Dim chwyd, dim byd

"Not much fighting at this disco, mun."

Thus is any sluggish social gathering, from wake to soirée, condemned in the colloquial English of Swansea. (Or "Ffwc ddim cwffio yn y disgo 'ma, chav," in the Welsh of Dolgellau). Again the loamy demotic wisdom of the Welsh gwerin cleaves the encrusted caulk of crach convention.

A Welsh can earn no greater honour than to raise a sub-par party, whether wedding feasting or Quaker monthly meeting, to the status of "brilliant sesh" by judicious two-fisted intervention.

I'm proud to say that I have managed this feat on two occasions. Once I "chinned" a doctor, turning the opening of a new ward or something at Central Middlesex Hospital into a minor riot. He had denigrated the shorter poems of Alexander Pushkin, so what else could I do?

But the greater moment came when I reached Maimonides's first and highest degree of charity by helping another, and an English at that, to elevate a college girl's birthday party into a window-buckling festival of water sports.

Matt was my neighbour at Swansea University (formerly Sketty Miners' Institute) in 1984. He led a life of near satori, being happy with his middle-period Simple Minds albums, crates of hair gel, white jeans and total lack of self-awareness.

All he lacked was female companionship. This went heavily with him, as he irritated men and women alike with his Teeside manners, non-narcotic chemistry course and vocal admiration of landsman Paul Daniels - Wales has always been for Ali Bongo.

His agony was doubled by hubris, as his acute object of desire was Delyth. A petite, dark and sweetly addictive Welsh-speaker, Delyth could often be found reading French and German literature in a nightingale Solva accent.

She was polite and understanding to him but, like all young ladies of her age and station, what she wanted was cock. And not some kinked, North Country pizzle, either, but a veiny hank of Celtic capstan that she could barely close both hands around.

There were ample lengths of the latter on offer at the Swansea University Rugby Union Club, doled out by both types of player: vicious, stubby flankers, and props - walking walls of dread whose heads were composed of the impacted remains of other men's skulls.

Delyth batted back and forth between the two like a dazed humming-bird, leaving Matt little chance to impress her with his disdain for Wales and ignorance of all sports, real or invented. Still, she responded to his persistence by inviting him to her birthday party, kindly pointing out that it would be thronged by jealous, drunken full-backs, as would she.

"Aaaargh I dunno watta do shes lovely but I dont standa chance wergh, wergh, wergh!" ruminated Matt down the bar at the Hendrefoelan student ghetto the night of the party.

"Here, drink this," I suggested, with approving nods from the meeting of the Meibion Glyndŵr (Killay & Clyne Valley Chapter) that he'd crashed. I offered him three pint of Felinfoel, seasoned with the Indian whisky that Gwil Goll had brought back from a fundraising mission to Goa.

Forty minutes later Matt felt ready to party with Delyth and the most violent group of men not yet to have joined the South Wales Police Minority Liaison Unit.

At about three o'clock the following morning I awoke to the sound of someone banging a sack of stoats against our front door. Ray the foulmouthed Chinaman opened it only to be struck silent by a lurching belch of bile and booze that had once been Matt. It squelched up the stairs in a cloud of ammonia and recrimination, not to emerge until lunchtime.

Matt eventually surfaced for a pint of kaolin & morphine and a review of his recent social life. I had spent the morning gathering intelligence at the launderette, having decided it was likely to have seen brisk après-sesh trade.

"All I remember is turning up at the party and asking where Delyth was," whispered Matt from beneath the pound of frozen sausages he'd taped to his forehead. "'She's upstairs', they said. So I went up to wish her happy birthday. Next thing I know it's three in the morning and I'm lying out front on the lawn, aching all over and soaking wet. Then I came home. What went wrong?"

"Nothing - you did splendidly!" I cried. "First, you roared into the party like a bad Brendan Behan impersonator, firebreathing ethanol. You barracked the scrum-half about Delyth's whereabouts for a good ten minutes until , in an access of malice, he told you she was hosting the front row in her bedroom.

"Undaunted, you marched upstairs, barged in and, once she'd disentangled herself from Slab, "Billy Goat" Griff and Dai Substantial, you proceeded to babble nonsense and booze fumes all over her at high speed. Delyth had stayed the Wrath of the Morlocks with a familiar flick of the wrist, but lost her natural poise when your stream of consciousness turned seamlessly into a stream of vomit.

"Griff said that, on reflection, it was a textbook display of the 'throw-in', but peformed with your stomach contents instead of a ball and straight into Delyth's face. The most striking detail was that you didn't stop talking before, during or after the manoeuvre.

"It was literally one fluid motion, and Griff said he would have mentioned you to the selectors if you hadn't been English or maimed beyond recognition. Maimed by being hurled through the first-floor window by a lovelorn Slab, who had vaulted across the room on his still proud manhood."

"Oh," noted Matt.

"And Slab would have got away with it - manslaughter, that is - if it hadn't been for the pesky warm weather, which had prompted Delyth to leave the window open - that and her native exhibitionism, of course. Your fall was broken by the muscle-relaxing properties of the ale and a temporary shutdown of your nervous system courtesy of Da Sousa's 10-Month-Old Reserve Hogmanay Malt," I continued.

"So why was I all wet? Even I can't soil myself that much," inquired Matt.

"No false modesty, please," I reassured him. "But this time you're right. After comforting Delyth individually then as a team, they found the time and inclination to hose you down in a sort of Amsterdam lap of honour. Subsequent partygoers did likewise, especially as a lager-drinker had barricaded himself in the toilet."

"The shame!" he sobbed.

"Not at all!" I beamed. "The party had been a drag - just some morose flankers bumping their knuckles on the furniture while the props took turns to congratulate Delyth upstairs.

"Then you turned up, and within minutes there was full-frontal vomiting and defenestration, highlights that you normally wait hours for. Word spread fast. By one in the morning they were running buses in from Bridgend.

"'Look out for the piss-stinking dead Englishman on the lawn, bois bach!' the police would tell drunk drivers from Morriston to The Mumbles. Best party anyone's had in years. Iechyd da!"

I cracked open a can of Brains, at which Matt encored the previous night's performance. The Cymru Rouge Outreach Programme and Assassination Bureau voted to award him posthumous Welsh citizenship then and there, but Matt decided that the price was too high.

There, for one shining moment, he was as close to being a Welsh as an Englishman can ever come.

Drouthy neibors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gleanings of thy harvest

Some readers will have surmised that charity in every sense of the word is a rare visitor to the House of Boyo. This would be a mistake. Our commitment to the Laws of Moses shines through in weekly acts of tsedakah:

• Big Issue sellers know Madame Boyo as the lady who hands out pocket editions of Trotsky and points them in the direction of the nearest gunsmith;
• My blog posts are feats of endurance in the spirit of Edith Cavell, both to read and to write; and


• Jehovah's Witnesses and Labour canvassers alike have often enjoyed our hospitality in the outbuilding that we simply call "The Bell Jar".

Readers would be right, however, to conclude that we have little time for the current crop of charitable organisations. I tend to agree with a colleague who favours only two petitioners with his largesse, these being the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and The Salvation Army.

There's something comforting about knowing there's a big boat full of big men somewhere out there, and the Sally Army is a sort of insurance policy for any keen drinker with an impatient wife.

