing room. It was so apolitical that we had an SDP Union President for about five years - the SDP being the political party for people who don't like politics.

The rare debates amounted to the curlew cry of the Athletic Union pleading to opt out of the college bilingual policy. This obliged them to submit every poster - "Headbutting Club members please assemble in the bins at Harper's Disco at 2300 sharp, please" - to someone like me, who translated it into Middle Cornish and threw the original English away.

There were also attempts to expel the Federation of Conservative Students. These porky date-rapists produced my favourite ever poster during the 1983 General Election: a picture of a British Army tank with the word "Benn" underneath it. Made me think.

The Union printed a newspaper called "Swansea Student", which sandwiched oddly prescient notices like "This Union deplores the US bombing of Libya" between music reviews copied from the NME and letters complaining about the Rugby Club's altruistic "bathe a lesbian" campaign.

The most active political group were the Socialist Workers - a shrill of Kentish girls in cardies led by a future accountant who looked like Béla Bartók. She focused on berating a politics lecturer for failing to see the sexism inherent in Tom Paine's "Rights of Man".

The only campaign that had any coherence or momentum was anti-Apartheid, although this largely amounted to shouting "Amandla!" at confused West Indians, picketing showings of "Zulu" and frowning at the Rugby Club's "Springboks" fashion range.

I have recounted one occasion when polishing a Silver Age college quip cost me dear in the coinage of love, and my sole contribution to anti-Apartheid at Swansea also dropped into the crusty sock of woe.

Everyone read the "Swansea Student", but I alone glanced at "College News", the university administration's tedious and ill-set bulletin. It was even printed on bilious orange paper - the eternal colour of the loser, from 70s porn actors to the Continuity Liberal Party (Meadowcroft Faction).

"College News" announced one day that our first principal, Professor Fulton, had died, and that in his honour College House would be renamed Fulton House. Sure enough, the following day the sign went up on the main administration building.

The Student Union, which clung to the back of College/Fulton House like an amorous beetle, had voted to rename its drinking hole "The Mandela Bar" only the day before. This seemed appropriate enough, as it resembled the rumpus room of a condemned Congolese jailhouse with worse beer and less female company, but these were the 1980s and irony was only allowed on Radio 4.

(It was later renamed after a series of children's TV characters and most recently Rob Brydon, before being sold to a Saudi engineering student as a garage for his gold-plated vacuum bed.)

I was sipping a cloudy half of SA in "The Mandela Bar" that lunchtime with a group of Union activists, mainly because I was taken with the Women's Society secretary. This followed my lifelong pattern of being attracted to women who instinctively disapprove of me.

Kay, despite the stripey tights, undyed cheesecloth drapes and general air of umbrage of her calling, liked having me around as I represented the native Welsh in her selection box of oppression. I was just happy for her braided hair to hover over my coal-streaked shoulder as she head-tilted to me about our Great Vowel Famine.

Conversation turned to the question of College House. "Who is this Fulton, anyway?" asked Kay, with customary distrust at any college decision.

Now, I could have told the truth and impressed the Union Executive with my ace reporting skills. Maybe Kay would have thought I was tapping into some mystical Celtic ley line of matriarchal knowledge about the soil and committee meeting rooms of my ancestors. I might even have drawn wry comparisons between the then principal's bookkeeper triteness and Professor Fulton's scholarly humility.

Instead I glanced thoughtfully across at the poster of Mandela and mused "Fulton? Isn't he the governor of Robben Island Prison?"

It took a day or two and some urgent clarification before the pickets dispersed and the Cuban delegation found its way back to the docks, but Kay had firmly struck me off the list of Insulted and Injured.

Student politics still follows the Boyo rules of instant irrelevance, in so far as the gowned masses can be roused from their rent-book torpor at all. Spengler and Gramsci would have picked up the gamey reek of decadence and nihilism in their chosen causes - The war in Iraq was "Not in My Meme", and the "We Are All Hezbollahas" are indifferent to the bigots Medieval and modern who litter their rallies like trousers in a Whitehall farce.

But then single-issue campaigns are the stripped-down chassis of politics, and inevitably attract the superficial. The Anti-Apartheid Movement, despite its occasional false starts, was a powerful motor of human progress. And it certainly had the best tunes.

When its official history is written I may try my luck again, assuming that Kay & Co are now busy shipping kohl to Gaza, and submit my chapter on "The Fulton House Siege" and its part in my downfall.

A Lone White Sail Gleams

2011-09-11T18:41:00.005Z

With summer ending, The Welsh Tourist Board of Wales is stepping up its campaign to bully some imaginary English poshboy into spending a few weeks glaring resentfully at his made-up wife over a slate of flummery in Lleyn.

And why not? We Welsh have so far been spoiled by the quality of our summer visitors. The questing Dutchman, panning for Mawddwy gold; the German couple with gunmetal eyes, calibrating their theodylites to sort the mountains from the hills; the vanful of Poles a-kindling in your copse - they all love Wales for what she is, so why not ring the changes and welcome a fellow who calls the game "rugger" and watch how long it takes before someone paints him green and sets his car on fire?

This raises a related question. While the world roils in Wales's tepid embrace, where can a Welshman go? Like Italians we are not great travellers, as we already live in a country that has everything - cakes, more than one coastline, y-front-rending women and no Highway Code.

I suggested Ukraine as a worthy holiday destination way back in the days when I still blogged in Wenglish. So let me now highlight its fine port of Odessa.

As close readers know, Madame Boyo and I spent our honeymoon in this Black Sea Tangiers and promptly dubbed it cymreigiol - worthy of the Welsh.

Russia's relationship with Europe has always been awkward. Peter the Great intended St Petersburg to be Russia's "Window on Europe", but built it on a troll-dark Finnish swamp miles from anywhere. Catherine the Great had the advantage of being an actual European, but still laid out Odessa somewhere over the Ottoman Empire.

It was a French-run free port for much of the Romanovs' reign, and managed to maintain its louche, Interzone buzz through Civil War, Stalin and Stagnation, topped up by a few war years under or occasionally straddling the corsetted Romanian officer corps.

When the various states of the Soviet Union just stopped turning up in late 1991, Odessa found itself, minus one "s", as Ukraine's main port. The Odessites adapted to the new country in their cosmopolitan way by speaking Russian but acting Ukrainian, and soon found a steady income from channelling the hinterland's chief exports - construction workers and whores - to Turkey.

Odessa has not allowed the advent of democracy to stifle its picaresque heritage, and the happy proximity of the brigand republic of Transdniestria to the northwest ensures that there's no better place for car thieves, vote-riggers, plutonium smugglers and taxi drivers to flourish.

Moreover, if there are any cocks trying it on, Odessa will snook them:

1. The Romanian occupiers killed almost all of the city's Jews, who themselves weren't too popular with Ukrainian or Russian nationalists either, so free Odessa chooses the splendidly Semitic Mr Edward Hurwitz as its elected mayor whenever the central government allows.

2. Viktor Yanukovych, the cloddish Ukrainian president and Kremlin fluffler, is no fan of Odessa, given its overall high IQ and lack of coal mines, so the Odessa Port Authority has reciprocated by putting up a Soviet-style banner of one of his most banal statements over its gates - "Professionals ought to work in the transport system" ("B транспортной системе должны работать профессионалы"). Yanuk of the North is flattered, and everyone else chuckles into their breakfast cognac.

The Soviets renamed the city's streets after random anniversaries, mass-murders and root vegetables - "Yeah, I'll see you at the corner of 29 Years of the Armenian Power Grid and Turnip, opposite Boston Strangler Square". Ukraine expected free Odessa to give them suitably Cossack monickers - "Jewbaiter Passage", "Square of the Sacred Sword of St Skovoroda" - while the looming Russians wanted the Lenins and Great October Socialist Revolutions to stay where they were.

The Odessites simply ressurrected the French names of the past, so you can still flâne down Richelieu Boulevard and De Ribas Street with a sprig of hibiscus in your lace-sleeved hand.

But the true jewels of Odessa are its women. Ukraine, like most Slavonic countries, is a British sit-com writer's dream - the men are oafs, while the women are sharp yet easy to handle, like Stanley knives.

Not in Odessa. The local men are cheery drunks, of course, but the women wander around as if they were auditioning for "Post-Coital - The Musical!", with hair akimbo, 3-D lipstick and thoughts that tune in and out.

Madame Boyo and I sought ice-cream, directions to French Boulevard and some sense from several Odessitas, and got nothing but asymmetrical smiles, Expressionist hand gestures and a rant about why President Yushchenko wasn't doing something about it (he'd been out of office for months).

But the finest tale of local womanhood came courtesy of Captain Ponomarev and the Odessa Yacht Club. This enterprising mariner and his chums ran a tourist entrapment service. It consisted of dressing an unusually coherent young woman in garments a size too small, positioning her on the coastal path with some Yacht Club brochures, and letting male lechery and female patience do the rest.

Within moments she had delivered us to the Captain, who put us to the test. Would we like a cruise around the bay in one of those motor yachts you see accountants fall off all along the Thames, or in a proper sailing boat? We passed, and hopped aboard his bilious barque.

We sat towards the prow with neither life-jacket nor harness, as Capt Ponomarev swung his great boom about our heads and scythed between tankers and towlines with the occasional arcane order to Bo'sun Grafich.

We clung to one another through more degrees of list than non-Odessan geometry allows, while the Captain recounted the proceedings of the local Pirate Society, of which he is Secretary and Keeper of the Plank of Justice.

(The chairman, as it happens, is a dentist. He carries out surgery in full rig on public holidays, reserving antique equipment for members of the City Council.)

I asked the Captain whether he had many local passengers on his Ship of Ghouls. "You know we call the city 'Odessa Mama'?" he began. "Well, one day a couple of our own Odessa mamas drifted down here and asked whether I did cruises of the bay. I said I did. With a satisfied cluck they parked themselves at the prow, so off we went.

"Once we'd left harbour one of them asked whether I had any coffee below deck. I did. 'Two coffees, please.' I fixed the coffee, passed them the cups, and out we surged into the swell.

"I gave them the big tour. 'Here's where the Germans bombed the Crusier Shnorbitz in '41, and just over the top of that crane is the Palace of Hadji Girai' - but I might as well have been yodelling.

"We crested some bell-bottomed waves, we tasted a whaler's spume, we passed through the shadow of a shark, and all the time they were like this -

"'Mrs Lyakhobiy, her as isn't no better than what she oughtn't to be, well, you've seen the hat, of course? If you can call it a hat. I had to whack my Grisha's cockerel with an icy spoon, if you catch the drift - '

"'Ooh, she never? Her neighbour, the one whose sister ships those dodgy plums from Romania in her stays, well, she robbed a couple of mackerel from the market, and there was no way of telling, if you know what I mean. And that Tymoshenko woman, if she is a woman - '

"A good hour and a half this went on for. I got them back to harbour, they thanked me for the coffee, stuffed enough money in my mitt and wandered off. They weren't wrong about that Mrs Lyakhobiy, either."

We reflected on the Eternal Mystery of Woman for a while as Grafich tacked us back into the little harbour. Suddenly we found ourselves beset by a Lilliputian fleet. Tiny sailing boats, each bearing a small boy, bobbed about us. A man by the quay in sinister Soviet-era tinted specs was yelling random orders at them. "Yura, haul your mainbrace! Shura, your boom's awry! Dima - are you listening? Dima?! - "

Dima, in Tot-Yacht No.9, was a lad apart. The others, none older than ten, acted either assured or appalled as we cleaved their convoy. But Dima, kitted out by his guilty dad in sailor's peaked cap and braided jacket, was pure Odessa in his indifference to our hulking hull. He sailed on as the others scattered. Capt Ponomarev ordered Grafich to steer sharply to starboard.

"Who are they?" asked Madame Boyo, as the junior service regrouped before their quayside commandant.

"That's the kids' trainee yacht club," beamed Ponomarev proudly. "We take them from five years onwards. Even give them life-jackets. Our little pride and joy."

The children stumble shaken-shanked onto the decking, all apart from Dima. He still sat at his mast, watching the sun soar over Trebizond, ethereal and unconcerned.

I can't help but think that Odessa and her Dimas of all ages will always hover between sky and sea, like Tadzio on the Venetian sandbank, just out of the ruffians' reach.

"What's your junior yacht club called?" I asked as we slid into our mooring. Ponomarev glanced over at the boys, nodded, and replied - "The Optimists".

A Welsh Artist Responds to Just Criticism

2011-08-29T16:59:00.004Z

I salute Madame Boyo's indefatigability in guessing my password and subjecting my film treatments to literally unanswerable analysis.

She had been similarly unimpressed by my first effort, "Escape From Bikini Island", and its radical revision - "No Escape From Bikini Island".

I acknowledge my error in following the decadent individualist advice to "write about what you know", which in my case is the porn/sci-fi axis around which the fulcrum of my mind rotates.

Hence "Alien vs Predator vs Dalek" and "The Lion Tamer", featuring Rt Hon Theresa May PC MP, HM Secretary of State for the Home Department, and a still-warm pelt.

I can only adopt the Deakin Defence - "I shouldn't ought to have done so, but I did it anyway. Let History be my judge" - and go back to Les Cahiers.

The Stone of Oblivion

2011-08-17T09:22:00.011Z

Keen readers of my web blog will recall a previous foray into management consultancy, in which I explained how best to use the office sociopath. I've given the topic more thought of late, and reached the conclusion that most managerial problems can be solved at the recruitment stage.

The overwhelming majority of managers, and "overwhelming" is a word readily associated with them, are unsuited to the job. The reason is that anyone who seeks to attend meetings, read memos, conduct appraisal interviews and associate with other managers is a drainage channel for moral slurry.

How to stop these "cc" zombies from taking over your world?

1. Advertise your managerial post with the usual verbiage about "top-shelf thinking", "disaggregating the transformational foliage" and "synergising the priority valve", take all the applications, and throw them away.

2. Find some normal colleagues. Normal people are those who laugh when they read newspapers, like to play sports rather than go to the gym, and have moderately untidy hair. They gather in bars and smoking areas, even if they neither drink nor smoke. They do not own Morcheeba CDs. If you have no such people or places at work, get another job.

3. Appoint these normal people as managers. They will instinctively know what to do, which most of the time is nothing. But, when danger looms in the shape of visit from Head Office or some sort of inquiry from the Personnel Department, they will lope into action like Lytton Strachey by interposing themselves between their staff and the incoming idiocy.

The result is that work will proceed, unhindered by "evaluations". Budgets will blossom, freed from the weeds of outside consultants. After a few months you will be able to say "pass me a form" to a colleague, and they will hand over a betting slip. An inquiry about "issues" will elicit a copy of the Racing Post. They may even have circled Ham Spanner for you in the 2:30 at Chepstow. In red pencil.

Some readers will nod with an uneasy sense of familiarity. For this is how we used to recruit in the days before management became an industry in itself rather than a way of keeping twits away from heavy machinery. Back then we were the toolbox of the known world. We invented interesting games, as well as gravity, the telly and the wireless, built two empires, won several wars against all comers, and had decent lunch breaks.

Now we do little but sell one another houses, loan our army to desert kleptomaniacs and wonder idly whether we ought to learn Chinese as we nibble a sandwich-style snack unit in a "breakout area". And all because of the wrong type of manager.

Take our spies, for example. They are all fools. Why? Because MI5 and co recruit their staff by asking "Hi there, does anyone want to be a spy?", then have to find safe things for the shiny pods of public-school fascists, child-molesters and Territorial Army rejects to do. Some turn up to interviews in tuxedos and scuba-masks, and bring their own car batteries.

How did the KGB find their own excellent bunch of spies? Imagine you were a bright student at some Soviet university. A chap with proper shoes would sit next to you at the trolleybus hangar one day. He would say that they had been observing your progress with interest for some time, and invite you to join the KGB.

The correct answer was "Rather!", unless you really disliked your parents and fancied a few years of underwater shale-dredging above the Arctic Circle.

Britain did something similar in the 1930s and 40s, but made the mistake of restricting its trawl to Oxbridge inverts - a small pool of talent if what you're looking for is brains and discretion. There's no surprise that the best fellows we recruited were already working for Uncle Joe, and somehow managed to live with the conflict of interest.

We need to return to this simple form of recruitment. Those dead-eyed weasels who do slip through under some New Labour full-employment scam can be dealt with through my Workplace Psycho Deployment Programme. (Remember: "If the Job's Worth Doing, Let Someone Else Do It.")

The righteous manager still has to deal with unenlightened organisations, such as the Personnel Department, for all our sakes, and here I offer a simple technique that worked for me.

My sole stint as a manager came during a posting overseas. We had a general manager who dealt with the local police, firemen and blackmailers, leaving one of the remaining expats to handle staff and editorial matters.

As in all well-run offices, this grisly job fell to the last man in - just as the tardiest reporter to file his copy with The Western Mail had to don the didacoi 'kerchief and write the horoscopes.

My turn came once I'd worked out how to switch on the special computer that contained the email link to Head Office back in Britain.

The special computer had one purpose - to send me strange messages from blonde PAs called Nikki "regarding" various matters of breathtaking inertia, requests for arcane information from the Personnel Department ("Does Mr Rashid have the capabilities to speak Kabbalist?") and misspelt threats from various Health & Safety 'droids ("There have been a case off rabies in your country in question and request your evcaute expatriate staff with IMMEDIATE effect, thank you regards.").

I would have turned to my predecessor for guidance, but he had already waved a quick cheerio and headed off to be languidly fellated in some souk. I remembered that he had told me to print off all these messages and deal with them "in order of some sort of priority". So I printed them off, stacked them on my desk, and ignored them.

Several days later the wind started to blow from High Tartary, buffeting the drapes and scattering reeds and papyri about the place. I found a large stone in the garden, which on reflection may have been the fossilised skull of an Sogdian betel trader, and adopted it as a paperweight. I put all my managerial emails under it and ignored them.

The Stone of Oblivion was born.

I soon found an agreeable managerial rhythm:

If Nikki or one of her revolving-door cohorts sent me a follow-up email ("Hi this is regarding an email I sent you regarding the issue regarding..."), I would fish the original missive out from under the Stone of Oblivion, put it in my in-tray and ignore it.

If the correspondence stretched to a third plea ("Mr Rashid's file does not indicate whether he is a man or a woman, please clarify") I would dispatch the Standard Stalling Response ("We are dealing with your inquiry"), and that would normally be the end of that. The original email would then go back under the Stone of Oblivion.

At the end of each month, I would sort out my paperwork. Everything under the Stone would be binned, and everything in the in-tray would go back under The Stone of Oblivion.

I estimate that I had to reply to fewer than one in ten of the emails I received, and only a fraction of those merited anything beyond the Standard Stalling Response. That fraction almost entirely consisted of pitiful attempts on the Nikkis' part to deal with one of our simple requests, such as some money to pay staff wages.

The Stone of Oblivion still has its place in a wired-up world where even journalists have computers, wap-drives and ceefaxes. A managerial spouse of mine handles much of her correspondence by funnelling it into mailbox folders that cannot be accessed and which, through the loving grace of technology, send back a conquering worm that destroys all evidence of the original message.

In this new age of austerity all the justly employed must bar the way to this Managerial Moloch. As companies close and municipal programmes implode, wingèd monkeys of misery flit through the heavy skies in search of new perches.

Before you know it, you have more Human Resources Facilitators than human beings on your payroll, and all your corner offices belong to diagonal roll-out directors and their clumpy-heeled 5k-a-day consultants.

Decent managers owe it to their colleagues to repel these powerpoint pirates through a cannonade of common sense and, if necessary, some dirty rock and roll. (Fact: managerial parasites cannot withstand the weaving guitars of late '60s Rolling Stones).

Or you could always rent a farmer. He'll spot the bullshit for you, and his rough rustic ways will send the interlopers fleeing for the nearest latte bar.

Otherwise you'd better invest heavily in quarries, because your Ziggurats of Oblivion are going to split the skies.

"Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me."

I Misteri d'Italia

2011-08-05T14:09:00.005Z

Mr Cameron, the occluded laird who heads This Great Coalition of Ours, let us all down with his gauche refusal to tip a Tuscan waitress.

The young lady told the prime minister she was too busy to carry his cups of coffee out onto the terrace. In primary-school pique he withheld the 150,000,000 lire she might have expected to find stacked under a saucer. Perhaps she should have been grateful that he didn't scoop up the loose change left on neighbouring tables and wheelbarrow it away to keep Mr Osborne quiet.

I see little point in allowing aristocrats back into power unless they show the world how to behave. We might as well have stuck with Mr Brown, who would not only have tipped correctly with the help of a slide-rule but might even have taken the used cups back to the kitchen.

But remember where we are. This isn't Greece, where you can wander around dressed like a refugee yet still get a slap-up fish grill. This isn't Spain, where the locals have set up zones of tolerance for the English and their deep-fried ways. This is Italy, and Mr Cameron not only broke some of its most fearsome laws, but fundamentally missed the point.

Italy, like the bumblebee, shouldn't get off the ground but it does. It seems anarchic:

no one pays taxes;
the South is run by the Corleones;
the rest is run by a priapic TV mogul;
buildings look as if they were recently strafed by a vengeful Ethopian air force; and
post a letter and three months later Il Postino may disentangle himself from your wife long enough to piss in the pillar box then set it alight.

And yet it's an excellent place to live. Why? Because Italy is Schelling's nightmare and Germany's antithesis - instead of elemental chaos boiling beneath a crust of civility, you have a rigidly conformist society that charms the world with its raffish air. The locals work hard to bring you the illusion of languor.

Italians travel relatively little, not only because they already live in Paradise but because we clearly see their Shinto uniformity when the Bel Paese spell is broken. Remember the plug of identically-kitted language students blocking the exit of the Tube carriage, or the Knightsbridge boutiques selling a sort of silken tweed and cavalry twill only worn in Milan.

The Italians do their best to shield the tourist from the secret mechanisms of their society. You can eat and drink whenever you like, padding about their cities with your trainers, singlets and water bottles, as if you were about to enter a bumpkin marathon. They say nothing, but have already silently allocated you a status just below lunatic and a little above leper.

Other European countries also understand that first impressions are always right, but play fair by letting you know about it. A lady friend popped out in her tracksuit to buy a pint of milk on Vienna's Graben, and still winces at the memory of trudging home with matrons pointing her out to their amused but wary grandchildren.

Dress like that in Paris and a foie gras seller may ask whether you've lost your house keys while nervously beckoning to the gendarme.

The Italians have no intention of sharing their social miracle with passing trade. Let us never know that the crumbling façade conceals a polished palazzo. But once in a while a kindly Etruscan may break ranks and tactfully try to tempt the wanderer into fare bella figura.

Mr Cameron's waitress was one such Samaritan. The prime minister thought he was simply ordering a couple of cappuccinos, a milky beverage that's conquered the world but which in Italy is spooned into infants. No one takes milk in their coffee after breakfast.

Most Italian cafés will gladly churn this out for the tee-shirted barbarians, but our waitress must have taken pity on Mr Cameron. By bearing the cappuccinos to his table in the late morning she would have exposed him and the willowy Mrs Cameron as little better than Dutchmen.

