I Shot George Orwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Our main target was Trotskyites.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Er, any idea what he was called?”

“No. Writer or something. Frondeur!”

"Was his name Blair, Eric Blair?”

“Could be, sounds familiar. Wrecker!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dos yn Galed, Brawd Rhif Un

All right-thinking people will enjoy the thoughts of evil honorary Welsh Laban Tall on the subject of Marcus Brigstocke, the Mark Steel of Maidstone.

Mr Brigstocke should certainly leave the big issues to comedy colossi like Tarby and our own Owen Money, for God has given him the precious task of stuffing David Blaine and "DJ" Tim Westwood in the knackersack - something he does well.

I can't help thinking that Westwood ought to change places with Chris Eubank. Mr Eubank is genuinely black, and could pick up the intricacies of putting records on turntables in no time. Tim would fit in as Lord of Brighton Manor, given that he was born to that sort of thing as hereditary Bishop of Peterborough.

And I for one would pay good money to see Tim Westwood go four rounds with Nigel Benn, himself a distinguished DJ.

The BBC has successfully driven all well-born, classically-educated Englishmen from its news and current affairs division, but it's inevitable that they would find a niche somewhere - in this case among the "wrap" and hip-hopping fraternity of Radio One.

Indeed, at his drug-smuggling hearing in Dubai last month it emerged that DJ Grooverider is one of the Ludlow Grooveriders, and that he would have got off if Judge Kif Fil Argilah hadn't had to fag for his Uncle Jasper at Harrow.

Wales to launch Arabic TV channel

A statement by Brâd ap Ŷt, chairman of the Cymru Rouge Commissariat of Foreign Relations and Unprovoked War Broadcasting and Censorship Department:

The Comrade Commissar for Fighting, Brother Iago Anffawd, has rightly remarked that "anyone who seeks a real ruck in this modern world of ours cannot afford to overlook the immense potential of the Arab nations" ("Mae'r 'rabod 'na wastad lan am uffar o sgarmas, chimod." - Address to the United Nations Development Programme International Women's Day conference, 8 March 2008).

The English neolab BBC's recent launch of an Arabic television channel is literally a skewer thrust through the sweetbreads of Cymric hegemony in the Middle East. Not content with its radio service and Foreign Office, England wants to dominate all areas of Arabian intercourse.

With this and the higher interests of the dai-alogue of civilisations - announced by Brother Leader Huw Samphan at the ceremonial closure of the University of Wales in Year Zero Minus Five (2005) - in hand, the Cymru Rouge Broadcasting and Censorship Department hereby inaugurates Sianel Goch i'r Arabiaid (SGA - Red Channel for the Arabs) TV.

A review of current pan-Arab channels (Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, Al-Alam, Al-Manar, Al-BBC) reveals a surprising degree of uniformity beneath the apparent diversity of political, and cultural vectors - namely that they all broadcast in Arabic.

SGA TV will refuse to talk down to its audience in their own language, but will respect their desire to embrace the modern world by broadcasting totally and utterly in Welsh.

A similar refreshing policy will apply in news, religious, cultural and entertainment scheduling, said Channel Director-General and former DJ Ali ap Rap.

"Our coverage will avoid stale reports about Iraq, Gazza, horse racing and oil prices in favour of exciting developments in the world of Welsh Marxism, rugby and slate-mining," Rap told Taffinfform news agency from behind his spinning turntables at the Ministry of Culture and Interrogation (formerly Clwb Ifor Bach).

"Likewise our director of religious programming, the Rev Goronwy Elias of the Independent Calvinist (Independent) Church in Cerigrafu, will bring a new, Evangelical angle to those endless debates about prophets, fatwas and wearing bags on your head - all of which he approves of, by the by," added Rap.

Aware of the demographical demand for children's programming, Ap Rap reported that he would be presenting a regular before-the-midnight-watershed show himself. "'Sesh!!' will feature all the latest in Welsh teenage drinking and pregnancy developments, coming at ya!" he grinned aimlessly.

Another area in which SGA TV will differ from other, lesser pan-Arab channels will be in its treatment of women.

"Look at their lady presenters," nodded Rap to the phat sounds of a Shaky/Umm Kalthoum mash-up, "It's Apartheid Wall-to-Wall honies, mun. How d'you think that makes fat birds feel? Exactly. That's why all our bulletins will be presented by munters from Carmarthen what we auditioned outside the chippy."

Asked what array of correspondents SGA TV intends to base in the Middle East and at key foreign bureaux, Rap took the opportunity to note another fundamental difference between his and other pan-Arab broadcasters.

"Any independent observer will agree that a measure of distance from the heated disputes of the region can only benefit news values. That's why we are keeping well out of it up by here, mun," Rap expounded, pointing to the lavish SGA TV studio and entertainment suite located behind the stage.

"If I was looking for tribal rivalry, religious fanaticism, endemic underdevelopment, misguided colonial adventures and funny stuff with sheep I'd have stayed home in Dwyfor, innit," he added.

SGA TV is available on terrestrial channels in the Morgangrad (formerly Cardiff) area of Wales, and by subscription on a series of C60 cassettes from the Welsh Ministry of External Trade, Trafficking and White Slavery (audio only).

Nite Klub

Al-Jazeera and the other Arab satellite TV channels have grown bored of al-Qaeda videos, just like Bokharan emirs of old whose palates were jaded by endless circles of Turkoman dancing boys. I can't blame them.

Grainy pictures of mad old men wagging their fingers and complaining about who owns Cadiz, interspersed with burning American tanks and Heads Off at the Herat Palladium, are hardly likely to improve their ratings when they're up against the Pouting Lovelies of Lebanon's LBC TV.

This leaves our intelligence agencies scrambling over copies of Tritton's Teach Yourself Arabic to find a video tape that doesn't have precious Dad's Army episodes on it to record and pore over the latest bad hat rants on the Al-Jibrish website or what have you.

This takes up enormous amounts of time, tape and bandwidth that could be better devoted to the louche activities that Osama and his crypto-Calvinist chums disapprove of, thereby reducing the net amount of Western depravity in the world. In other words, we're doing their work for them.

The answer is to fight back using the same weapons.

Rather than issue statements condemning jihadis for their various acts of mayhem, or analysing their latest outpourings on Newsnight, our democratic governments should respond solely by means of video clips on Western-friendly, password-protected websites.

In order to find out what Zionist Crusader schemes we have up our wizards' sleeves, Zawahiri and that ghoulish American bloke they like will have to register with, and log on to, GummiKnabe.de, Madame Minh's House of Cracks, Modern Drunkard's membership page and various Jackie Mason fansites.