We feel that the task of the blogger is not to jeer at more socially-attuned people but rather to drag them down to our level, and so here is the No Good Boyo wishlist of charities:

1. Oxfemme. This organisation seeks to guide Oxbridge gals like Gail Trimble out of their blue stockings and into garments at once more complicated and yet much flimsier. Chief Executive Officer: Mrs Pouncer.

2. Dr St Bernardos. Teams of burly dogs bearing barrels of brandy enrich and deepen the lives of orphans.

3. Waugh on Want. Dyspeptic High Tories rove the wretched places of the Earth - The Levant, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Scotland - telling the slovenly locals to shut up, leave the livestock alone, read some hardback books and restock their wine cellars with decent but affordable claret.

4. Scopes. A group that campaigns to put the word "monkey" in front of most nouns on the grounds that this makes them instantly funny to the student community. For example: monkey tennis, monkey priest of Killybashangel, monkey nut, monkey puzzle and monkey man - low-hung or otherwise.

5. The Society of St Lynsey de Paul. A schismatic Catholic sect that venerates rather than condemns The Blessed Lynsey's 1970s recording career as one of the Seven Dolours of the Modern World. They run an Internet radio station that pledges to play "Won't Somebody Dance With Me?" over and over until The Vatican gives Cricklewood the same pilgrim status as Santiago de Compostela.

6. The Alex Higgins Trust. "The Hurricanes", as its members are known, are a band of Irishmen who seek to teach bookish homosexuals the virtues of drinking, smoking, billiards and the Ulster Fry.

7. Shelter-Skelter. Traps homeless people in cellars and makes them listen to rants about the secret meaning of Beatles songs.

8. Human Kites Watch. A dinner-party campaign to return Iraq and Afghanistan to the kite-adorned contentment that they enjoyed under Saddam and the Taleban. Patron: Michael Moore.

9. Interpal. Worldwide association of the "nice" halves of the "nice copper/nasty copper" partnership. Offers cigarettes and friendly advice to people who've just been thrown down a police station staircase in a sack.

I am happy to gather any contributions readers might want to make to these charities pending their establishment. Cheques and postal orders can be made out to "NGB" and sent to Banco Boiano, Skomer Island, Wales.

The Eighth of Thermidor of No Good Boyo

An acquaintance of unpalatable right-wing views once asked me with studied nonchalance whether I thought he would enjoy Gregor von Rezzori's "Memoirs of an Anti-Semite". "Only as a suppository," I replied.

It is one of my favourite books, although two aspects of it make me flinch. One is that Von Rezzori himself translated the middle section into better English than I can speak, and the other is a scene where the author encounters some unpleasantness with Bucharest roughs at a suburban circus. It involves his mistress, a bear and vigorous expressions of class resentment.

Collisions with Blood and Soil types distress us, the deracinated of the world, and that passage reminds me painfully of my own dealings with a stuffed squirrel in Soviet Moscow.

The reputation of taxidermy has never recovered from the shoddy work of Messrs "Ed" Gein and Alfred Hitchcock, neither of whom frankly had the skill to match their enthusiasm for the art as practitioner and propagandist respectively. Once was a time when one's aunts were safely shuttered away behind a screen of stuffed cats, dogs, canaries and boy scouts, but now nephews have no defence from their plump, probing fingers, rouged lips and madeira-soaked mutterings.

Where the West led, Soviet Russia firmly refused to follow. As Europe and America embraced deodorants, natural fibres, dentistry and not ramming sawdust up the arses of dead monkeys, the gamey trolls of Muscovy marched past shops full of stuffed rodents, their polyvinyl uniforms crackling in the permafrost, whistling songs of Socialism through mouths full of blackened stumps.

I came across one such shop at Patriarch's Ponds in Moscow one hazy summer day in 1988. I, along with my colleagues Max Braddel, Tubby Johnson, Swanny and a Scotchman called Duncan, had spent Library Day afternoon down the Panjab Indian Restaurant, as usual.

Every Wednesday was Library Day in the Soviet state. Colleges closed early so that students could rush off to the archives to carry out their own research, footnote their essays and order learned journals. This they resolved to do after extrapolating the modalities at various beer halls, kebab cellars and fish barrels. Eager to learn from our progressive counterparts, we did likewise. The Panjab soon became our symposium of choice.

The restaurant was set up in the 1970s glow of Soviet-Indian friendship. Mrs Gandhi had just suspended the rule of law and started sterilising people, so the Kremlin, reassured that Asia's best democracy was heading in the right direction at last, started shipping vodka, combustible television sets and plastic suits to Delhi.

The Indians promptly ousted Indira, restored civil rights and doled out transistor radios to the recently emasculated. As a belated gesture, the foreign minister sent some chefs over to Moscow to set up a few decent eateries so that he wouldn't have to live on Kit-Kats and condensed milk on his next official visit.

The Panjab was one such eatery, and was swiftly heading down the path to putrescence followed by all previous attempts to stimulate the Soviet palate. The pattern was familiar:

• Foreign chef arrives in joint-venture restaurant. Brings fine herbs and spices, authentic recipes, trains local staff.
• Restaurant is a hit, chef returns home with the Order of Laika the Space Dog (Third Class) and a moody blonde wife called Natasha who leaves him for an English backpacker called Josh whose father owns Hampshire.
• Soviet staff junk menu, add exotic spices to the usual stodge in order to mask elderly ingredients, steal light fittings, flood toilets.
• The restaurant critic of the KGB in-house magazine drops by, staff are executed, eatery closes "for technical reasons".
• Six months later it reopens as a Stuffed Animal Shop.

We had caught the Panjab halfway through the first stage. It served oily red soup ("What flavour is this soup, comrade waiter?" "Red.") Russian salads (meat in mayonnaise), and a sort of pudding that might once have been a rice-based condiment but was now a hideous rite of passage for the unwitting diner.

It had many advantages, nonetheless, chief among them being its abundant supply of alcohol. Mr Gorbachev's prohibition law was already being widely flouted, but nowhere with such baroque ebullience as down the Panjab.

Not only could you enjoy a relatively fresh bottle of Moscow's finest bottom-watering Zhiguli beer, but it was also the exclusive Moscow supplier of a tarry Moldavian wine called Joc. A brief tasting, courtesy of our tame waiter, confirmed our collective view that it was near-undrinkable liver rot. On a good day we would have a bottle each.

It was after such an expansive lunch that we wandered through the 19th century lanes of Patriarch's Ponds, one of the few parts of central Moscow not to have been turned into a cross between a 1980s after-the-bomb B movie set and the Seven Elms Market toilets by Soviet town planners. A cosy gun shop glinted in the bloodshots of our eyes, and we strolled in.

It was odd that lazily pro-Soviet British students were shocked by the ease with which Russians could buy rifles. First, because a fleeting glance at Soviet and Russian history revealed an epic story of beastly behaviour at home and abroad. The national symbols of icon, axe, hammer and sickle were also a give-away.

Second, if they had such faith in the poise and harmony of Soviet society, why would they worry about those long, shiny guns being used for anything other than pest control and holding back the Polish revanche?

