Elephant Talk

A conversation at The Tethered Goat this lunchtime:

Boyo: You going to The Glade this year?

The K Man: Dunno. Weather was terrible last year. Would've have flooded my wellies if I'd had any. It was like the Somme, man. Like Stalingrad.

Boyo: I think the problem at Stalingrad wasn't the rain so much as the cold.

K Man: Ah, so it wasn't that bad after all!

Boyo: And Von Paulus and his men weren't charged £30 a head for getting in, either.

K Man: Thirty quid!?! More like £125!

All history is contemporary.

The Wounds of Armenia I

Gyppo Byard's heather-hawking Armenian anabasis has reminded me of my long and inglorious association with that fine country.

Although shaped like one of those moulded bed pans men toy with in NHS hospitals, Armenia has everything going for it in terms of attracting a Welsh:

• it, like random chunks of the Amazonian rainforest, is about the size of Wales (see also other fun countries Albania and Israel);
  
  
• The Armenian for "good morning" is "Barry Lewis" (բարի լույս);
  
  
• Their big neighbours are still a source of annoyance, and they don't let you forget it;
  
  
• They used to live on the plains, but are now stuck in some useless mountains;
  
  
• They are short and dark, while their history is long and darker - think of The Crow, but with better music;
  
  
• Their menfolk are largely engaged in loafing and criminality; and
  
  
• Turks killed my great-grandfather at Gallipoli in 1915, the same time as they killed most Armenians' great-grandparents.

There are differences, of course, Armenian women and the weather being the most striking, but these only add to the allure.

As a student at the University of That London in the 80s, I was always on the lookout for ways of funding my Art Pepper way of living (this was the time before lifestyles).

Stints as a ballet impressario and art dealer had brought me deep joy, some cash and the attention of law-enforcement agencies in countries where civil servants wear sunglasses indoors, so male-modelling and sperm donation seemed the next step. Until an academic, whom I shall call Dr Steffan ap Sioncs, advertised for Armenian lessons.

Dr Sioncs was a Welsh, and a specialist on Georgians (the Stalin-boosting wine merchants, not the lynching-prone peanut fanciers or lady-dodging poets) who wanted an insight into the language of their frumpier neighbours. I spoke no Armenian beyond basic greetings, enquiries about alcohol availability and slanders on the Turkic national epic Crazy Dumrul, but possessed guile and a copy of the CIA's marvellous "Spoken Eastern Armenian". We went to work.

I would prepare a lesson the night before my weekly class with Dr Sioncs, and rebuff his polite questions about grammar points and non-spook vocabulary with assurances that he must not harrow his narrow Silurian mind with too much Armenian at this delicate early stage.

I even persuaded him that the Georgians had lifted their spaghetti alphabet from the elegant Mesropian Armenian script rather than from the commonly-received tin of soup. This had the virtue of not being true and of getting him into immense trouble with any Georgians he might want to share it with.

This nonsense went on for months, to the benefit of all. The landlord of the Friend in Hand got his tab paid, Dr Sioncs could order a bottle of prolapse-friendly Zhiguli beer in Yerevan, and any number of distressed young ladies avoided being seeded with frozen shots of Chateau Boyo.

But this was not even the beginning of my dealings with Armenia and its ungrateful denizens. There was a prequel, a sequel, and a tragic coda. Of which more anon.

We Live As We Dream, Alone

Gyppo Byard has pitched his vardo in the lay-by of British womanhood and started hawking the scented heather of Oriental delight.

The lively one-sided debate he provoked raises questions not about the media as the message, but the difficulty of perceiving that message while drinking buckets of soave with your girlfriends in the various chrome-plated bars of English market towns.

"Sex and the City: The Movie" opens in cinemas here this week, and Mrs Boyo is marching her phalanx of the Rosa Luxemburg Sexual Illiteracy Combat Brigade through the piles of empty Thornton's boxes, rosé wine bottles and mascara puddles to pressgang stragglers into the popcorn galleys for what she hopes will be anti-Romaticism aversion therapy.

I fear she may be wrong. I enjoyed the TV series "Sex and the City" as a sort of "Coupling" for simpletons. There is considerable evidence, however, that many lady viewers see it not as a "satire on the self-delusion of gender-based empowerment in late-capitalist society", to quote Mrs Boyo, but rather as a practical guide for the perplexed.

I would therefore suggest that the makers of this and other fine comedy programmes should preface each broadcast with the following message:

"The lives portrayed herein are fictional. Any attempt to spend yours in lunchtime frascati sessions while squealing about orgasms and harrassing waiters will leave you a penniless and lonely lush. You will die in a pool of your own wee in a failed attempt to struggle into a frock designed for a Neapolitan teenager. And - no: gay men do not find you fascinating. They see you as ungainly object lessons in why they made the right choice. Enjoy the show."