In these posts they would find practical displays of secular slacking, the most powerful weapon in our anti-jihad armoury. They would spend hours analysing drinking patterns, pocket billiards and ill-informed sports comments for hints as to our blasphemous intent:

Ghoul: We have the latest tape from the English Brownite dogs, O Sheikh, as posted on WeLoveLindsayLohan.com!

Zawahiri: Render it unto the VCR, O brother mujahed, that we might get a better look at it. (tape rolls) What are they saying, Al-Ghoul?

Ghoul: Our British analysts say that it looks like a tavern called The Amir of Wales, in the Caversham settlement of Barq-Shir Province, England. The content is an extended commentary on a game of football between The Arsenal, as is the beloved of our Sheikh Osama, and the Quds-occupying team of Tottenham Hotspur, which is also known as The Spurs. This would place it sometime in the last month.

Zawahiri: And who is the one who is speaking?

Ghoul: The main speaker, judging by the tattoos and bite marks, is the one they call Neckless Steve. The research department says that he is particularly uninterested in matters of ijtihad. The local dialect is as impenetrable as Maghrebi, but he appears to be debating with an unseen interlocutor, possibly his murid "Whack", the virtues of buying two "pints" - a total of nearly 1.7 litres - of a liquid described as "largah" at a time given that, and I quote, "the bar is chocka with tossers".

Zawahiri: Alarming. And what of this Whack? What is his ruling in the matter?

Ghoul: Ya ustadh, Whack has countered with a proposal that the majlis should reconvene at the Clifton - this is a bridge near the port city of Bristol - as his "dog needs a wazz".

Zawahiri: Is this a coded threat against the strugglers of Al-Anbar?

Ghoul: That is not clear, but we have our best men working on it, O Luminous One.

The hours would fly by.

Mynd i Rymni

A statement by the Cymru Rouge Responsibility Reallocation Department

There has been a considerable amount of what we can only soberly call total and utter over-the-top and typical anti-Welsh media hysteria about the recent comments of Uffar O'Gwair, Director of the Cymru Rouge Rugby Union and Chemical Weapons Division.

Comrade O'Gwair, speaking yesterday at the Martyr Cayo Evans (formerly St David's Day) celebrations down the staff social club of the Live Ordinance Manual Disposal Depot and Juvenile Deliquents Re-education Camp, Sennybridge, made some remarks about the forthcoming Six Nations fixture between the massed socialist ranks of the Welsh rugby squad and the prancing lager-drinkers of the Continuity Irish Free State [ed: Irish Republic].

His words were as follows: "Cromweliwn ni Iwerddon y tro 'ma fel chafodd y Padis erioed eu chromwelio ers dyddiau'r Hen Gromwel ei hyn, ynafe!"

This has been translated as "We shall give Ireland the sort of Cromwelling the Paddies haven't had since the days of Old Cromwell himself, isn't it!" (cf Reuters, AFP, Irish Government web site, UN Security Council, Council of Europe, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, that Hague Tribunal again)

While acknowledging the possibly literal accuracy of this rendering, the Cymru Rouge deems it necessary to issue the following urgent clarification.

"In using the term 'Cromwell', bourgeois media outlets and Illuminati hirelings are trying to incinerate that Brother Uffar was suggesting that the Welsh Rugby Squad would carry out a massacre of the Irish team in the way that the Anglo-Welsh laypreacher and military personality Oliver Cromwell did on the broader Irish scene in 1649-1650.

"There is no basis for this aspertion, as an ideologically-atuned reading shows that O'Gwair was clearly using the Welsh verb 'cromweilio' in a dialect form common in the Radnor area.

"Its meaning in this context is 'to show Celtic and agro-proletarian fraternal sporting solidarity while kicking their clerical-reactionary behinds through a stack of Enya albums'.

"This will be confirmed in the forthcoming reprinting of the Welsh Academy Dictionary of the Welsh Language, once the Academy members have been released from hard labour on the Bardsey Island to Haverfordwest Anti-Hiberian Defensive Maritime Barrier.

"On behalf of the Senedd and People of Wales, we hope that this will go some way to persuading the Irish Coastguard to return the Abersoch Under-15s' ball that got blown out to sea on Friday."

Buddugoliaeth neu marwolaeth!

Brawd Rhif Naw
Clebran Brân

Awr y Blaidd

Nefyn TV provided Wales with 24-hour sports, and sometimes the best of it - coracle races, slateboarding, the grudge-bearing sprint.

Despite its adherence to the state's offical policy of ruthless egalitarianism, Nefyn TV had spawned a star. Rhowter Hers presented the Sabbath afternoon Sport Ffantâstig programme, filled with top billing Hillman Imp rallies, cliff-face soccer and women's custard slicing.

The lads liked his lively bratiaith splicing of North and South dialects, the ladies keened for his slack shawl. The station managers booked their caravans in Mwnt months in advance on his account alone.

Everyone loved him, except the staff. "I's had enough of them," Hers told his boss Aelwyd Hongian one sweet and windy afternoon. "You can see them on the big screen behind me when I'm ap-dressing the nation. Are they hard at work filing reports on Caersws Giant-Killers? Are they ffyc! They's slobbing in Big Leaves t-shirts, eating half pies, skulling Brains, smoking Embassies and reading the papers. Tell them to shape up or I's off to Al-Jazeera, mun."

So the word went out to the newsroom: "Look tidy, boys. No messing about. He may be a Kinnock, but he's our Kinnock, like Eisenhower used to say."

The crew smartened up and lagered down. They pretended to type on their computers and answer phones while Hers flashed his anthracite crowns at the housewives of Carmarthen. The studio floor was a tent of understanding. Then along came Iago.

Iago Anffawd, fab Sieffre Siomedig, fab Gwil Goll. That's what his staff card said. No one remembers hiring him, he just turned up one afternoon in a wolf mask and mitts.

"Bit of a Bergman boy, are you?" laughed Lol Fach, the literary editor.

"Hrhaïng!" replied Iago, which no one understood but simply took as a Solva accent.

Iago spent a few hours dragging planks around the Management Suite, hammering nails into fire alarms and generally being handy. Then he decided to take a short cut through the newsroom.

The nation held chip to lip in bewilderment then mirth as Rhowter Hers read out the Bethesda League Friendly Fight results while a bloke in a wolf mask and "Bollocks to the Poll Tax" t-shirt stood in the newsroom right behind him, waving hairy mitts at the camera before settling down with a can and The Daily Post.