By feigning preoccupation she left Mr Cameron to carry the cups himself. A strolling local would then have taken the prime minister, with his crumpled shirt and bizarre shoes, to be an anæmic Albanian beggar earning a few florins by ferrying froth to some backpackers, and thought no ill of him.

An English gentleman would have learned enough Apennine ways on his Grand Tour to have instinctively understood the waitress's selfless gesture. But she overestimated Mr Cameron, who would have done better to take Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, in particular The Roads Round Pisa, as his holiday reading rather than the usual dim volume of American social philosophy. Truly was it said that no good turn goes unpunished.

I was once lucky enough to see a chip in the lacquer, and appreciated how tartly Italians treat their errant own. I was at Bologna airport, whiling away the minutes before my flight over an espresso. A 30-something man, clearly Italian, dressed, pressed and crimped with designer shades, man-bag and tender shoes, nodded to the waitress and asked for a macchiato - an espresso with a gust of hot milk.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon.

The waitress paused. He repeated his order with a pleasant smile, but might as well have asked her to top the cup up from her own tawny teats. The rest of us pretended to read our Calvino novels, but every plucked and vaselined eyebrow was arched in his direction.

The waitress nodded, approached the coffee dragon - Claudia Cardinale's jilted and unforgiving aunt - and gave the order. The dragon cast a glance at the cheery customer, grunted and made him an espresso. She set it aside and let the waitress bustle about until the fool's flight was called. Only then did he get his coffee, with no time to collect his change.

We saw nothing. Thus does Italy guard her secrets. Silendo libertatem servo.

Woe from Wit

2011-07-20T23:59:00.003Z

I avoid making controversial political statements on my blog, but feel safe in saying that little good ever came from Adolf Hitler and his trans-Alpine ultras.

I'm also sure that Catholic priests' chosen way of life rules them out as sources of emulation. Cardinal Newman was right to say that a liberal education is its own reward, but would have been more honest to note that it is its sole reward. One glance at the sort of stuff Newman enjoyed -being unhappily celibate, not eating much, arguing with the Pope - suggests that his advice was an introit to woe.

Indeed, a steady theme of this blog and therefore my life is how knowing things has constantly frustrated my mojo. A splendid series of articles by former colleague, literary colossus and all-round Spaniard Jason "De Vere" Webster on visiting Hitlerian holy places recently reminded me of another such missed opportunity.

I always felt sorry for historians of Nazi Germany. Scholars of less lurid eras display their professional envy with the odd sneer: "Don't worry, I'm sure you're purely interested in post-Gleichschaltung welfare policy, and aren't at all turned on by the shiny boots and pederasty, old man."

However much they protest, academic specialists on the Third Reich get lumped in with Colin Wilson and people who "research" serial killers, not helped by their high profile on TV strands ostensibly dealing with history but in fact entirely devoted to archive film of Himmler signing death warrants.

Jason brings out the awkwardness of having your genuine interest in some of the most significant loci of recent history mistaken for an obsession with skull shapes, department-store ownership and moving Poland around the map once every generation.

One part of Europe where people are refreshingly relaxed about mentioning the War is the Baltic States.

"Rorschach-blobby countries
With a dodgy Nazi past,
They disappointed Stalin
And left the Jews aghast"

as I once dubbed them, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had a decidedly mixed 20th century. A scattering of squat peasants teetering above a wintry sea, the Balts speak abrupt archaic languages and annoyed the Tsars so much with their dour folk songs that Alexander I subcontracted their government to the local German squires.

This made the Baltics easily the best-administered and most developed part of the Russian Empire, which was otherwise as baggy, inept and truculent as the "Madchester" music scene. It also meant that the suicidal Tsarist combination of idleness and cruelty reconciled the hitherto hostile freeholders and Junkers in an anti-Russian bond that holds true to this day.

Lenin had the novel idea that millenarian mumbo-jumbo and killing all the smart people would somehow improve Russia's condition, but should not have been surprised when the Balts opted instead for 20 years of frugal independence.

That lasted as long as it took for Hitler to elope with Stalin. This gruesome couple, despite their rapid falling-out, managed to scupper the Germano-Baltic alliance by respectively repatriating the Junkers to the Reich and setting up East Germany, a one-pot meal of a state that reduced the worst flavours of Prussian and Soviet bombast to a lignite jus rancid enough to repel even the squarest-headed Lett.

Nonetheless, the consistently beastly behaviour of the Soviet served to keep the Balts' Germanophilia simmering away under the tight lid of the Socialist saucepan until the whole Communist kitchen collapsed in 1991. Since then these new European Union colleagues have proudly rediscovered their Hanseatic and some other less edifying Teutonic ties.

I found this out on a visit to Estonia organised by the Soviet Ministry of Public Enlightenment in 1986. The Soviet Union would grudging allow a couple of dozen British students of the Russian language to spend a year in their string-vest satrapy, but worked hard to retard our linguistic progress by penning us in a crypto-Cossack backwater called Voronezh.

They'd let us out on the odd trip to places like the Baltics, Azerbaijan and Armenia, where speaking Russian usually earns you a kick in the pods. With this in mind, I prepared an Estonian phrasebook in cooperation with the Tallinn-born girlfriend of Young Young Aherne, whom we have met before.

Earnest analysis of Estonian society and intimate knowledge of my fellow-students helped me strip the required phrases down to a pair: "Vabandage, ma ei oksa eesti keelt" ("Excuse me, I don't speak Estonian") and "Neli õlut, palun" ("Four beers, please").

This proved to be an outstanding success. Deploying the first phrase melted the average Esth's features from a frosty furrow to an almost mollified maw of gold teeth and onion breath, while the second christened our new-found friendship in the amber dregs of State Brewery No. 17's sphincter-sapping ale.

It also helped to break the packed ice of prejudice between us and a group of ten East Germans whom the Soviets had also sent to Tallinn. The Politburo thought that bolting some Brandenburgers onto our party would comprehensively poop it. The Soviets were convinced, largely through study of our war films, that we shared their disdain for all things German.

Not so. Jerry always buys his round, for one thing, and is grateful in an older-mistress manner for any overtures from non-Axis chaps.

As usual, what really annoyed the Russians was a fault of their own making. East Germans were taught to see themselves as heirs to the Valiant Communist Resistance Movement, and so felt no guilt about Hitler and his chums. And what the average Russian really likes, next to a dead German, is a contrite one.

It didn't help that the East Germans had made a better fist of Socialism that the Soviets, and rather rubbed it in with their non-laxative beer and functioning cameras.

Moreover, the Russians underestimated the common ground between the British and the Germans. Apart from awful clothes, overcooked pork and talking about cars, we share a suspicion of the French, to whom life seems to come far too easily.

On the overnight train to Estonia, we and the pared-down Prussians decided that our Russian hosts were indeed no better than Frenchmen. True, their wine and weather scarcely recall Bordeaux, but they have a certain Gallic gift for all-day drinking, haughty women, toxic diplomacy and smoking through their rare ablutions. By the time the Baltic Express pulled into Tallinn Central, our carriage sounded like an pilot episode of "Meet the Bismarcks".

Our North-Sea Alliance was strengthened by the absence of the East Germans' "scharfe Hund" Stasi minder, who had gone too far in parading his pro-Soviet sympathies and actually eaten a Moscow railway station packed lunch.

One of the first Leipzigers to leap the psychological Anti-Fascist Defence Wall was Beata. The two of us hit it off together, as she combined a bürgerlich fondness for tailored tracksuits (as good as East German fashion got, believe me), unpermed hair and being photographed lounging on the bonnets of BMWs with a scholarly knowledge of German history. She also had a name full of southern light, unlike the crowds of Heidruns and Edeltrauds.

One morning a group of us were ambling towards the Kadriog Palace art gallery. I asked Beata whether she was also planning to join the afternoon jaunt to the Kilingi-Nõmme Experimental Synthetic Fabrics Plant.

She gazed out across the field-grey sea and mused "My room-mate Margit will go, as she has an interest in nylon tricotage. This alas I do not share. I shall rather spend the afternoon in our hotel room, examining the Hungarian lingerie that I purchased yesterday at the flea market. Are you interested in lingerie?"

I mimed that I was very interested in lingerie. "Good. Maybe you will join me?" Further Noh theatre gestures indicated my consent as we stepped, me bent nearly double, into the gallery.

The Kadriog Palace had, I heard, briefly been the residence of Estonia's interwar heads of state. So modest was Estonia's political class that it had taken until 1938 to appoint a president, and then he had had to seize power and appoint himself.

Welsh nationalists of the time were great admirers of the Baltic states, seeing their rude agrarian independence as a model, and m'Lord President of Wales and the Marches Dafydd Elis-Thomas later championed their captive cause through the long Soviet twilight.

This Quaker cult of simplicity lives on in Jan Morris's "A Machynlleth Triad" and, like everything Quaker, is doomed. It doesn't even have the random, redeeming élan of the Jacobites and Carlists. Mad-hatted feudal Poland survived the war against all odds, as did Regency Hungary and kleptomanic Romania. But the humble, horse-hoeing Balts spent 50 years as an insanitary shopping mall for Leningrad fishwives.

I should have been content to nod at a few "Girl Meets Tractor" efforts in oils then rush back to the hotel and help Beata sort her new purchases with my teeth. Instead I decided to try out my languages and ask a few edgy questions.

In the Soviet Union all checkpoints between the public and sources of fun were patrolled by leathery female War veterans who'd never needed such bourgeois baubles as weapons to dispatch the enemy. Restaurant lobbies, hotel floors, art galleries - each had its attendant Gorgon, her hydrae hidden by a mauve knitted beret.

I approached the Modernist Room Medusa with a caution born of Classical learning and numerous midnight flights from hotel balconies. "Excuse me, I don't speak Estonian," I opened.

"Wha'?" she stirred.

I tried again in Russian. "Can you help me? Is this the room where the Estonian presidents used to live?"

"Deutsch?" she ventured.

"Ja!" I replied, meaning that, yes, I do speak O-Level German.

"Good! You know, I remember during the War when you lot were here. My mother worked as a maid for the Generalkommissar, and he used to review the troops from that window over there. They were so smart! Everything was good, then the Russians came back and ruined it all."

I backed away, smiling, towards the door as she muttered to herself in German. I gave a final wave, which she again misinterpreted.

"Heil Hitler!" she beamed. I grinned like a chimp with rictus right arm as the East Germans filed into the room, turned smartly on their Cuban heels and filed back out again. And like the man queuing for tea in British 1950s horror flicks who's the first to see the monster slither out of the Thames, I could only stare open-mouthed at Beata as she marched past with no word spoken.

Still, the Vinalon alloy socks from the Kilingi-Nõmme goody bag have lasted me to this day.

Llên Lên

2011-07-11T17:54:00.006Z

I've a post over at The Dabbler on how Wales can catch up with Scotland and South Sudan in the race to independence - not by being miserable, or fighting some Arabs, but rather through the potency of cheap literature.

It worked for the Afghans, it can work for us.

Read on, then start writing. Our country needs you.

Wars of the Diadochoi

2011-06-20T11:22:00.007Z

The death of one-man mob Brian Haw leaves a bloke-shaped gap at his unilateral peace camp opposite Parliament. All sorts of unsavoury types, ranging from Brian's supporters to HM Government, are eager to fill it.

That is why we in the Cymru Rouge, who enjoyed his protest on a variety of levels, are launching the Brian Haw Succession Prize to ensure that his absence is well-spent.

We will accept submissions to take Brian's place from all-comers - rather like the empty plinth on Trafalgar Square, but with even more of a transgressive thrill for Britain's progressives.

Four nominations have arrived already and passed the selection criteria. They are:

1. Dr Mabuse. This wild-eyed, cadaverous German thinker looks the part and is down on Capitalism and democracy. He proposes to replace Brian's graphic banners with something altogether more Expressionist - black-on-white posters screaming "SCHIKSAL!" and "ANGST!", all underlit in flaring phosphorous.

Counting against him is his un-Havian silence, and being a doctor means he may get irritated with Brian's supporters asking him about homeopathy and Big Pharma all the time.

We imagine him gesticulating in an angular fashion atop a period Packard, as Independent readers make sympathetic noises about Dresden.

2. Nataliya Vitrenko. Little-known outside her native Ukraine and generally ignored within it, Ms Vitrenko makes up in volume, stridency and spray-can anti-Americanism what she lacks in presence.

She speaks vulnerable English, which will endear her to people who share their lives with cats, and has a catholic selection of banners that combine swastikas with the Stars and Stripes in the approved student manner.

She does have a hill to climb, though. A five-foot scold like the mop-faced women who sell you dried fish in Soviet underpasses, Nataliya cannot match Brian's praying-mantis prowl. Nor does she favour hats - an unusual omission, given the knitted berets sported by her onion-breathed matronly supporters.

On the plus side she likes Lyndon LaRouche, a grim American conspiracy freakshow who fancies HM The Queen as head of an international cocaine cartel. This turbo lunacy would let Vitrenko outflank the 9/11 nutters on Parliament Square who pretend to Brian's pitch.

3. The BBC Question Time audience. We give you 50-odd people - the racial, social and age spectrum of modern Britain in all its lurid diversity - and they think exactly alike.

It's a literally left-field candidacy, granted. Their collective coziness contrasts with Brian's stark vigil, and it's only too easy to imagine squabbles over the crèche rota and gluten issues.

Their sickly pall of patchouli and antihistamine spray could never match Brian's manly musk, and barely would their reedy, am-dram voices buzz above the backbench belches.

But, for all that, these were his people, bound together by the same thought that they had once had. Perhaps a little corner of Whitehall should always be a "Not In Our Name" installation.

4. Jesus Christ. Brian Haw was a religious man. He trained as a carpenter. He spoke out against violence and the powerful of the land. Few disciples joined him on his lonely journey, and most of his followers misunderstood his message.

With the Archbishop of Canterbury not even trying anymore, and Westminster Abbey a short donkey ride away, Our Lord and Saviour's time has come. Again.

He may want to keep quiet about being Jewish, though.

All other nominations sceptically received.

A oes heddwch?

Huw Samphan, Brawd Rhif Un
Adjudicator
Brian Haw Succession Prize
Cymru Rouge

damnatio ad bestias

2011-06-12T05:35:00.009Z

The BBC's looking for new programme ideas again. They've yet to accept any of my previous offerings, so I've modelled this bid on something they already like and given it a modish political angle.

Along the lines of BBC3's worthy "Snog, Marry, Avoid", I'd like to propose "Shelter, Shag, Shunt".

Exclusively nubile asylum seekers are assessed by a panel of sandpapery newspaper columnists, loathesome hipsters and Radio 4 official comedians to decide whether to:

house them for free in the attic of the North London mews you share with your dreary Quaker-lite family;

employ them as, er, nannies;

or/and denounce them to Immigration.

nominations for panelists below, please.

If the Beeb's not interested I may try Sky, or the Home Office.

Wretched Dionysus

2011-05-30T18:11:00.009Z

A concealed vegetable laid me low, so I missed out on much of L'affaire Giggs. The Cymru Rouge Fact Reduction Department got to work immediately, and reported the good news - Giggs had returned to his undying roots by bedding a Welsh brunette who looks like she lives in an InterCity buffet car.

We duly promoted him to the status of Martyr and, because there is no higher award than that of the Order of the Charred Lung of Llwchwr (Third Class), we gave him another one.

The endurance of the Welsh People into modern times has long mystified and annoyed our neighbours. The Picts, Gauls, Jutes and Deserving Poor have all gone, yet we persist.

The answer is Unnatural Selection. While the English and lesser races with too much law pursue leggy, beaming, ethereal blondes, we prefer dumpy, bad-tempered brunettes who go like a Young Farmer in a Hillman Imp. This breeds a swart, vinegar-fisted people, able to dwell undetected in woods, caves and Labour Exchanges, sustained by fermented herbs and fungi.

My own Iberian preference once won me the admiration of a purse of academic feminists - "won", rather than "earned", as there was no question of any effort on my part. Indeed, in this case my back was my best friend.

Just as Europe languished between Rome and Renaissance in a Dark Age of Lothars and Lombards, so did I wallow between Wales and undemanding public service in the brackish waters of post-graduate penury.

It seemed a good idea at the time. I had an excellent degree from an unknown university and aspired to more than being a goatish librarian in some Northern town. "Try for a doctorate," yawned my mentor, the splendid Prof Pethybridge. "Ivy League, Oxbridge, that sort of thing. Gowns and gals. Believe me. Just steer clear of London. Grubby Benthamites. You have been warned."

But I bumped into an old mate, Mike the Monk, who'd baled out of his Benedictine Monastery in protest at the lack of weekend disco passes. He'd found refuge in the City, where the Big Bang had opened the doors of the Stock Exchange to plausible young men who could shout a lot while remembering whose stripey blazer they were wearing.

"No fyccing idea what's going on, but. Got a Lamborghini and a flat in Dulwich, mind. Bit lonely, though. Not enough Welshes. You coming?"

I went. Four years of ligging, gigging, snorting, boffing, biffing, tooting, becking, belting and "manic fries" followed, leaving me with no hair, a mystifying reputation for diabolism, a rumble of Limehouse guttersnipes who've always seen me right, and about one chapter (since lost) of a PhD on homosexuality in Russian imperial student Burschenschaften that one peer reviewer called "gamey".

There were a few more tricky years of impersonating an impresario before I found my niche as a broadcast drone, but the London interregnum did remind me of the inestimable advantages of being Welsh.

My brunette moment came late one sultry morning in the summer of 1989. The postgraduate reading room at our college was a cool and airy chamber with windows designed for some phantom dictator to survey the Bloomsbury swarm.

My colleagues were the admirable Wislen, a brace of English chaps called Jonathan, a disgraced Iranian diplomat, Will the rangy New Yorker, a white Rasta who really shouldn't have been there, and a pod of American bluestockings - brunette and bespectacled with Puritan promise.

The social life of the males revolved around luring these delectable scholars down the Friend in Hand, plying them with halves of "lager beer" and trying to glimpse their knees. They were charming young ladies, all studying worthy subjects like Comecon, Polish beet planning and centre-periphery relations in Shelest-era Ukraine. They treated us with a companionable bemusement born of boredom and curiosity about our teeth. We were so happy.

Then along came Angela. Five foot eleven in silken jeans and fringed rodeo jacket, she tossed her flaxen tresses from breast to breast as she trilled "Is this desk free for my tomes of Romantic Romanian poetry?" Yes, she spoke in verse, and with a Parisan "r" that ushered her Aldeburgh accent into a husky demi-monde of Ambleresque intrigue.

If an orchid could speak, it would sound like Angela.

The postgrad gents were all over her like aphids. Even Julian the Rasta briefly refrained from keening about the sorrows that Babylon had inflicted on him and his people in their Maidstone exile.

I alone was immune to her freckles, good nature and alto sighs thanks to Samuel D. Kassow's PhD thesis on the Russian student movement, which not only covered everything I had planned to write about but was also about to be published as "Students, Professors and State in Tsarist Russia".

I was perusing this exquisite text on a microfiche reader, a piece of Kubrick technology that owed more to A Clockwork Orange than A Space Odyssey. It meant plunging my head inside a sensory deprivation hood and staring at flickering green letters that spelled the end of two years of dillatory research in the musty bowels of various Muscovite archives.

As I whispered "bugger, bugger, bugger" over and over with my back to the room, I missed the Arrival of the Queen of Suffolk along the carpet of rolled-out tongues. I was brought to by our resident Iranian calling out "Boyo - lunch in Diseases!", this being the standard invitation to partake of pie at the adjacent School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

I shuffled out of the room behind the rest, lost in thoughts of how I could salvage my doctorate from the unfair advantage Kassow had of having done the work earlier and with greater dispatch. Again I missed all sight of Angela, and so was not expecting to be flanked by two of the American MA gals.

"Boyo, you're the only real man in that room!" whined the taller brunette warmly, her woollen dress brushing those fleshy knees seductively.

"Threesome!" I thought.

My reputation among these sunless social scientists remained in the ascendant over lunch, where I had little to say to the unalloyed Angela and her leggy, blonde enjambement. I take my women like my lemons - bitter, jaundiced and unwaxed. We exchanged a few pleasantries, then I left her to gargle Eminescu to the sound of half a dozen trouser seams bursting.

"A thought, once uttered, is untrue," confirmed Russian poet and anagram Fiodor Tyutchev, and it didn't take long to establish that my flat-heeled colleagues were impressed more by the Boyo sang froid that the prospect of my using them as a sort of Tantric climbing frame.

This came as a mild relief, as a close study of Kingsley Amis's "The Green Man" had sown mighty oaks of doubt about my ability to compete with the natural attraction that the two smouldering sophomores would with any luck harbour for one another.

Lunch ended and we trailed back to our desks, some to thumb through indices of freight derailments by drunken bears in 1970s Bulgaria, others to comb the Zhakhiv district party secretary lists, and one to stretch her dappled arms across jasmine-scented editions of Ştefănescu Delavrancea and dream of the sea.

But, as Angela unfurled before us like a fondant fern between the banks of bowing Jonathans, the taller brunette showed why she and her tawny tribe are always the better bet, and certainly the greater fun.

"Perhaps I should befriend her," she wondered. "Get her to cut her hair".

Tercio de muerte

2011-05-15T07:59:00.016Z

Nick Clegg, the leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat junior partners in the Coalition of Evil with the Conservative Party, has threatened us all with "muscular liberalism" over the coming year.

I can't avoid the image of a skinny man in a white t-shirt and 501s edging daintily around the sweaty dance-floor at Amsterdam's celebrated "Love Girder" club on "Tower of Power" night. Whatever happens, he's going to get hurt and it'll be available on the Internet.

It's really not good enough. Once you could vote for the Liberal Democrats and thrill a little at the frisson of cost-free rebellion. Now they're in government, hobbling along on their knees with Mr Cameron's crop and ashtray balanced on their heads.

Who's to blame for this? Now, I don't want to sound like one of the lipless witchfinders who populate The Guardian's online comment site, but personally I blame The Guardian.

That newspaper has an impeccably liberal tradition of lecturing voters on their vulgar failings between elections before inching its slack, exfoliated buttocks onto the Fence Post of Indecision come polling day.

But the General Election of May 2010 was different. On 30 April the paper's editorial "enthusiastically" and at great length endorsed the Liberal Democrats under the banner "The Liberal Moment Has Come".

Foreign readers, most Britons and, as they realized with a corretto jolt on 10 May 2010, loyal Liberal Democrat voters, had no idea what this panto-horse party stands for.

The Liberal Democrats are like an episode of the moreish "X-Files" spin-off "The Lone Gunmen", but without the sexy lady. Imagine a windowless rabbit run filled with trolls, gabbling geeks who've never met a barber, and sad-eyed men with peppery beards, jackets made of car rugs and no friends, and you have a vision of the Lib-Dems' annual conference.

It is a grim statement about the Conservatives and Labour that literally millions of otherwise sane Britons prefer to vote for these Airfix models and "Internet researchers" than for the grown-up parties.

It is an even grimmer statement about The Guardian that it chose the 2010 election, the only one seriously flagged up to produce a hung parliament, to back these sagging wifeswappers as the Queen's Champions.