It seems the kindest thing they could do.

Stalin Wasn't Stallin'

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

Today runs three types of story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Severn Pillows of Wisdom

Back from a bracing week of clouds and tooth decay in Wales, I have the latest news and developments so you don't have to.

1. The government in Cardiff has decided that the English name of the country will henceforth be spelled !Wales!. The idea is to make people think we are not only musical, but a musical. This ought to bring the pink pounds pouring in, and give our homophobe community something to do since the last gays in the villages left to be something in the London media.

2. In order to overcome the North-South divide, the regions of Wales are to be renamed as follows:

• North Wales coast - The Rhylviera


• Rest of North Wales - Mid Wales


• Mid Wales - Middlewales, in order to make the Tolkien-cultists infesting Machynlleth feel at home.


• South-West Wales - Ireland (Tenby will be called Galway and Pembrokeshire West Cork. Having your head slammed in a pub door by the Young Farmers will be known henceforth as "the craic")


• The Valleys - Little Switzerland. Tonypandy will be twinned with Zürich's Needle Park.


• Glamorgan - Westworld.


• Cardiff - The Torchwood.

3. In a similar move, the Welsh language will be rebranded as Gaelic, so no one will be scared of it anymore.

4. The Academi Gymreig, which attempts to regulate the Welsh language, has issued its latest list of words we ought to use instead of just saying English ones with a comic accent. They are:

• Spambot: plastic luncheon-meat holder.


• Charlota: singing bustily.


• Chwerthfawr: laughable.


• Cotseinio: to mark oneself out as a bit of a tool.

The model sentence provided was "Chwydais 'nghinio yn syth yn y spambot wrth glywed Glenys Blydi Kinnock yn ceisio charlota. Chwerthfawr oedd i'w gweld hi yn cotseinio ei hun gymaint."

5. Under family pressure, my brother Annwn has agreed to call his dog Bruno, instead of Duw ffyc aye - his all-purpose greeting.

6. The Senedd has announced the summer list of who is and who isn't currently Welsh. Terry Jones is out, and anyone who 'd like to play for the national football squad is in.

7. Plaid Cymru capo Dafydd Iwan returned No Good Boyo's jaunty greeting on the gristly streets of Dolgellau, and so is assured of both of my votes once again.

Heimatklang

Wales beckons with its six-fingered shuffle, and so the House of Boyo is piling into Old Mossy tomorrow morning for a week of drizzle, feral relatives and nursery food in the ancestral shed in Snowdonia.

Leaves in the dam often leave our hometown with an erratic power supply, as do angry peasants advancing up the hill at midnight, so web blogging may be light. In which case I leave you with the further adventures of Capt Deakin in or near Afghanistan.

As they say in Penarth, ciao for now:

DOWN THE OXUS ON A LOG: PART THE THIRD

The Governor motioned on his map to the blasted deserts north of the Hindoo-Koosh, that God-forsaken arena for the Tournament of Shadows between England and the Russian Bear for the fealty of the petty Amirs and Khans of Toorkistan.

"Things arebeginning to stir up there on the Oxus, Deakin, and it's time for us to strengthen our hand amongst the Pamiri chieftains. We have had reports, disturbing reports, that Cossack patrols from Tashkent are plying the hill-tribes of Wakhan and Kulyab with baubles, jewelled prayer-books and Smith & Wesson repeat-action rifles, not to mention Persian dancing-boys.

"The most worrying intelligence is that Col. Shatkovski is amongst them - no, you buffoon, not the dancing-boys, although Iwouldn't put that past him. He is a master of disguise, seduction, and all the other dark arts of espionage. Fluent inall the local Turki dialects, plus Persian, Pashto and English, he is a most formidable adversary - his greatest weapon being the insight into our own way of thinking he gained from attending a minor public school in Scotland; Dr Shuggie Macleod's Caledonian Academy, I believe.

"There he learnt to survive on salted grits, clad only in a hessian kilt, in extreme cold and almost Trappist silence for his first eighteen years. Part of some absurd exchange programme, it seems, under which we sent twenty pale youths to the Russiacity of Voronezh, a ship-building centre near the Don. They all returned married to Cossack women, and had to be put out of their misery within weeks."

"So you want an expedition to go up there and flog the blazes out of the Pamiris' womenfolk, to show the infidel who's boss of the Himalayas from Assam to Bokhara, eh Sir?" I interrupted enthusiastically. "Problem solved. I'll assemble a raiding party from the Gallant Welshmen of the Fifth, under Lt. Probert, right away, Sir, and show those heathens what fun can be had with three lengths of stout hemp and a selection of melons. Leave it to Deakin, Sir!"