The newsroom high-fived, the people as one pressed "record" on their dvd players, and Rhowter's career blanched in the flash of two million mobile phone cameras.

He was very upset.

"I wants Scooby-ffycinn-Doo out, and out today!" he yelled at the editor.

"Right, Rowter, I'll give him his cards this evening," soothed the foam-flecked hack.

Iago was tannoyed to come to the editor's office at six, when his shift ended. Aelwyd Hongian stood by his window, watching the sun set over the moors. A shadow blocked the glass door, followed by a soft but heavy knock.

********************************************************************************

Inspector Pumsaint of the Tangnefeddwyr Murder Squad looked around the office in horror. "Pardon my English, but what the cock happened here?"

The forensics officer pointed to the slick of blood that coated the wrecked room. "That's all that's left of the victim. Journalist he was."

"Still, it's not right," muttered Pumsaint. "OK, motive? Theft - anything missing?"

"It's been badly turned over, but there's nothing missing apart from the solid parts of the late Mr Hongian," said the forensics man, pushing his glasses back up his nose. "Oh, and this." He picked up a sodden card index.

"It's where the station kept all the staff details - national insurance, home addresses, that sort of thing. There's one card missing. It belongs to Rhowter Hers."

Cyfres Y Ceirw IV: Diotwyr Y Sul

Who knows who this young Celt is, but from inital cheeky "arright?" to his immaculate disposal of some Rioja he and his followers displays all the qualities that Glyndŵr and his chums invoked when they raised the banner at Sycharth.



Let all us Holy Drinkers raise a vase of Plovdiv Red and hope to follow in his unsteady footprints.

Gebe Gott uns allen, uns Trinkern, einen so leichten und so schönen Tod!

Black pointy hat-tip to Harry Hutton.

Bambule Babe

Valentine's Day is not marked in the House of Boyo, as we Welsh have our own Dydd Santes Dwynwen on which to shower our loved ones with oats and cockles.

Mrs Boyo resists this practice, and rejects International Women's Solidarity Junta Day on 8 March on the grounds that the Soviet mafia grew out of Chechens' cornering the flower market. I suspect that the commercial failure of her "Deny the Floral Compradors!" range of Socialist greetings cards may have played a role, but this suspicion I keep to myself.

Nonetheless, I decided to persuade Mrs Boyo otherwise by spending a spare morning before Arianrhod's monthly declawing session searching the Intern Net for images that combined dialectical rectitude and diaphonous pulchritude - a pursuit also popular with all manner of non-revolutionaries these days, I gather.

My trawl uncovered some rectitude and much diaphony, but little that combined the two in a satisfyingly Hegelian manner.

Now, we in the Cymru Rouge have little time for the narcissistic violence and poor dress sense of the Baader Meinhof Group, and as Maoists we consider their alliance with the nomadic nationalists of the PLO to be a juvenile distraction from the important work of planting slate and indoctrinating infants.

The smudged faces mooning out of those wanted posters may have driven a generation of over-excited students to abandon sit-ins and advanced smoking techniques in favour of blowing up civil servants and stealing white Mercedes, but they did nothing for The Rouge.

Then I found this:



Ulrike Meinhof the Terrorist may have looked like the sort of yoghurt-skinned drab you bumped against while trying to escape from Bauhaus concerts, but Ulrike Meinhof the 60s Journalist was a Hot-to Trot! A cuddly cushion of Klassenkampf with adorable dimples, plump vowels and a nice line in tailored jackets.

O Ulrike, where did it all go wrong?

The Archdruid of Canterbury

Dear readers,

I would like to take this opportunity, as a Welsh, to apologize to the people of England for the presence of Dr Rowan Williams in your public life.

Now you know why we disestablished him and his kind back in 1914.

And no, we won't take him back.

Cymru Rouge Accepts Rugby Laurels

A Press Release from Cymru Rouge Retrospective Achievements Department:

Attention Welshes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Otherwise, well done!

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

Wales - We're In It Together

What with the recession, the Millennium and that, I've been thinking of branching out into other careers, preferably those of other people.

Two fields that attract me are politics and Evil, so it makes sense that I should consider spin-doctoring.

Being a Welsh, the sole choice for me is to offer my services to Plaid Cymru, which nowadays helpfully subtitles itself The Party of Wales.

There's a Westminster election only a matter of months away, and Plaid needs to raise its media game if it's to consign Labour to the working men's club of history.

And so here's my shooting script for a short party political broadcast on behalf of Plaid. If anyone from Tŷ Gwynfor is reading, feel free to use it. In return I ask only to be made head of ADEC (Adran Diogelwch Cenedlaethol - Department of National Security) come the glorious day.

SCENE: A drizzly valley town, dragons foraging on the slag heaps and facing down feral sheep over moody, male-voice hymnal music. Camera pans along a black and white terraced street to a doorway where a TANGNEFEDDWR ["peacemaker" - cruel but fair Welsh policeman of the Nationalist Future] is clubbing a Labour canvasser who looks vaguely Kinnockian.

KINNOCKITE: [under truncheon crunches] Urgh, arghl, bloody kebabbed mun, totally and utterly...

TANGNEFEDDWR: 'ckin' Sachsengruss, innit!

SCENE: Camera fades into sepia and pans in through window of house opposite as hymn music lightens a little. A pious Welsh family of Father, Mam, teenage son and eight-year-old daughter are settling down to an evening meal of oven-ready chips at an oilcloth dinner table.

Portraits of Saunders Lewis, Cayo Evans and Shaky adorn the dingy walls.

FATHER: Before we eats, let us never forget or forgive the Battle of Morfa Rhuddlan, the Treason of the Blue Books, Hedd Wyn, Wales not qualifying for the World Cup in 1974, and Windsor Davies.

MAM: Ap-men!

Family tucks into chips, content in their Cambritude.

Then the little girl looks through the window to the scene of the Tangnefeddwr wearily clubbing the yappy Labour lackey.

Slowly, she gets up from the table and heads for the front door.

Family stops eating aghast, and music halts abruptly. Father moves to intercept the girl, but Mam holds him back. They watch petrified as their daughter steps out onto the slick pavement, and crosses the street towards the scene of the walloping.

She extends the slate of chips towards the two men.

The Tangnefeddwr turns, his truncheon raised ready to rain down bludgeoning blows, his face a scree of stubble under a Pinochet ski-slope peaked cap.

The little girl looks him in the eye, and offers him a chip.

The Tangnefeddwr, tears mingling with the sleet in his slate-grey eyes, takes the tiny chip in his great, gauntleted hand, and nibbles it with the delicacy of a Hawarden vicar's wife.