Exposure to Muscovite militarism was a sort of Billy Wilder moment for these students, a small tug at the sleeve of their received opinions that would eventually hoist them aloft by their drainpipe trousers and send their Red Wedge and ANC badges tumbling about their pierced ears. The next step tended to be a casual leaf through last month's Daily Telegraph at the Consulate, during which they found themselves nodding slowly at the letters page.

The gun shop was empty of customers despite being stocked with everything the modern Russian might need - big guns, much ammo, evil knives, gumboots, bundles of twine and a stuffed squirrel. I spotted it first.

"Squirrel," I slurred to myself, describing a slow arc across an upper shelf with an outstreched finger. "Ha ha ha ha," I added. The others, being town boys, were entranced by the big guns, and saw nothing. The squirrel had been stuffed by a committee of blind Gypsy violinists, and seemed to have died from ritual Chechen disembowelment before being mounted on a tree stump with a couple of nuts in his paws. Then we ambled off to ogle the lady policewomen on The Arbat.

A few weeks later there dawned Duncan's birthday, and my mind returned to the squirrel. "What a semiotic amuse-gueule of a gift that would be," I told Max. "It meets all the requirements of 1980s Moscow expat postgraduate life - it's ironic, authentic, portable and useless. I'll pick it up this afternoon."

Having committed myself to the purchase, I set off for Patriarch's Ponds with a few hours to spare. The gun shop, however, was now packed with horny-browed anglers buying buckets of worms, gun-toting werewolves filling their pockets with shot, and silent giants trying out the latest blades on their own forearms.

They all turned sullenly as I inched past their steaming flanks up to the counter, where I extended an etiolated hand towards the upper shelf and lisped "Can I have the thquirrew pleathe?"

The shopkeeper took some time to scan the premises for my little stuffed chum, then enlisted the help of a pair of knife-swallowers to hoist it down. He asked whether I wanted it wrapped all nice. "Yeth," I whimpered as he carefully crated and bound the beast in "23 Years of Soviet/South-Yemenite Friendship" bunting. I handed over 12 roubles 15 kopecks and shuffled off with my new companion under my arm amid a collective simmering of gruff pity.

Duncan liked the squirrel, it reminded him of happy afternoon strolls by the Ponds. It presided over the room he shared with Swanny, playing the odd hand of poker and looking after everyone's hats. But, every time I looked into Comrade Nutkinich's feral eyes, the painted mask of a gamin bound for a gigue with Madame Guillotine gurned back.

Some men have nightmares about finding themselves naked in public, or having to run a gauntlet of picketing miners while dressed in evening wear. In my dark places I teeter through a throng of armed stevedores with a tufty-tailed wig on my head.

When the Welsh state publishing house Taffizdat comes to print my official autobiography in years ahead, the anonymous author may have cause to return to that shop on Patriarch's Ponds. There he will try to recapture the moment when I came to full maturity as a Marxist political leader. He may write:

"Boyo had never had time for the dictum 'That which does not kill me makes me stronger', noting that the leaders of the various former opposition parties in Wales were still alive but certainly not flourishing in the Martyr Michael Owen Underwater Cockle Plantation off Bardsey Island.

"Nonetheless, L'Affaire Nutkin did bring him to an awareness that Lenin, Robespierre and Kinnock had reached by less pathetically fallacious means - namely that the working classes cannot be beaten or joined, except in some elementary experiments in Madame Boyo's father's Carpathian laboratory. But they can be led."

["Boyo: Triumph and Tragedy"; pp245-246, Taffizdat, Morgangrad]

Eсть такая партия!

The most intense, significant event of the past two weeks has been the situationist spectacle groyned high on the roof of some plutocrat's house in Berkshire.

The parents of drinks-cabinet virtuoso and tyro toff Rory McInnes were so relieved that he hadn't hosted a Facebook party or bequeathed their patio to Irish tinkers that they failed to notice the mighty male member he had ordered their Filipino maids to chalk on the ancestral tiles in a mixture of bat guano and the tears of homesickness.

At our McInnes Festschrift down the Tethered Goat, the Dog of Deceit (and Hypocrisy) pointed out that young Rory had revealed his objectively bourgeois origins by omitting the three droplets that ought to arch from the tip of the glans towards infinity. These are the mark of the true proletarian artiste du lavabo, as seen on the walls of gents' toilets throughout these United Kingdoms.

As ever, I wondered how this anarcho-syndicalist indulgence could be put to raising true class consciousness among the workers, scythe-making peasants and progressively-inclinded graphic artists of Britain, once they've come back from entertaining London tourists during the G20 summit this week.

And the reply was soon in coming. The Cymru Rouge has been planning to field candidates in England at the next Westminster elections. We have gradually come to realize that Welsh independence, slate-based autarky and compulsory leek-docking for the English among the Pembrokeshire paddy fields are policies unlikely to put us much further ahead than the Liberal Democrats.

And so I have distilled our entire England manifesto into one, poll-storming pledge:

Yeomen of England!

If you vote Rouge, our government will act swiftly to carve three droplets of finest, hop-green piss flying out of the eye of the Cerne Abbas Giant's morning glory.

This will literally cement Saxon workers' hegemony over the cultural sacra of the Norman feudal elite.

We shall then disband, our work here done. Next week, Scotland.

Henffych!

Ta Moq, Brawd Rhiff Un, etc

You know it makes sense.

Derwydd Bryn Doncyn

The House of Boyo has been touched by triumph and tragedy in the past week:

• On the Vernal Equinox all of Madame Boyo's calculations came right and our son Bendigeidfran ap Saisladdwr aMhorcaunt de Boyo was born not made. Offerings are to be brought to Foel Offrwm, Dolgellau, on the eve of Saint Trisant's Day.


• Then four days later Sioba Siencyn, sheath and cymbal of the Welsh Nation, followed the badger spirit guide to the oak groves and pitheads of Avalon, there to prepare leek poultices and tend the flames of the ever-burning second home.

Siencyn was able to greet Bendigeidfran before his passing, and our son is at a week old already studying the antient texts that he bequeathed on pillars of slate.

Myn Duw, mi a wn y daw...

Die Verwandlung

Victor Carroon, the British astronaut in the Quatermass Experiment, endured his painful transformation into a malign extraterrestrial carpet with silent, stoic anguish. I am bearing my steady evolution into my own father with less dignity.

Readers of this web blog will know that I've long lamented the failure of the Antient Order of the Dad to lead me along the Path of the Hush Puppy. It looks like this impertinence has earned me an Ovidian punishment.

In my bachelor days I used to spend a few weeks at my parents' house each summer while they tramped around Bavaria in search of the Spear of Destiny. One year my father had abandoned his opposition to the video recorder ("Satan's trouser-press!" was his initial judgment) and filled a bookshelf with tapes for me to plunder.

To my New Statesmanly chagrin his video collection (pronounced "vie-deo" in Wales, by the way) consisted entirely of grim Brit war flicks like "Ice-Cold in Alex" and a couple of staid thrillers. After a comprehensive audit I found two films worth watching - "The Day of the Jackal" and another copy of the same.

I'd brought a worn tape of "Betty Blue" with me in lieu of human female company, otherwise I was at the mercy of Houseburner's Choice on the S4C Welsh channel. There was nothing for it but to go out and get bat-punching drunk down the Llawes Goch tavern every night and challenge the town's leading Gypsy artist to smoking competitions. Country ways.