The Governor was silent for a while, moved no doubt by my selfless offer to sacrifice my own men in the glaciers ofthe north. He even had to sit down and hold his head in his hands for a good few minutes, before raising his bloodshot eyes and addressing me again.

"Captain. Shut up and listen to me, or I'll second you to the Army Education Corps. How do you fancy twenty years of teaching literacy and elementary toilet-training to web-fingered East Anglians who pine for the sisters in the Fens? I thought not. Right, this is what you are going to do.

"I have gathered a small party of pundits - natives who know the uncharted Hindoo-Koosh passes and the Pamiri statelets like the back of their hands, and who can pass through the bazaars of Samarkand and Bokhara unnoticed. They are loyal and discreet, and will lead a select group of officers to the Hakim of Bunjikath, who we believe is willing to cut off the Cossacks as they return north from their mission to the Akhund of Basiq-Arvil.

"The Hakim has no love for the Russians, but has as yet no reason to help us either. The aim of our party will be to overtake Shatkovski and his mercenary crew, assure the Hakim of His Majesty's intentions to protect the Pamiris from the Bear's incursions, and promise him all the territories of Basiq-Arvil from the frontier with Kondooz to the Bokharan settlement of Hissar..."

At this point the oppressive heat, compounded by the delayed effects of the previous night's gin-drinking competition with"Fluffy" Tarry in the Mess - I won - conspired to send me into a light doze, but I don't think the Governor noticed.

"Wake up, you slobbering dipsomaniac! Good Lord, I have no more time to waste on you. Listen. You will nominally head the party, because the Russians have never heard of your worthless hide, and because you have the ideal alibi - officially you're dead. If reports of you reach the Russians, they will simply attribute them to native idiocy - moreover, they will never believe that we would entrust such a sensitive mission to a shifty incompetent like you.

"And they will be right. The party will in practice be led by two fine soldiers: Captain Champion of the Kashmiri Rifles, a superb linguist, crack shot and gallant officer, who has led many forays against the Pathans; and by Abdul Khalik, a pundit who is known and respected bythe Hakim of Bunjikath.

"Both men are too well-known to be formally acknowledged as members of the party, and will travel in mufti as traders: Champion has passed himself off as an Uighur merchant from Kashgar several times before. Your task will be to render them any assistance they might need - in short, to be expendable.

"If the mission succeeds and the Hakim pledges allegiance to the King-Emperor, we will have halted the Russian juggernaut in its tracks - St Petersburg will not dare openly challenge England, its ally in Europe, for control of the passes to Afghanistan. Moreover, you will have won yourself redemption, and will be allowed to return to the card-tables of Quetta to fritter away your life in vulgar debauchery."

"Thank you sir, there is nothing I could wish for more. You can count on me. But may I ask one question?", I interposed. The Governor nodded his assent. "The way I see it is this. The alliance with Russia is all wrong. Look, Ivan may becoming over all soft in Europe, but the battle for world domination is being played out here, in the Afghan Cockpit. The Germans have no objection, as I see it, to our dominion over Asia, as long as we let them establish beach-towel hegemony over the Frogs and Wops. If we let them have their way across the Channel, they will have no reason not to help us give the Russkies the damn good hidin' they deserve on the Oxus and Jaxartes.

"Siberia will then be ours, an ideal dumping ground for all the socialists, liberals, Jews and book-reading types as are ruinin' our country. Our joint Germanic axis can then turn its attention to winning back the North American colonies and bringing civilisation to the benighted Africans and Latin Americans. European history took a wrong turning when it abandoned feudalism, and it's up to us Saxons to put matters right by sharing the benefits of slavery, corporal punishment and extensive ground-nut plantations with the lesser breeds.

"Champion and I shall take big guns, plenty of whisky and some Lilly Langtree phonogram recordings to the Hakim fellow, let him keep this Abdulawallah chap as a gesture of goodwill, then move the Baluchi Lancers up to the Pamirs, cable the Kaiser and tell him to get his Hussars cracking against Ivan. Yer see, the Krauts have this Von Schlieffen Plan, and it really can't fail, because..."

"Captain Deakin!", shrieked the Governor. "You will keep your political fantasies to yourself or I'll have you shot for treason! Do as Capt. Champion says, keep your tackle in your trousers, maintain some semblance of sobriety and maybe -just maybe - I'll let you return to your regiment. Is that clear? Good.

"Now, report to the Kashmiri Rifles at four o'clock sharp tomorrow morning. Champion and Abdul Khalik will be waiting for you, and you can set off before morning prayers. Get your batman to assemble mountain kit for you tonight, retire early, and don't let me hear from you again until you return with your party intact and the Hakim's pledge of loyalty in your pocket. Now go!"