He strokes the little girl's damp hair in thanks, then notices the muttering colonial heap bolshily bleeding on his boots below.

A gradual grin cracks the craggy terrain of his endlessly Welsh face, and he hands the little girl his truncheon.

With a coy smile, she sets about the Kinnockite's sweetbreads under the sheltering gaze of the chip-munching Tangnefeddwr.

VOICEOVER: [Philip Madoc, ideally] Gymry, dewch i rhannu (Welshies, come and share)!

Calon by Injaroc (or Diffiniad, if you must), plays out over fade to Plaid Cymru logo.

END

Ex Oriente Lux

The War Office has decided to boost the popularity of the Army with our pasty-chomping fellow-countrymen by having squaddies march around the streets in uniform, rather than in jeans, crew-cut and Lynx like the rest of us.

Smart move. It worked in Chile, after all.

The generals are worried that our burger-flecked youth does not respect the armed forces, based on the fact that no one turns up for coming-home parades in the web-footed Fens and what have you.

I wouldn't worry. Those people still think we're fighting Boney. Fact is, British youth respects no one unless they've been on Big Brother or some botox-sponsored talent show.

So unless they want to hear something along the lines of:

"Hi, we're the The Royal Dragoon Guards Battlegroup and this is 16 Flight Army Air Corps, but tonight, Matthew, we're going to be Steps!"

The brasshats ought to relax.

The real problem the Army has is that it used to be a handy way of travelling the world, scoring some primo weed in Belize, learning why we fought the Germans twice while trying to get served in a bar in Bielefeld, and picking up a trade, with the only downside being having to sit in a bath of penicillin for a week after a night out in Larnaca. Ulster had calmed down, everything was going nicely.

Then along came Tony Blair and his radical conscience, and ever since our soldiers have been stuck in pebbly countries with atonal folk music, poor bar facilities and a female population most often kitted out in hessian sacks, kalashnikovs and a brace of suspicious brothers. A hard gig to sell even in Newport.

If it's any consolation to the Chiefs of Staff, when in doubt I always turn for inspiration to Ukraine. The Ministry of Defence in Kiev has had to deal with similar problems, with the added disincentive of malnutrition, buggery and being blown up by drunks' using your armoury as a fumoir.

Their response was the following recruitment video:



The message here is simple:

"That fat kid from your village learned to read and got a job with computers and stuff in Cherkasy. Now he's got a car. Big deal! You just join the army, son, and the cast of the Fastiv Amateur Dramatics Society production of Flashdance will do the sort of things to your crank that Yanko's gran got up to with the Germans during the war. And you get to keep the tank every third weekend."

I don't know whether being molested by the female population of Wantage is as attractive a proposition, but it might be worth a try. Alternatively, our aspirant warriors could always join the Ukrainian Army. It beats working in Morrisons.

Won't Get Fooled Again

As a truculent teeny I cast around the world of popular music for a bard to express my angst.

If I'd had access to the John Peel Show everything would have been fine and I'd have worshipped at the shrine of Ian Curtis like the rest of the country, but early bedtimes and the local cult of heavy metal formed a Separation Barrier of snores and drum solos between me and the flat-vowelled introspection that I craved.

Cruellest of all was the mocking spectre of Baron Paul von und zu Bloody McCartney. Like most of Britain's bilious youth I considered him a waste of ears, but then came the Winter of 1977.

I'd had my weekly bath and was sitting in the kitchen while my mother administered the sort of haircut that ensured my only friends were the Play-Doh Twins and a kid with a pen-top wedged up his sinuses. Then the Radio 1 Top Forty presenter announced to a bell-bottomed nation that Sir Paul had gone straight in at Number One.

I slumped at the strummed acoustic guitar opening, thereby losing another half-inch off the temples, and thought "He's not putting out 'Yesterday' again, is he?" Then came the fragile opening line:

"Bollocking Time..."

At last! Macca had shown he was still able to tackle the Zeitgeist and drag it half way down the field with this subtly striking adaptation of the Punk sensibility.

I headed for school the next day with a raffish undone collar, confident that under the leadership of Sir Paul of the Bleedin' McCartneys the kids could never be defeated, Dennis Healey would have to stop putting up sweet prices twice a year, Wales would be independent with Geraint Jarman as president, and everything would be alright.

Disillusion came before the mid-morning break in the form of a tart précis of the actual lyrics of Mull of Kintyre by Huw Fat, followed by an appointment with the ear, nose and throat specialist Dr Barraclough.

Still, it stopped me from ever buying a Wings record, something that I ought to have pointed out in my defence during the Genesis trial by ordeal.

Some years later, when I woke up to the news that John Lennon had been shot, I couldn't help but wonder whether he too had misheard the song coming through the short-wave World Service whine in his New York apartment.

"Arh fokh," he said to Yoko as she paused from stencilling the Baader Meinhof logo on his arse, "Paul's gone an nikhed me werkin' class cred again! I'll have to so summut really radikhal, or else the kids'll think I juss write falsetto crap about you all the time, love."

Now I'm not saying anything ghoulish like Lennon arranged his own death to preserve his reputation as the Huey Long of millionaire socialist songwriters or something, as it seems that was the Jews again. But what if it were true?

As they say in Liverpool, think on.

Anti-Danube: Chapter VIII

In which I learn not to rely on geography

"Frda's dense breasts rang out the carillon of the desecrated church of St Hydrofoilj above my burnished helmet. I had another hour before my lone raid on the nest of intentionalist vipers, where I would use only stealth, nakedness and a small armoury to smite the enemies of objective progress. Could the very fibres of Frda's basted body hold out that long, or would I have to return to her two sisters?..."

I set down the pen, my mind harrowed from producing ideologically-attuned erotica for NAKRO agents on night watch. This was my evening of voluntary labour after days spent on the basic induction course "Getting To Know And Kill The Imperialists", run by Agents Tschtjetz and Kafka.

I was warming to Kafka, an altogether more predictable and marginally less malodorous character than his mercurial, mullet-musky colleague.

Kafka's parents had realized from an early age that the security services were a reliable channel of advancement for slovenly yet meaty plebeians in a Socialist society, and did everything they could to ease their son into the ranks of NAKRO - which amounted to naming him "Agent" and writing denunciations of their neighbours in his childish hand.

It worked, and Agent Agent Kafka was recruited into the NAKRO "Young Vultures" (Mladi Gaijyi) division at the age of 15. He excelled at once, his first act being to denounce his parents' act of naming him as "Anticipating the Path of the Party and People" under Section 567/Y(xiv) of Paragraph 678 of the Criminal Code ("On Unsanctioned Enthusiasm").