Now, however, my dvd rental list is choked with offerings from Dirk Bogarde's khaki hetero phase and "Tora! Tora!Tora!", which I realised is not about exuberant Hasidim. There's certainly more Frederick than Bill in my Forsyth selection.

I shall pass over the Venn intersection with my father on politics and clothing with little comment. It is as much a question of age and affluence as of genes. Yes, both Lord Tebbit and Mr Netanyahu make a lot more sense to me now than they did in the 1980s, and my IRA funeral party chic has long been decommissioned in favour of sludgy tweeds and a tendency for my head to keep growing through the top of my hair.

Of more concern are major divergences from my previous philosophical theses on weighty matters. Film choices are one. Motor vehicles are another.

Keen Boyovians will recall the touching combination of reluctance and incompetence with which I approached learning to drive, while Mrs Boyo's cadres may prefer her more dialectical accounts.

Once I'd wrenched the certificate from the cold, hairless palm of the driving examiner, I swore to Mrs Boyo that our car would do no more than ferry her good self to that airstrip where she meets her Colombian chums near Dunwich and take our daughter Arianrhod on trips to the vet.

A few weeks passed and I'd become a sparking plug of chauvinist velocity, my right arm lobstered large from cabbie's elbow, my flecked eyes set on sneer alert for any signs of non-reverse parking or adherence to rural speed limits:

• I have to be lured from the driving seat by offers of raw steak, rum and an evening's viewing of the Top Gear three-part special on Wankel engines;
  
  
• On my frequent exiles from the Boyo bedroom I find solace in running my sac up and down the fan belt, which is warmer and more legal than hanging around that nurses' training college in the early hours; and
  
  
• Mention the word "escort" and once I'd have obliged with my little black book of big black ladies. Now I whimper "The Mark III - why, Ford, why?!"
  

More precious pillars of my persona may now be bracing themselves for the blows of banality.

My taste in music is so exquisite that previous lady friends have cited it as unreasonable behaviour. So when will I buy my first brass band medley or compilation of "hits"? And is that Mireille Mathieu luring me onto the rocks - in German?

As Gyppo Byard has gallantly recalled, I like my ladies the way I like my lemons - bitter, jaundiced and unwaxed. So what signs of decay can I next expect? I think of my father's film collection, and the words "Joan Greenwood" toll like a leper's bell in my inner ear. A yearning for Felicity Kendal will mean I've got off lightly.

Like Dorian Gray, I peer queerly at the picture that hangs in my study. A pipe has appeared in the breast pocket, true, but is that a ballpoint pen that now nestles beside it? Has the hour struck when, like Zhatko before me, I murmur "mon semblable - mon père"?

Let us bathe, Prodike

I'm pleased to report that Stay-At-Home Indie Pop (not one of the Ludlow Indy-Popps, I fear) has launched a thoughtful catalogue of people who irritate him by their very act of being.

His first target is a crass fellow "down the gym" (pron. "gime": Simpson's Dictionary and Menu-Reader).

The simple presence of this character at a gymnasium would have propelled him straight into the 110% buffoon category for me, but would also have raised questions as to what Pop was doing at such a grim institution.

There are few acceptable reasons for being "down" a gym, as opposed to taking exercise in a manly way like playing rugby football, pleasuring bored housewives, smearing your face with spoor and stalking ramblers through a thicket, or a combination of the above. Here are some:

• You work at the gym in a non-motivational, spandex-free role, especially if it involves tempting the lost souls with corned beef sandwiches, ale and Senior Service untipped in the cafeteria;


• You escort your Stepford Child there for some activity that Mrs Boyo put in motion but never gets round to attending, and keep your own callisthenic cavorting to the minimum;


• You reassure depressed 30-something mothers at the weekly Water Tot Splash Slot that there are bald Welshmen who find them attractive, and not necessarily two at a time; and


• You are a property developer assessing the premises with a view to converting it into a massive cake factory.

As Cavafy might have waned elegaic, Anglo-Saxon culture has taken the best of the Greek Tradition and reduced it to owl-haunted rubble.

To the Ancients the gymnasium was a place where, yes, you could run around and lift heavy objects if you felt the need, but it also invited deep thought and discussion with your fellow citizens.

The topics of debate ranged beyond "I've packed my glutes/hey, feel the pecs on my abs!/I've just burnt something to the max", encompassing as they did politics, arete, agape and who would win in a fight - the minotaur, or the eagle that ate Prometheus's liver?

And, to sharpen the point that there's more to life than tossing a plate around, the Greeks made athletes practice their vile arts naked.

This held the men up to female ridicule and unwarranted attention from middle-aged bachelors, and gave young chaps an idea of which young lady to ask to the agora for a refreshing jug of wine and twigs.

And what about the symposium? For the Greeks, sympotein meant "Your round, son, get 'em in!", and that is exactly what everyone did from Hades to the Hellespont.

If you wanted to talk about the Epiriote Question or how many squaddies you can stick up the arse of a wooden pantomine horse, this is where you would do it - over a bowl or three of Cyprus Sherry.

On the other hand, if you wanted a lewd sing-song about the Queen of Sheba or just to ogle some good-time girls' tonguing a primitive oboe, the symposium was also the place for you.

Turning up at a symposium in Brown's Britain with a bucket of wine, a brace of Moroccan boys and a courtesan to hold your toga is not likely to do your professional reputation much good unless you are a gangster rapper or attend the School of Oriental and African Studies.

More likely a fish-eyed "facilitator" in an Asda suit will ask you first whether you've registered for Image and Signal Processing and Analysis, Calcified Tissues, Regen(e)dering Hierarchies or Start Your Own Nationalised Bank, and second whether you'd leave, please. And not a flute-girl in sight.

We ought to show the Grecians some respect by returning these terms and calling our own debased gymnasia and symposia something more honest, such as "sweat planks" and "bore holes".

"You going to rub your damp buttocks on a sweat plank this afternoon, Justin?" "Cheers mate, but I've got to talk about growing deficit awareness down a bore hole. Fancy some drunken gay sex instead?"

The same goes for kebabs, although the Grand Turk may have had a hand in turning the noble souvlaki of Plato's day (pronounced συβλaκή (süblahké) back then, of course) into the cone of pink impacted knackers we see impaled in gibbets up and down the high streets of modern Albion.

We are all Persians now.

Scherzo di Follia

For everyone there is a mirage of cheated desire that beckons across the Gobi wastes of current domesticity.

For some it's the backward glance of a girl as she left a student party on, or in Wales under, the arm of some lunk. For others it's the trace of her perfume, her cigarette or a splash of her favourite cider on your lap.

For me it's a family sack of Maltesers and a roomful of bearded nuns.

The English are masters of enforced jollity, and audience participation is its most vicious form. It bookends their lives from pantomine to wedding discos, and reaches an anguished acme in the singalong film phenomenon - a Basingstoke ballo in maschera barking at a cinema near you.

I think you know what I mean. The "Rocky Horror Picture Show" is one thing, a crowd of strange men in suspenders and make-up belting out "The Time Warp" in your local shopping precinct is another.

To be fair, "Rocky Horror" receives the Boyo imprimatur if only because buxom ladies can be counted on to cram themselves into their younger sisters' basques for the evening.