It is the grimmest statement of all that no one noticed the near-Ickean truth about the Liberal Democrats, namely that above the human spam of their membership there rules a caste of reptilian posh people. The Astors, Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe and Nick Clegg - they may have had their shortcomings, but their socks are clean and they've never had to buy a pair themselves.

Furthermore, a glance at the parliamentary constituencies the Lib-Dems represent - shrill suburbs, offal-mulching Celtic counties, Liverpool - would suggest that, manifesto pledges apart, they're not much bothered about people who enjoy ITV or work for a living in places without water-coolers.

It should not require excessive analysis to conclude that, given a choice between the cleft-scratching Labour frontbench and the languid Tories with their toothsome Mrs May, Mr Clegg would opt for people who don't buy their suits off costermongers.

The Tories and their Liberal Democrat appendix are like Stalin, but in a good way. Back in the 1930s Stalin decided that he wanted to make the Soviet Union a powerful force for wrong in the world, and that he would need flinty engineers, massive tanks, and strong-jawed men to fire both.

What he did not need was tens of thousands of wispy-bearded feuilletonistes in peasant smocks, lippy lorgnette-dipping bluestockings, bolshy trade unionists, pitchfork-wielding mobs, cleverclog Israelites, trainee Napoleons and people who had known him at the seminary.

The problem was that much of the Soviet Communist Party and ruling class was made up of precisely these groups. The ferocity of the purge in which they were subsequently purged was such that the word "purge" doesn't really convey it. Imagine pigbreathed men wandering blindfolded through the crowd at a Coldplay concert, swinging chainsaws, flamethrowers and yetis about in a random but deadly fashion, and you're getting close.

Those who survived were a red-eyed phalanx of psychos who snorted vodka, smoked trees, dammed rivers with human heads, played Poland like an accordion and parked their tanks on top of Hitler's house. Not pretty, but more effective at getting rid of Nazis than Futurist poetry, innovative camera techniques and endless speccy speeches.

On the other front of the class war, the Tories and Liberal Democrat leaders now face a similar problem. They ache to turn Britain into a country fit for Baroness Thatcher to die in, but have to overcome two groups - the core Liberal Democrat membership, and the people who voted for them in May 2010 after reading that Guardian editorial.

The methods at the disposal of Mssrs Cameron and Clegg lack Stalin's plebeian vigour and, thanks to Baroness Thatcher's economic policies, industrial machinery, but they found their way:

1. The slow, gleeful tearing up, non-acidic recyclable page by page, of the Liberal Democrat manifesto over the course of a whole year has deprived the most mole-like party activist and low-wattage Guardian reader of any grounds to believe that anything they think or do has any meaning.

2. The appointment to visible but powerless ministerial posts of preachy MPs from the Lib-Dems' ample, dun-clad array. Chris Huhne accepted the post of Secretary of State for the Environment, knowing full well that Tories think the environment is what they drive their Jags over at 120mph on the way home from regular acts of drunken indiscretion.

3. Giving a few competent Liberal Democrats impossible jobs like restraining the flashing blade of Chancellor George Osborne or deputising for men who would think nothing of cuckolding them and their sons-in-law, at the same time if possible.

But the estocada that felled the stumbling Lib-Dem oxen was the Alternative Vote campaign. This dispelled any doubts about their leaders' determination to slip the bonds of surly supporters and touch the sac of power.

1. Electoral-reform martyr Roy Jenkins himself described AV as "vile stuff, sort of thing they sell in boxes in supermarkets", and the Liberal Democrats' sole identifiable policy for 40 years has been to call for Proportional Representation, so this was bound to dismay the besandled masses.

2. The "face" of the campaign was comedian Eddie Izzard, whose previous achievements included promoting the euro, portraying a German, and speaking French in public. In particular, he looks better in a frock than most voters' wives. A poor choice to win over bluff patriots.

3. With Daily Mail and Telegraph readers it's best to say everything twice, so the campaign made sure AV was put to a referendum. Referenda are intrinsically European and suspect, being associated with Napoleon III (not even the proper Napoleon), Hitler, the Common Market and the Swiss.

4. What makes Britain worth living in, apart from Bettany Hughes, is that fabled sense of fair play. There's an altruism that neither state dependency nor Mrs Thatcher could banish, and when it looks at AV it sees benefits for one party alone - the dastardly Liberal Democrats. Pipes are tapped out and wirelesses retuned to the cricket.

5. Finally, the Celtic nations of Britain held elections about the same time under a form of real proportional representation. The referendum might as well have said "We Liberal Democrats think you English are dimmer than a Manxman. Would you like to keep us in power forever?"

A question remains as to why The Guardian decided to boost the Liberal Democrats at the 2010 election, leading as it did to a Conservative government, the comic emasculation of the Liberal Democrats themselves, and an end to hopes for proportional representation.

Readers of this web blog will be familiar with the long struggle of Wales to destroy anything that looks like giving England a break. So, were the Learned Elders of Capel Seion behind it?

As with "Operation Clark County", there is little evidence of Cambrian cupidity in this case. Instead I'm reminded of those cosy Catholic apologists who reach their mid-fifties and suddenly run off with the chambermaid. Glimpsing America surge past into the heroic age of Obama, The Guardian abruptly spat out the snaffle and raced for the finishing line, only to fall flat on its face. Both of them.

What next for the Liberal Democrats? Mr Clegg is a student of German politics, and hopes his frumpish footsoldiers will squelch off stage left to give Labour a hard time. This will allow him to fashion a British version of the Free Democrats - people with expensive cars and even dearer doctorates, undemanding constituents and the occasional foray into the Privy Council.

But we Welsh haven't finished with the Liberal Democrats yet. As I wrote back in October 2008:

"The Liberal Democrats have not been doing badly of late, but that's largely because we've transferred our Silurian attentions to the major parties. Watch out for adopted Welsh Lembit Öpik, though. He's bidding to be President of the party, and owes us one after the way he treated the lovely Siân Lloyd."

The Montgomeryshire Candidate need only relax with a game of Romanian strip poker for the Lib-Dems' true nightmare to begin. Not merely a nightmare, but a Nightmare of Horror.

Sous les pavés la peste

2011-05-05T09:47:00.007Z

A public address by Huw Samphan, Cymru Rouge shadow commissar of demographic realignment, on the occasion of the Welsh Assembly Elections:

Put her down and listen!

Today you, the people of Wales, and those English who've somehow evaded capture, will chose which mangy hyena hirelings will lick the suppurating sores of Anglo-Scotch Capital for the next four years in the Temple of Onan they call the co-called Welsh Assembly.

You, the militant Sons of Glyndŵrism, have as one bruised knuckle of vengeance awaited guidance from the Cymru Rouge about who or what to do.

Now. in keeping with our proud Maoist heritage, we tend totally and utterly to boycott elections on the following grounds:

1. Voting requires the rudiments of literacy, numeracy (Wales employs a form of proportional representation deemed too complex for the ruddy, roastbeef fingers of the English), and in some cases the donning of spectacles.

All of this runs counter to Cymru Rouge edjucation policy, founded as it is on the correct application of mattocks and child labourers' cheerily chanting narrow nationalist slogans in the cocklefields of Penclawdd.

2. Ballot forms are a precious waste of slate - the Grey Gold from which your hovels, furniture, contraceptive barriers and choicest garnishes are fashioned.

3. What with the global economic turndown, Y2K, the Millennium and the sheer expense of running Charlotte Church, Wales simply cannot afford to waste our limited supplies of air and gravity on public debate.

The resultant atmospheric imbalance might have a negative impact on Catherine Zeta Jones, our sole export earner and Execution Squad sweetheart.

4. Analysis by our Department for the Promotion of Harmony has revealed that many Assembly candidates espouse a range of non-Marxist and objectively anti-Welsh policies, including "healthcare", machinery, banking and sunshine.

Some recall how pseudo-Marxist Georgi Plekhanov criticised Lenin's farsighted policy of killing the few economically useful Russians with the scornful phrase "The worse it is, the better it is".

Recent research has suggested that Plekhanov was in fact commenting on Lenin's marriage to the ill-favoured Nadezhda Krupskaya. Nonetheless, we Rouges have decided that, in the specific instance of the Welsh Assembly, his advice is apposite.

The election of Labour, Plaid Cymru, Liberal Democrat and Conservative members can only serve to remind the boiling masses of the literal bankruptcy of representative democracy, incapable as it is of turning Wales into a net rice exporter and indifferent as it remains to the struggle of our Maoist comrades in India, Nepal and the student unions of former polytechnics in the London penumbra.

The Prif Sasiwn of the Cymru Rouge therefore endorses all parties standing in the Assembly elections, and urges the struggling workers, peasants, scarecrows and benefit champions to cast their vote for whichever candidate looks the least appealing.

Cymru Rouge cadres, of course, will be expected to maintain their corpse-like discipline and shun the ballot box. Instead we recommend the policy of Papist pedant and stationary Reichsheer target Charles Péguy, who once wrote that "Example is not simply a way of influencing others, it is the only way".

Cadres will position themselves outside polling stations, dressed in their best black pyjamas and red bandanas, and engage in wholesome Marxist-Glyndŵrist activities in order to show voters that there is another, more violent way. We recommend:

1. Reading aloud from the Red Book of Hergest and the Black Book of Carmarthen (but not the White Book of Eifionydd), to the accompaniment of small arms fire. NB the readings must be from memory, as books disempower our semi-literate constituency of Young Farmers, cider-swigging car thieves and Valleys opiate connoisseurs.

2. Socialist folk dancing. This requires a harp, 15 clogs and ill-fitting trousers. Displays of skill are to be judged fairly, and those found guilty will be transported to the Martyr Cerys Matthews Submarine Sports Facility off the coast of Holyhead.

3. Friendly fighting. In the days of the Princes, the Welsh resolved their disputes not by hustings and committees but by fraternal exchanges of blows - whether by sickle, tree or righteously-engorged glans. So step forward and help the misguided Dyfed-Powys Police overcome their false consciousness.

4. Drinking. Walking to and from polling stations, concentrating on what to mark with your green crayon, is an egregious bourgeois ploy to divert proletarians and collectivist artisans from the traditional brewing and consumption of nutty ale and fermented potato potations. Intersperse your shooting, brawling, yelling and cavorting with generous draughts from room-temperature cans of Wrexham Lager.

5. Above all, ensure that our are well-supplied with Cymru Rouge political pamphlets. Copies of the party anthem ("We are Rouge, We are Strong, Come Swing on This You Saxon"), the 2011 manifesto ("Schools into Silos, Saxons into Silage"), and the official programme ("Wales will be Free, from the Orkneys to the Lea!") are available from Gwasg Gwallgo on demand.

Any members of the public seen reading the printed material will of course be deported on grounds of spying or wanton display of intellectual curiosity - back to Wales, if necessary.

¡Ystalyfera siempre!

Cymru Rouge
Rhiwbeunos Aires

The Wales

The Ring of Hwyl

2011-05-02T08:11:00.005Z

A communication from the Cymru Rouge Department of Inter-Faith Dai-alogue and Forced Labour Camp Quotas:

The electricity-based mediums of the radio and television have announced the death of the al-Qaeda leader, prodigal plutocrat and Greenmantle Pimpernel, Osama Bin Laden.

We, the Cymru Rouge, rejoice in the death of pretty much anyone, but are also aware of allegations that this comprador clerical reactionary and occasional Guardian columnist was a Welsh.

As the auto-selected vanguard of the Welsh Senate and People, we have established a committee of eisteddfod adjudicators, Paris-edjucated intellectuals and shrieking, hemp-clad child soldiers to investigate the matter.

Here are our interim findings. In common with the Welsh people, Bin Laden:

1. Liked caves, and the things you find in caves.

2. Spoke poor English and less Welsh.

3. Passed for Pakistani in the eyes of the Pakistani and US military and the Cambridge Footlights casualties who lurk in the 6:30 pm weekday trainee-comedian slot on Radio 4.

4. Thought C60 cassettes were new-fangled, and never quite got the hang of video (pronounced "vie-joe").

5. Liked dressing up in white robes and prancing around hillsides.

6. Supported an English Premier League (Association) football team

This is more convincing evidence than most of the guilty face before their fair tribunal and execution at the Cymru Rouge people's sheepdog trials, but there is more.

We are ecumenical in accepting damning proof from all sources, and so gratefully acknowledge the help of the Bernsteinian ameliorationists of Welsh Labour in uncovering the following links between Osama Bin Laden and the poujadiste bourgeois nationalists of Plaid Cymru.

In common with Plaid Cymru, Bin Laden:

1. Did not like low-flying US aircraft.

2. Was suspicious of Nato, the European Union and Capitalism.

3. Curried the support of the powerful hill-farming lobby.

5. Wasn't keen on Israel.

6. Had links to organised crime families.

The Cymru Rouge Department for the Identification and Eradication of Religion has further noted that Bin Laden, like Welsh Baptists, seemed to enjoy public piety without heeding the basic message of their respective creeds' founders.

Furthermore, the Welsh appreciated the teetotal tedium of Methodism but found it lacking a certain edge, and so tempered it in the fires of Calvinism.

Likewise Bin Laden thought regular Saudi Islam deficient in finger-wagging threats of sky-sanctioned violence, concentrating its venom as it did on non-Muslims. His embrace of the Takfiri Option, which considers most other Muslims to be little better than Rabbi Julia Neuberger, has the authentic Revivalist ring of hwyl about it.

The Department for the Abolition of Elections therefore urges Cymru Rouge cadres to carry out searching altruistic criticism sessions of all political opponents until the usual suspicions are confirmed.

Please note that a professed love of folk music is almost certainly a cover for fanatical hatred of melody, harmony and correct tuning, especially if accompanied by beards.

Henffych!

Brawd Rhif Un - Paul Pot

Brawd Rhif Dau - Huw Samphan

Brawd Rhif Tri - Ta Mock Tudor

Brawd Rhif Ankh - Hwsni Mwbarac

The Longest Weekend

2011-04-20T03:31:00.015Z

Dear Mr Cameron,

I trust that this letter finds you and Mr Clegg in good health.

Mr Brown, your predecessor and a fellow Scotchman, albeit of the more common truculent variety, used to collect suggestions for national celebrations on the Downing St website.

We now appreciate that he ought to have been scolding bankers and pretending to admire Mr Obama instead of reading block-capital demands that he should resign in favour of various motoring correspondents.

Especially as his staff of grammar-school bullies rejected one of the few ideas that might have given the public a hearty dose of British spunk and rebuffed the Muslim Menace, namely my proposal for Fenella Fielding Day.

This Great Coalition of Yours has so far chosen to disregard our various Cymru Rouge offers of political footsie, and has not even had the nous to steal our cruel but fair policies. So perhaps the time has come to appeal to your unthinking conservatism.

Evelyn Waugh, the off-the-peg Papist with bespoke reactionary views, lamented that Tory governments never turn the clock back. Your readiness to anger your own Highland clansmen by literally turning the winter clock back encourages me to think that you might accept my proposal to drag Britain, pimp-rolling and glottalising, into the 1940s.

"Why the 1940s?" you drawl. I have carried out audience research among the usurers, recovering lepers and mad-haired women who constitute my Facebook followers, and they all agree that the 1940s made the best war films.

You and I know that the 1940s made the best war, while the films belong to later decades. But my Morlocks have a point. Britain's current economic, social and political conditions are moving steadily towards the 1937 indicators, and your Coalition echoes the lion-eats-lamb Biblical balance of Mr Baldwin's National Government. So the 1940s are indeed something to aspire to.

These Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers are a shower, although that's an improvement on their voters - who simply need a shower. You laugh. See? That's traditional 1940s humour, usually delivered before some Limehouse stage props by a man in a five-piece suit to an audience of pickpockets and costermongers. I think the Nation is ready.

I propose that the government reorganise public life along the lines of our best war films. I don't mean pacifist nonsense like either Paths or Tunes of Glory, but rather those evergreen paeans to Britons' licking Hitler and other undesirables through impromptu ingenuity, feudal fealty, speaking very fast and putting the Poles to good use.

I have in mind "Sink the Bismarck!", "Went the Day Well", "Mrs Miniver", "Ill Met By Moonlight", "Brief Encounter", "The Goose Steps Out", "In Which We Serve" and all those Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone.

British life will be based on the Kitchener morality, breakneck diction, blithe prejudices, smoking endurance records, eerie cuisine and occasional personal hygiene of these films.

The most important lesson, as ever, concerns class. Britain is a scarecrow sown from many cloths - the Harris tweed of Scotland, Irish lace, English houndstooth and Welsh stonewashed denim - and its seams can only run true if everyone knows which side to dress to.

War films reinforce the wholesome order reflected in your own Government, Mr Cameron, with their officer corps of effete English aristos, dour but dependable Scotch NCOs, brave, bantering cockney corporals, incoherent, expendable Welsh sappers, Irish fifth-columnists and fesity terriers with vaguely racialist names.

"But how will our more recent Muslim, Hindu, Afro-Caribbean, Roma and Geordie citizens fit in this cosy communal hierarchy?" you may ask, glancing nervously over your shoulder.

The question is appropriate. In the 1940s Britain hosted only two significant immigrant communities - the anti-fascist Italian miners of Wales and Scotland, and the German Jewish refugees of most public libraries in North London.

It was in some ways unfortunate that our chief antagonists in the 1939-1945 War were precisely Italy and Germany, as this meant that these noble, sad-eyed people with their waistcoats and drooping moustaches spent the war locked up on the Isle of Man with dozens of Mosleyite pederasts and, for all I know, Rudolf Hess.

As such they feature little in our war film catalogue, and provide far from reassuring role models for our bearded, multi-armed and roofless minorities.

The answer is thick-ankled Thatcherite laisser choisir, which lets our newer compatriots decide for themselves which silver-screen nationality to emulate.

Your Liberal Democrat colleagues' historic pandering to communal interests in local government will ensure that this process is not carried out in a messy personal manner, but rather through the agency of religious and gang leaders, whose ethnic and faith groups will convert en masse to Celtdom, Cocknicity or what have you.

The social workers and librarians who once voted Liberal Democrat find themselves politically and soon literally homeless. They will be given a stake in the Big Society by retraining our minorities in their ethnos of choice.

For example, if Sikhs decide to become Scotchmen they will need to acquire the keys to the Treasury and a mystifying sense of grievance. The newly-English Hindus will have to channel their energy into random football commentary and freestyle drinking, while the Welsh Gypsies will need watching very, very carefully.

Anyone wanting to be German will be taken aside for a quiet word, and the whole world eagerly awaits the advent of the Muslim Ulstermen.

Other aspects of our war-film culture will help to make Britain a breezier place:

Speaking very fast without opening your mouth much will confound the lip-readers of foreign intelligence services and reduce the amount of time needed for TV and radio broadcasts.

Double-fisted smoking and abstinence from central heating will save on NHS bills, while most medical treatments will be replaced by alcoholic GPs' bellowing "stuff and nonsense!", cross-country running for the highly-strung, and the application of wire wool and Dettol to persistent wounds.

Foreign policy will change little, amounting as it already does to sponging off the Americans, eyeing "Ivan" warily, alternately ignoring and shooting at Continentals, and pointless badgering about in the Near East.

There are many other benefits to the 1940s, such as a deluded optimism on the Left about their ability to make the world, and indeed Britain itself, a better place.

You, Mr Cameron, will be able to exploit this by welcoming the bluff fellows of the Labour Party into government as less annoying coalition partners, just like Mr Churchill did.

Labour will be buoyed by the belief that an electoral landslide is just around the corner. And the whole nation will enjoy watching the Liberals retreat to the Marches and Rievers where they belong, there to judge sheepdog trials and give Celtic drunks a party to play with.

Here's how!

Yours etc,

Huw Samphan, chief adjudicator (external affairs and fighting)
The Cymru Rouge

Salem's Knot

2011-04-12T09:10:00.008Z

Fifty years ago the All-Union League of Mad Scientists stuffed a peasant inside a giant ball-bearing and fired it at the Moon.

The sphere, equipped with a camera, tape recorder and vodka chiller, fell to Earth in a Urals corn field, thereby halving the Soviet Union's grain harvest for 1961.

Hunger was a price worth paying, however, as it showed the Americans that it was possible to steal German rocket technology without giving war criminals citizenship and vast amounts of loot.

The Glorious Soviet Union considered self-deprecation, self-doubt, The Self and indeed self- anything to be bourgeois deformations of the well-engineered soul, so mocking official bombast became an underground phenomenon.

You'd marvel at a Moscow metro station, only for some hornrimmed drip in Estonian denim to remark that "of course it was built by German prisoners-of-war" - a good decade before Stalin had finally made up his mind on the correct use of Krauts.

Even Yuri Gagarin fell foul of this corrosive carping. The potato-headed human projectile may have had his faults, but on balance he seemed a decent fellow who died young in pursuit of Socialist science and national defence.

Or rather in pursuit of Socialist skirt and unintentional defenestration, if you believe the Soviet rumour-processing plant, which held that he had plunged to his death from the window of a nurses' dormitory in Minsk while attempting the ambitious triple-daisy entry manoeuvre.

Disgraceful, but not as bad as the hilarity occasioned in unpatriotic, colour-coordinating quarters by the inclusion of Gagarin's overcoat in the permanent display at Moscow's Krasnaya Presnya Museum.

Rumour had it that he was also a flasher, adding up to a remarkable tally of parallel peccadilloes for one so young and high-profile.

Other attempts at character assassination showed the survival of snobbery under Socialism, as rotten liberals with fancy clocks in their Peredelkino summer houses claimed that Cosmonaut German Titov was passed over for the orbital honour because he was too classy and refined.

A simpler explanation, surely, is that the Politburo vetoed the poor lad because his first name was "German" and his surname sounded too much like that of the despised Yugoslav president and notorious Titoist, Josip Tito.

It would have been like the Americans ditching Neil Armstrong in favour of someone called Fidel Tojo, or Ho Chi Trudeau, entertaining though that would have been for the rest of us.

The Gagarin-as-flasher story extended to the alleged nixing of one planned statue to the little fellow in Omsk, the base of which was deemed to look too much like a dirty mac.

Now, the otherwise welcome abolition of religion had some unfortunate side effects on Soviet society. One was the sublimination of the urge to see Blessed Virgins in copses, Names of Allah in aubergines and Golems in Aunty Roza's kippering cupboard.

This manifested itself in fevered visions of The Other in the artistic rendering of garments.

(NB: "Fevered Visions of The Other in the Artistic Rendering of Garments" is the working title of my PhD thesis. So no filching, please. Moreover, "Fevered Visions of The Other in the Artful Rending of Garments" is an erotic novel I'm working on in case the PhD doesn't win me the Chair in Semiotics at Uppsala University that I crave. So no felching, please.)

One such vision plagued Vera Mukhina's monumental dual statue of Worker and Collective Farm Dollybird, which represented for Russia at the 1937 Paris Expo and has since served as a windbreak for tramps near the mystifying Soviet Economic Achievements theme park in Moscow.