He was commended by none other than Minister of State Security Jajcabiy himself in a marginal note on his annual report, which praised the lad's concern for his parents' ideological well-being - a note that Kafka thoughtfully passed on to his mother and, posthumously, his father at Corrective Uranium-Packing Plant No.4 in the Name of Fisk.

Kafka's company was edgy but, unlike that of Tschtjetz, did not present any immediate physical danger. An empurpled, hairless head erupted from the chapped collar of his uniform, and was barely restrained from entering a resentment-fuelled low orbit by his mottled peaked cap. Conversation was something Kafka kept to a minimum. In between draughts of slyvovytz he would grunt accounts of retribution against individuals real and imaginary who had slighted him, all concluding with a triumphant snort of "Kafka focked him!".

Sometimes, I gathered, this was literally true.

Agent Kafka's contribution to the induction was a module on "Active Witnessing of Interrogations", which consisted of his playing a gramophone recording of The Internationale while crushing a pair of ripe tomatoes between his thumbs.

As a citizen of Socialist, Democratic and Popular Ruthenia I was more interested in where he had found the tomatoes, but rated his classes as overall more agreeable that Tschtjetz's practical course on sewer surveillance and "The Coat Hangar: Tool of the Trade and Occasional Comfort".

In a quiet moment after he'd sent the rest of the class to the infirmary to practice their techniques, Kafka took me aside and explained the story of the missing mountain.

"Naxajlo is like fox, but fox with mind of dog," he explained. "Source says after much bucket treatment that Naxajlo will announce loss of Mount Dohrudj at cultural event here in Zhakhiv this week via his agents, on whom we spit from afar. Aim - destroy proletarian faith in government ability to control geography. Is lie. Lower than Naxajlo is only crawling slee-worm."

I could tell Agent Kafka took the sensational disappearance of our iconic mountain personally, as his accent and disdain for verbs and articles marked him out as either an Alpine Ruthenian or a simpleton.

I too was pained. How could any patriot not be? I recalled the words of our national poet, Nikolas Blinko, in our national poem "We Are Ruthenians, Please Leave Us Alone":

"Dohrudj! Twin-breasted Amazon,
Rearing twice above our shadowed plains.
Dohrudj! Goddess, huntress and defender
Of our lesser, but also divine, mountains..."

I blinked back tears. "How can a subjective comprador emigrant hijack an entire mountain?"

"Where was our People's Popular Defensive Attack Force? Where were our brave Internal Retentive Border Coordination Guards? Where is our mountain? These are the near-treasonable thoughts passing through your still-attached head, Comrade Zhatko. Please let them, and it, remain there."

Colonel Nadroth had entered the classroom through a panel concealed behind a poster of the So-Called Hungarian Menace. He lit a cheroot from the blowtorch Kafka was still dangling from his belt, and continued:

"Naxajlo may be able to ease favours from the yielding flesh of nomenklatura beldames, but he played no part in the disappearance of Mount Dohrudj. That, I'm almost proud to say, was an unintended by-product of the Soviet-Ruthenian Defensive Manoeuvre Pact of 1978.

"Comrade First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers' Democratic and (United) Socialist Party of Ruthenia, Kostyatyn Novak, had decided to grant our eastern Slav brothers a weapons-testing facility on the slopes of Mount Dohrudj. Some infelicities of translation led the Soviet Army to read this as 'weapons-testing facility Mount Dohrudj', which they rapidly reduced to rubble through dry-runs of the planned peaceful saturation bombing of the Ruhr Valley."

"From Dohrudj to No-hrudj," grunted Kafka, who had clearly waited a decade to make that crack.

"Thank you, Agent Kafka, you may continue the narrative," Nadroth gracefully acknowledged Kafka's bon mot.

"No all bad. First, rubble used to build NAKRO children camp, large crater make good ducking pool. Second, uncover much uranium, so open new Corrective Uranium-Packing Plant No.5 in Name of Dejevsky. Clear mountain air benefit Kafka's mother. Third, much improved views across plain to assess Hungarian Menace," Kafka continued, adding "We fock them!" in case I doubted the efficacy of Ruthenian military planning.

"But what about the Questing Marmot youth hikes in the Dohrudj foothills, the Central Committee mountain-top resort where foreign dignitaries are entertained, the mountain itself, looming majestically over the slack rooftops of Yützhrad?" I asked.

"To take your points in order," responded Nadroth, "Our inquisitive Socialist youthlings are transported at night to sororial Romania, where they wander the Carpathians in the company of horincă-dispensing Gypsy girls and are happy to keep their doubts to themselves.

"The mountain-top resort is in southern Poland, where our leaders forewarn themselves of the latest compromises our quadrant-hatted near-neighbours are making with the despised world of commerce. It also ensures foreign dignitaries have a positive impression of our Socialist society, as we have disaggregated hospitality to the Poles under a Comecon agreement. In return we repair their wristwatches."

"Lech potatoheads!" snorted Kafka "We fock them!"

"Thank you, Kafka. And finally, the outcrop glowering over scenic Yützhrad is Mount Dohlav, the identity of which was kept secret for decades by being hidden behind Mount Dohrudj. It was the prewar alpine playground of King Oleg the Invert, and widely shunned by the local peasantry for that reason. The People's Defensive Artillery carried out some basic reshaping of the summit, and a strategic adjustment to spectacle prescriptions by the local Health Board ensured that none of the berry-chewing moujiks is any the wiser," concluded the Colonel with a friendly tap of his cigar in my gaping mouth.

"Any of them go walk and talk about it, we leave them overnight in Szekler village and send pictures to family," added Kafka blandly.

"I am of course impressed and humbled by the ingenuity and compassion of the people's representatives in this, and all other, endeavours to protect the workers, peasants and progressive toilers by brain and hand from the consequences of their actions, but what role am I, a simple philosopher, to play in this?" I asked, sensing that I was not being admitted to the sanctum of state secrecy out of some brandy-based communal candour.

"Comrade Zhatko!" Nadroth rapped out his response with a crisp tattoo with his crop on my crotch. "First, you will infiltrate the event at which Naxajlo's creatures are to make their treacherous announcement, and second you will identify the translator whose error led to the destruction of our only peasant-free mountain.

"Even," he added, "if that translator turns out to be yourself!"

Deny the Venizelote Revanchistes!

A Cymru Rouge press release:

The BBC recently started calling Macedonia Macedonia. It had hitherto dubbed it the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which sounds like the sort of thing Prince changes his name to. So the United Nations liked it: big deal, they like all sorts of junk. The BBC done right.