"So you agree to my plan, Sir!" I exclaimed in delight. The Governor clasped his head in his hands once again, no doubt overwhelmed by my brilliant strategic vision and the honour History would accord him for his role as my mentor in this undertaking.

"Listen, Peter," he said quietly. "You go and have an early night, and report to the Kashmiris as I said. Send my your batman, and I'll explain everything to him, alright?"

"Jawohl, Herr Gouverneur!" I assented with a knowing click of my heels, and moved to leave the State Room.

"One moment, Deakin," he beckoned. "Just tell me this before you go: how did you ever obtain a commission in the first place?"

"Perfectly simple, Sir; I inherited if orf my brother Bill."

"Bill, Bill Deakin? You surely don't mean William Wilberforce D'Arcy Deakin, the most brilliant graduate from Sandhurst in his year? Really? My son was there, too. Says your brother was a most promising officer."

"Oh, yes, Bill. Bit of an off-ox, actually. Wouldn't let Pater buy him a commission. Insisted on going through Sandhurst on merit, and then volunteered for the Engineers, fer Chrissakes. Wasted his spare time writing some damn-fool book- "The Army of the Future" or something, about how cavalry and infantry must be replaced by high-mobility mechanised divisions, or else the next war will be bogged down in murderous trench-warfare that will sacrifice an entire generation of the Flower of Europe, one by one. Well, I ask you! Thought bright-red uniforms were a bad idea, too. Stuff and nonsense!"

"What happened to him?" asked the Governor.

"Well, he decided to get himself married. Not to a decent shires brood-mare, either, but to some Oxford blue-stocking. Went on their honeymoon to look at wall-paintings in churches in Italy, if yer please. Wouldn't have a stag-night in the mess either, - her idea, no doubt - so me and the chaps slipped some stiff ones in his cocoa the night before and left him with a tupp'ny whore in Whitechapel - old Uncle Jack's stamping-ground, yer know. The least we could do.

"Anyway, damnedest thing happened. He came back from Eytieland blind, started raving about being the Duke of Wellington, went paralysed from the neck down, lost his nose, and died. Bit of a nancy-boy, really, but a shame all the same. Mater was quite cut-up about it, actually; too grief-stricken to speak to me for five years.

"Anyway, our loss was the Army's gain. Pater pulled a few strings and I got the commission."

The Governor was silent for a while. "You mean your father paid good money to get you into the Fifth Baluchi Lancers?"

"Well, er, no, actually. I was meant to join the Welsh Guards- fifteen guineas and a season-ticket to Twickenham for the CO, apparently - but my attempts to console Bill's widow were horribly misinterpreted, and the Lancers was where I ended up. Still, they're a good bunch and they do a damn important job."

"Yes, I suppose the Empire needs men to keep those vicious Baluchi nomad-pastoralists under control, or else they might sack Delhi with their dreaded, sharp-fanged flocks of sheep and fearsome walking-sticks."

"Quite, Sir. Their womenfolk are a force to be reckoned with, too," I agreed ruefully, recalling the number of narrow escapes we'd had from their wet towels and heavy undergarments during our Washing-Day bayonet-charges on the village bath-houses.

"Off you go, Deakin, and don't come back until I've been transferred somewhere else," said the Governor with a straight face. Quite a wag, really, I thought.

The Thought

L. P. Hartley wrote one of the best horror stories ever, "Podolo". Another gruesome effort was "The Thought", in which a man was driven to repent by nagging guilt - only to find something much worse. Both can be found in his collection "The Travelling Grave", if at all.

I once used the power of whimsy to banish an unpleasant image from Mrs Boyo's mind. I was happy to do so, as I had suggested the nightmare in the first place. The fantasy of a kingdom ruled by rabbits in the High Pamirs proved so saccharine that Mrs B was unable to recall anything saltier for days.

If only I had someone like myself to drive out my own djinns. Rather like tickling yourself or auto-fellatio, it just doesn't work.

In my student days, I joined Black Country yogi Ward Cooper in proselytising on behalf of synthpop, which we were sure would soon replace poetry, opera and conversation as the basis of human civilisation.

During one bout of evangelising I explained to Irish Pete the depth and intensity of Blancmange lyrics.

"What are these waves
They're coming over me
It must be my destiny"



sang the Surprised-Looking One Who Didn't Look Like Vince Clarke (the Hardest-Working Man in SynthPop. The Hardest Working-Man in the genre was without doubt Dave Gahan Out Of Depeche Mode).

"What the Surprised-Looking One is trying to tell us here, Irish Pete, is that he is drowning and there's nothing he can do about it. Very Zen" I ventured, passing the wild-eared Jack Shepherd impersonator another digestive.

He stuffed the biscuit in his Bundeswehr surplus lederhosen and proposed another reading.