It can be seen in all its twirling glory in the opening credits of all MosFilm studio productions:

This Art Deco Stalinist mash-up was examined, section after section, by assorted Torquemadas from the People's Commissariat of Public Occlusion before being put on public display, and all because of the rumoured outline of Trotsky's features in the peasant girl's impenetrable skirts.

Stalin himself paid the statue a midnight visit to ensure that no pedantic pince-nez peered back at him.

Soviet Russia was not alone in entertaining such Salem-lite antics. We in Wales never got over the loss of Catholicism, which satisfied our desire for subsidies from a world empire while accommodating our fondness for setting fire to things we don't like.

The cattle-grid collision of Calvinism and Methodism that makes up our national religion is firmly against everything, even displays of piety, so our unquenchable Celtic exhibitionism and love of lying must out once in a while.

This makes Wales a favourite location for the haunted-toolshed reality TV programmes that fill non-BBC channels, on my television at least. It also accounts for sightings of Old Nick in the folds of the Welsh lady's shawl in Curnow Vosper's painting "Salem" at the top of this page.

All clerics are by definition deluded, but there's nothing like the temptation of turning some prodigals to drive them into the depths of Dunce. The dialogues between eager Catholic modernists and patient, predatory Marxists in the 1960s make diverting reading for the armchair sadist, especially as both have since shrivelled in the searing light of bigotry.

But what if the Soviet Union had taken the gaitered bait and raised the chalice of Orthodox Christianity to the parched lip-service it paid to social justice? The cult of the embalmed miracle-worker Lenin had already paved the Via Ponderosa to such a grisly Hegelian synthesis of unreason.

Osip Mandelstam, Soviet poet and imperial pain in the arse, once wrote that only in Russia is poetry respected, as only there does it get poets killed. Perhaps that is because Stalin, the ex-seminarian and ultimate autodidact, worshipped classical literature and deemed Modernist movements like Mandelstam's Acmeism to be little less than heresy.

We owe a greater debt than ever to the bucketheaded Nikita Khrushchev, who announced that there was no God because Gagarin had seen no trace of Him in the Heavens. St Yuri might otherwise have touched the Countenance Divine and returned to endow the Soviet cause with Holy Sanction.

The Politsynod, having later canonised Martyr Yuri Gagarin, would have given the imprimatur of both faith and science to reports of his beery features beaming out of beetroots from Bryansk to Borodino. Modernism, not liberalism, would have been anathema, and only the truly devoted would have risked an auto-da-fé for the sake of a few laughs.

There would be enough strips found of Gagarin's overcoat to rival the fragments of the Holy Cross and the wandering limbs of the Caliph Ali. Woven together in a mighty banner, perhaps by the Ust'-Kamenogorsk Experimental Textile Plant, they would have been borne by the conquering armies and fleet of the Third Rome across Europe and into the mouth of the Thames.

Perhaps interpretation of Lenin would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumscribed people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Marx.

As if.

Exile on Friar St.

2011-04-01T08:27:00.008Z

As a feminist, I've no time for practical jokers. Messing with a chap's mind is what women are for.

I don't like to generalise, but pranksters are all social inadequates. When not humiliating pensioners or decent, upstanding purchasers of pornography, they "research" serial killers or nod slowly as they read UKIP election pamphlets. I've dismissed them in a previous post.

I enjoy spontaneous fun at other people's expense, but distrust these failed, bearded minor public school bullies. Humour, like sudden wealth, should be effortless and leave the innocent unharmed.

I once skewered that Golden Section while lunching down the Tethered Goat many years ago. The third pint of Champion's Speckled Johnson was in prospect as a work colleague stomped in and stumped up.

"Cheers," I greeted him.

"Bloody Keith!" he snapped through a head of hoppy spume.

He referred to another colleague and quintessential English type - the Gentleman of Science. I wrote recently against the English cult of DIY, and Keith represented the Fellowship of the Computer Tinkerer.

Our company was run by alumni of Leeds University English Dept thanks to the sort of conspiracy that would keep Independent letter writers busy for a summer. They had to put someone in charge of adapting software to our recondite needs. They could of course have hired an IT specialist.

On the other hand, there was a genial, muttering sort somewhere in the editorial team who could be seen playing steering-wheels with a copy of Home Computer down by the ornamental pond.

"Fetch Keith!" commanded The Director.

On the plus side, we saved money and didn't have to tolerate some t-shirted tubster droning on about rams and other such computer nonsense. On the down side we had to use Keith's macros.

Keith's oblique approach to streamlining the business involved the keyboard equivalent of the Monty Python title sequence, complete with brass band effects. I ought to mention that Keith, when not destroying our ability to type peace unto nation, played one of the ugly duckling instruments in a wind band.

Trumpets and cornets are noble instruments, and what lady can resist the virile lunge of the trombone? But Keith parped and trilled away on a piece of plumbing that looked as if it had been designed to gather rain water in an Edwardian garden.

Anyway, my lunchtime partner had just spent an hour with other monitor martyrs watching Keith chuckle at crabbed glyphs on a white board while their fingers fused over his suggested strokes.

"Useless, cardie-clad cockring!" grunted my neighbour, who went on to describe how Keith's preferred musical instrument could best be uncoiled and used on its owner, first as a marital aid and then as a stake.

Then I had an epiphany. "Hidden depths has old Keith, y'know," I drawled.

"Oh?"

"Yup. He was in the Rolling Stones."

"-?!"

"Well, the band before they became the Stones. They were a skiffle outfit then, with the late, great Deryck Guyler on washboard. Keith played his euphoricum. Those were the glory days, when the skirl of skiffle stirred the air waves. Lonnie Donegan had made 'The Cumberland Gap' an anthem for groomed youth and not just an euphemism for Egyptian practices.

"There was nothing to hold Keith back. A US tour beckoned, with the promise of the Appalachian high life and all the snaggle-toothed groupies you could twang your banjo at.

"But it was not to be. The rest of the band had decided to rip off the blues, and besides there were more than creative tensions - Keith Richard didn't like the fact that our hero, being a Reading boy, was a little too close to Marianne Faithfull.

"''Ere, there's ownly room for one Keef in this band, ow right!' declared Jagger one turbid autumn day, and our lad packed his duffel bag and hitched back up the Thames.

"He doesn't talk about it, but that random-haired wreck has a nobility others can only dream of - for he stepped aside from the life and the woman he loved to make way for History."

"What about Deryck Guyler?" asked my chastened audience.

"The blues thing was his idea, I gather. The skiffle crowd never forgave him, like when Dylan went electric. Stones soon dropped him too, as he never managed the switch from washboard to drumkit. Ended up being a comedy turn on the telly. Cruel but fair, I'd say. Another?"

Shortly afterwards I fell out with elements of the Chechen separatist government and Armenian secret service, so chose to spend a few years sampling the assisted baths of Samarkand.

I found my eventual return to work a little trying, and wandered down The Goat again for a late-morning restorative. One bar prop was hissing abuse at his lager.

"Anything wrong?" I inquired.

"Bloody Keith and his Macro Magic Show! An hour watching him hitch up his Millets jeans and point at what looks like Japanese sewing-machine instructions while my monitor melts down! Monkey plunger!"

"Not changed then, has he?" I sighed.

"Too right. Mind you, I heard he was in the Rolling Stones once. What do you reckon?" asked the imbiber.

"Keith? Well, he's musical all right, and grew up in Reading the same time as Marianne Faithfull. Still waters, eh?" I returned to my pint.

Keith got the respect he was due, impatient youth learned wisdom, and I had the pleasure of seeing the seed I'd sown years ago sprout and soar into the skies above Serendip.

A legend was born.

As for the Skiffling Stones, there's a clip of Maestro Guyler with Eric & Ernie below, at 7'30". What might have been:

One Day in the Life of Isaac Danilovich

2011-03-25T10:51:00.006Z

Nothing rounds off an afternoon stroll along Odessa's coastal path than early supper at Dacha.

This restaurant is set in a country house generously bequeathed to whoever was passing at the time by its owner, the cautious Mr Peretz, who decided not to give Soviet power the benefit of the doubt and fled to France in a flurry of fur coats and floozies in 1919.

Dacha offers a zesty selection of soups, savouries, sweets and, of course, sinus-snapping spirits. I can recommend the okroshka, salo, kambala, Chernihiv unfiltered beer and horse-radish horilka.

The last of these prompts a fecund stirring of the loins and a variety of unusual admissions at Accident & Emergency unless congress is achieved within two hours of consumption - not usually a problem in Slack-Drawered Odessa.

Madame Boyo and I were relaxing at a garden table, after an arduous afternoon on the Otrada beach, when a neo-Chekhovian tableau commenced nearby.

An Odessite businessman in his mid-50s - let us call him Isaac Danilovich - trailed into the garden behind his overstuffed wife and 20-something daughter. Isaac is typical of a certain type of entrepreneur in the eastern Slavosphere:

Not venal, but has plenty of venal people on his speed-dial;
Uxurious, even though he could have traded in his wife for a waxed blonde shop-hopper long ago; and
Drinks with his partners and rivals, but didn't make his millions by being mashed on monkey juice half the day.

So an afternoon en famille at Dacha would have been a pleasant break from wheeling deals, but Isaac looked troubled. Jowls and the corners of various features all drooped towards his tasselled loafers. Then I saw why.

One of the many horrors that Soviet Communism spared its ranks of soldiers, peasants and grade three meat-processing-plant operatives was interior designers.

Dizainer, by contrast, was a familiar Jewish surname in Odessa. A perestroika joke goes that a new-breed interior designer hired to wreck some poor sap's flat turned up at the wrong address.

"Hello, I'm a designer," said the prominently Hebrew young professional.

"Well, I can see you're not an Ivanov!" grunted the vest-clad tenant as he slammed the door.

Back at Dacha, Madame Boyo and I beheld the bane of Danilovich. Blonde hair tugged into a brisk ponytail, yoghurt-nourished curves crammed into a grey two-piece and kitten heels, Masha the Interior Designer bore down on Issac's table, brandishing her laptop like a shield before her businesslike bosom.

After a few perky greetings she perched on a chair to the left and ordered still mineral water without ice. Daughter and Mrs Danilovich were arrayed to the right, with Mr D arraigned between them.

Masha unfurled the laptop, fanned out some brochures and began bobbing her ponytail in time with mother and daughter as they pored over her plans. Danilich, to use the familiar contraction, briefly caught my eye. "Help me!" blinked his haggard orbs.

For a moment I considered a discreet flick of forefinger to throat, the wordless Soviet invitiation to share a half-litre of red-eye behind a missile silo. He would have muttered an excuse and caught up with me among the silver birches to swig and forget in the silent brotherhood of the bottle.

Instead I raised my litre of Chernihiv Unfiltered and nodded with a wink towards Mrs Boyo, a woman whose idea of interior décor goes no further than the steel bookshelves and noticeboards of the drill hall where she was born. Uncle, you're on your own.

The next half hour saw Danilich lurch through the Four Stages of Life.

Of all the great religions, Hinduism has most acutely pondered the pointlessness of human endeavour. Buddhism usually earns that accolade, but rather embraces failure with Schopenhauerian smugness.

Hindus, on the other seven hands, regard our futile footling with Himalayan dispassion, and seek diversion in acrobatic erotica and a pantheon that could pass an East Enders audition. And, like true country types, they've worked out that cows are best left alone.

Your Hindu divides our trudge to the municipal boneyard into four allotments of increasing disappointment, and poor Isaac Danilovich slouched sulphurous through the whole tetralogy before our blinking eyes.

1. Brahmacharya: The stage when a young man learns from his elders under conditions of celibacy.

Isaac Danilovich had turned up to lunch with the intention of taking this vow, with fingers subtly crossed, having calculated that feigned interest in plaster niches and pre-aged parquet might earn him a reprieve from whatever other improving ideas his womenfolk had in mind - banning handguns from the banya, for example.

So he bowed gravely before the queasy neon of the laptop, wherein his hunting lodge was shrouded in the chandeliers and drapes of a Syrian soap-opera drawing room decorated by the last remaining Situationist.

This lasted about five minutes. A getter-up and goer, Danilich couldn't fake enthusiasm for dadoes, corniches and pergolas any more than the average husband. Before long he leaned back and pretended to read important text messages on his mobile. His wife and daughter drew closer as he moved out into the lower orbit of irrelevance.

2. Griastha: The mature stage of life in which you settle down and devote yourself to family matters.

Danilich needed to wrest control of his precarious patrimony before Masha turned his smoking terrace into a magnolia "break-out area". He began to make helpful suggestions like some domestic Schindler, desperately seeking to save a few mammoth trophies and billiard tables from the encroaching cream emulsion.

Too late. The daughter, who hadn't studied Social Technology at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy for nothing, gently batted them aside while Mother patted his hand. Masha smiled indulgently, then continued her breathless exposition.

One aspect of Griastha is Kama, or sensual gratification. Isaac Danilovich now had recourse to this by idly assessing Masha's public assets. "If I make her my mistress and buy her a flat on Richelieu Street, perhaps she'll leave my house alone," he mused.

3. Vanaprastha: The gradual abdication of wordly desire, often accompanied by a retreat from town to country.

Danilich understood that an affair with Masha, while entirely possible and, in many Ukrainian situations, almost unavoidable, would only burden his soul while not necessarily sparing his estate. The daughter would find another designer, and he'd have to spend late afternooons staring at Masha's stretched ceiling with a mouthful of Spanish fly and the sound of snapping garters in his ears.

He moved his chair back to "take a call" and the hitherto emollient Mrs Danilovich slid her seat sideways into the space, all the better to peer over her fleshy Tartar cheekbones at some new albumen abomination in glass brickwork.

Slowly, steadily, Isaac Danilovich was being eased beyond the familial Van Allen Belt into the harsh solar winds of woe.

4. Sannyasa: The final withdrawal from a world full of weeping into the contemplation of the Eternal.

The Sannyasin, legally dead, must have provided for his family before being allowed to renounce them, and this Danilich had clearly done. But some Hindu sages insist that Sannyasa is permitted only to those who have sired a son, and this clearly troubled Isaac.

A son - Boris! - would have ridden to his rescue in a pimped convertible; open-shirted, Aviator-shaded and slightly bandy from polo and penicillin. The finest waitresses would have fed them cognac and caviar canapés from their cleavages while the chef coshed and grilled all passing livestock at their table.

Masha, whom Boris would have mounted at some point before dessert, would eagerly agree that a 15ft HD wall-mounted television with extendable cocktail cabinet/barbecue is what every modern bedroom needs.

This phantom progeny seemed to urge Isaac on to an uprising against the carmine-lipped camarilla. He grabbed the laptop and jabbed at various offending features, muttering urgent pleas for domestic give-and-take. The Daughter eased the monitor from his clammy grasp.

Mother replaced his chair a good yard away and poured his first tumbler of vodka. Isaac Danilovich lit a Cohiba of consolation. It was all over. He'd take the yacht down to Varna for the summer, in sure and blissful hopelessness about the state of Villa Danilich on his return. Perhaps they'd leave him his shed.

Shanty, shanty, shanty.

Gumboot Diplomacy

2011-03-09T08:20:00.004Z

The English language revels in its irregular verbs:

I'm a traveller, you're a tourist, he's EasyJet ballast;
I appreciate erotica, you watch porn, she's a former Home Secretary;

That sort of thing. One verb to savour is "I work abroad, you've gone native, he's an expat".

The British abroad are a queasy seesaw of expat and diplomat. Expats, whether metro journalist or furrowed accountant, all decompose into a septic tank of drunken suburban prejudice and low-wattage adultery.

British diplomats, whether baronets or bursary boys, rise into a Zen stratosphere of airless detachment from the life of others.

The recent turmoil in Libya has provided virtuoso displays of both. Take the expat who complained to the BBC that African migrant workers were slicking Tripoli airport with their tears when they didn't even have passports and his kitchen still needed mopping. He was grateful to Col Gaddafi's toughs for clearing his path to duty-free. Classy.

As for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, it never lets us Schadenfreunde down. Making expats show a bit of leg to every passing troop-carrier was a true crowd-pleaser. But nothing prepared even the most jaded observer for their decision to drop Terry-Thomas and The Professionals, unannounced, by helicopter into territory where the noble, trigger-happy rebels were preparing to repulse Gaddafi's air attacks.

If you ever wonder why a country like Britain maintains such an extensive diplomatic corps, there is your answer. It takes teams of tombstone-toothed tools in dandruffed suits to come up with ideas that even SOE would have rejected during the invasion of Crete, and all to maintain Britain's international reputation for endearing if sometimes deadly eccentricity.

There were many joys to life as a foreign student in the Glorious Soviet Union, but chief among them was the realisation that the entire country was run on an operational basis by drunks.

I have written about this in detail, but one aspect I failed to mention was the pleasure derived from encounters between truculent Russian drunks (Russ: пьяный мужик) and middle-class Englishmen with a misplaced sense of entitlement (Lat: vagina correcta).

In those days the British Embassy in Moscow was a Tangiers of pinstriped stupidity, where stammering consuls rubbed bulbous Adam's apples with Magdalene M.Phil.s, all in pursuit of a tennis court. An hour sat in the lobby was the best recruiting sergeant the Communist Party (Hairy-Arsed Pickaxe Faction) could have imagined.

I heard some choice tales of buffoonery over those months. A Thatcher-era cabinet minister arrived at midnight in a midwinter city somewhere beyond the Urals to attend an international beetroot symposium. He was denied access to his hotel by the usual gnarled war veteran who'd leafed through the Wehrmacht etiquette book before bayoneting its owner with a frozen wolf.

"I'm a government minister, from Britain!" the hireling of capital had wailed. "Britain? Never heard of it!" snapped ex-Gunner Yebalkin before slamming the door and returning to his bucket of vodka.

From that day on, an embassy flunkey had to fly ahead and occupy the hotel room until the visiting duffer du jour had arrived.

My own experience of a winoes vs whiners bout was less epic in scale but all the more satisfying for the small part I played on the side of the workers, peasants and revolutionary soldiery.

I had arrived back in Moscow after a pleasant fortnight delousing in London. The flight, bound for Tokyo, stopped off at Sheremetyevo Airport in the early hours, catching the aerial portal to the Soviet Union at its sepulchral best.

Sheremetyevo by day was a Führerbunker that the Reich had never got round to burying, full of cardboard uniforms, fizzing electrical circuits and huddles of leprous men in leather caps and piss-stained brown trousers.

But by night it became Czarina Anna's ice palace. Corridors of gleaming marble glided into distant darkness. The chill silence was disturbed only by the drip-drip of thawing sentries. Every surface glowed in gentle lemon neon.

Into this vacuum-cleaner's Valhalla stepped myself, half-a-dozen other slackers, and a middle-aged couple flanked by invisible barriers of disdain. He was well-tailored, lightly tanned and severely side-parted. She was brittle, like thin ice rather than cut crystal. They looked around in mild distraction.

"Passport control's over there," I offered with the random amiability that steady ingestion of advocaat can bring.

"Not for us, actually," she snapped.

They made off for the Diplomatic Channel, which differed from the workers, peasants etc line only in being unstaffed.

There they stood as we brave few shuffled past the KGB blonde.
Still they stood as we picked up our bags.
Stood they yet as, having explained the use and abuse of garter belts to a bumpkin customs officer, we strode out into Socialist Paradise and followed the aroma of meths and exploding cigarettes to the taxi rank.

I loitered a little, being something of a théâtromane, to see what happened to the Rattigan Couple. The customs officer wandered over to them and gesticulated towards the KGB gorgon.

"We're British diplomats, actually," hissed the wife in an accent that spoke of shabby boarding schools, secretarial courses and matrimonial miscalculation. Her husband looked as if he'd just had his colon sandpapered.

"Go there!" barked the Shield of the Revolution. A drunk bloke had meanwhile appeared from behind a rubber flap and started hauling their bags away in a most undiplomatic manner.

"No!" squeaked Mrs Actually, clattering across the hall and straight into the rough embrace of Corporal Mordaboyko, who pointed her back to passport control.

As she trudged the ten yards of defeat, I quietly whistled the Laurel & Hardy tune. I repeated the performance after they had both submitted their passports to the blonde. Her arch comment "But these are diplomatic passports!" broke the language barrier effortlessly before she waved them through with a flick of her Kalashnikov-stripping wrist.

While my betters waited to have their passports bent out of shape, I'd busied myself with finding a taxi. There was only one driver left, and I managed to haggle him down with the inducement of the British Airways in-flight magazine, which happened to feature an underdressed actress on the cover. "English gentleman's journal, most depraved," I urged.

The Actuallies limped out onto the freezing concourse just as the driver dropped my duffel bag in the boot. "Taxi!" ventured the Second Secretary, whose official car must have displayed an impeccable sense of British justice by not turning up.

"Yes, I know," I waved cheerily as I settled into the passenger seat of the sole mobile vehicle in a 2km radius. They were still standing there as we vanished between the silver birches, bound for the bright lights and dark pleasures of Boris Galushkin Street.

Dark Side of the Rainbow

2011-03-03T09:20:00.004Z

Once in a while lakes in Africa turn themselves over, releasing noxious vapours that kill all life on the shore and turn the countryside into something out of Poe.

Once in a while employers in Britain turn their staff over by getting them to reapply for their jobs, releasing noxious employees into the environment and turning the local Labour Exchange into a Cliff Richard film scripted by Kafka.

I was near alone one evening with such a colleague as he wove his way through the re-application form.

"It's just like the script for an interview, but without the interviewer," he muttered.

"So, in order to get the psychological advantage, does that mean you have to imagine yourself naked while filling it in?" I asked.

"I always imagine myself naked," he added.

Beyond the frosted window something stirred in a distant lake.

Klootzak Nation

2011-02-25T17:28:00.005Z

Some time ago I found myself sitting opposite an old college lady-friend on a train. She asked me what I'd been up to since being drummed out of Wales. I outlined my career as media mercenary, following walk-ons in showbiz raiding parties and the ironic smuggling of non-contraband goods.

"And what about you?" I concluded in my best Prince Charles manner.

"I'm a dominatrix," she replied with the best smug-plug since a Belarussian mother-in-law told me she'd danced with the Tsar.

Channeling pure heir-du-trône, I ventured "How interesting, and what does that entail?"

"I kick middle managers in the pods with my Christian Louboutin slapper wellies for 200 quid an hour, and don't even have to listen to them complain about their wives."

She belonged to the dumpy, frumpy and grumpy category of Metroland gals - second daughters who end up as council leaders' PAs - so it was good to see her penetrating a profession that I lazily associated with angular Germans and Oriental ladies in catsuits.

It also explained what you do with an lower-second degree in geography.

"What about Repetitive Strain Injury?" I inquired.

"You bet they have!" she beamed.

"I meant you."

"Nah, I swap legs. It's quite aerobic."

Not sure what knackersmacking had to do with yoghurt, I asked whether she varied it with other forms of violent perversion. She provided a list of alarming gerunds, all of which seemed to involve applying kitchen implements, manual or electrical, to her client's danglers.

By now we had the carriage to ourselves, so she elaborated on her favourite practices.

"People talk about BDSM, but there's a world of difference between S&M aficionados and the adepts of bondage. I much prefer the former. They are usually well-born, bohemian or members of the higher professions, and mess not about.