The Cymru Rouge keeps a close eye on BBC activities - the eye in question being that of Iago Anffawd (fab Sieffre Siomedig fab Gwil Goll), which has had a protrudent, stalk-like adaptability ever since he test-dived with the Welsh Socialist Navy's first experimental submarine coracle.

He regularly reports back to the Sedd Fawr of the Rouge on metropolitan outrages against Cambritude, such as Glenys Bloody Kinnock appearances and weathergirls standing in front of Aberystwyth on the map and mispronouncing it.

He has recently noted soul-searching among BBC staff over this Macedonian policy. Not the sort of soul-searching carried out by Mrs Boyo's father in his Vinnytsya oubliette, which involved attaching electric cables to deacons at prayer, but a bout of self-criticism about the wisdom of this choice.

This uncertainty was prompted by the quantity of complaints they've received from Greek opponents of the name change - patriots with a burning commitment to their ancestral land, even though circumstances seem to prevent them from actually living in it at the moment.

We web bloggers do not fear complaints about our work - we call them "comments", and post them on our sites. The Cymru Rouge urges the BBC to stand firm, like the Oak of Nannau, in the face of Attic barracking.

For our narrow nationalist readers and admirers of the work of Lily Allen, who may both be unaware of the Macedonian Question, the Cymru Rouge Grudge Assessment Unit has prepared the following background briefing:

The warrior and statesman Sir Winston Churchill always drew a distinction between "Greeks" - the Ancients who brought us philosophy, wine and recreational sport, and saved us from Persian savagery - and "Grecians" - the current inhabitants of that area who have brought us, their neighbours and indeed themselves little but grief, resinous wine and overcooked food in the last 200 years.

One cannot help but think that Aristotle and Demosthenes would have seen fit, as have we and Sir Winston, to draw a similar distinction between whoever might have lived in Macedonia several thousands of years ago, and the people who live there now. Demosthenes, certainly, would have left it up to our contemporaries to decide what they want to call themselves and their country.

Let us take it step by step.

There is a province of Greece called Macedonia, inhabited by Grecians who like to call themselves Greeks, Slavs who like to call themselves Macedonians, and Vlachs who like to call themselves Romanians.

There is also an independent state called Macedonia, inhabited by Slavs who like to call themselves Macedonians and Albanians who, alone in the region, are happy to be called just that. This makes the Albanians the only clear-headed people around. Food for thought.

On the subject of which, there is a fruit salad called Macedonia, made up of a similarly colourful if rather more welcome diversity of elements. Not a coincidence, we imagine.

Now, if the Grecians want to call their province Macedonia, or their country Greece for that matter, it's no one else's business. Our African cousins get by with two separate Congoes, and the same goes for the qat-fuelled decision to enjoy the benefits of two Yemens for a while, and no one really minds.

The same goes for Grecian Macedonia and the Republic of Macedonia. Take our word for it, no one really minds.

A phrase we recall from our hemp-clad, slogan-chanting childhood is "The Greeks have a word for it". In the case of the Epirote revanchistes, we suspect that word might be "hubris".

To employ a good Greek word, Adio.

Fear not, BBC, the Cymru Rouge is behind you!

Brawd Rhif Un - Huw Samphan
Brawd Rhif Dau - Paul Pot
Braws Rhif Tri - Moc Tudor

Cyfres Y Ceirw III: Shakin' Stevens

Shaky is, of course, the greatest living Welsh after Tom Jones, Howards Marks and Charlotte Church. So why does he need extra exposure by here? Surely his body of work speaks for itself?

Indeed, but I come to praise not Shaky the Rock Colossus, for he belongs to the world, but Shaky the socialist politician and Welsh patriot.

As is often the case with great Welsh radicals, today's Shaky grew from unexpected roots.

Born Étienne Tremblant in the fabled Dynevor Tower of Oystermouth Castle in 1948, Shaky was the scion of one of Wales's oldest and most rapacious Norman families. His father, Sir Rollo Tremblant Bt, handed him over to a cabal of reves, makars and soused nursemaids, who instructed him in the ways of robber-barony in the back lanes and bedchambers of Gower.

A lifetime of sybaritic cruelty, ruffled shirts and bastardy awaited young Étienne until a fateful trip to the bordellos of Hamburg in 1967 organised by his private tutor - the unlicensed apothecary, Katangan consul and author of "Achmed, un fils du Rif", Conrad Latto.

As the two rode down the midnight Reeperbahn in a carriage drawn by a pair of Moroccan pony-boys, Étienne leafed through a copy of Adorno's "Minima Moralia" that he'd picked up in an alternative bookshop in the reasonable expectation that it was a Renaissance guide to mauve depravity.

As he told Michael Heatley, "[Adorno's] fragmentary aphorisms seemed to fuse together as I read them, forming a golden bar of philosophical bullion. The way forward was now clear to me. I told Conrad to rein in Mohand and Abdenour, dismounted, shook his hand for the last time, and strode into the dialectic as confidently as my silken hosiery permitted." ("Shaky: The Biography of Shakin' Stevens", Michael O'Mara Books, 2005, p38)

Étienne used his inheritance and shallow reading in the crepuscular classics of European and Near Eastern literatures to surf the spume of the German radical left, which began battering the bollards of bourgeois West Germany the following year.

But he soon grew disillusioned with the Marcusean posturings of the 68er-Bewegung, clearly foreseeing the rise of its violent, anarchic undercurrent to the surface in the form of the Baader-Meinhof Group (see his pamphlet "The One-Dimensional Movement: The Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund and a Superstructure of Gewalt", Spartakusverlag, Hamburg, 1968).

Many were unable to forgive him this incisive criticism, especially after the attempt on the life of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke, and Tremblant decided to return to Wales.

It was while toying with the radio in the family Bentley as he crossed the Heads of the Valleys that Étienne found himself switching rapidly between a recording of Aneurin Bevan and a track by a young rockabilly outfit called The Sunsets from Penarth. A second epiphany followed. "How to bring the tropes of Critical Theory to the working classes in Wales? For 'we are a musical nation' are we not? I had the car turn left - where else? - and we raced down the Rhondda towards the The Sunsets, towards the sea." (Heatley, p97).

It took a little time and a lot of money for Étienne to persuade The Sunsets to let him take lead vocals and songwriting duties, but it soon paid off in a string of consciousness-raising gigs.

The hits - "Sweet Little Rock & Roller" (1972 - dedicated to Leila Khaled), "Honey Honey" (1973 - a critical anthem mocking the statist posturings of the new East German Communist leader Erich Honecker), and "Jungle Rock" (1976 - in memory of Patrice Lumumba) - kept the band going while not compromising its revolutionary integrity.