"Yer man's a dwarf or elf or some shite, and he's working in one of them gay whorehouses in Amsterdam. There's a circle of Swedish sailors round him, and they're whacking out five-months of backed-up spud water over the feller. So as there's buckets of the stuff. Feck all he can do about it, mind."

With that he he waved a Thin Lizzy tape at me and left.

So now, whenever I hear the keening of a Moog, trip over a person of restricted arseitude, venture near the Gothenburg docks, or go to Ireland, I can't banish the image of a man dressed as Punch (for some reason) getting a Scandinavian man shower.

I've tried thinking of Kylie, mine enemies vanquished by Gorgons, Bono and Sting before a firing squad, all to no avail.

Any suggestions?

Cahiers du Cinema III: Village of The Damned

A film called "The Midwich Cukoos" is only going to attract Bill Oddie and trainspotters in their weird, sellotape-spectacled version of rehab.

So the not-at-all-spooky-sounding Wolf Rilla was right to rename his reverential cinematic version of John Wyndham's "Help! Our kid's a alien!" novel "Village of the Damned" in order to pull in the Hammer House of Horror crowd, despite what Mrs Boyo rightly noted as its dearth of Mediaeval eschatology.

I showed the film to Mrs B the other night, partly to aid her research into my hinterland ("There's a whole monograph there," she says) and as a cautionary tale about letting our daughter Arianrhod spend so much time talking to bees.

Mrs Boyo seemed to agree with my view that the central thesis of the film ("Blondes are not to be trusted") had held up well over the intervening 48 years. I was pleased that it had retained its pace and tension, revealed much about the dynamics of 1950s village life in England, and included the Greatest Living Dai-aspora Welshmen Peter "Grouty" Vaughan as "fainting deferential policemen No.1".

It was only while discussing Grouty's powerful performance with motor-muddle celebrity blogger Scaryduck over a vat of pig lager that the main plot flaw in the film occured to me.

Silken suave gentleman scholar and poignantly punctual suicide George Sanders concentrates on the image of a brick wall, so that the telepathic pre-teens cannot read his mind and see he's planted a bomb in their midst.

A masterly sequence in the film shows their short-trousered mental efforts to blast the image away, brick by brick, until they reveal the bomb - too late.

In my Fostered epiphany, I realised that Sanders was tragically too old and genteel to recall his own pre-adolescent state. Otherwise he would have ditched his brick wall in favour of the one image guaranteed to distract his charges - Big Knockers.

It's true. If he'd thought of a pair of giant love jugs, the kids would have been transfixed. The boys would have thought "Mmmm, big ones", thereby setting their mental coordinates for the next 60 years.
The girls would have thought "So that's it. Sod deportment, cooking and bridge, if I want one of these apemen to do my bidding all I need is some hankies until Eva Herzigová invents the Wonderbra."

The whelps would have still been pondering the mysteries of the mammary as George's sturdy, English bomb blew their pointy heads to all corners of Watford. He could have sauntered out of the school and celebrated by making normal babies with Barbara Shelley.

And, who knows, the real Sanders might have decided not to leave us in that Catalonian hotel room in 1972, but rather to live on and stop John Carpenter's remake.

And all for want of a D-cup.

Going Off My Rocker in a Knocking Shop

Spain was created, it seems, in order to convince me that Jung and Sting were both right when they cracked on about synchronicity.

Apart my Orwellian nightbus nightmare, there was the strange case of the Chueca hotel.

The best job I ever had was helping Belorussian ballerinas with their non-professional needs on a shambolic tour of Britain in 1990. I enjoyed it so much that I volunteered to continue my duties during their Madrid season in 1991, free of charge. I even bought my own airline ticket. Frankly, I'd have crawled there with Roy "Chubby" Brown chained to my nuts if need be.

As always I left travel arrangements to the last minute, and so boarded an Aerolineas Argentinas flying trolleybus at sometime near midnight with what looked like a convention of people who took their dogs with them to "no questions asked" country guest houses.

I won't detail the bizarre manner in which the airline wanted paying, as I suspect there's a squad of men in black from the International Atomic Energy Agency still engaged exclusively on unravelling that one.

My best efforts at Spanish earned me a bus ride to central Madrid before my fellow-passengers had even recovered their collars and leashes. I found a public phone and called Basque Artist IV who had kindly offered me lodgings during my stay.

Basque Artist IV was a stubbled lush whose name began and ended with "X". This had struck me as a good basis for friendship at a party in London some months earlier. "When you come to Madrid you stay with me, Xardox the Fourth Artist!" he rasped through a cloud of cachaça and Ducados, propped up by his modishly-Scottish girlfriend and Basque Artists I-III.

He scrawled a phone number on a fag packet. I got him to sign it in case he achieved Hockneyed fame or I forgot the order of consonants and ended up lost, alone and sober on the midnight streets of Madrid.