"'Good afternoon, Mistress Cadwaladr! After my opaque summation, the jury will be out for at least two hours. Kindly belabour my buttocks with whatever pieces of Javanese furniture you might have to hand, then disparage me in your choicest fishwife demotic.' And then off they go, happy as hogs.

"Bondage bores are another matter. Teachers, social workers and reformed clerics in the main, they sport facial hair, broadsheet newspapers and inky little diagrams of precisely how they want to be suspended from my rafters.

"They insist on using Japanese technical terms, which they mispronounce, and once they're up there all you get it 'Ooh, mistress, if you don't mind, I think the 股縄 may be slipping out of the 海老責め! Could you twist it up a notch?'

"Then they hang around for ages doing nothing, just moaning loud enough to drown out my iPod. And once it's all over they email me 'feedback' on the session. Needledicks!"

I don't think Lord Tebbit himself could have coined a pithier metaphor for the public sector.

The Boy Scout devotion to knots shown by Mistress C's trussing companions confirmed my conviction that DIY is the true vice anglais. It poisons the whole of English life, from Fred West and his patio tombs to Mr Cameron's Big Society, via the have-a-go-hero on his way to Casualty in two separate ambulances.

And this taint spreads from the lower-middle classes:

Aristocrats wear ancient clothes and drive decrepit jalopies around decayed estates, heralded by explosive plumbing and overcooked food.
Working people make things for sale in the marketplace, and undergo years of training in the correct use of tools.
Professional types hire artisans from a guild of nations to primp their pergolas, appease their boilers and entertain their children.

Only the petite bourgeoisie tamper with motor engines, venture into drains, wrong-end soldering irons and lose rabbits in ersatz top hats before rooms of tearful tots.

On a global scale I'd hitherto always associated the Japanese with the Scots:

They like tartan, whisky, golf and rewriting history;
They owe everything to their mighty neighbours, and never show the slightest gratitude;
They've more than their fair share of islands; and
Their cooks do frightful things with fish.

But, on reflection, perhaps the true kinsmen of the Japanese are the English:

They share a belligerent attitude to their continental cousins;
Their simple language is let down by an absurd writing system;
Their closest former colonies - Ireland and Korea - are sods of incomprehensible souses split into an eccentric south and truculent north; and
They like naval fleets, public drunkenness and below-par royalty, whom they invest with religious significance.

The Japanese also mirror the English class system, and I bet their salarymen like being mortally coiled too.

There are vital differences, of course. Japanese cars work, and the country has no equivalent of the Welsh. The Hairy Ainu match most of the roles performed by the Scots, although the Japanese are careful never to let them rule the country.

But the most common weal of England and Japan is decline. While we dismantle the Welfare State, Japan slips behind China among the mercantile nations.

Perhaps the road to recovery lies in abandoning the cult of DIY. I assume the Japanese are prey to this too, given the prevalence of paper houses in their rice-bound realm.

Aspirants to public office could be asked what, in their view, is the correct use of hemp. If they reply that it involves enhanced smoking, they may proceed.

If they mumble something about resentful redbrick lady graduates brandishing the I-Spy Book of Knots, the Switchfinder-General should do everyone a favour and belt them up.

Night Coracle to Cairo

2011-02-09T12:34:00.009Z

I pay the BBC licence fee so that I don't have to waste time listening to opinions on other wirelesses, so when a chap called Leyne assured me that both the argy and the bargy in Tunisia would go no further I was happy to switch back to the Third Programme for some soothing Xenakis.

I was not pleased to wake up two week later to discover the Copts, Ankhs and other denizens of Durrell's feverish novels getting their Hannibal on in the teeming streets of Egypt.

"What's wrong with you? Arabs have the right to elect useless sods instead of just inheriting them, as you pointed out in your last post!" a reader might rile.

Indeed, and I like everyone else totally and utterly support the revolting Egyptians in all ways but the ones that might do them some good. The cause of my chagrin is, as ever, purely personal and national:

"So, you Welshes have screwed up another perfectly decent holiday resort. Thanks a lot, I was looking forward to a spot of shark-punching down Sharm el-Sheikh, now I'll be lucky to get a week in a bucket dangling from a Somerset gibbet."

Yes, the conspiracy theorists who are my colleagues have worked it out. The cause of Mr Mubarak's downfall is once again The Welsh Connection.

When the moderate, non-violent Islamic Jihad gunned down President Anwar Sadat at a military parade in 1981, BBC Wales's flagship news pit-pony "Wales Today" was quick to spot that the new president had a Welsh wife, Suzanne.

Wales was a land of austerity in the early 1980s, and even news was scarce. As a result, smouldering Gail Foley, random sports bloke David Parry-Jones and the other news colossi of "Wales Today" spent much of their time finding Welsh angles to other countries' stories in order to pad out a bulletin otherwise devoted to rugby disasters, werewolves, and firemen shrugging in front of charred holiday cottages.

A particular low point was the Jeremy Thorpe trial. This tale of former Liberal leaders, by-the-hour inversion, velvet collars, Great Danes and, for reasons that escape me, former King Constantine of the Hellenes attempted to grip a nation already being thoroughly gripped by the newly-elected steel claws of Lady Thatcher.

It received lavish daily coverage on the BBC national news, and Welsh viewers had to sit through it all again on "Wales Today" just because the caddish Mr Thorpe's co-defendants were a spit-roast of Welsh businessmen.

The Mubarak succession was a gift to "Wales Today". They yanked a cub reporter off his permament pitch outside a rainy steelworks, gave him a Fodor guide to Luxor and the bus fare to the Mubarak in-laws' council house in Pontypridd.

What reporters are meant to do in such circumstances is ask about Mrs Mubarak's early life, her forgetting the words of "Y Wiwer" at the school eisteddfod, and other things they might know about, not demand instant analysis of the Middle East like some Radio 4 harridan.

The Ponty Mubaraks, like most of the Welsh population, conversed by constantly rearranging the words "Duw", "fuck" and "aye" in overlapping patterns like an early Steve Reich piece, so the ensuing doorstep interview was a masterclass in the clueless leading the scabrous:

[Shiny reporter] "Do you think your relative Mr Mubarak will be a stronger leader than the dead Mr Sadat is?"

[Unshaven man in vest] "Well, he won't let hisself gets killed so easy though but and."

It didn't get any better, as question after leading question produced ever-more baffled responses from a group of people who, come to think of it, were quite possibly not even related to Mrs Mubarak at all. It's not an uncommon name along the Rhondda Riviera.

I like to think Suzanne's ghastly relatives all descended on Cairo in 1981, like secretaries on a cake trolley, in pursuit of cockle concessions and anything they could carry off.

The Egyptians are used to being ruled by other people - Hyskos, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Albanians, the English, Israelis (parts only), and giant Sun-rolling beetles if you go back far enough - so Welsh administration was likely to be relatively benign.

After all, we Welsh have long-cherished fictional links with the Ancient Egyptian people, largely thanks to Prof Sir John Morris-Jones's article "Pre-Aryan Syntax in Insular Celtic" - an ambitious attempt to bypass England via a Welsh-Berber linguistic bridge across the Bay of Biscay, unfortunately based on occult loon Prof Wallis Budge's ouija-board guesswork about Ancient Egyptian grammar.

But enough is enough, or "Kifaya!" as they say in Ponty. Seething increased in recent months when it became clear that Mubarak intended to transfer power to his idiot son Goronwy (known as "Gamal" in Egypt, owing to the absence of typically Welsh sounds and animal shapes in hieroglyphics).

But the final straw in the brick of Nilotic anger was the news that the Mubarak clan had handed over maintenance of the pyramids to some Welsh cowboys.

The prospect of these tombs emerging from the Griffiths Bros, Builders & Decorators tarpaulin either studded with pebbledash and satellite dishes or brownly glossed into a Toblerone theme park (children and Free Wales Army veterans, half-price), was too much for the Coptic back to bear, and so another country collapses into Cambrian-created chaos.

Borges once wrote a story in which Thoth, the baboon lord of the Nile, joins other ancient deities in an attempted coup against The Academy. But he, like his fellow putschists, can no longer speak, only howl like a beast.

We Welsh may not be much more articulate, so I'd give it a couple of weeks before sending a camera crew back to Pontypridd to ask the newly-arrived Mubaraks how they like the view.

Carthenogenesis

2011-01-23T20:02:00.006Z

There are good reasons for many people to applaud recent events in Tunisia, a country I'd hitherto thought was no more than a bebop reference:

- The Tunisians have a chance to enjoy their own beaches as mottled Brits flee to Gatwick;

- Leila Trabelsi, the rather fetching former First Lady, will soon tire of Saudi après-ski and relaunch herself onto the international jet trash circuit; and

- Channel 4 News can give unthinking credibility to a whole new phalanx of clerical fascists.

But the happiest desert campers are we brave web bloggers, for one of our one has been thrust from his encrusted bedroom blinking before the twin beams of government.

Slim Amamou used to have mad hair prior to his prison crop, a novelty pipe, excellent name and retro specs. He looked like a Karl Radek tribute act, and now, courtesy of the Tunis Department of Corrections, could pass for a French rapper or London barista. Instead, he's decided to become his country's secretary of state for youth and sport.

Now, cynics among you will rightly dub this portfolio the externally-genitalled equivalent of the Ministry of Children and Tiny Cakes. This is nonetheless a major step forward for the Near and Middle East, where power usually rests with courtesy colonels, delusional god-naggers, demented faux-nomads, retired bouncers and someone else's relatives.

I wish Slim well in persuading young North African men to take an interest in sport, and draw from his success the conclusion that the Bloggers' Time Has Come. From Lake Vyrnwy to the Finland Station, we must set aside our coffee mugs, ironic t-shirts and imaginary girlfriends, and Prepare for Government.

For too long has This Glorious Coalition of Ours ignored my overtures, and I can see why. Unlike the sleek Mr Cameron, I have sacrificed grandeur of gesture on the altar of detailed policy. No more. The Cymru Rouge will shortly dispatch a passenger pigeon to That London with but one word inscribed on its entrails - "Because".

We were sipping lunch in The Tethered Goat the other day. The Dog, stunned by the government's announcement that he had to eat eight "potions" of fruit and veg a day, was struggling to name as many after Dazza had pointed out that "rhubobs" are technically stalks, "just like Daleks' eyes".

Into this bucolic symposium the K Man injected a note of woe. He'd returned from some sort of Approved School reunion, where a young lady of his distant acquaintance, whom he dubbed "bowsome an' sonsie an' bricht", had taken up with a "toaley-heided bampot" on whom the K "wuildnae pish in Knox's fumous fornace".

The K Man's dilemma was how to raise the veil from her delightfully bossed eyes without driving her deeper into the "bawheid's" embrace. "You'd think the government could do something about such manifest injustice," he opined "but as your legal adviser I can tell you there's no provision for separating a beeheidit lassie from a gomerel".

It suddenly came to me. "How about a Law for the Prevention of Unforeseeable Disagreeableness?" I began. "We could call it 'Tam's Law'" - for such was the unsuitable suitor's name.

I explained the workings of my bill. "I gather than any normal person who meets Tam immediately files him under 'Arse: pain, in the', correct? So we lock him up, or whatever, and when Liberty and other human-rights lobbies/Regent St emporia come creeping round, we simply offer to introduce them to their object of concern. Sorted."

I imagined the following exchange in the House of Commons:

Ed Miliband, Friend of the Downtrodden: "Could the Rt Hon Gentleman the Prime Minister please tell the House why Mr Tam Bawheid was taken from his tenement and posted to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as a - and I quote - "go-it-alone one-man-army" - to take on the might of the Taliban, armed only with a Bronski Beat mix tape and a pair of PVC chaps?"

David Cameron, Oily Toff: "Mr Speaker - Bee-CAUSE!" [cheers from HM Govt benches]

Ed Miliband: "Mr Speaker, Mr Speaker, that trivial and dismissive response is typical of a Government that has -"

David Cameron, interrupting: "Would the Rt Hon Gentleman like to visit Mr Bawheid and assess his awfulness for himself?"

Miliband does so, and returns tanned, wiser and with a little less to say about Tam.

The possible applications of Tam's Law are as wide as a Chinaman's grin. How many boiled-beef, common-sense measures that hitherto got tangled in red tape, legal precedent and basic concepts of right and wrong could be settled with a simple, explanatory "because"?

Miliband, again: "The deportation of Imam al-Murjan to Algeria, where Amnesty reports that he has had a new top-up self-circumcision kit tested on his person in a number of frankly outlandish - "

Cameron, majestic: "Be-CAUSE!"

Miliband: "Mick Hucknall, Michael Winner, N-Dubz (except the girl) - how can the Prime Minister really expect us to believe that they volunteered for this alleged Venezuelan shark rodeo?"

Cameron: "I refer the Rt Hon Gentleman to my previous answer, which was Be-CAUSE! And, by the way, your brother's been in touch."

There are some who would compare the scope, intent and implications of my Unforeseeable Disagreeableness Prevention Law to Hitler's Enabling Act of March 1933, by which the Nazis turned the Weimar Republic into something cold, shiny and very fast.

They would have a point if they were dealing with normal politics. But, in a world where bloggers enjoy ministerial privilege, I can accuse them of breach of Godwin's Law - "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches" - and simply leave it at that.

The objection that a comparison with the Nazis or Hitler is sometimes not only justifiable but unavoidable carries less weight in the vast dormitory that is the Intern Net than being caught holding a meme when the music stops.

Moreover, our cabinet's so blue of blood it could serve as a upended row of curaçao optics at a Vampire Convention, so a simple drawl of "listen, one instinctively knows when something is right" ought to take care of most Radio 4 interviewers and backbench Liberal Democrats.

Indeed, many Liberals, Fabians and environmentalists of a more ruthless bent might find something appealing about no longer having to reason with the irritatingly enfranchised. Although I must insist that there is no provision in my bill for the public immolation of children, athletes or actress just because they can't get excited about global warming.

Just think about it: your daughter's overfamiliar classmates, IT personnel who ask what they can "do you for", the "Question Time" audience. All redeployed usefully elsewhere, like organising a Bach Choir tour of Mogadishu.

And all because.

Quis custodiet idiotas?

2011-01-11T12:36:00.006Z

The wisest advice I ever received came courtesy of Nurilbek Atajanov, deputy director of the Shymkent Brandy Distillery in Kazakhstan.

"Never drink five-star Shymkent brandy," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because we don't make any."

I was reminded of Nuri, who went on to design Kazakhstan's first combination ski-slope/catwalk for spry models, when considering The Guardian newspaper and the dismal advice it proffers.

"What are you doing, considering The Guardian?" the reader might venture, knowing how pressed I am for time. The answer is that the other reader has asked whether, given that newspaper's repeated failure to advance the progressive cause, The Guardian might be part of the Welsh plot to give the English and those easily mistaken for them a bad time.

These are serious charges. Like sappers, we Elders of Capel Seion don't make more than one mistake at a time, and The Guardian looks and smells like a great big Bong full of Wrong.

I have therefore undertaken a case study of three Guardian "advices", as the K Man would have it, to assess them for signs of crypto-Cambrian cupidity.

They are:

Operation Clark County
The Liberal Moment Has Come; and
"No Pressure"

These campaigns had several traits in common, apart from the albatross of Guardian endorsement:

They backed causes close to the liberal/progressive heart
They boasted sophisticated use of the media, and
They not only failed, but possibly harmed their objects of desire.

This does indeed-to-goodness sound like Welsh work, so let us peer into the anthracite pit and see what slurry it yields. Today we shall consider Disaster Number One:

1. Operation Clark County. Not, as you might imagine, an attempt to rename Glamorgan after Clarks's excellent radioactive meat pies, but rather a Guardian campaign to persuade the cussed, gun-hugging folk of that swing country in the swinging state of Ohio to cherish the lute-like sensibilities of Liberal Europe and vote against George W Bush in the 2004 US presidential election.

If you want to influence US public opinion you'd be well-advised to enist the support of fellow-countrymen whom the average American might have heard of, such as some golfers, "House" or Mr Bean.

You'd get them to do a breezy, 30-second television ad, ending with a signoff like "This illegal campaign broadcast was brought to you by the concerned citizenry of Notting Hill and Four Weddings & a Funeraland. Have an absolutely topping one".

In practice, a hector of Darwinists, thespians and book-writin' types sent letters - actual, pen & ink letters - clattering through the peaceful post boxes of their transatlantic targets, combining insults with a solipsistic sense of injury. Americans responded with an equally predictable brace of threats, invitations to involuntary dental surgery and thanks from Republican campaign managers.

The Guardian eventually acknowledged that this was doing little to advance Senator Kerry's cause and halted the operation. The result had been a swing towards the Godly if unlettered President Bush in Clark Country, alone of all the counties of Ohio.

It was as if all the good work of cultural ambassadors like the Spice Girls, Tony Blair and Helen Mirren had been crushed under a giant statue of Terry-Thomas relieving himself into a Jesus-shaped apple pie while waving a North Vietnamese flag.

Plus President Bush was helped back in for another four years of colliding with international affairs and the banking system like a flatulent toddler.

All very good, but was it Welsh? Intense research has uncovered two apparent culprits. Droll Australian dopebaiter Tim Blair claimed that The Guardian had simply acted on his suggestion. This had itself been prompted by Guardian tentacle Jonathan Freedland's novel complaint that he and other foreigners were not allowed to vote in the US election.

(As the Mighty Professor Geras noted, Freedland didn't demand the right to pay US taxes that would usually accompany such a privilege).

The Guardian denied the Blair Thesis, but failed to name names. So could there be a Welsh collier at the bottom or it all, deconstructing the campaign coalface? My conclusion is negative.

We Welsh like to parade our peccadilloes, not sheathe them in silence. Now, with hindsight Operation Clark County might loom doomed out of the liberal fog like a Citroën 2CV at a Tennessee demolition derby, but The Guardian wasn't to know at the time that the Jihad Jocelyns and mad lady librarians with Henry V hairdos who make up their readership would outnumber solicitous Atlanticists in the Clark County mail bag.

Common sense, empirical study of the data and an element of self-awareness would have made this obvious, but, chwarae teg, we are dealing with The Guardian.

Conclusion: Welsh involvement not proven (The K Man insists on Scottish Law, modified by Norse practices)

The evidence of the 2010 UK General Election and a cinematic campaign advocating the detonation of schoolchildren in defence of the envirnonment will be considered in due course.

A Brack of Brine

2010-12-31T14:22:00.015Z

As has become a tradition at No Good Boyo, here to usher in the New Year is another Ghost Story of a Welsh Antiquary:

I see you are all settled with your pipes and pints. Prys-Price-Jones-Parry-Williams will set out cockles and fly agaric on the dresser in a moment. So I shall begin.

Now, I spent the Imbolg half-term in the seaside resort of Llwyngwril, in the county of M-shire. My pleasures are solitary, and the blustery coast is little troubled by hoi polloi at that time of year. One can take rubbings of lobster pots or pull the odd mussel undisturbed.

I had a little college business to attend to among the parish records of Llangelynnin Church. This tiny chapel lies half-drowned in the doleful dunes above Llwyngwril beach, a fate that the local Nonconformists attribute to the Romish practices of a former incumbent who, the records show, was in fact no more than scrupulous in matters of personal grooming.

It was while returning the weary notes of the defamed parson's successor to the ledger that I noticed a few yellowed leaves, pressed between a sermon about the wind and a tract against Whitsun dowsing.

These were no more than a fragment, dating from the middle of the last century I would hazard, but intriguing nonetheless, and I shall read them for your entertainment. Ah, Prys-Price-Jones-Parry-Williams has lighted the Calan Cottage, so let me begin.

...at the church of Llangellenen, its pitiful frame sunken in the sands. My goal was to etch the rood screen and trace a few inscriptions, but all thoughts of such trivia were banished by a curious discovery on the very edge of the cliff, where ancient gravestones made their last stand before being dashed on the rocks below.

I wandered among these near-derelict memento mori and fair tripped over what I took to be an oddly isolated clump of ivy. Closer inspection revealed a stump, the remnant of a gravestone. I tugged away at the foliage, only to be confounded by what lay beneath.

The stone was wholly bound in seaweed of a particularly tenacious genus that I had not seen before on these shores, or indeed on any others. It was brown and dessicated in appearance, yet firm, oily and unpleasantly cold to the touch. It smelled of mould, of ferment, and of something that I could not quite identify - something that lingered disagreeably in the back of my throat.

I was trying to make out the crude carving when I sensed a presence at my back. I turned to see the verger, an elderly rustic on whose spare frame a mildewed cassock sagged like rotting oilcloth.

"You were wondering who might lie there, sir?" wheezed the gnarled custodian.

"Yes. The stone rather stands out from its neighbours." We spoke in the local dialect of Welsh until, satisfied that there were no visitors nearby, we switched to English.

He pushed aside the kelp with a bradawl long enough to uncover the inscription:

"Er cof

Am Ogof.

Â dial dof."

"In memory of a Cave. I shall bring vengeance?" I essayed.

"Quite so, sir," nodded the verger in defiance of the chill breeze. "None knew his name, if he was ever one person or in truth any person at all," he continued. A sudden shaft of sunlight swept across the graveyard, if only to mock us with the ensuing gloom.

We made our way back to the porch, where my companion continued his tale.

It seems that there was once a flourishing trade in victuals between Cornwall and the local quarrymen of Eryri. "Our district is cursed many-fold," explained the verger. "By uncouth tongue, barbarous weather, mean industry and unpredictable gravity. But worst of all are the meagre offerings of the Welsh kitchen and the sour admonitions of the Chapel.

"A hewer of slate wishes to slake his thirst, soothe his soul and halt his hunger with meat and ale, not the thin flummery and parched tea that his shrewish bedmate delivers.

"So our enterprising Cornish cousins, whom England has tutored longer in the science of commerce, sent schooners laden with pasties, scones, cider and perry to Port-Madock and thence by pit-pony to the quarries at Llech-Wedd, Dinnorwick and yea even unto Nantlley.

"O how the sons of toil rejoiced! And nay, how their wives and the Chapel elders seethed. No one knows how it began, but wreckers lit fires here above Llwyngwril to lure the Cornish cutters onto the rocks.

"As the terrified matelots waded ashore, bearing their battered cargoes, a hellish horde of harridans would set about them with mattocks, stones and sometimes - horribile dictu! - the bones of our departed, wrenched from the rotting sod.

"Those who survived were bundled into their own barrels of cider and rolled from the cliff tops to a dreadful death.

"Those times are long gone, as are the pasties and flagons, but local people tell of a sentinel set to guard these witching peaks from the distractions of solid food and cheery potations. If the Cornishmen should return with their sinful gifts, it shall rise to wreak revenge upon them 'o'r hallt a'r heli' - from salt and brine."

"And that guardian of Cambrian virtue lies beneath this stone?" I asked, but the verger smiled thinly, shook his mottled head and stooped into the dank and darkening vestry. A strange tale, and one that I...

And here our manuscript ends. As you can imagine I was most intrigued, and enquired discreetly among the scant educated men of the parish.

