Tercio de muerte

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.

Salem's Knot

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.

Cain Rising

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.

Stalin Wasn't Stallin'

Mrs Boyo and I start the day with target practice and Radio 4's Today Programme Bingo - combining the two if possible. As respectively a Marxian Spenglerist and a Welsh de Maistrean of reptilian sang froid, we find the consequent rise in blood pressure helps us blend in with the neighbours, while the kitchen-table cries of "House!" remind us of what we're meant to be living in.

Today runs three types of story:

I. Things Today thinks we need to know (global warming, Gaza, what Bono's up to).

II. People doing things that aren't illegal, but which Today thinks ought to be (drinking, smoking).

III. People doing things that are illegal, but which Today thinks have "root causes" (recreational drugs, bombing).

The aim of Today Bingo is to find a story that combines at least two, and ideally all three of these elements. If it then interviews a BBC correspondent to reinforce its point with exquisite solipsism, you've got a full house.

The other morning I was quick to bag a story that sounded promising. The gist was "Naturists are taking teens to their nudy camps, but what if there are paedos about?" It had a strong strain of Element II - naturists are not illegal, but their suburban vulgarity puts them firmly on the Today list of undesirables. I could also stake a claim to Element I, as Today was running stories on "The Kids" all week.

No chance of Element III, I'm glad to say, unless the London media were even more depraved than I'd thought, but two out of three put me well ahead of Mrs Boyo and her Element II bid on the weather forecast (it was snippy about the Home Counties, where Todaythink maintains people ought to be guilty about residing).

But then I realised, with almost toast-crunching horror, that I agreed with an aspect of the item. Naturists - or nudists, to use the technical term - were alright in Carry On films and Sunday Express cartoons, but there remains something suspiciously German and 1920s about them in real life.

I have a list of types who, while not criminal or inherently evil, I would not allow near "The Kids". These are Quakers, vegetarians and Esperantists. Quakers are worthy in a wheaten way, but are Wrong About Everything. Vegetarians deny God's meaty bounty, and dare to be smug about it. Esperantists are usually an intersection of the last two, like in a Venn diagram *.

To that number I now add nudists. The Lord filled Britain with brambles and damp weather, and made our kinfolk lumpy and uneven of tooth. He also granted us the bounty of Scotswomen to weave sturdy tweeds and the colony of Malaya to provide sap for our gumboots, so that we might adapt to the tepid discomforts of these islands.

Not good enough for nudists, apparently. Like Quakers, they think they know better than God. As this is a free country, nudists are free to frolic on the sunkissed beaches of Llanbedr and get bullied on the Today programme like the rest of us, but they set an example of poor taste, self-absorption and blasphemy to our youth.

Mrs Boyo pointed out that Stalin locked up as many Quakers, vegetarians and Esperantists as he could lay his iron fists on, when not distracted by trying to destroy the few clever, well-born and good-looking people who'd survived his mate Lenin. I replied frostily that this argument of guilt by association didn't intimidate me.

Until I understood that she wasn't trying to contradict me at all.

(* Thanks to Scaryduck, for explaining a Venn diagram in response to my gesticulations.)

I Shot George Orwell

Not entirely true, but it was the headline that loomed out of the Ripperian fog of my mind in a Bloomsbury student hostel sometime in September 1985.

It was fast followed, in true Hammer style, by an orchestral blare of "Noooo!" as I realized I'd let a journalistic career-kickstart walk off the National Express at Digbeth without leaving his name.

Then I fell asleep, and thought little of it for years. The next day I flew to the Soviet Union for a year of language debasement, alcohol riffs, cramped sexual encounters and hair loss.

It all started in Llangollen, where I boarded the London bus with high hopes, thermal underwear and an encouraging lecture from my Uncle Dai on KGB honey traps. I sat next to a flat-capped gent who might have been a Robert-Maxwell-O-Gram in earlier days. We got talking, and it turned out he was a Czech wartime emigré who'd spent the last few decades as a manager for Lucas, the headlamp people.

I turned the conversation as quickly as I could from car components to interwar Czechoslovakia, and took a step into a world I was only to enter in earnest the following day - the realm of full-on Communist nuttery.