After an uncertain start, Tremblant heeded the band's advice and agreed to change his name to something both more rock and yet more roll. In an early intimation of his interest in Welsh culture, Étienne opted for the name Steffan Y Crynwr, but the possible translation as "Stephen the Quaker" brought in too many earnestly silent men in cardigans and plain, plain women to make the joints jump. And so he bowed to cultural hegemony, and adopted another English version of his stage name. Thus was born Shakin' Stevens.

Shaky went solo in 1977, but the bond of solidarity he'd already forged with the workers, peasants and progressive studentry of Wales kept him in touch politically during the good times - and supported him in the locust years of the 1980s.

For Shaky's work was subject to a near-total and utter broadcasting boycott throughout the grim decade of Thatcherism following his alleged assault on Richard Madeley during an episode of "Calendar Goes Pop" in 1980. It was simply a Happening that Shaky had staged to illustrate a point he'd been trying to make about Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" to Francis Rossi out of Status Quo, but the coarsened social sensibility of the time was unable to grasp that.

Richard and Judy are the closest thing the English have to royalty, even though it was years before they'd met, and Shaky stood no chance. The only records of his that Radio One would play were either covers or songs with lyrics of such Æsopian subtlety that the BBC censors could not catch their thread of subversion. "I felt like I could look Vysotsky, Victor Jara and Wolf Biermann in the eye at last," Shaky recalled ruefully of those tense times (Heatley p178).

Highlights of the "Decade of Resistance", as Shaky called it, were "Shooting Gallery" (1980 - a chill warning of the advent of President Reagan), "This Ole House" (1981 - which pilloried the impotence of the House of Commons in the face of Thatcherism), "Oh Julie" (1982 - a bold doo-wop treatment of the semiotics of Julia Kristeva), and "A Rockin' Good Way" (1984, with miners' activist Bonnie Tyler, and dedicated to Woody Guthrie), culminating in the coruscating slab of anti-Eurocommunism that was 1990s "Pink Champagne".

Indeed, Shaky had been increasingly unhappy with the reformism taking root in the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and 1981's "Green Door" was a clear overture to Plaid Cymru's socialist wing under Dafydd Elis Thomas to form a broad Welsh left alliance.

An explicit invitation to Plaid would have cost Shaky his candidate Politburo membership, of course, and it is only to be regretted that Elis Thomas was unable (or unwilling?) to break free of Plaid's Gwynforite ascendancy. Shaky has written wistfully of what might have been in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Dafydd Wigley", a pamphlet that the Arts Council of Wales repeatedly refuses to print.

The bureaucratic establishment of the Welsh Assembly has long since cast the pall of osmosis over Elis Thomas and other erstwhile radicals, and the irony is that Shaky's political legacy is more widely recognised at home than abroad.

His record sales in Denmark are an indictment of us all, and it has been left to the Northern chronicler of proletarian culture, Peter Kay, to pay Shaky tribute by making him the only star to make two separate appearances in his homage to the Mexican Revolution, "(Is This The Way to) Amarillo":



As Tom Jones gradually reduces his public commitments and Owain Glyndwr persistently declines to heed the call, the stage may yet still be set for Shaky to take his rightful place as First President of the Welsh Republic. The question is, are we Welsh enough to deserve him?

Back in the Jug

The vodka and pickles are beginning to clear, and I see Mrs Boyo's careful and, I must say, slightly over-tight packing has brought me safely home from Ukraine to a Britain apparently zombified by the sort of flu once administered to Comrade Zhatko.

I'm therefore lying low on night shifts until the plague has passed, and shall share my dank thoughts shortly.

Ukraine's chief exports are steel, missiles, radiation and preedy gorls, so it's fitting that its premiership ought once more to be occupied by Madame Yuliya Tymoshenko - a lady who combines all the best qualities of those commodities.

Our own lady politicians have not been faring so well - Harriet Harman's facing questions over her deputy leadership campaign, Lady Thatcher is slowly turning into a giant moth, Glenys Bloody Kinnock still hasn't emigrated to Cuba, and Theresa May's secretary must be useless as she never replies to my illustrated letters.

They all need a lesson in campaigning from Madame Tymoshenko, and this Ukrainian folk group shows them how it's done with their song "Yuliya". Take it away, ladies:

Happy New Year, innit

Mrs Boyo has just fastened name tags to my clothing, as we're off on our annual pilgrimage to Ukraine - the touristic delights of which are carolled here.

Back on 5th January, so have yourselves a lively time over the New Year. I'll be somewhere on Maydan Nezalezhnosti or arm-wrestling Kolya Lektryk for the return of my trousers as usual.

In the meantime, here's some more of the thoughts of Capt Deakin on the rainbow nations of the North-West Frontier:

... could mimic a bassoon at 100 yds by straining slightly for
weeks thereafter. I could not have imagined such horrors those
few months ago as I was summoned into the Govnr's State Rooms
in Peshawar, even though I was not expecting thepleasantest of
conversations.

"I'm innocent, Sir! The native girl was sick; she would have
died anyway," I said by way of greeting, after the G's curt
nod.

"Desist, Capt. Deakin. I have no wish to trawl deeper through
the sump of degeneracy that is your personal contribution to
the White Man's Burden." The G pointed wearily at a large
area of the Punjab, coloured crimson on his campaign map. "The
main chieftains of the area have been appeased by the gift of
many head of elephants, and the urban curfew is now being
observed, despite many days of mutiny by the Seventh Sepoys
and the disembowelment of fifteen Unitarian missionaries by
the indignant populace in Chunki-Pazaar."

"Capital! No real harm done then, eh, Your Excellency... What
about a round of billiards? I'll let yer win, treat you to a
Siamese Sandwich at Madame Wong's Star of Mandalay Rub-and-Tug
Parlour, if yer know what I mean, and we'll forget all about
this ghastly misunderstanding - watcha say?"

My normally successful tactics for dealing with anxious
superior officers failed me in this my one encounter with the
Govnr, who was clearly not a Fifth Lancers' Man.

"Capt. Deakin! Confound you, man! Thanks to your grotesque
behaviour we nearly lost the whole of north-west India to
bloody insurrection, and all you can suggest is table-games
and further molestation of His Majesty's colonial charges!
Have you any idea, you depraved cretin, of how close you have
come to a full court-martial? THAT close!" bellowed the
clearly overwrought G., hacking at the punkah-wallah with
his scimitar by way of illustration of my proximity to
disgrace. "It is only the intercession on your behalf of Col.
Dunn-Chan - Lord alone knows why - that spared you from five
years in the stockade and a transfer to the Gurkha Target-
Practice Platoon, for Heaven's sake!"