The village scribe, who also dredged the wells and greased the Scold's Girdle, muttered something about a stranger long ago who had poked around on the cliffs and brought half of them down on his head.

The solicitor knew nothing, and the "physick" had lost his predecessor's records. Their silence was eloquent. I walked the cliff-top graveyard myself, and found no trace of this noisome stump and its words of dread. It had probably followed many others onto the rocks below.

It was only a week or so ago that I received a letter from Aberystwyth, from the National Library no less. My anonymous correspondent enclosed cuttings torn, I am sorry to say, from two periodicals of the last century.

One, from the Dydd newspaper of Dolgellau, had reported the death of a Mr Trelawny of Truro:

"The visitor to Llwyngwril had been staying at the Garthangharad Inn, where the landlord had reported him missing three days before the unfortunate's body was found washed up in a cave below the graveyard cliff. The magistrate, on the advice of Dr Myddfai, ruled that Mr Trelawney had lost his footing and fallen to his death."

Scrawled across the back of this clipping were the following remarks. "No one can find that cave. And there has never been a verger at Llangelynnin."

The other cutting came from The West Briton of Truro itself, and was dated some months later. After rehearsing the bare facts printed in Y Dydd, it went on:

"A beachcomber told this reporter that Mr Trelawney's body showed no signs of immersion in water. It was laid out in the cave on a cairn of bones, some of great age, in a manner suggestive of blasphemy. Our countryman's face could not easily be described. The local constable was unable to recall the exact events, as he had been 'at stool' most of the day, and no other notables would make themselves available for conjecture."

Across the back of this clipping was another inscription: "His mouth was stuffed with seaweed, and his pockets full of pies."

Ah, I see no one has touched their cockles. Then let me bid you all a Happy New Year, sure of step and easy of rest!

False teeth consciousness

2010-12-17T08:43:00.011Z

Leslie Nielsen is mourned on eight continents, including one from Altair IV that ended up in orbit around the Star of Knöchbant. His passing reminded me of another fine but unsung actor, my Uncle Voltaire.

Voltaire was a Communist. Neither a pigeon-chested polytechnician nor a media milquetoast, he was a real, strike-leading, seam-hewing, bailiff-defying, Fascist-bayoneting, book-reading Second-Fronter. A gentle, thoughtful man, he endured decades of disappointment with dignity.

Many tests were thrust upon him - Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Alexei Sayle - but others were objectively infantile deviations of his own, not least his marrying into the House of Boyo.

Voltaire's first name witnessed his family's radical posture - in the Marxist sense of understanding that the root of the matter is Man himself (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, 1843), rather than the justification for clerical reaction you may hear today.

It also enshrined his Anglo-Welsh heritage, as ordinary Valleys folk hallow their heroes in forenames - hence the Haydns and Verdis of an earlier age, and the Gavins and Ryans of today.

His marital foray among the Boyos, who bore names like Matholwch, assessed suitors' skull shapes and took out Llanfrothen's sole subscription to Action Française, resembled the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in being either an audacious dialectical gamble or a blunt Stalinist blunder, depending on which issue of the Daily Worker you were consulting.

He bore the endless taunts of his hairy-cheeked in-laws at first with the calm indulgence of one with History on His Side, and later in Stoic silence as the tide of tyranny turned.

A modest man, he would occasionally mention his combat in the Spanish Civil War. "For the Freemasons or General Franco?" Boyo grandpère would invariably inquire with a sickle smile. Voltaire silently switched to Old Holborn when his tormentor took to calling his favourite pipe tobacco "Condor Legion".

Poujadiste popinjay Peter "The Lesser" Hitchens singled out central heating as a wrecker of Albion in his lobe-bolting "Abolition of Britain". This Socialist redistribution of warmth allowed family members to retreat to their own rooms rather than huddle together in Blitz-like bliss before reruns of the Coronation on a black and white TV set, itself the size and shape of the back of the hand of a friendly bobby on the beat.

Hitchens would have loved Casa Boyo, which was never warmed by more than a salty smouldering log from the submerged forest of Borth - apart from a happy decade when we basked in the backdraft of cottage conflagrations, courtesy of Meibion Glyndŵr.

One evening I sat watching Nielsen in Airplane! on our anthracite box. Dad was out tapping badger lungs, Mam was tarring the pantry, and my brother Morthwyl was taunting some Dutch campers about their losing the war (you try telling him). Auntie Esmwyth was asleep, so visiting Uncle Voltaire wandered downstairs "for a bit of company" and casually to cast Communist Youth League pamphlets on the dresser:

"Oh, how about that, I see school enrolment is up in Nicaragua, almost to German levels. Democratic German levels, of course. But then a young fellow like you knows all about the Antifascist Defence Wall, eh? If not, this booklet answers a lot of questions...."

"Ta, Uncle Volt, though but I's after watching the telly, isn't it," I grunted through my fringe.

"Ah yes, the kinema - the most democratic of the art forms, Lenin said. And, and what do we have here, then?"

We had come to the scene where Elaine earnestly fellates the automatic pilot into a state of alertness, after which they share a cigarette. Secondary smoke was of marginal interest in those Reaganite days of sauve qui peut, so Uncle Voltaire asked what exactly the young lady had been doing.

I explained the (literal) gag, larding it with the sort of progressive social references he might appreciate - "and, among the Cape Malays, ladies sometimes remove their front teeth in an act of defiance against the misogynistic anti-contraception policies of Apartheid South Africa, and for ease of access" - but eventually realised that Uncle Voltaire wasn't listening.

As he gazed in silence, his lips slightly parted, the lights and colours of the pulsing screen hollowed and shadowed his haggard cheeks. The eyes alone spoke the thoughts that marched through the drill hall of his mind:

Surprise, incredulity, revulsion, intrigue, the spirit of scientific inquiry, a mental slide rule, confusion, anguish, regret, the shadow of knowing, and the darkness of loss.

All passed in seconds, with not a word uttered or a muscle twitched. Uncle Voltaire nodded good night, mounted the stairs and abandoned the struggle, but not before giving a masterclass in screen acting that Sir Roger Moore himself would have applauded.

Tribuni plebis consulari potestate

2010-12-04T22:02:00.007Z

Jana Bennett has quit as Director of Vision (meaning TV, film and, in Wales, the magic lantern) at the BBC, and Mrs Boyo is thinking of bidding for her place as part of her own long stomp through the institutions.

I've given her my lists of programme ideas (transliterated into Glagolitic), but La Boyo feels that we need to appeal to something slightly above the crone-dunking demographic.

Not wanting to lose the audience my scheduling will have gained the BBC, I propose using some of its established lint-gatherers in settings at once intellectually more challenging yet viscerally satisfying.

My first idea is You're History, in which a modern TV sweatsack will try to repeat the historical actions of a famous namesake.

Now, given that the British public's knowledge of history is restricted to the Nazis, Blackadder Goes Forth and Sunday teatime abdomen-rippers like Khartoum and the gay classic Zulu, this ties us down to re-enacting Great Humiliations in British Imperial History, the Somme and The Holocaust.

Consultations with my legal adviser, the K Man, and a glance at BBC funding have pretty much ruled out trench warfare and genocide, so it looks like a series devoted to men in over-elaborate uniforms getting their moustaches caught in harem portals, and the odd reassuring bayonet charge. So be it.

The pilot programme will feature Eastenders tribute act and No Good Boyo favourite Danny Dyer, who will attempt to follow the clattering spurs of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer.

"Open Fire" Dyer had commanded a massacre of unarmed civilians in the Indian city of Amritsar in 1919, an action for which he never expressed a moment's remorse. Churchill called it a "monstrous event". It marked the beginning of the end of the Raj.

Dyer Junior will not be expected to shoot anyone, as the whole You're History series will be imbued with the BBC's twin commitments to cheering up foreigners and saluting the health and safety flag. And Dyer doesn't look as if he could really handle a .303 Lee-Enfield, to be honest.

No, young Danny will track down some dagger-happy Sikh toughs and, armed only with a volume of Ruskin's "Unto This Last", an Indira Gandhi t-shirt and his stubbly little face, seek to engage with The Other.

It is my conviction, both creative and possibly criminal, that the ensuing documentary will have something for viewers of all tastes at home and abroad, and perhaps the more idle elements of the Animal Kingdom.

We may even want to project it onto the bland face of Venus as part of my campaign to persuade extraterrestrials that we genuinely mean no harm.

And if that's not Speaking Peace Unto Nation, then I'm Lord Reith's sporran fluffer.

WikiLeaks - Wales responds

2010-11-30T16:37:00.006Z

Wales "enjoys" WikiLeaks report of corruption, violence

Text of report by Welsh official Taffinfform news agency

Boyograd [formerly Cardiff] 1 December (Taffinfform): Welsh government spokesman Griff [Gruffydd ap Gruffydd, fab Gruffydd] reacted with customary bemusement to revelations on the WikiLeaks website about levels of corruption and imaginative violence in Welsh official institutions.

"These revulations has totally and utterly come as a surprise to us, and to me, though but," he told punters in an impromptu press conference at the Martyr Dr Phil Williams Memorial Institute of Tantric Studies, Boyograd.

The WikiLeaks publication of tens of thousands of classified US State Department cables included a number of oddly stained pneumatiques from Burlington Arcade III, ambassador [extraordinary and plenipotentiary] to Wales, in which he set out his views on the Cymru Rouge administration and Wales in general.

"Graft is so much a way of life to these people that, after only six months in the post, I find myself slipping the police escort 300 dwris just not to taser me on the can [Welsh currency: 100 tans to the dwri. One dwri = 2 cents or a roofing slate. Can = American toilet].

"Extortion is never nearly enough. It only counts if accompanied by menaces, often of an outré sexual nature.

"I raised the question of kickbacks in military procurements with Defence Minister Anffawd [Iago Anffawd, fab Sieffre Siomedig, fab Gwil Goll]. Have any of you boys at Foggy Bottom ever been keelhauled around a coracle? I guessed not. Item - they're round. It never ends.

"They gave me 30 minutes with a 'fat bird from Carmarthen' then used me as a rudder. We got as far as Lundy [former English island in the Bristol Channel, now used by the Welsh Army as a underwater political prison and weapons testing range] before I agreed to drop the matter."

"We's never heard of this fucker or his so-called, soi-disant America," explained Griff. "We denies these hackersations, and disasorcerates us selves from whatever's going to happen to him in the next week."

"And," he added.

Political analyst John Osmond of the exiled Institute of Welsh Affairs, Chester, said much of the confusion can be attributed to two factors, nomenclature and not really giving a shit [Welsh: malu ffwc ddim].

"The Cymru Rouge manifesto dealt with the traditional Welsh blights of corruption and violence by simply reclassifying them as 'The Economy' and 'Public Relations' respectively. Investment from Eastern Europe and the Middle East seems to have vindicated this policy so far, and complaints from the allegedly late Ambassador Arcade are unlikely to change that," he expanded.

Asked about the current whereabouts of Burlington Arcade III, spokesman Griff feigned indifference to reports of a pair of ambulances bearing the US envoy to the Martyr Shakin' Stevens Cosmodrome, Abergavenny, after a freak accident at the unveiling of the Newport transporter bridge and noyade.

"You might well think that; I couldn't possibly comment," he quipped, "largely because I's monged on 'shrooms, see. But a fiver might get you the audio track of a rocket launch tragedy."

"We didn't eat him," he added.

Source: Taffinfform news agency, Cardiff, in Welsh 0058 gmt 1 Dec 10

Scenes from a Pedantic Hard-Boiled Novel

2010-11-21T09:50:00.006Z

Exiled pedagogue Matthew Ward once proposed a two-fisted actionfest to the BBC, based on the sort of wish-fulfilment even Robert Fisk enjoys. His synopsis ran thus:

"TEFL teacher in Latin America joins the Cymru Rouge, rises through the ranks and is eventually sent as ambassador to Rutheria with his Ukrainian spouse, where he gets involved in cachaça-induced japes and sinister episodes of physical and mental torture. Maybe Timothy Spall would take the lead? I imagine a twenty-first century Citizen Smith meets Zorra Total."

My response as his agent was to aim higher and sketch out a trailer:

Sod the BBC, that's got Hollywood treatment written all over it:

"(Rumbling Voice, over Rio scenes): Far from the Copacabana (cut to snaggle-toothed peasant riding a goat in a top hat) deep in the forests of Ruthenia, there's monkey juice that needs drinking (close-up of cachaça bottle slamming down on a table surrounded by sweaty men in ill-fitting uniforms).

"And here's the mouth that's going to do it (crash-zoom from across a cellar deep into the throat of a screaming man tied to a Medieval dentist's chair).

"(Clanging noise over smoky screen, with male silhouette slowly emerging) Sean Penn is MC Ward.

"(Unhinged woman, stomping towards camera) Helen Lederer is his made-up scary Ukrainian wife who's nothing at all like Mrs Boyo.

"(Gurning thugs yell in close-up) Keith Allen, Ray Winstone and Ralph Brown are the population of Ruthenia, in..."

I took my 12% and, at Madame Boyo's Hegelian insistence, let The Dialectic do the rest.

Three years later to the day, I've come up with the High Concept.

What makes Matt Ward different to other sheath-rending action heroes?

Eastwood is carved from teak
Jack Bauer is Dick Cheney in a wig
Monk is a mental

So what's Ward? Why, he's a middle-aged English teacher. So let's work his innate pedantry into the script. There's an untapped audience of librarians, Liberal (not Liberal Democrat) Party activists, jazz afficionadoes and mildly autistic teenagers to tap.

So here's some sample dialogue:

(LA police precinct, a uniformed cop hustles the standard pair of remonstrating whores past an office where some sweaty men in bad suits are discussing their new boss)

Detective 1: So, what's this Ward guy like?

Detective 2: Lootenant Ward's the kinda sonofabitch who'll rip off your prick and shove it up your ass.

Detective 1: Holy Shit!

Ward (striding through the door in horn-rims and elbow-patches): Correction, gentlemen. I am indeed the kind of son of a bitch who'll rip off your prick and shove it up your ass. But then I'd notice that the prick in question had become flaccid from loss of blood, and therefore impossible to shove up any ass without assistance. So I'd take a stick, and I'd use it to work your prick up your ass. I'd take a prick-sticking stick to stick your prick up your ass - capeesh?

Detectives: Sir!

Will there be more in the next three years? Like the French Revolution, with me it's always too soon to say.

Honi soit qui mal y ponce

2010-11-17T10:30:00.005Z

I'm sure that you will join me and all of Wales, man and beast, in conveying our best wishes to HRH Prince William and Miss Kate Middleton on their impending honeymoon in the Rhodri Morgan Memorial Caravan, Mwnt, before they settle down among the Turnipmen of Anglesey.

This is a particularly happy event for me personally. As attentive readers will know, one of my obligations as Cotsengi and Hereditary Ostler to the Court of Senghenydd is to break in prospective royal brides. My predecessor, Sir Dai Llewellyn , had a pop at the grooms too, but that was Sir Dai all over. Big heart, among other organs, and no stranger to the optics.

This time round I can honestly say that I'm looking forward to discharging my duties, and not just because Princess Katherine's pile at Bucklebury is only a 20-minute drive from my place. I could fit her in one lunchtime and still have time for a swift couple of jugs of Champion's Freckled Johnson down the Tethered Goat before heading back to my desk.

The more pressing matter, however, is what title HM The Queen is going to bestow on Prince William once he becomes a real man. Suggestions from my colleagues include Duke of Newport-Gwent, Lord Barry (although I think that's been reserved for Mr John), the Torch of Wood, and The Real Lord Kinnock. The Welsh Assembly might then have to legalise polyandry again so that the prince could add Baroness Kinnock to his harem. Lucky boy.

Myself, I propose a more radical solution. HM The Queen should strip Prince Charles of the title of Prince of Wales and give it to William. The explanation would be simple:

"Sorry, Charles, but William's earned it. He has a normal-shaped head, he chose his own wife first time round - and without her being married to anyone else at the time, either - and he doesn't talk to the foliage. Enjoy Cornwall, it's lovely this time of year. As they say in Benllech, ciao for now."

Can't say fairer than that.

Any respectful suggestions for alternative titles are welcome in the comments box. They must be royal, and Welsh.

Hwyl!

Cymru Rouge Royal Protocol Department

Year One, Anno Gwylimae

Gwae y Cayman

2010-11-05T12:59:00.015Z

A pronunciamento from the Prif Sasiwn of the Cymru Rouge (Commissariat of External Relations and Instant Rebuttal):

So! Once again, the expressed will of literally millions of ordinary, working-class men, women and children, poor-to-middling peasants, discharged policemen and revolutionarily-inclined students has been thwarted by the machinations of International Capital and its ten-fingered hirelings!

The Learned Elders of the Intern Net have spurned the inherent right of all Welsh to have a domain name ending in '.cym'. Instead, they have added insult to ursury by granting this domain name to what we gather is some sort of crocodile.

The Cymru Rouge has long supported the dotCYM campaign, if only as a means of compiling our list of suspiciously-literate Welsh for the slate-quarry pioneer battalions, and would have put the banner on our website if we'd been able to work out the html code.

To put some sort of big fish ahead of Wales is little better than giving preference to the so-called English and their Scotch masters. In light of this farsighted attack on our stealth acquisition of the trappings of statehood, we, the Rouge, hereby proclaim a boycott of the Intern Net, the Web Ring and all forms of the Ram.

This boycott is mandatory for all Cymru Rouge cadres and any other Welsh.

In the spirit of not making things worse for ourselves for once, we have commissioned the University of Central Meirionydd (formerly Compute 'R' Us, Eldon Square, Dolgellau) to carry out a study of Intern Net use with a view to mitigating any economic and social damage the boycott might cause.

The findings of the study are as follows:

"Former Vice-President Al Gore of the United States invented the Internet (sic, passim) as a means of conquering space by environmentally more tedious means than firing rockets full of scientists at it.

"President George W Bush saw little virtue in either pursuit, and so the Internet remained empty until some Dutchmen found it and filled it with porn.

"This was the Golden Age of the Internet. Since then use has decayed, and the current inventory of Internet content is as follows:

89% porn
4% pictures of cats
4% people blaming Israel
2% German cannibals seeking dinner dates
1% the Scaryduck publishing empire
2% creative accounting."

On the basis of this, the Cymru Rouge has devised a reach-around so that any patriotic Welsh can achieve his goals without entering a modem. We have categorised the above categories into three categories:

1. Porn, pictures of cats, and people blaming Israel. A girlfriend from Newport, incontinent aunt and television licence will suffice.

2. German cannibals. We assume that anyone who wants to be stuffed in a Pfälzer Saumagen will have already bought the one-way ticket on the Kürten Express by now.

3. Scaryduck. Media projections suggest that Scaryduck will acquire controlling shares in all British newspapers, commercial radio stations and works of fiction by 2015, so sit still and all will be well.

5. Creative accounting. Over half of all legally employed Welsh are involved in this industry - Wales's second largest - and are therefore exempt from the Intern Net ban in the workplace. Instead they will be expected to undertake an indefinite strike in support of our cause.

For the plutocrats who control the Intern Net, the pressure will be unbearable.

As for dotCYM, we applaud their continuing campaign and suggest that they now demand total and utter control over the domain name '.ll'.

Henffych!

Paul Pot - Brawd Rhif Un
Huw Samphan - Brawd Rhif Dau
Ta Moc Tudor - Brawd Rhif Tri
"H" (out of Steps) - Groyw loyw
Prif Sasiwm y Cymry Rouge.

The Weremen of England

2010-10-31T22:14:00.009Z

Halloween, like much of modern life, works well in America but collapses like a suet soufflé when we try it over here. Escape if you can. I'm at work, having let Arianrhod loose on the neighbours in the company of some friendly Gypsies, and it's the safest place to be. You think you're alright down the pub, but maybe you're not. Maybe it's a werewolf pub.

To live in Wales is to be unaware of Halloween, as it's like that most evenings, and every village pub is a werewolf pub. So I was delighted to find these establishments existed in England too. Perhaps they still do.

When I lived in Oxford I ventured into the Kite Inn, on Mill St. The sort of place that could easily have been called The Spread Eagle, with a graphic, swinging sign to make the spatchcocked point, The Kite was my near local. O how my heart sang when I pushed open that creaking door and every Morlock within stopped talking and looked at me with a combination of mistrust and hunger. It was just like home.

To be Welsh is at various points in your life to meet some onion-breathed bore who once walked into a pub in North Wales - well, it was a friend, actually - no, the friend of a friend, come to mention it - and no, he can't remember where - anyway, they were all talking English and suddenly they switched to Welsh.

To be Welsh is to point out the extreme linguistic improbability of natural-born Anglophones switching to anything but spirits as the evening wears on. What the mythical traveller heard was not Welsh but bat-hooting mockery - they sound similar.

It is true, however, that people in matching shoes and perpendicular teeth still get stared at. That's what made The Kite so special. In a city like Oxford, where soap and vegetables trickle down from the 'Varsity like syrup in a scholar's navel, there are few corners of crabbed and cussed rusticity left.

I'm not sure where The Kite's customers came from, but their's were faces you could imagine on Cromwell's men. You would not ask them for a latte. An eminent historian told me his father once visited The Kite during the War. "Do you do sandwiches?" he asked. "Only fur 'em as wants 'em" he was told with a mahogany finality.

Were they unfriendly? No, it's just that The Kite was a werewolf pub. The Weremen of England once howled and carrolled on All Souls' Eve, now they polish and porter at All Souls College. Always at a disadvantage when it came to edjucation, these hairer handymen retreated to tanneries where they could gnaw at a hidden hide, and supped in backstreet bars where gentlefolk never strayed. Well, never more than once.

The drinkers at The Kite and other werewolf pubs know we could easily occupy their last lines, so they wait with the patience of beasts for us to down our daquiris and head back west before they draw the blinds, bolt the doors and slip scarred boots off their docked claws.

Caversham is too bonny and alice-banded to host a werewolf pub, but lupine youth would sometimes venture into The Travellers Rest.

It's another tasteful, lightwood eaterie where college girls take their parents for lunch these days, but I remember it as a dank crimson mortuary for broken chairs and hacking pensioners, with one corner a shrine to fruit flies. The staff as such huddled behind a partition and never managed to pull a decent pint in a clean glass.

I spent a lot of time there with Sioba Siencyn and the Dog, wondering why it looked like the Overlook Hotel and had a massive Masonic Lodge bolted onto the back like a bustle of spurious cosmology. Indian burial ground, was Siencyn's theory.

Once we saw the werewolves. In they came one early evening, three lads in white sports casuals and baseball caps. Affable but detached, they sat at the bar and took a lava lamp out of its box. After a quick nod to the pink-eyed bargirl, they plugged the '60s geegaw into the mains and gazed as the turquoise ooze undulated for their pleasure.

I stood beside them for the ten minutes it took to order a pint of Johnson, and overheard their conversation.

"His hair was like Dracula's."

"What, black and slicked back?"

"Nah, all grey and up like some fucking wig."

Something about their caps, seen close up, said that the hair concealed beneath was also grey and abundant.

As dusk fell there came a rap at the window. The lads slid off their barstools as one, picked up the lamp and headed for the door. Curious, I made as for the gents to observe their depature.