There is, however, little for the hetero lech to enjoy in "Singalongasoundofmusic", what with its arch Baron and lonely goatherds all yodelling away like bald dachshunds.

I attended such an Alpenfest at the Reading Hexagon some years ago on a Cymru Rouge cultural alienation course. My companions were Sioba Siencyn, Bob Friog and the latter's trainee odalisque Becky.

We are graduates, we read Sontag, we relish the coy outré, but we still hadn't achieved the necessary poise to take this collision of Berkshire Gay Pride's moustachioed nun and knickerbocker factions in our velveteen stride.

The same applied to the dozen Henley parents who'd brought little Jake and Annabel along for a wholesome afternoon of Julie Andrews. They found themselves Von Trapped between the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the gummiknabe.de subscription list, all leering their way through "My Favourite Things" with a variety of Hunnish gestures.

The audience was 97% kinky, 2.9% shocked shiresfolk and 0.1% detatched sophisticates such as ourselves. We settled down to enjoy the irony both onscreen and off.

As in all of these singalongs the high priests of the camp cargo cult had allocated each of us a bag of totems and fetishes to lob at the film like perverted Pavlovian poodles whenever a key word like "wedding", "Nazi" or "Baroness" was mentioned.

Now, my "Sound of Music" moment of truth is that I have always liked the elegant Viennese Baroness and could never understand why the Captain dropped her for that guitar-mauling drab Maria.

I imagine the discalced nun would spend her wedding night squeaking "Gesumaria!"with her nightie and rosary wound round her throat, whereas the Divine Elsa would swing upside down from the chandelier in a cat's cradle of garter belts and saddlewear and set the church bells a-pealing three valleys away with her bel canto bellows of carnal blasphemy.

I admit that the plot of the film would have been different ("Von Trapps stay in Austria, dispatch ghastly children to boarding school, maintain dignity by not plaguing world with song, emerge from War with estate intact, go on to play worthy role in the local Österreichische Volkspartei"), but the sheer venom and shower of projectiles directed at poor Elsa by the cabal of unconvincing Carmelites around me was too much.

During the interval our party assembled for light refreshments at the bar, and Becky hoofed off in search of chocolate. "You'll be lucky," I remarked. "Unless the Hexagon has misjudged its audience, the kiosks will be stuffed with poppers and edible crucifices."

I was setting out my views on the Baroness at appropriate, lubricious length, as received with polite contempt by my Mariolatric colleagues, when I sensed the air stir behind me.

Even with my back turned I could tell she was a blonde. Slender in tweed for the Venetian market, freshwater pearls and campari passant, buoyed by an undertow of Shalimar and righted by an almost accurate dash of Hydra Lustre, she was a feast of South Oxfordshire feudal foxiness.

"I quite agree," she chirped in the eager tones of a lady imbiber who'd laid off the sauce for some serious man-pulling. "She's hard done by, the Baroness. I mean, compare their hair alone - "

Our guest's own hair was Jane Asher after a fight at the Liberty sales, and I was falling rapidly in love. Any woman distracted enough to seek straight adult fun at the largest gathering of inverts in the Thames Valley might just be The One for me.

I imagined our cottage outside Shiplake, weekend lunches at The Plowden Arms, Elgar on 78s, boar-sticking with her father ("Brought my own over from the Auvergne, no fight in th'local porkers"), exemption from speed limits ("Told th'magistrate it dates back to the Normans") and waking in a tangle of bed sheets, Pimm's and harnesses. Oh yes.

I was about to suggest that, as the only unattached heterosexuals in a quarter-mile radius, we should explore our compatibility further in the snug of The Hobgoblin public house, when Becky came crashing through a gaggle of mascara'd novices, a jumbo bag of Maltesers held aloft in her dimpled hand.

"Boyo, Boyo, look what I've got, and I had to fight off two men in gingham and pigtails for it! There's enough for both of us -"

And lo! my Nettlebed nymph had fled among the habits and hosen.

My legal advisor The K Man points out that I am, of course, happily in thrall to Mrs Boyo and no longer entertain thoughts of other women, real or imaginary.

Nonetheless, a trace of Guerlain and angostura bitters can still summon a happy vision of sloshed ladies cantering down country lanes. But then comes the chorus of stevedores in wimples singing "Climb Every Mountain", and the reverie is lost in a puff of amyl nitrate.

Atlantis - the Poor Man's Wales

From the Press and Instant Rebuttal Office of the Cymru Rouge:

The bourgeois and lumpen Anglo-Saxon media have circulated rumours that a Greek imperalist colony "the size of Wales" has been discovered off a beach in the Canaries.

In support of this assertion they cite Google Earth, a neo-Copernican organisation that propagates the "Round Earth" thesis, so you might as well say you read it on Wikipedia for all the impression it makes on scientific socialists.

The Prif Sasiwn of the Cymru Rouge takes this opportunity totally and utterly to reject any linkage between the Atlantean white settlers and the ordinary, working-class helots of Wales.

"Like the Dutch before them, the Greeks are not content with colonising other countries but are setting out to annex the very sea bed," explained the Cymru Rouge Commissar for Anti-Cosmopolitan Affairs, Griff ap Ystlum.

"And they're trying to cover up their irridentist activities by appropriating the history of Cantre'r Gwaelod, the historic Welsh county that some dolphins stole in the Middle Ages," he continued.

The authorities have been investigating any possible Atlantean acts of subversion in Wales itself.

"Machynlleth is full of bearded hey-nonny Englishmen in stripy clothes, usually trailing unkempt common-law wives and kids called 'Uthur' and 'Morgana' behind them on the way to the Social," stated the Prif Forthwyl (Mattock-in-Chief) of the Tangnefeddwyr police force, Chwyldro ap Ffistan.

"They live in wigwams and drink their own piss - and quite possibly ours too. We just don't know," he added.

"The Tangnefeddwyr are not sure whether this lot are a Socratic Fifth Column for the Greeks, but we've decided to make them more at home by relocating them to the historic site of Cantre'r Gwaelod itself," pledged ap Ffistan.

The scientific community was also wisely unanimous in refuting any links between Atlantis and Wales.

"Me and the missus went to Cephalonia, and we've got a good idea of what them Greeks get up to," commented the chairman of the Welsh Academy of Motor Mechanics, Gwil Garêj. "It's the seals I feel sorry for. As if they haven't got enough problems what with global warming, the Millennium and that."

"And there's no way this has anything to do with Wales," he persisted. "Look at that Atlantis - flat, with nice straight roads and not a cloud in sight.

"If we lived there you'd have mountains of slate, roads that end on cliff tops, it would be tipping down day and night and the sea would belong to Liverpool Corporation," noted Garêj. "And we'd still have a hosepipe ban."

The Cymru Rouge instruct the media that the random chunks of rainforest that disappear every day have nothing to do with Wales either, and that the arrival of Sting or the late Anita Roddick anywhere on Welsh territory will be regarded as an act of war.

My Universities: Intelligence Officer

"Sgt. Rock is going to help me

make the girl mine

keep her stood in line"

Sang the nudge-wink Wurzels of XTC in one of their clunky early 80s singles.

"Not if I've got anything to do with it, duckboy!" I bellowed thoughtfully. I decided to join the Army immediately to stop this witless NCO from doling out the dolly birds to Andy Partridge.