Which is of course exactly what happened.

His phone hadn't answered for days. I assumed he was painting a mural in, or possibly on, Bilbao and would be back any day. He wasn't. For all I know he was some sort of happening dreamt up by Basque Artists I-III in a moment of Situationist ennui. Perhaps they had all been members of the Federation of Conservative Students making some sort of over-subtle point about minority cultures. I just don't know.

The hours passed in gloomy contemplation of Franco's architectural legacy, enlivened by a dousing from the maniacs who hose the streets in the two-hour gap that allows the crowds of happy drunks to get home, shower and arrive at their bank/parade ground/air-traffic control tower in time for work.

The most welcome sign in the world is a large, plastic doner kebab outside a Pinner takeaway near where I first stayed in London. "In this sign shall ye conquer" it says to me. But for a moment a scrappy neon "Hotel" in a cramped Madrid backstreet nudged it into the salad bowl of oblivion.

I spilled into the lobby, and had an exchange in elementary Spanish with the oily clerk at reception that went like this (to my understanding):

Boyo: Good morning, sir, do you have a room free?

Clerk: A room?

Boyo. Please. For just one night. I am tired, but have money.

Clerk: Certainly. For one night?

Boyo: Please.

Clerk: OK. Random number of pesetas. Room 14.

Boyo: (handing random number of bills and swiftly rejected passport) Ta.

I spent a grateful few hours in the knackersack of Lethe, then called the partner of a friend due in Madrid that day in the hope he could put me up. He called me back soon after, and I checked out and moved into his pension round the corner.

It was owned by a couple who'd discovered that their modish support for the Republican cause did not go down well with General Franco's otherwise commendably multicultural Moroccan Regulares. They spent several grateful decades in France, and so I was able to explain in French my luck in finding such an accommodating establishment but relief at moving into their more distinguished rooms.

"That was not a hotel, but a maison d'assignation," explained our worldly host.

And so, on reflection, my exchange with the reception clerk probably went like this:

Boyo: Good God, Cavalry, do you have an open camera?

Clerk: You want a room?

Boyo. Colour me up. For just one night. I have a uniform and doublets.

Clerk: Whatever floats your Armada, son. You want the whole night on your own?

Boyo: Would you care to join me?

Clerk: I'm ok here. Random number of pesetas. Conchita is in Room 14.

Boyo: (handing random number of bills and swiftly rejected passport) Hail Mary.

The receptionist at a Madrid brothel was confronted in the middle of a dry and balmy night by a friendly yet sodden Englishman (how was he to know?), bearing a suitcase of Mediaeval jerkins and expressing no interest in the specialist staff. He handled it well, as I'm sure he did during every Conservative Future outing to Spain.

Many years later, I wandered past a work colleague engrossed in the Rough Guide to Madrid. We fell to talking, and I asked him where he was staying in that fine city.

"A boutique hotel in Chueca, the former red-light district. It used to be a brothel, akchooly," he honked fruitily, pointing at the address and description in the book.

As Bryan Ferry once remarked, you can guess the rest.

One of Us! One of Us!

As prophesised in our ancient tomes of Silurian lore - The Red Book of Hergest, the Black Book of Carmarthen, the White Book of Eifionydd and the Blue Books of Treason - the lost lands of Lloegr, Cantre'r Gwaelod and America are returning to the well-upholstered bosom of Gwalia.

The workers, peasants and progressively-inclined intellectuals of the village of Audlem in Occupied Swydd Gaer (Cheshire) have raised high the standard of Glyndŵr in their flippery hands and cast down the tattered banner of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenburg-Mountbatten-Windsor- (I could go on).

Literally sickened by millenia of English rule, these plaintive rustics have converted to Welsh in order to seek salve for their Saxon-shriven shingles, buboes and agues.

As regular S4C news broadcasts make clear, the National Health Service in England has been largely given over the campaigns against the Tudor-given right to smoke fags and neck pints of rusty ale while eating your way out of a giant steak-and-kidney pie.

We in Wales, thank Annwn, still believe that a doctor is there to stitch your palms up against self-pollution and dispense pink pills to mad old women. Hospitals are for harassing nurses and comparing Friday-night battle-scars. Chemists exist to employ teenage girls for the maximum embarrassment of the smalltown STD and rubber-purchasing communities.

Our Audlem prodigals appreciate this, and have humbly petitioned to rejoin Wales. We in the Targeted Outreach Division of the Cymru Rouge welcome them, their hard-currency Post Office Savings books and their real shoes.

Soon all the Marches will embrace their new role as a Welsh Remilitarised Zone, thereby opening a great chasm of friendship between ourselves and our English neighbours.