Outside, in the shadow of an overgrown hedge, an ancient Ford Corsair estate spluttered as the youths piled in the back. It eased out into the car park, then stalled. It bucked and snarled in the yellow murk.

I wandered over to offer my help. One of the lads wound down the window and asked for a shove. I pushed, and the car started easily. I waved as they drove off. And then, in the gauzy streetlight, I saw their ears.

So watch where you drink when the wolfbane blooms. You may wish your fellow-drinkers were speaking Welsh after all.

Cain Rising

2010-10-20T15:10:00.006Z

The salons and lavabos of Europe have trilled with talk of riot and revolution in Kyrgyzstan, a country close to the kidney of all Welshmen if only for proving that there is life without consonants.

I once provided readers with a sheath-bursting tour d'horizon of Central Asia, in which I characterised the Kyrgyz thus:

The Kyrgyz are the Welsh of Central Asia. They're jolly, profoundly democratic, and inhabit a beautiful, mountainous country that no one visits and which has no natural resources at all except for some gold and clapped-out mining.

They are divided north and south in lifestyle and geographical orientation, and are widely associated with sheep-related activities.

They still practice droving, and have the worst cuisine in the world. Their southern valleys are home to heroin connoisseurs.

They have never ruled anything, not even Kyrgyzstan, and don't really seem to care. They think their neighbours are soft and that they secretly wish they too were Kyrgyz.

Their neighbours rarely think of them at all, except in a comic context, but if pushed will say they distrust them as sly and two-faced.

Russian spittle-licking suits them just fine, and hey, Ivan, why don't you buy some of our lovely smack while you're here?

Prophetic words, you'll agree, and compassionate too. But not, I'm ashamed to say, entirely truthful. For there is another political factor at play in Kyrgyzstan beyond the Russo-American strategic rivalry, beyond the scheming Uzbeks of the South and the patient Han of the East.

Some chap from Dubai took time out from driving his Mercedes round and round to pen a few hundred cheerily uninformative words for The Guardian's web-based Comment is Free rubric on why the bold ouster of Kyrgyzstan's tawdry Mr Bakiyev was not likely to be repeated with the Arab world's sullen satraps.

It's difficult to read past his endorsement of Noam Chomsky, but Mr Al-Qassemi deserves praise for not indulging any of the conspiracy theories common in his part of the world - for that you'll need to read the remarks on his article by the Jocelyns of the Comment is Free crew.

The fact is that the Assads and Al-Sa'uds can rest their rectangular heads, for they do not have to contend with the most occluded factor in Kyrgyz politics - the Yeti Lobby.

Some background: The Soviet conquest of Central Asia only really took off after the various inept and insane White Generals had been dispatched to the four corners of emigration, execution, incarceration or promotion.

Commander Mikhail Frunze, a native of what is now the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, took the Red Army with him on his trip back home. The corpulent pederast Alim Khan sought to shore up his Bukharan throne by casting gaggles of gap-toothed dancing boys before the advancing Bolshevik hordes, only to see the bacchás shorn, shod and shown how to shoot sodomites.

(The Emir himself fled to Afghanistan, and his pragmatic decision to transfer his affections to young girls prompted peasants to cake their daughters' faces in dung as he passed. A fashion that has not died out entirely in the Zaamin area, I can testify.)

While Frunze was shriving Tajiks at the head of the terrier-shaped tyranny that would soon become Uzbekistan, one of his officers was busy sorting out the Khan of Khiva's troops under its Khwarezmian tail.

Divisional Commander Morgunov's method, in an eerie pre-echo of Comrade Stalin's quondam Nazi allies, was to line up the captured mingbashis and fit their skulls into types of fruit - a round, watermelon match marked the bearer as a subtle urban Sart, while a Mr Punch honeymelon profile meant a Turcoman desert nomad.

The latter were instructed in the ways of Leninism, given fresh horses and sent against the British Dunsterforce on the Caspian. The former were drowned in buckets or something.

This policy of gourd-based divide and kill took on a new, hairier dimension in High Badakhshan, where the questing Bolshevists faced Alim Khan's last line of defence - the sepâhe 'âliye kojâkân (the Noble Host of Abominable Snowmen).

Yetis remain elusive in the Himalayas, as they resent being scalped by monks, tracked by Germans or mounted by lonely sherpas, but they rub along nicely with the chilled Isma'ilis of the Pamirs.

Alim Khan's ancestor, the debased martinet Nasrallah Bahadur Khan, had regimented these loping vegetarians into a fearsome phalanx in return for their exercising droit de seigneur over the monobrowed maidens of Soghd. Frunze's commissars, however, persuaded them through the media of mime and crude surgery that Socialism offered a chance to build a new world, one fit for all bipeds.

The Yetis donned the Red Army budenovka and drove the Last Manghit across the Jaxartes. Stalin granted them regional autonomy, an alphabet, and the right to send delegates to the Grand Soviet in Moscow, but as ever there was a catch.

In order to prevent a powerful Yeti presence in still-volatile Central Asia, the Bolsheviks partitioned their historic uplands between the emerging Kyrgyz republic and Tajikistan.

On the Kyrgyz side of the frontier was the Lower Abominable Snowman Autonomous Region (Нижняя cнежнe-человеческая автономная область), and on the Badakhshani plateau stood the less-developed Upper Abominable Snowman Autonomous District (Верхний cнежнe-человеческий автономный округ).

The result was that the Yeti of Tajikistan were subject to institutional speciesism, and soon embarked on the Great Lollop (Yettish: Tümőnt'z Nyi'ařl) - a mass migration across the cordillera to British India. Their spiritual leader, Yebhamoth the Marmot-Slayer, shaved closely and enlisted in the 5th Baluchi Lancers, with anti-Soviet vengeance on his single-lobed mind.

He quickly rose to the rank of corporal among the mainly Welsh troops, but General Sir Anthony"Bracing" Shower had him court-martialled and shot for sloppy kit. The whereabouts of his grave are unknown, although his manhood was used as the parade-ground flagpole in Quetta until it vanished after a visit by Lady Mountbatten in 1947 (see Maj Gervaise "Neither Know" Nacquere: "The Abominable Snowman - A Frightful Consequence of Miscegenation", HMSO, Quetta, 1947).

Meanwhile, the Yetis of Kyrgyzstan embarked on a long shamble through the institutions of Soviet power. Their position was strengthened during the Great Purges of the 1930s - not through collaboration with Stalin and his henchmen, but because Russian-made bullets merely bounced off the back of their heads. Uncle Joe admired that, and promoted Yetis to all major party and government posts in the republic.

Khrushchev's policy of de-Stalinisation eclipsed the Abominables who, in an exquisite example of Marxian anti-thesis, then became the literal backbone of the dissident movement. On the fall of Soviet power, the ethnic-Kyrgyz and Russian party leaders were swept away by a liberal faction led by a close-shaven Yeti physicist who used the nom de l'homme of Askar Akayev.

The new Yeti elite ran independent Kyrgyzstan better than their human peers managed in the other Central Asian states. As cryptozoological creatures they were able to rise about the seething ethnic, religious and musical divisions of the land, but tensions soon emerged that doomed their hirsute hegemony:

The Kyrgyz in their bigoted way thought a country called "Kyrgyzstan" ought to be run by Kyrgyz;

Russian men complained that their russet-haired, slatternly wives were discarding their greasy housecoats and running off with sober, upwardly mobile and downwardly endowed Mi-Go;

Tajikistan complained that their own downtrodden Yeti were seeking secession in order to create a Great Yetistan astride the Ferghana Valley; and

Muslim clerics were appalled at the staunch secularism of the Snowmen and the prospect of anyone having a good time.

This coalition of the insulted and injured toppled Akayev from his eminence, and ushered in the recent Time of Troubles where crowds of men in piss-stained brown flares struggled to find the keys to the presidential drinks cabinet.

The Yetis bided their time. They quietly built alliances, promising Uzbek irredentists, Russian militarists and cosmopolitain drug barons a fair deal. And now they're back.

I shall not speculate on the likely policies of the second Yeti administration, although the abolition of VAT on hair-removal products, nail-clippers and extra-strong mints is a fair bet.

I will only suggest that we cast our eyes southwards. The success of the Snowmen of Bishkek may galvanise the Yetis of Tajikistan - where they largely work as street cleaners - Kashmir and Ladakh.

Above all, we ought to consider Nepal. The fall of the monarchy and the recent outbreak of Maoist syndicalism have created an atmosphere in which the mountain men may decide to intervene. A Yeti-led state literally atop the world and on the borders of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan is not a matter that Russia or China can regard with equanimity.

I leave you with this item that I translated from Vatanparvar, the entertaining organ of the Uzbek Armed Forces (16 September 1995, p 4).

The border-violator was a yeti

An unusual occurrence took place at the M. Strelnikov border outpost. At night, a border patrol saw a two-metre-tall creature, moving ahead on two legs, similar to descriptions of the yeti - the abominable snowman.

Its eyes gleamed in the dark. The leader of the patrol there and then made a report by telephone to the outpost. A search party, sent promptly to the scene, found half-metre-long human-like footprints. A dog caught the trail, which crossed into the border demarcation zone.

And on they lope, like Wells's tripods, towards the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, there to bathe their steaming extremities and comb out their matted hair with the rib-cages of our upstart race.

Old fags and cabbage-stumps

2010-09-28T11:24:00.013Z

Autumn is upon us like a damp, slightly-aroused setter, and still no word from the BBC about my programme suggestions. Never mind, here are a few more. Channel 4 can have them too, if they like. I'm open to a Dutch auction, or indeed anything else Dutch except their dismal breakfasts. On the subject of which:

1. Danny Dyer's Hard Men: the poignant spam-faced professional Londoner travels to s'Achtengracht to get to know the hardest men in Holland's XXXX gay porn film scene. An interactive feature on digital called 'Danny Dyer's Old Mum' will see mildly-sedated female relatives of the downward-spiral star talked through proceedings, both on set and in traction, by "Backpacking IV" star Bent Vanderpump and a team of proctologists.

2. Your Thought For The Day: Radio 4's team of house-trained clerics on the 'Today' programme are obliged to answer questions from listeners, instead of cramming some twee homily into the day's events. This week Glasgow University's Dr Mona Siddiqui is asked "Have you considered a sabbatical at Riyadh Poly?"

3. Oliver's Army: Following his success in reminding the Americans exactly why they had a Revolution in the first place, galley urchin 'Jamie' Oliver brings his unique blend of matey condescension to feeding hungry squaddies worldwide. This week Jamie tries out his new vegetarian menu on the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Next week Heston Blumenthal devises a basic meal that Jamie can consume through an array of tubes in Moscow's Botkin Infirmary Intensive Care Department.

4. Meidl Madonna: Every orphan's nightmare Madonna Ciccone visits the Jewish mystics of Israel's holy city of Safed and immerses herself in the esoteric depths of Lurianic Kabbalah. Episode One: Madonna has her head shaved and is told to stand behind a wall and shut up, already.

5. Suor Angela: German Federal Chancellor and Theresa May-o-gram Angela Merkel enacts Puccini's opera Suor Angelica in the full habit of a Benedictine nun, albeit one fashioned from latex. Well, I'd watch it. If need be, I'd direct it.

If anyone knows any machers I'd be grateful for a tip-off. No one wants to spend the next few months watching Minnie Driver, except perhaps in a lunar module.

Dearth of the Cool

2010-09-09T08:53:00.007Z

Gorilla Bananas has catalogued the disappointing career of sunny Swede Ulrika Jonsson. I shuddered - not because I've met Ms Jonsson, but because she cost me my fleeting Cool.

The quest for Cool is futile. Like Celticity, you either have it or you have not. We Welsh are effortless Celts.

Despite living only a few miles from the English and even having a lot of them all over the place back home, we remain relaxed in our sexual license, enthusiasm for herbs, proliferation of dark-haired plump women and speaking of an Xtreme language ("So, you change the endings of your words, do you? Well, we change the endings, middle and beginnings. Ha! let's see your dictionary help you now, Herr learner?").

Our Scotch cousins try too hard, what with the skirling, man-skirts and sheep guts. That work-ethic marks them out as Calvin's Krauts. They even grow kale, although health statistics suggest they don't eat it.

So to Cool. Like the joy of drink, it's easier to describe than to define. If we take the important stuff:

Jazz - yes; jazz fans - no.
World music - yes; your own folk music - no.
Unthinking Left - yes; any sort of Right - no.
Tea is cool; coffee is for those who can't cope.

I was once in the happy position of having Cool thrust upon me. On a weekend in London I ambled into HMV on Oxford St to buy some t-shirts. It was uncool to buy records there - that's what small shops in Soho are for. The HMV staff were nonetheless fairly cool, belonging as they did loosely to the class of what Americans call "record-store clerks".

Thrumming through the racks of the usual Pop Art sludge and '68 slogans, I struck medium-sized gold. It was a promotional t-shirt for the "What a Wonderful World" duet by Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan.

It portrayed the two crooners sitting side-by-side and black & white in a public house, arms across one another's shoulders, cradling cigs and glasses of some refreshment.

It was perfect. The Cave/MacGowan version is my favourite song, the artwork was tasteful without being primly minimalist, and a master-stroke had printed all of this on an off-white background - the colour that all credible t-shirts aspire to. And it was the last one in the shop. Indeed, I've never seen one anywhere else, and it remains my most cherished non-human possession.

Elated, I picked up another t-shirt and headed for the till. Record-Store Clerk #1 took one look at Wonderful World and gave me an almost-approving glance. He showed my purchase to the smoky Berlin cadaver at the neighbouring till. Her lip flickered. Indie Cool beckoned.

I saw myself, a few weeks later, deconstructing and rerolling unfiltered Camels in the editorial office/fuckbox of a lower-case fanzine in West Hampstead, muttering "Yeah, but when I say Beefheart I'm thinking Snakefinger" and filing down tenor sax reeds with a straight razor. I'd even pass off my unpalatable right-wing views with a shrugged "Ask Joey Ramone".

It would hardly be worth buying any pants, given the risk of friction burns from having them wrenched off by the rhythm guitarists of Japanese all-girl bands. Possibly twins.

Then #1 came to my second t-shirt. Anything tied to a mainstream television comedy show might have passed through the Irony Mesh, but the self-consciously surreal Reeves & Mortimer meant the instant Death of Cool. On reflection, I ought to have received some credit for audacity in presenting The Clerks not with Vic'n'Bob themselves, but rather their gormless "Ulrika-ka-ka-ka" sidekick, but there's no right of appeal in the Court of Cool.

Mind you, that wasn't my worst encounter with record-store clerks. There's a hardcore faction camped out at Tower Records in Tel Aviv. I rather like Israeli pop music of the 1950s and decided to buy a couple of compilation CDs while on holiday in the White City.

"You're buying this?!" barked the Clerk, brandishing "Our Tiny Country" like a Manx passport. "It's for my Dad," I mumbled, thereby slandering a man who thought music took a wrong turn when it spurned Skiffle for "that Presley boy and his drums". I thought of grabbing some last-minute Aviv Geffen, but rightly decided it would only make matters worse.

I'm glad I've now moved into the post-Cool phase of life. I've two children, a mortgage, car, career, standing orders, and a wife to run it all. I'm expected to dance badly at weddings, and look forward to embarrassing my daughter at school and in all social settings. I visit National Trust properties and enjoy war films in which our side wins. I find Felicity Kendall attractive.

All I have to do before dying is avoid humorous clothing (hats, Simpsons socks, "kipper" ties) and being jail-baited, and Paradise should beckon. Unless the gates are manned by a Recording Clerk Angel, rooting through my après-vinyl purchases with a beady, kohl-framed eye.

Revolution: Televised

2010-08-30T23:25:00.004Z

The BBC autumn television schedules will shortly sidle up, chalk an ominous "M" on our overcoat and move on unnoticed through the broadcast spam.

It's time to offer some creative solutions to help the BBC counter its critics' most common - in every sense of the word - charge that it is politically correct and consensual, like some sort of gay, Obama-admiring test-tube offspring of Butler & Gaitskell.

So, before the House of Boyo heads back to Wales for a week of mushroom interface and owl baiting, here are my suggestions for some primo programming:

1. Pride or Prejudice. You, a bigot, have a choice. Either set out your views to the audience, possibly armed and made up of the object of your ill-considered scorn, or tell it to a pride of lions.

This week, the Sunday Times's gin-shy food bully A "A" Gill dons a kilt and has a full and frank exchange of bones at the Meibion Glyndŵr annual tombola and fundraiser (pensioners, children, Monmouthshire - half-price), and is then fed to the big cats anyway.

Filmed in Belarus, where this sort of thing is either legal or at least cheap.

2. Boundary Commission Question Time. Like regular Question Time, except that the panel is made up of MPs who will lose their seats through This Glorious Coalition of Ours's planned constituency cut'n'shut. They've been in the Green Room since teatime and don't give a Manxman's elbow for the wet-cheeked "opinions" of the producer's mates' bedfellows in the studio audience, and are ready to say so at great, vivid and drunken length.

3. Vanderpump & Wellbelove: Porn Detectives. Bent Vanderpump and Trixie Wellbelove are a couple of Dutch hardcore stars who incidentally solve crimes by using insights gained from years in the porn industry.

Episode 1: The Whacker Man. Filmed on Anglesey. "We'll be loving the both of you".

4. Shmooks. The BBC's hit spy series "Spooks" goes to the real Middle East, where Alexei Sayle, Tom Paulin, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Lauren Booth are kidnapped from the Beirut Book Festival by al-Qaeda bad hats who nonetheless have a refined sense of irony.

Only Israel's Mossad can save them, and our heroes have to decide whether to boycott their own rescue. May contain scenes of pseudo-liberal angst and some naches.

5. One Man and His Dyke. A Jeremy Clarkson/Littlejohn/rugger bugger tries to persuade a lesbian that it's time to get back on solids. And we mean a real Diesel, not one of those BBC2 costume-drama waifs. May end in the Clarkson type breaking down and confessing to unspeakable urges towards Kelly Jones out of The Stereophonics. He's dreamy.

6. Baboons in a Room. This idea comes courtesy of The Dog of Decei(p)t and Hypocrisy. Just baboons, in a room. This week the baboons' guest is Polly Toynbee.

7. It's My Dream Home, So You Can Fuck Right Off. (Courtesy of Dazza.) The BBC gives a member of the public (Dazza) a wodge to do up a castle/villa in a warm part of Europe where taxes are something that happens to other people.

A year later Dazza sends us a postcard, with his guard dogs and Maltese heavies featuring prominently. We get the picture. Followed by studio discussion about accountability and the Licence Fee.

8. "Long" Jack Lang. The new UN piracy adviser stars in a Mogadishu-based dark comedy, much against his will. Also stars Captain Ahmed's Crazee Bastards. May lead to spin-off series featuring Captain Ahmed and a mermaid fashioned from the remains of Lang.

Over to you, readers.

Dai-aspora

2010-08-21T10:27:00.010Z

This is a momentous day for all Welsh and conspiracy theorists, not to mention the free people of Australia. For in that mulleted land on the outer edge of the earthly disc has the fearsome Welsh Lobby faced its sternest task.

Readers of this web blog will be aware of the sheer slate power of the Elders of Capel Seion, the cabal of chapel-goers, eisteddfod adjudicators, thirsty sopranos and plum-faced newsreaders who have screwed up every English political endeavour since the Battle of Morfa Rhuddlan.

No Good Boyo's new friend, the moderate Scotchman Hyperbore, has recently drawn the attention of a world struck mute with horror to Wales's internationalist mission to spread political misery where ever English and other non-Welsh languages are spoken.

He notes that the WikiLeaks revelations that civilians die in wars in Afghanistan just as elsewhere stem from one Bradley Manning. Although a US citizen born to English parents, young Bradley spent his youth in Wales - long enough to be recruited as a sleeper agent.

He joined the US Marines, gathered his documents and, when the moment came to sabotage the Anglo-American plot to impose social democracy on the happy helots of Herat, Bradley unbuckled his belt.

What other evidence is there of Cambrian confusion abroad? Consider the following:

1. The Confederate States of America had everything going for them. Easily defensible territory, a cautious US Congress, excellent military leaders and the tacit support of much of Europe. So who did they choose as their one and only president? Jefferson Davis, whose family hailed from Glamorgan.

The South might as well have burned down Atlanta itself and saved everyone three years of having their balls blown off.

2. Somalia had the makings of a successful state, believe it not. Unlike much of Africa it has an homogeneous population, convenient location on modern trading routes, decent ports, a proper alphabet and a thriving market in the export of glamorous models. The plucky Somalis even managed to oust their dictator Siad Barre all by themselves.

Then along came General Hersi Morgan, who combined the military efficiency of his father-in-law Barre with a devotion to famine and pestilence to rival that of any Horseman of the Apocalypse. The Somalis have not managed to hold a government together since, too preoccupied are they with avoiding al-Qaeda, the Ethiopian Army, pirates, Ridley Scott and one another.

3. Staying in Africa, take a look at Zimbabwe. Comrade Bob is no Welshman, as far as I know, but our ways are more subtle than that. Knowing what it's like, we assumed the International Community would press President Mugabe to cut a deal with the opposition rather than send in the brace of French paratroopers it would take to topple him.

Enter Morgan Tsvangirai and the rather obvious Welshman Ncube. Don't expect Mr Mugabe to be retiring any time soon.

4. Indeed, you could say that Africa's entire ghastly colonial experience came down to a Welsh. Dr Livingstone was as lost as a fisherman in Fortnum's and faced certain death by Mau Mau when he was rescued by Henry Morton Stanley, a hack from Denbigh who specialised in being a literal bastard on three continents.

The ensuing publicity stoked the Scramble for Africa, blighted the place with Bibles, and gave Stanley the chance to resume the career of killing black people that his capture and defection from the Confederate side had cut short during the American Civil War. His sole act of humility was to cede to King Leopold II of the Belgians not only the whole Congo but also the title of Worst White Man of the 19th Century.

Wales has tried to compensate Africa by adopting Lesotho, the only case of one country twinning with another, but we still get Christmas cards addressed to Mr Kurtz.

5. We have not neglected the lesser continents, either. South America seems relatively Waliserrein, apart from the agrarian simpletons of the Chubut Valley in Argentina. These religious pastoralists resented the way science, the telegraph and life-long teeth were ruining their traditional ways in Bala, and so set off for what they thought would be a verdant Eden in the Pampas.

They managed to turn the shrieking rocks and numbing desert that Buenos Ayres had sold them into a fair copy of Cardiganshire, but hopes of autonomy met the same fate as any attempt to rule Latin America that didn't involve ridiculous peaked caps and misuse of the power supply.

The Welsh of the Wladfa, as we call the Chubut colony, avenged themselves on the grim gauchos, though but. The Argentine junta's last gamble was the Falklands grab of 1982, a debacle that led to the election of Raul Alfonsín (a Welsh Foulkes on his mother's side) as president.

Good show, you might say, democracy and all that. Except that Alfonsín, in blazing a trail for the free market and constitutional rule, set up the liberal movements throughout the continent for a fall. Their European sensibility and advocacy of civil society clearly rankled with the Latin soul, as the voters whom they had freed soon ousted them in favour of lunatics, rabble-rousers and mini Castros.