Leech-charming comic-maven Ward Cooper bumped into me and pointed out that I should put on some more clothes or at least stop thinking so hard about Hanna Schygulla if I wanted to reassure the recruitment board.

He also told me that Sergeant Rock was an American and therefore unlikely to oblige XTC with anything other than a concert tour of Nicaraguan Contra camps and a good nuking, but I was taking no chances.

Swansea University's careers officer regarded me with professional distaste. He wanted to help nubile drama students audition for burlesque shows, but instead he had gits with highlights seeking ways to inflict themselves on the "media" and me with my random inquiries.

"Need to be Army officer. Real Army, not Free Wales one, mind. Got to stop Partridge," I panted.

"I hate you," replied Mr Thomas. "I fought for this country in Korea and Malaya, plus a brief excursion into Thailand on my own. I got malaria, nad rot and pink eye, and some sort of squid set up house in my spleen. They had to drain it with a home-brewing kit up my old man. There was piss coming out of my ears for weeks.

"Still, I managed to kill a brace of Communists and render at least one species of antelope extinct. And I never made it past private. Why should the Army make you an officer, you feckless dilettante?"

"Going to get good degree, world owes me living. Buffed bod deserves tailored uniform. Natural authority born of Promethean self-deception. I could go on, but there's no time," I wheezed.

"Very well," sighed the jaundiced killing-machine before me. "Do you have any regimental preferences? The Welsh Guards? Household Cavalry? Afrika Korps? The Chaplaincy?"

The Chaplaincy had appealed ever since I'd read and profoundly misunderstood Kingsley Amis's "The Anti-Death League", but none of these legions seemed likely depots for my small armory of skills, which Mr Thomas had grimly summed up as playing the flute and speaking Russian, in that order of proficiency.

"You won't want the Education Corps, they spend their time teaching Fenlanders how to dress. So it's a marching band or the Intelligence Corps, Boyo. Which is it to be?" he posed.

I'd spent too many autumn afternoons of childhood trying to catapult toads into bandstand tubas to fancy fielding the incoming amphibians myself, so I opted for Intelligence.

Now I'd never wanted to go to college in the first place, having set my heart on becoming an urban shepherd - herding my flock through the mean streets of Treorchy, learning about life, and sharing my Georgian idyll with the Valleys folk as they shared their heroin with me.

But my father had advised me to try yet more education - "Give it a go, boy. You can't drive or use power tools, and you've never fought a wolf. There's nothing for you by here." - and I was a good son.

I'd been drifting through my studies of the Nikhuyaki (Нихуяки) existential-nihilist literary movement of the Russian 1920s in the unfocused expectation of postgraduate work and a sinecure writing stuff like "Experimental Diversion: (Road)Sign as Sign-if-I-er in the Soviet Highway Code of 1928" at a Slavonic semiotics department somewhere like Uppsala.

I usually drowned any doubts in Steppenwolf measures of Don Darías red, but the more I considered the Boyo blend of torpor and ignorance, seasoned with non-plutocrat parents, the more I was inclined towards finding an actual job. Shop-lifting, dancing for pennies and suicide apart, the Army Intelligence Corps suddenly seemed full of promise.

My knowledge of this fine body of fighting men was gleaned from Evelyn Waugh and "Ill Met by Moonlight", so I imagined myself dropped smart-moustached into rustic Illyria with gold sovereigns sown into my shalwar and a couple of cantilevered peasant girls waiting to wash my minor wounds after a hard day confounding the Communists.

"I know what you're thinking by that fanciful twirl of your upper lip and fecund motion of your Levis," snapped Thomas.

"Assuming the brass hats are mad enough to take you, they'll just stick you in front of purloined Soviet tank manuals and a stack of dictionaries in some Holborn basement and lose the key. Wednesday, 1400 hours, Room 15, there will be an officer waiting to speak to you. Dismissed!"

The following week I slipped into my best linen suit for a chat with Colonel Diamond of the Intelligence Corps. This was the first test: can I get through the whole interview without thinking of Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, or at least not let it show?

Col Diamond was clearly trained not to react to ill-shaven young men with watering eyes. Even my "Our Man in Havana" attire didn't perturb him, although on beholding the majesty of his cavalry twill I saw I ought to have opted for a discreet blue pinstripe, stout tweed or at least a Pickelhaube.

He cantered past my history and personality with commendable sangfroid before drawing up before my knowledge of Russian, Russia and the Russians. "This is what interests us, Boyo," he barked cordially. "Gorbachev, perestroika, glasnost - watcher mecker it orl, eh?"

From somewhere I heard a fruity patrician accent reply: "Trouble with Ivan is this, sah. Perestroika and what have you sounds promising, but dissemblin' is second nature to your Communist - assuming he had a first one to start with." The voice was mine, as amplified by my employment aversion instinct. "Need to keep our eyes peeled and our guard up."

From the truffling noises billowing about Col Diamond's 'tache I gathered my analysis was in line with current military thinking. He also thought my flute-playing was a good sign - "keeps the spirits up, what?" - but then he'd never heard it.

We got along splendidly. As I rose to leave, Col Diamond asked "So if yer getter decent degree will yer join th'Corps or go orf and do yer PhD?"

"Join the Corps!" I replied, rather taken with the idea in its own right. I had all but forgotten about my mission to stop XTC (and its breakaway factions like Shriekback, for that matter).

"Yer wrong!" he declared. "If yer've got it in yer, fer pity's sake get it out! Applies ter books as well as ter tapeworm. Otherwise yer'll regret it th'rester yer life and be no bally use ter anyone, sighin' fer yesteryear like some Frenchman. Here's how!"

The colonel was right. Just because I'm as stupid as I sound doesn't mean everyone else is. I learned a valuable lesson that day, one I've chosen to ignore ever since.

Girded with a double-first in Russian Expressionism and Innumeracy honoris causā - the highest honour the University of Wales can bestow without money changing hands - I took myself off to London to pursue doctoral research on Great Maritime Inverts of the Late Tsarist Epoch and gave no further thought to Diamond, derring or do.

One Russell Square afternoon a professor attended my lecture on Masturbation in the St Petersburg Student Imagination (I'm not making this up) and invited me for a celebratory curry. This tandoori night soon became a weekly institution, as we discovered common interests in smoking, Belorussian syntax, North Indian cuisine and slack-drawered undergrads.

Months passed in scholarly seediness before the professor pushed away the remains of our ox Madras, dismissed the second-year slatterns, cleared his throat and said "Don't quite know how to put this, but some friends want to know whether you'd still be interested in the Intelligence Corps. Fast-tracked to captain, minimal blanco-ing of your Sam Browne."

"Col Diamond?" I ventured.

"Hmm." Perhaps the time to liberate the Letts had come. A good time could be had in Daugavpils with a quirt and some Swedish crowns.

"I'm interested."

A few days later I received a breezy letter asking whether I'd had enough of white Rastas, libraries and plain women in leggings and fancied a change. "Ra-ther!" I thought with a slap of the thigh, and called the number supplied.

"Fact is, Boyo, we've recently acquired this stack of Russian tank manuals..."

Sic pereant omnes inimici tui, Gwalia!