Our man - for the sake of simplicity let's call him Jiří - was a leftwing Socialist in the early 1930s. He'd had his first brush with international intrigue when smuggling party literature into Austria, which was then run by a midget fascist yokel called Engelbert Dollfuss. The police caught Jiří in Vienna, held him overnight, and deported him to Czechoslovakia the following morning.

They carried out the deportation by making him walk all the way back to Bratislava, a petty gesture that marked down the Dolfuss regime as lacking the brio necessary to qualify as truly fascist. I like to think this was one of the reasons why Mussolini let Hitler take Austria in 1938 - dearth of la bella figura.

When his call-up papers came through Jiří decided that munching those Czech cheese pasties in an Olomouc barracks while waiting for Adolf to call didn't sit well with his reputation for woeful foreign adventures. So he swapped national service for three years of fighting Franco in Spain.

By now Jiří's jaded collectivist palate was demanding the gamier flavours of Stalinism, and he spurned the dowdy International Brigades for the thrills and glamour of the Soviet goon squad in Barcelona.

“Our main target was Trotskyites.”

I shared his contempt for trustafarians in keffiyehs, but suggested that Francoists, Falangists, Carlists, fifth-columnists, Fifth Monarchy Men and other rotters were surely a higher priority.

“Not for us, boy. POUM were collaborating with Franco, and had misled large part of Catalan proletariat.”

The POUM used the Catalan language, George Orwell was proud to be in their rambunctious ranks, and I seemed to remember that Anaïs Nin was their leader. This tipped my minority, literary, romantic heart lazily in their favour when compared with rat-faced Russians in dead men’s suits.

(I also liked the Durrutti Column because they defended Madrid and didn't brag about it. If I’d run a Spanish anarchist outfit I’d have called it the Bugatti Brigade and just waited for the petrolheads to sue. And I'd have been a Basque, too.)

Anyway, Jiří set me right on all this objectively-bourgeois flummery that passed for my historical knowledge.

“Listen, they were bunch of nun-loving Nazi poufs. They had to go, and we were the blokes to get them gone.”

There followed accounts of beret-wearing intellectuals and baffled dockworkers being blatted by the J Man and his greasy mates in a variety of primitive and protracted ways, often involving masonry tools.

This brought him to a startling account of a shift that went wrong at the coalface of revolutionary violence.

“So we spent whole day waiting in lobby of hotel where some English Trot was staying. He never turn up. Wife tip him off about us before we could tip him off balcony.”

“Er, any idea what he was called?”

“No. Writer or something. Frondeur!”

"Was his name Blair, Eric Blair?”

“Could be, sounds familiar. Wrecker!”

I gave Jiří an O-level synopsis of Homage to Catalonia, recalling mention of Mrs Blair's flight from a hotel. He acknowledged that it could have been him and his team of charmers.

"If you’d known who he was, would you have killed him?"

“Of course. He was fifth-columnist, Trotsky-Maxtonite traitor to worker class. My boys would have tattooed hammer and sickle on his head with bullets. We had many. Soviet economy strong,” he confirmed.

How different world literature would have been if Jiří and The Mausers had fulfilled their Five-Bullet Plan that day. No Animal Farm or 1984. We'd have had to make do with Charlotte's Web and the unfilmable Brave New World.

Jiří got out to Britain via France in 1940 to serve in the Free Czech Forces with distinction. He remained true to Uncle Joe throughout, as further Tales of Violence and Hypocrisy attested, but the dialectic urged him to stay in cosy Britain in 1948 rather than return to Soviet-run Czechoslovakia.

He proceeded to build Socialism in One Company, and probably helped apply Plekhanov's dictum "The worse, the better" to British Leyland in the 1970s.

He left the coach at Birmingham full of envy at my imminent submersion in Soviet life. I wish I'd taken his phone number, as his story deserved a better telling than I've managed here.

Still, spotting a chance and letting it go is what life is all about. Just like Jiří and Mr Orwell.

Cymru Rouge Accepts Rugby Laurels

A Press Release from Cymru Rouge Retrospective Achievements Department:

Attention Welshes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Otherwise, well done!

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