Hell, even the Sandinistas made a comeback.

6. Our impact on Asia seems slight, but consider the heroic work of Agent Anna Leonowens (née Edwards). She encouraged the King of Siam to reform his country to such an extent that he was honoured with a musical, no doubt to the delight of the ladyboys of his elegantly debauched realm.

Again, what's not to like? But Anna's target was not the fragrant Thais, but the neighbouring British and French empires in India and Indochina. A strong Siam frustrated their efforts at expansion. Britain would have ruined their cuisine and the French their womenfolk. Instead they had to make do with Burma and Cambodia, countries renowned for their beastly food, absurd languages and razor-toothed, truculent beldames. In these respects they were a little reminder that Wales is never far away.

7. Even Europe is not immune. Literacy, the Code Napoléon and any sort of plumbing has kept the Welsh out of Charlemagne's patrimony, but the lost lands of Byzantium and the Third Rome are ripe for wrongdoing.

So far we've managed one success. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine was always going to be a disappointment, given the mediocrity of President Yushchenko and the mendacity of his prime-ministerial nemesis, Madame Tymoshenko, but its solid achievement of a free press, democratic process and the rule of law ought to have outlived it.

Not with President Viktor Yanukovych in power, I'm afraid. This carp-brained golem would have been nothing without the backing of the colliery oligarchs of Donetsk - a city and industry founded by, and once named for, Welsh coal baron John Hughes. Soon the proud Cossacks will envy their Belarussians neighbours to the north, with their abundant swamps, radiation and carefree inbreeding.

8. Which brings us back to Australia. This model of sturdy democracy and constitutional progress was dragged in and out of war by Billy Hughes, an Antipodean Lloyd George who cast parties and policies in his wake like teeth on a rugby pitch. The only parliamentary group he didn't wreck in his endless political career was the Country Party, which he could count on to continue his cussedness long after he had descended cackling into Annwn.

The Australians are a generous folk, and their Labor Party decided to give Wales another chance when it chose Julia Gillard, a russet Kinnockette from Barry, as its leader all of two months ago.

The result of Saturday's snap election, as Hyperbore further wrote, shows that she turned a ten-point poll lead into a double defeat - not only are Labor in second place behind the Liberal Party, but with no overall majority it looks like Australia will be run, Israeli-style, at the whim of nutjob independents.

Shall we weep, like Alexander, with no more worlds to conquer? Not while Antarctica lies untaffed, and possibly English planets wink in the Welsh sky. Mae'r Anghenfil yn y Lloer.

Friend Highball

2010-08-02T22:53:00.006Z

"Civilisation is an exercise in self-restraint," intoned Senator William "I hate you, Butler" Yeats, Irish poet and statesman. Wise words, and rich ones too coming from a man who wrote marching song for Franco reject Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts and spent his last years having unnecessary surgery, monkeying around with young ladies and dying, predictably enough, in France.

Yeats's ghost was knocking at the door of The Tethered Goat the other day as we sat down to lunch. I offered the Dog of Decei(p)t and Hypocrisy his usual Steppenwolf measure of red wine, but he quietly declined and opted for a Diet Coke.

"That's not even a proper mixer!" complained Dazza. The K Man was lost for printable words.

The Dog mumbled something about "health concerns", also known as being a middle-aged bloke, and pledged to buy his own beverages for the duration.

We've all known the Dog for many years and have grown accustomed to his ways. Indeed, we all have our oddities:

The K Man likes French lager;
Dazza insists on eating at table;
I wear "gay" shirts; and
The Dog drives a BMW.

But none of us has ever ordered a soft drink, not even for a girl who specifically asked for one ("Here's a spritzer, love, it even sounds like Sprite."). The next couple of lunchtimes were spent debating whether there were any historical precedents for this behaviour among normal people. We found none.

The closest we came was the case of "Young Young" Magurn, an ex-colleague and epic ale-whalloper, who would switch to Diet Coke and a regime of running around a lot for a fortnight when ever he lost sight of his feet or mistook them for someone else's. Once contact with his loafer tassels was re-established, he would resume his campaign to drain all South Coast breweries by the nearest church festival.

"That wasn't giving up, that was getting in training," I explained to what we thought would be a chastened Dog. "That's what I'm doing," he countered, picking lemon from his teeth. "I need to get into shape for the International Berlin Beer Festival."

It was like that moment in American films when everything you've seen hitherto turns out to have been a pungent red herring, elaborate conspiracy or the dream of a hedgerow mammal. We rushed our apologies - apart from the K Man, who disapproves of festivals that don't involve getting monged in a field in Wiltshire while "some Fenians" try to steal your tent - and considered a new point of philosophy:

What is more manly - the Dog Trend or the Dazza-Boyo Stance? The Dog Trend is:

To drink vats of all sorts of stuff, eat pies, climb onto the roof of your house and hurl night soil at the neighbours' dovecotes.
To cease this activity, substituting soft drinks, omelettes (there is an option without chips, apparently) and a stroll around the garden for a few weeks.
To visit a world shrine of booze, where adepts from all corners of the Earthly disc gather to insist that they don't really want a girlfriend anyway.
To return home with a novelty tankard, the phone number of an ambiguous Belgian and a renewed commitment to The Drink.

The Dazza-Boyo Stance is to drink fairly large amounts of certain stuff, eat things that aren't just brown, and sit on the sofa criticising the telly.

The case for the Dog Trend is that it requires the collective willpower of the Rolling Stones (minus Bill Wyman) to refrain from this life of Neronic excess, only to plunge back in after a fixed period.

The case for the Dazza-Boyo Stance is neo-Yeatsian, in that it involves self-discipline to keep your drinking within the bounds of the just-about unacceptable.

We are genuinely unsure which is the maler, as both approaches have gods on their side:

The Dog Trend reminds me of the Nazarite cult in Judaism, wherein the devout would prepare themselves for pilgrim festivals by not cutting their hair, drinking wine or mucking about with corpses. Rather like promising God that you're not going to be a medical student.

The Dazza-Boyo Stance has elements of Zen, with a hint of Shaolin.

Now the Dog Trend God is the real, Jewish God that everyone recognizes as God. The Dazza-Boyo endorsement may be more obscure, but you get more deities for your sack of butt.

We turned to our independent arbiter, the K Man. He lowered his cigarette, nodded sagely, and pronounced "ye're aw a toosht o' girzies' gairtens". Then he pointed to his empty glass with a bony finger worthy of Knox himself.

I have a sort of dream

2010-07-16T00:46:00.006Z

The Radio 4 reading of Hellhound on His Tail has brought home to me one of the many differences between myself and the late Martin Luther King.

Dr King's subconscious thoughts, to judge by his "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, were blessed with a Periclean progression and majestic, King James eschatology that mine lack.

I resent this, as dreams are yet another aspect of my life over which I have no control. Teenage months spent sleeping with a picture of Sally James (above) and a sachet of Bird's Custard under my pillow confirm this.

Being married to Mrs Boyo means never having to remind yourself of your own essential shallowness, but History persists in doing so:

I read in Michael Balfour's biography of Wilhelm II that the Kaiser frittered away his evenings in witless badinage with drones and poseurs. I do the same pretty much all day;
Eisenstein's October suggests that epic loser Alexander Kerensky spent much of 1917 stealing into dowagers' boudoirs in over-elaborate footwear - a college past-time of my own; and
Along with the benign Emperor Ferdinand of Austria, I like dumplings.

My devotion to Marxism is in part a calculation, based on the 20th century record, that it might best help me to rewrite this past.

Or else I could go back to Uncle Karl himself and, instead of whining about History like some Silurian Stalin, actually try to change it. Here I'm handicapped by honesty, a character flaw the led to my first expulsion from Wales.

If I tried to emulate Dr King's speech today, for example, it would go something like this:

"I have a dream that I am sitting near the back of the Corris Uchaf to Machynlleth bus, when just about Esgairgeiliog the crypto-Welsh character actor Peter Vaughan sits down next to me.

"I have a dream that Vaughan is in the guise of 'Genial' Harry Grout, Mr Big of Her Majesty's Prison Slade out of the 1970s British crim-com Porridge.

"I have a dream that 'Grouty' begins to sing 'Two Little Boys' to me with sinister suburban sibilance. I have a dream today!

"I have a dream that little Welsh pensioners and little Brummie dole-siphons are sitting all around us, hoping that Bing Crosby might get on at Maespoeth and croon 'The Little Drummer Boy', with or without help from Mr David Bowie.

"I have a dream that, when the ticket inspector boards the bus near the Pennal turning, my fellow-passengers will not be judged by their sentimental musical taste but by the content of their wallets! I have a dream today!

"Free at last! Free at last! They all qualify for the free bus pass!"

It's doubtful whether these powerful images would have inspired the Civil Rights Movement, but Americans of all hues would have gone away a little wiser about British popular culture, mid-Wales topography, and the concessionary fares offered by the Crosville Cymru transport giant.

Have any of you Cymru Rouge cadres had a dream that might have changed history, or at least moved rather than vaguely disturbed the Wretched of the Earth?

And please bear in mind that this web blog officially supports Jung, so none of that mucky Freudian stuff about my wanting Bing Crosby to be my dad. I get enough of that from my mother.

The Secret Life of Oxiana

2010-06-25T10:39:00.005Z

Ukrainian pop diva Natasha Koroleva left her husband, the Russian singer-songwriter Igor Nikolayev, for a male stripper called Tarzan who was largely made up of seaweed and several boar carcasses.

Nikolayev didn't even pause to wipe breakfast off his silvery moustache, but departed at once to take command of the 201st Gatchina Twice Red Banner Motor-Rifle Division of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, stationed at the time in distant Tajikistan.

This Rorschach horror of glaciers and dung pits, wedged sourly between Afghanistan and the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Testing Range, was emerging from 70 years of Soviet literacy, pavements and buttons into the awareness that its Afghan neighbours had spent the intervening period cheerily hacking off one another's heads and using them for mountain-top semaphore. It was time to catch up.

The 201st (Gatchina Twice Red Banner) Motor-Rifle Division had spent the 50 years since its glory days in the Second World War watching with dismay as non-Slavs basked in the benefits of Soviet bounty without having their geography, economy and womenfolk repeatedly ransacked, Berlin style. It was time to catch up.

Enter President Boris Yeltsin, who raised his face from a bucket of vodka jellies long enough to send this band of fighting, drinking demolition men down Tajikistan way to teach the sense-starved trainee-Iranian locals some manners.

The Tajik civil war, and the cultural fissures that lay beneath, is a complex matter than can best be summed up thus:

The paleo-Communist government of Tajikistan was a bootleg recording of a live Mariah Carey concert.

The armed Islamic opposition was a teenage girl singing along to said concert with a fucked Walkman on a hot train, stranded at points near Swindon.

The 201st Motor-Rifle Division was a snarl of Cardiff City supporters on said train, returning home from a thrashing at Brentford. And the buffet car's closed.

This was the mess that Igor Nikolayev came to sort out. On arrival in Dushanbe, the country's capital and chief limb repository, he headed for the cunningly-named Hotel Tajikistan, where the 201st had set up an impromptu rest and recreation facility on, and often through, the first and second floors.

Here's a description by a Foreign Office diplomat visiting the British embassy, which then shared the hotel with the 201st:

"Breakfast was served in the basement and sometimes passed without incident, as the men of the 201st generally swung out of their companions at about ten. They descended for a brunch of roast ibex and fermented grain before touching up the décor with their Kalashnikovs. Their involuntary bedmates were perspiring enough by lunchtime to slip their leathren bonds and flee for the entrance, only to find that the 201st were using the central stairwell for heavy artillery practice. I dined elsewhere." (Daniel Thornton, "The Tajik Helix", Callard & Bowser, London, 2004, p.69)

Nikolayev took one look at this scene of double-jointed debauch and ordered the men to assemble in the remains of the central courtyard. He then delivered the following address:

"Men of the 201st! I am Igor Yurievich Nikolayev, the gentleman of Russian pop. I have the moustaches of a fin de siècle hussar on his release from Ottoman captivity, and the mien of the late Tsar as he faced his executioners.

"It is often remarked that I never dwell upon my betrayal by my former wife, the raven-haired rackasaurus Natasha Koroleva, who left me for a caramel-glazed glans called Sergei 'Tarzan' Glushko.

"This is true. And I choose not to waste my time on that stiletto-heeled sump of squalor precisely because of my profound respect for women. This is the basis of my moral code. And from now on, you are all going to do the same.

"These young ladies and their livestock - you are to free them at once! They are somebody's sisters, somebody's daughters, and sometimes both. How can we instill self-respect and respect for others among our Tajik hosts while we ourselves treat their women as meat hammocks?

"A person's individual qualities do not boost or undermine their inalienable rights. My ex-spouse Natasha Koroleva cavorts like a crack whore on late-night TV in ever more explicit music videos with her wax-balled baboon, but for all that I don't wish her ill. The fact that some of these girls may be tuppeny trollops with their own bank accounts makes them in no way less human, less deserving of dignity.

"So, men, recall the words of the French philosopher, Charles Péguy. He said that 'example is not merely the best way to lead, it is the only way'. Free these women from bondage, free yourselves from the Gordian Knot, and let us free Tajikistan from fear! And, yes, the quartermaster-general will pay them off - in local currency."

With that, Igor Nikolayev and the 201st Motor Rifle Division began the slow task of reconciling mullah with Marxist, jihadist with Jew, head with bayonet, and man with yeti. True, much blood was still to clog the tank tracks and roulette wheels, but sweet reason soon swelled from the Soghdian wells and peace returned to toxic Tajikistan.

Many an observer agreed that, although writing hit after hit for such stars of the Soviet and Russian fame factory as Alla Pugacheva and Igor Krutoi had made a man of Nikolayev, it was the slow crucifixion of watching his venal, bewitching Natasha roam the hairless plains of Tarzan's chest like some leopard of lust that stretched and strengthened his mental sinews into noble girders of courage that eventually spanned the chasms of Chorasmian mistrust.

A coalition government was formed - not quite as glorious as our own, but still impressive in its felix conjunctio of anachronism and ambition. Before returning to Moscow and his musical career, Nikolayev was invited to address the Majlisi Oli national assembly. With typical modesty, he spoke a few words of simple wisdom:

"Mr President, honourable members of the Majlis, ambassadors extraordinary and plenipotentiary, ladies and gentlemen, few of us had the faith to foresee the day when we would all be sitting here, in one hall, planning the future of Tajikistan together - not with mortars and mattocks, but with diaries and draft laws.

"You may recall the reason some lost souls gave for joining the French Foreign Legion - 'To Forget'. Some have joked that I came here to forget the trivial and lascivious treason of my former wife, Natasha Koroleva, the top-heavy temptress of Ternopol. They could not be further from the truth, as I try not to lower my gaze to the gutter of TV talk-shows and gossip columns in the yellow press, where she preens and prattles like a cake-crazed cormorant of cupidity over the bronzed balustrade Glushko.

"No, we must never forget. Never forget the widow's tears, the village in flames, the meat-processing plant daubed with discriminatory slogans, or the lecturer in Dialectal Materialism used as a toilet. Those who urge us to forget want to rewrite our history and steal our past. That is why we must remember, remember the camaraderie of battle and the solidarity of adversity, as well as pain at the loss of a loved one - whether to gunfire, exile or some semi-literate mastodon on steroids.

"It is just as important to learn to forgive, of course. Without reconciliation there can be no progress. It is heartening to see how old enemies are already working together in this new dispensation. They have not forgotten who they once were, and what they were capable of, only a few months ago, but have chosen to focus on who they are now, and what they can do for their country.

"At the prayer meeting earlier I shared a rug with a couple of mujahidin commanders who, as was often the case, drew their noms-de-guerre from Indian cinema. Commander Jagi and I discussed the grapes of Samarkand, while Commander Tarzan commended Khorog as a cheap and appealing holiday destination.

"Now, I don't believe I let Commander Tarzan know what unhappy associations his monicker has for me [laughter from the hall] - I see you're shaking your head, Tarzan jaan!

"Well, perhaps I might have let slip a few thoughts on what it's like to see your ex-wife parade the child you were never able to give her in the embrace of an oiled ape - it's like having your entrails wound out through your throat, then salted and left to crack and bleed in the baking sun, if you've ever wondered - but the point is that I never, not even in the tensest standoff in the Surkhandarya Salient, let my subjective emotions overwhelm the strategic need of the hour.

"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you from my very soul for the gift of a home here in Tajikistan, plus the Tursunzoda Aluminium Works, that you have presented to me, but I must respectfully decline your offer. My work here is done, Tajiks must become masters of their own fate. I would only remind you of the bad old days.

"Someone once said that you can never go home. That's very true, because home is away and somewhere else. My native town of Kholmsk is not the bustling port of my youth any more, but rather an edgy frontier post on the cusp of three worlds. I would not be able to recreate those carefree summer days on the dockside, learning shanties from old sea dogs returned home to harbour.

"Likewise, I never tarry in Kiev after a tour, because it reminds of times spent schooning on the Dnieper alongside a succubus with a Wonderbra fixation and no heart.

"Have faith in your future, Tajikistan! It is important to believe, no matter how unlikely success might seem. Who would have believed two years ago that a turbanned hafiz would be deflecting headers from a KGB colonel down the municipal football pitch? No more than the scant number who thought my Natasha would stay plugged into that mumbling sperm-hose rather than return to explore the life of the mind with me, I reckon.

"I've learned to accept that she was not the woman I thought she was, and live in the hope that one day I might find someone with her grace, beauty and talent, but who appreciates Chekhov and good conversation more than being ploughed up and down like an allotment wheelbarrow.

"And you, dear friends, will accept that your country is never going to be a second-rate Switzerland or Sweden, so work to make it a first-class Tajikistan - a land where men earn their bread through honest labour and appreciate good music, rather than flexing their bare buttocks for the titillation of beldames and pederasts, a land of chaste women who value age and dignity over cologne and dexterity with Chinese love beads! Ladies and gentlemen - Tajikiston zindabod!" [rapturous applause, turning into a standing ovation]

Nikolayev returned to Moscow and won the unreserved admiration of another generation of Russian music-lovers. Now the doyen of the Moscow stage, he still writes and performs. Perhaps you'll catch him after a concert one day, and ask him whether he ever recalls his days as a warrior prince. Perhaps he'll smile gently and walk on, perhaps he'll refer you to his bodyguards, or perhaps he'll take up his guitar and sing:

Either way, you will have shared a moment with Igor Nikolayev, scholar, soldier, a man at peace.

A Tale of the Extinguished Moon

2010-05-29T20:01:00.011Z

Mad scientist and Laurie Anderson impersonator Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that there are aliens out there, and they may be less welcoming than the inhabitants of Llanfrothen.

When it comes to astronauts Hawking knows what he's talking about, so for once I agree with him: we need to be careful not to provoke these deranged space bugs.

It's only a matter of time before the triphallic crab pupae of Queequeg IV intercept a live broadcast of a U2 concert and naturally launch a battery of intergalactic sulphuric spunk missiles at the general Isle of Man area.

I'm aware that I may not measure up to Guardian or BBC standards in terms of celebrating the vibrant diversity of cultural responses to encounters with The Other, but on this occasion I simply don't want to be drowned and fried in flying space spoff because some interdimensional star-spawn blames me for Bono.

And further two-handed research on the Intern Net has established that we will only have ourselves to blame for our imminent obliteration.

You see, at some point in the otherwise excellent 1970s, Mankind sent the Voyager 1 spaceship into the cosmic ether with a message of greeting for any bored xenomorphs out there.

What NASA hurled skywards was a vinyl 33" containing a "Hooked on Bach" record, Da Vinci's drawing of a man with six limbs, and a porn flick. A 1970s porn flick, with bad hair, wicka-wacka plastic funk soundtrack and lots of lobstering. Oh, and it was narrated by Jimmy Carter.

It would be harder to imagine a more irritating communication without involving George Galloway and Jive Bunny. Moreover, it gave an inaccurate impression of the human race, shower of bastards though we may be.

I think we need to correct these mistakes fast, and send a new cosmopod beyond Pluto with a fair representation of what we have to offer our distant neighbours.

The vessel should contain a pair of Manolo Blahniks, a recording of a man breaking wind, and a Benny Hill DVD. The shoes and gastric eruption tell you all there is to know about the respective sexes, and Benny Hill sums up modern civilisation in an unflinching yet digestible manner.

The 1970s mission also lacked a crucial contribution from our Soviet co-planetarians. From the mid-1950s onwards the Russians liked nothing better than to fire small animals at Saturn, hence all the monkey skeletons in decaying orbits around the Earth and that little dog who's probably now worshipped as a demiurge on Neptune.

This Great Coalition of Ours is trying to improve relations with the Kremlin on the basis of a shared interest in evil, so I propose that we honour the Reds' previous space endeavours by packing Limahl out of Kajagoogoo into the cone of the craft.

He would give the aliens a fair idea of what pets Paris Hilton likes. And an affordable supply of Ryvita, hair gel and Embassy Number 1s ought to keep him going, given his slender build and necessarily restricted movements.

The Betelgeusians would be impressed by our level of development and obviously benign intent, especially the concern we show to the bald, Irish and underdressed in the work of Hill, and would request a meeting of envoys.

The obvious choice would be a delegation from the United Nations General Assembly, but I'm not sure that alien life is as convinced that the problematic emissions in the Horseshoe Nebula are all the fault of Israel. So I'd suggest a small mission of the sagest groovers we have to offer.

There is an emerging consensus that the acme of all human achievement - cultural, intellectual, acrobatic and erotic - was reached in the British popular music scene in 1980-1994.

From this Golden Bough I would pluck the first and finest fruits to establish contact with the carnivorous kelp of Alpha Centauri, namely Shakin' Stevens, Pete Wylie, and Bez out of The Happy Mondays.

Shaky combines hip-gyration with deserved modesty, Wylie has the righteous, random wrath of Jeremiah, and Bez adds something of Zen as well as pharmacology. They will be universally respected in the Heavens as they are on Earth.

The reply from the Venusians is easy to predict. "We thank you for the welcome afforded by Ambassador Shaky and the warning about the Sony Corporation provided by Special Envoy Wylie. We shall endeavour to seek out and neutralise this threat with our scrotal infibulator beam.

"Soon we shall send our own leading scholars to share their starry wisdom with your elders, those who are learnèd in your science of hydroponics, that which they call "Gabba", and the Belgian House.

"As for Counsellor Bez, we ask that he tarry a while with us. We have so much to learn from him. Oh, and Limahl is doing splendidly in our maritime breeding programme."

The Midrash Rabbah to Genesis 3:9 posits that God created and destroyed many worlds before He allowed this one to dangle harmlessly just beneath the Moon for a few thousand years.

Let us not give Him good cause to destroy the Earth again for all our sins.

But above all let us not irk the alkaloid rhombuses of Cnychbant Felix into doing the same, just because we wouldn't frogmarch Simply Red and Edwina Currie onto a leaky coracle off the North Korean coast and let international geo-politics take its course.