A press release by Cymru Rouge Solutions PLC:

Morgangrad [formerly Cardiff], 13th Cayo, Anno Cambriae Rubrae [13th February, 2009]: The Prif Sasiwn of the Cymru Rouge congratulates itself, and invites all Welsh to do likewise, on the vanquishing of the Normano-Jutish corporatist ultramontane British People's "Alliance" clique!

This den of comprador squirrels raised their puny pennants in paws green and furred from Hunnish practices, then sought to deny the uniqueness of Welsh coal - Welsh coal, hewn from Welsh rock by the twelve fingers of child soldiers chanting slogans of narrow nationalism and slate-based autarky!

Now that pennant lies sodden in the seed of Silurian scorn, and the fierce, four-dimensional banner of Marxist-Glyndŵrism rears regal above a paddy-field of clenched peasant fists!

The British "People's" Alliance and its chief Guelphist "lackey" David Lindsay strove to subject the workers, peasants and shrieking, indoctrinated youth of Red Wales to the warped whims of lords-lieutenants, and to pen them like quisling quail in the prison of "preserved counties".

Once again, literally millions of ordinary, Maoist commissars, syndicalists and teachers of applied atheism rose up and followed the example of Commander Martyr Billy MacKenzie in shouting out a militant "NO!" to these comb-over clowns and packing them off to the country hotels where they lie with their dogs as others do with wives.

Brawd Rhif Un Huw Samphan dashed the knitted mitten of defiance across the mottled chops of the Powellite marionette "Lindsay" and pledged to put up a Cymru Rouge parliamentary candidate in each seat that the "British" People's Alliance might contest.

Within a mere seven months these hirelings, catamites and kennel-fanciers had fled to the four rims of the earthly disc to forego the humiliation of being belted, beetled, bleached and bentsched by the Viet Vyrnwy in every constituency of this and any other land.

Now, some Bernsteinian revisionists and bourgeois nationalists have criticised the Cymru Rouge for its focus on this pack of yokels to the exclusion of "New" Labour, the Liberal "Democrats", "Plaid" Cymru and the Tory "Bastards".

These parties attack Cymreictod through its institutions - the Assembly, the Eisteddfod, the Rugby Union and the sheath-bursting musk of our masculinity. Lindsay, on the other hand, was like the hedgehog in that he understood one big thing - and lived in a hedge.

He knew that our language and equally wholesome coal are the twin axes around which the fulcrum of Welshness revolves, and to deny us our consonant clusters and clods of carbon is tantamount to turning us into a bunch of Cornishmen.

And now Lindsay cowers under a deckchair, flecking the Sandbanks spume with his Saxon spittle, while we Welsh wade on, our oddly-shaped balls in our hands, towards an ever-swelling destiny.

¡Caminemos hacia la luz del Glyndŵrismo!

Brawd Rhif Un Huw Samphan
Brawd Rhif Dau Ta Mogs
Brawd Rhif Tri Paul Pot
Chwaer a Hanner Y Fonheddwraig Boyo

Un bateau ivre

The news that Obama-inspired People Power prevented a booze-weary Aeroflot pilot from taking to the clouds in his wingèd trolley-bus brought up queasy memories of my encounters with Soviet-era air travel.

Aeroflot was called "The Flying Gulag" by the unfortunates who were obliged to skid from runway to runway in its dusty crates. The in-flight staff were trained to punch you at the slightest comment and spent their time ferrying all the food and drink up to the cockpit for a slap-up mid-flight feast with the pilots.

I don't remember any of their air crew being drunk, but that might be because I, like the other 150 million inhabitants of the First Socialist State in the World, kept myself topped up at all times on various skull-numbing fluids.

My sole encounter with a drunken airman came at Moscow's endless Sheremetyevo Airport in 1986, courtesy of the Polish state airline Lot.

I was writing a fond postcard to my soon-abandoned Black Earth ladylove in the post office when a poorly-shaved bear in a blue suit a size too small slurred a request to borrow my pen.

This happened a great deal in the Glorious Soviet Union, as the Ust-Kamenogorsk Ballpoint Pen Factory and Nuclear Testing Ground concentrated on producing James-Bond jobs that poisoned Bulgarian journalists and turned into speed boats etc.

I reluctantly handed over my prized Bic, only to notice that my petitioner was wearing a Lot pilot's uniform. As a subtle protest against Soviet oppression I had spent the previous two months learning Polish instead of Russian, and couldn't resist the chance to show off my linguistic brio.

"Here is my pen!" I announced with a Cracowian bow.

"Prząbwość niech kładowięckiego żibrząb sztont śmigrzydzły!" declared the ursine Pole as he embraced his new-found if clearly simple compatriot.

All correspondence forgotten, he opened his pilot's jacket to reveal a half-bottle of finest Dagestani brandy. My shoulders still pinned within his mighty paw, we lurched off to the underground car park to celebrate what I gather was our "szkrątnowalkówięnrzność".

I felt uneasy about this prospect for a number of reasons:

• The Soviet Union was enjoying a predictably disastrous period of Prohibition, and swigging firewater in one of their sensitive border facilities was likely to earn you a hands-on tour of the local drunk tank followed by two years in a uranium mine.

• Poles were regarded as the weak link in the great Chain of Socialism, and any association with these backsliders might lead to an evening attached to a KGB car battery.

• For reasons I shall go into, I was wearing a 1950s Red Army cavalry officer's uniform under my fisherman's sweater and loon pants.

My companion - for the sake of simplicity let us call him Kapitan Mieczysław Wrzaszczyk-Ćwierczakiewicz - found us a bulky concrete pillar to hide behind while we exchanged swigs of Makhachkala three-star cornea-rot. Soldiers skulked at the nearby Central Committee limousine pool.

All Slavonic languages merge into one when you've taken on half a pint of spirits, so I was able to tune into Mieczysław's musings in the middle of an impressively clinical account of the internal workings of Iranian women.

He flew the Warsaw-Tehran route, the destination of which afforded him more opportunities for alcohol and spousal abuse - other men's spouses, I gathered - than the BBC news might suggest.

"Pięknię kobietą, ale chopi-chop - skrzy pierst części mórze!" he explained, with cheery gestures that suggested a unicorn had recently tried to saw through his glans.

But the return stopover in Moscow, with its familiar aromas of cheap petrol, damp hair, fried gristle and bark-enriched cigarettes, brought on a wave of nostalgia for Poland and his shrewish wife Małgorzata.

Hence the recourse to Caucasian monkey-juice and the tearful letter of confession that she would never receive - not least because the Soviet postal system had diverted all Poland-bound material to a large fire near Zhlobin as a matter of policy since 1921.

This was all very interesting, but we both had flights to catch, so I offered to escort "Mike" - I could no longer manage more than one Polish syllable at a time - up to the departures lounge.

"At least you get to sleep it all off on this leg of the flight, eh?" I remarked as we staggered up the motionless, herring-scented escalator.

"You must be joking!" he wailed. "Kazimierz has been drinking brake-fluid since Tabriz, so I'm in the driving seat!"

At this point I fell over. As Mike helped me up he saw the Soviet Army collar stick out of my sweater. With a cry of "Skafander przeciwprzeciążeniowy!" he lurched off towards the crew entrance, where a few other uniformed Poles were propping one another up and trying to fit their arms into one sleeve of a jacket.

