One Day in the Life of Isaac Danilovich

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.