We will however take some pleasure in turning down any application for Welshness from Telford. It will remain an English exclave in our motted, bailey flank. The London government will have our permission to ship in weekly consignments of pasties, teenage-pregnancy kits and tattoos.

Myn Duw mi a wn y daw.

St George's Day: An Apology

Welsh Police Apologise in Advance For St George's Day Violence

Text of report from Taffinfform news agency

Morgangrad (formerly Cardiff), 22 April: The Prif Forthwyl (Mattock-in-Chief) of the Tangnefeddwyr (Peacemakers - Welsh police), Chwyldro ap Ffistan, has issued a formal apology to the English community of Wales over the state-sanctioned violence against them on St George's Day.

"They's going to be right ffyct over again. Sorry," Ffistan told scuba-diving onlookers at the launch of Gwynedd's first underwater political prison facility just off Bangor.

St George's Day is marked by an official parade in Morgangrad, attended by the ambassadors of Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Montenegro, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Canada, Catalonia, China and Ancient Anatolia, at which the Welsh artillery fight a human dragon kindly supplied by the Chinese Correctional Facilities Service.

Representatives of the English minority have long asked in a diffident sort of way whether it might be, you know, ok if they were to join in if that's alright with everyone.

Wales's Cymru Rouge government insists that the parade is a diplomatic event, and points out that it arranges an English Folk Day celebration every 23 April which the English community is encouraged to attend.

"They dress our people up as Morris dancers in Jeremy Clarkson masks, then drive us at pitchfork-point through the teeming streets of Bethesda," Dave Eversough-Sorey, chairman of the banned Plaid Sais (English People's Party) commented from his fissure in the Martyr Cerys Matthews Re-Edjucation Camp, Brymbo(formerly the National Coal Board slurry storage dump).

"This follows the three-day local mushroom festival and coincides with National Small Arms Practice Day," he went on, blinking uncertainly in the natural phosphorescence. "They are rarely that pleased to see us."

Cymru Rouge Youth League First-Secretary Dim Clem denied allegations that English Folk Day was little more than a pogrom-building activity for schools in the Ogwen Valley.

"The practical sections of the Welsh Baccalaureate Demographic-Realignment Module are carried out in the Demilitarised Zone (formerly Shrewsbury), especially as we can't get the Katyushas and cages of apes up the road to Bethesda anymore," he explained

In further developments, the official Welsh Commission of Welsh Human Rights has referred Eversough-Sorey's comments to the Director of Clandestine Prosecutions and Ministry of Food on grounds of "cockiness".

Dim Clem, the regional representative of the Rights Commission, Prosecutor's Office and Food Ministry, was adamant that the late [sic] Eversough-Sorey would receive a fair trial prior to his execution, as was also the case with the missing members of last year's Amnesty International monitoring team.

"We didn't eat them!" he concluded firmly.

Et puis je fume

Richard "Elastic" Bond, linguist and Depeche Mode analyst, had an effective way of deciding what people were like without having to get to know them. He asked which side they would have fought on in the English Civil War.

It's a deceptively simple question, but reflection on it drapes the inner walls of your brain with doubt. I'd always considered myself one of Nature's Roundheads, but an access of honesty made me realise that I'm a Cavalier. I've had no concern for the common weal ever since.

Being a Cavalier doesn't mean you're a Royalist, social conservative or git. It's an attitude. A certain élan, insouciance, indifference to details like success, fondness for French words, a blithe torpor maintained through flashes of ruthlessness - these mark the Cavalier.

A Roundhead need not be a Messianic reformer or friend of the poor. An inexorable quality, dependable but not always right, marks Cromwell's children.

It's not a question of left or right. The Bolsheviks, apart from Trotsky, were Roundheads. The Nazis in the main were Cavaliers. In Spain, the Nationalists were Roundheads, and the Republicans Cavaliers.

There's a queasy glamour attached to being a Cavalier. Minor royals and suburban punks don't turn up to fancy dress parties dressed as Comrade Beria (although Mrs Boyo does).

If you want to be remembered far beyond your worth, be a Cavalier. Look at Dixie.

Like Elastic Bond, I tend to sort people into two groups. Mine are smokers and non-smokers. As with Prince Rupert versus the New Model Army, it has little to do with whether you're a slave to the weed or not.

Smokers don't know the way but usually get you there, by which time you don't care anymore. They are not always kind, but feel some remorse later. They have wit and no sarcasm. They write and play music with aimless enjoyment, don't object strongly to ironed clothes, and are lazily good in bed.

Non-smokers. Well. The chances are you work for one, unless you're a burlesque dancer.

I gave up smoking week before last. I'd come to it relatively late and applied myself with zeal. When cigs weren't doing it anymore, I switched to the pipe - aptly described by leechmeister Ward Cooper as "the smoker's equivalent of meths". Gradually I cut down in line with shrinking fugged-up public spaces and expanding family.