I never saw him or his plane again.

While writing this I've received a number of urgent demands for clarification as to my unusual attire at the time. In short, I had bought the cavalry uniform from a retired Soviet Army officer in Voronezh with the ruse that we had a military museum at Swansea University (formerly Sketty Catering College) that needed ideological balance.

"It's all Wehrmacht and Free Wales Army by there, Igor," I had explained.

The true reason, as usual, was to ease my assignations with the female wing of progressive studentry, most representatives of which were called Hillary.

In 1986 the Hillaries loved a man in righteous Red Army uniform, perhaps because it was good practice for when the Warsaw Pact rumbled up Bexhill High Street and billeted its hunky officers in Mummy's house (Daddy moved away to France with That Slut back in 1978).

This was all to change. By 1988 Gorbachev was friends with that awful President Reagan and you could buy Perestroika! t-shirts in Top Shop.

Meanwhile The Guardian had noticed that General Rabin was busy breaking bones on the West Bank, so you suddenly needed the Full Yasser (keffiyeh, Bundeswehr surplus jacket, shades and stubble - the lips of a corpulent voluptuary were optional) to part a sociology 2nd-year from her black leggings.

Worse was to come. Within months the Berlin Wall was gone and you could pick up Soviet Army uniforms, Kalashnikovs and atom-bomb kits on the Ku'damm. My outfit was well-tailored in bilious cotton, rather than the boxy khaki polyester of the 1980s infantryman, but once you have to explain the difference it's time to move on.

I dug the ensemble out one more time, at the request of the college Catholic chaplain "Desperate" Dom Leo Bonsall. I was giving him my full high-kicking staircase descent when his housekeeper's husband wandered in.

This refugee from eastern Poland had last seen a Soviet cavalry officer riding his Aunt Jadwiga to market in Brześć nad Bugiem in 1940, and the bastard had never come back with the change he'd promised either.

"Skafander przeciwprzeciążeniowy!" he yelled and lurched for the kitchen, where a few other Poles were eating goose fat and trying to fit all the countries of Central Europe into one map of inter-war Poland.

I never saw him or his wife's gołąbki again.

Nacktwandervögel

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by mad, overfed, phlegmatic naked Germans," as Ginsberg might have written if he'd been a Welsh blog-jockey instead of an excitable American with an unlimited supply of bongo cigarettes.

Man of science Francis Sedgemore and mighty sage Prof Norman Geras have both taken on the knotty, veiny problem the Swiss have been having with their usually so affable German neighbours.

"Swiss authorities are trying to fend off hordes of German ramblers dressed in nothing more than a rucksack and walking boots," reports The Times in an article bristly with single entendres. "Sehr prickelnd und schön," noted comedy German Michael Lücke to the maniacs at Bild Zeitung.

Francis is appreciative of the humour with which the crabbed Swiss are trying to trample on the Germans' historic right to wander around other people's countries in big boots, and I have to agree that many a violation of the natural order is acceptable if it's done with a certain panache.

Prof Geras, however, turns his mind to the proposition of wearisome liberal John Stuart Mill that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others".

Mill thought offences against public decency could require restraint, while Sir Norm (that's right - where's his gong, Mr Brown?) maintains that trailing your Teutonic testes in the innocent faces of Alpine fauna is somehow ok. The professor has asked for his readers' opinions on the matter.

"On Liberty" is the only book Madame Boyo has burnt that wasn't written by Will Self, but I as a politics student appreciated its brevity and lack of footnotes. And so I shall attempt to answer Prof Geras's poser.

Heather tycoon and gonzo anthropologist Gyppo Byard thinks that Evolution Itself demands a ban on wandering about in the nip. "When a man sees a naked woman he perceives an invitation, when a woman sees a naked man she perceives a threat," he mused.

This is true only up to a point. An au naturel encounter with most female members of the Socialist Workers Party or House of Lords, for example, would strike the average male as an invitation to consider the Rule of St Benedict, whereas the ladies of the House of Boyo regard my weekly rain-barrel ablutions not as a threat so much as an opportunity for target practice and amateur surgery.

It's all very well Byard's pontificating from his ivory vardo on such matters. We Boyos have had firsthand experience of this abomination.

Madame B and I took a trip to the Cotswolds some time ago, and visited the feudal burg of Malmesbury to jeer at the villeins of Baron Dyson. The town has fine Abbey Gardens that stretch down a wooded hillside to a stream, but we thought the entrance fee too steep and went for a stroll in the nature reserve on the other bank instead.

We were happily watching a plucky yeoman coot face down a couple of Angevin mallards when I saw a fat man wearing what appeared to be nothing as he plashed through the ferns. I was about to remark on this when a scrawny but similarly skyclad 30-something stopped in his barefoot tracks by the brook, startled at our clothed appearance.

"Have we stumbled across the Austrian Consulate's away day?" asked Madame Boyo in a voice that carries well across steelworks, let alone water.

Our visitor showed a clean pair of cheeks and fled.

Later research revealed that the Abbey Gardens are run by a pair of depraved "naturists" - or "nudists", to use the technical term - who allow fellow degenerates to frolic in the briar and hawthorn thickets four times a year.

We were unlucky enough to be passing by on one such jubilee, although I imagine the nudists could complain that they hadn't paid good money to be heckled by literally rive-gauche Marxists.

I have made my views on nudists known in a previous post, and will merely summarise why they need restraining by whatever police force Mill had in mind in his beige dystopia:

1. Class. When workers, peasants and progressively-inclinded soldiers feel like stripping off, they head for the beaches of Spain, slap on some baby oil and cheerily threaten hawkers who take too close an interest in their wives' breast enhancements.

Aristocrats only present themselves in flagrante during the annual selection of chambermaids, on horseback, or both, and are usually drunk.

Nudists, on the other hand, are always petit bourgeois. Line them up on parade and ask the Esperantists, Quakers and vegetarians to fall out, and you'll have no one left. So you line them up again and summon the Red Guards.

2. Aesthetics. The lords and serfs mentioned in my first point are easy on the eye due to manual labour or good breeding.

Nudists, however, are pale, bulbous, whey-haired and meek before the demands of gravity. They could hide for weeks in a pile of parsnips without anyone noticing.

3. Eugenics. Britain is as brambly and moist as Opus Dei underwear, and not designed for nude cavorting. If you do so it will not make you a Nietzschean superperson, it will merely usher mouldy, rheumy Death your way.

And after all, despite the urgings of common sense, Mill thought we ought to save people from killing themselves.

4. The Common Weal. Scotland has little going for it beyond tweeds and Hunter Wellington boots, and each purchase counts in these lean times. If these industries collapse, the last usefully employed Scotsmen will have to join their compatriots among the cabinet ministers and legislators of London. This can only exacerbate social tension with the native English.

5. Blasphemy. God made this country lukewarm and itchy on the outside, so that coddlers of the hot-water bottle and sippers of lemon could peer out at it through pebbled windows and give thanks for our excellent array of cardigans and television channels. Those who think they know better than The Almighty are poor sextants for our already rudderless youth.

I hope that I have provided answers practical, theological, Wildean and dialectical to Prof Geras's question, and would be happy for this or any other post to be appended to the next edition of On Liberty and The Highway Code as a warning to the curious.