Good old Gussie Dunn-Chan, I thought to myself. Not much of a
soldier, but a sound chap who knows when he's been done a
favour. The sale of his appalling spouse to those devil-
worshippers in Chitral for a sack of goat-fat and a set of
Uighur embroidered undergarments, only slightly soiled, was
one of my most successful trades as Commercial Commissioner in
Chini-Bagh two years previously, and Gussie's gratitude has
been as touching as it is useful. I also got him out of some
bother over the Inflatable Sari business in Sindh prior to the
King's Durbar, and he has never let me down since.

"When all is said and done you're still an officer in the
British Army of India, but the Ghorband of Amritsar is
demanding that an example should be made of you, nonetheless,"
continued the G., mollified by my respectful silence. "With
Russian agents crawling all over the place we cannot afford to
be seen to be ignoring his demands, nor can we give in to an
ultimatum from some damn'd native nabob. So I have decided on
a compromise."

With that the Govnr drew a service-revolver from his
desk and handed it to me. "Mortified by the distress and
sanguinary bedlam caused by your incontinent behaviour, you
did what any Lancer would have done," he said, with more
relish than I thought necessary. "Your death will calm the
Ghorband, and impress upon the masses how strict is the
British officers' code of honour. The worst of the damage will
be put right, and we can get on with the job of winning border
tribes to the Empire's side in preparation for the final
reckoning with the Czar and his Cossack marauders. You know it
makes sense, Deakin."

I thought it worth seeking some sort of dignified alternative
that would, nonetheless, not diminish my standing in the
Govnr.-General's eyes. "Can't we shoot one of the men and
dress him up to look like me Sir? My batman, Rose, would
gladly sacrifice himself the greater good, and anyway we
needn't tell. Give me half an hour and I sort it out myself,"
I volunteered.

"A coward, a bully, and a disgrace to our Island Race, as I
always suspected!" exploded the G., which I thought was
rather hard on poor old Rosie. Never the model fighting-man,
it must be said, and prone to excessive perspiration when
being used as a human shield by an officer under heavy
artillery-fire, but an ideal if reluctant beater on tiger-
sticking outings and a ready source of cash in that difficult
last week of the month - after a little physical persuasion
and threats to deport his mulatto family to the molasses-farms
of Guiana.

"Don't worry, Captain, I don't seriously expect you to do the
decent thing and blow your warped brains out, given your
incompetence and the sheer volume of your gin intake, not to
mention the difficulty of finding the target. No, we have a
much more positive use for you mottled neck."

Cahiers ou Cinema?

I like to spend my lunch hour drinking with NCOs, people with further education, religious scholars, that sort of thing. Conversation ranges widely, with owl etiquette and myself as frequent reference points.

Recently the Spirit of Radio 4 descended upon us and led to a discussion of whether the original book is always better than the film adaptation, with particular reference to Trainspotting.

I thought a more interesting question was why call either version Trainspotting unless you wanted to introduce the wrapped-sandwich community to skag, turps, fast music and Scottish culture, but as usual I was wrong.

Our conclusion, after scant consideration of little evidence, was that the book is always better. At which point we thought about it a bit more, and reached the following more comprehensive assessment.

The book is better than the film, with the following exceptions:

1. Films of Stephen King novels are better than the books, unless the films have the words "Stephen King's" in the title;

2. The same goes for Philip K Dick and in fact almost any piece of science fiction (see the Solaris debate I had with myself);

3. Our Man in Havana; and

4. Hardcore porn (that was my idea).

Unlike Radio 4 we are open to informed dissent, so fire away all you Christmas objectors.

Cyfres y Ceirw II: Vincent Price

Now as always, Wales dominates the ham section of the acting profession. Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, Ray Milland, Richard Coyle - they all had to come from somewhere, I'm afraid, and that somewhere was Vincent Price.

Price's career as an actor, cook, art-collector and TV gobshite is all too well-known, but his humble background, political activism and sheer Welshness are not.

Born Fychan ap Rhys in Bethesda to Rhys and Falmai ap Rhys, Price spent his childhood training to follow his father into the sin-eating business. This prepared him well for his later role in The Witchfinder General and various adverts.

A defining moment, however, came during his preparations for the Bethesda Cwyniad - the local Welsh-language freestyle toasting and dissing sessions. He used the hwntw expression "chimod" to rhyme with "Ichabod" during a bravura dismissal of Archdruid Cynan, and was booed off the chapel benches by the local Gog separatists.

Although there is no proof of this, Cynan incited the local bigots to drive Price away from the well where his family had dwelt for generations - partly in jealousy over the young man's courtship of Dolgellau harp diva and ankle-model Telynores Dwyryd, or so it's said.

This made Price a doughty champion of Welsh national unity and an opponent of racial intolerance, even when it was entirely justified.

He fled south to the easygoing port city of Tenby, where he eked out a living as a crwth-player with a street jazz combo and developed his interest in cookery by slapping Welsh cakes for the demimondaines at Maison Griff's all-night speakeasy - the only place you could get a drink in Pembrokeshire in those days, even a cup of tea.

Fate grabbed Price by the danglers once again when the US Fleet steamed into harbour, heralding Wales’s entry into the Second World War on the Allied side.

A group of Calvinist street toughs had marked his card over the "hot" version of "Arglwydd Dyma Fi" he'd performed at a Griff jam session one crazy night, so he stowed away on a US frigate heading for Havana to pick up cigars for Mr Churchill.

Price was discovered near the Azores, but his cooking and rhyming skills, plus his ability to see U-boats underwater, soon had him shoot up the ratings. By the time the ship had docked in New York, Price was a Senior Captain - which meant he not only ran the ship itself but had the use of another when his was being mended.

A glorious naval career followed, but Price showed his principles once again by resigning his commission when President Truman refused to carry the war to its logical conclusion and free Wales from English occupation.

Instead, he sold his medals to fund a Broadway musical version of Caradog Pritchard's "Un Nos Ola Leuad" called "Mam!". Literally no one came to see it, which allowed him to recycle much of the material in a concert work for male voice choir and crwth that he toured around clubs in LA.

Michael Jackson loved the piece so much that he turned it into the hit single "Thriller". Price, ever the crusader against racism, praised Jackson for giving so many prominent parts to black people in the video, and agreed to play a cameo part. That, as they, is the measure of the man - composer, warrior, lover, short-order chef and Welsh.