I don't miss it, because I will always be a smoker. It's a lost cause, and worthy of devotion - with a cigarette or without.

Zona industrială

The Curse of the BBC strikes again, but this time it claims a worthy victim in its Lonely Planet subsidiary.

I felt vaguely sorry for the various Jocelyns sacked over the Brendarama and Socksgate scandals, in the way you do on hearing how a remote Persian satrap was once forced to eat his own hands by gurning Yazidi madmen.

I have no sympathy, however, for the Lonely Planet writer who got sacked for rhapsodising about countries he'd not been to.

I would normally salute a louche fellow slacker, even though he looks like a medical student who larks around the morgue at midnight. But not this time, as Mrs Boyo and I once orbited Lonely Planet long enough to fall for its advocacy of the Romanian city of Suceava.

Suceava, the guide to Romania & Moldova assured us, has a "real charm", and "harbours some of the funkiest, most happening clubs and bars" in the country. No it hasn't, and no it doesn't. Three categories of people might disagree:

1. The Suceava Guild of Licenced Victuallers.

2. The Suceava District Psychiatric Hospital Concert Party.

3. Someone who has talked to, and believed, one or both of the above.

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

The few cars had straggled away across the inky plain, carrying our fellow-travellers into the dust that was settling around Suceava airport like an elderly dog.

A series of requests for lifts from local thugs got nowhere, as Romanian is an Esperanto for Etruscan centurions and soundly defeated my every attempt at more than "two beers and the bucket of polenta you always bring whatever I order, please".

Mrs Boyo eventually found a soul at the ghostly terminal who called us a taxi. As Mad Iancu ferried us across the acres of murk that surround Suceava, he muttered "zona industrială". Little did we know we'd just past the city's chief attraction.

I am being rather unfair, as Suceava has a fine castle, working synagogue, splendid graveyard and a rain-soaked ethnographic museum to rival the one I tricked Mrs Boyo into visiting in Cluj.

It has an excellent Italian restaurant, and is the ideal base for visiting the painted monasteries of Moldavia. I also drank the best afinată fruit brandy of the whole journey in the nearby village of Marginea.

It's difficult to dislike a place that has a signpost to the Borgo Pass, but it is not the Seattle of the Carpathians that we were misled into expecting. The nightlife is dominated, as everywhere in smalltown Europe, by clumps of hair gel and hormones hanging out of badly-modified cars.

The Lonely Planet didn't even have the grace to get the map of the tiny downtown right, so it took ages to find the one travel agent who could get us back to Bucharest, where the dead travel fast but at least don't pause for handbrake turns outside our hotel window.

Some time later I was reading Tim Moore's sublime Frost on My Moustache and came across a casual comment about the refined indignities to which he and his wife would like to subject the author of the Lonely Planet guide to Romania at the wretch's inevitable show trial.

So I rushed off to read the LP guides to Central Asia and Ukraine, areas I know well. Sure enough, they too were pants.

Once BBC Worldwide announced they were buying this tie-dyed sack of patchouli-stained porkies, it was only a matter of time before the subprime travel guide market leapt off the window ledge into the "always bustling town piazza" that's been closed for years due to that massacre.

The Starry Wisdom

Our daughter Arianrhod ferch Saisladdwr is interested in subacquatic lifeforms and betting, and entertains ideas of owning a brace of racing lobsters one day.

She's at the stage where she names everything with enthusiasm and added accuracy. Except for the octopus, which she once called "octopus" but now dubs "Ee-ee-eh".

This baffled me, until I realised that she'd overheard my casual incantation to the Great Cthulhu - Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Ftaghn!

Cthulhu could be the One we meet on Judgement Day, and doesn't sound the meek, forgiving type if his prophet Mr Lovecraft can be trusted. I'm hardly pious, but do like to keep my options open.

I've been thinking about when to begin Arianrhod's religious education, but she seems to have picked it up all on her own.

Als das Kind Kind war,
wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen waren eins.

Mrs Boyo doesn't know about it, so keep it to yourselves.

Angleterre: Mode d'emploi

This web blog is a sort of lay-by for foreign readers with more time than sense. Often they ask "No Good Boyo, yes we know what Wales is. But what is this England of which you write about?"

I have therefore taken some time out of my schedule as agitator and vivisectionist to compile a brief guide to England and those who live there:

ENGLAND; WHAT IT IS?

A network of motorways and military bases on a broad isthmus between Wales and Scotland, England is among the world's leading entrepôts for tobacco and drink smuggling.

Like many other Germanic and Scandanavian tribes, the English have been cowed by self-doubt in recent decades, and have turned from beserking empire-hurlers into a nation of social workers, drones and emigrants.

Despite brief periods of independence in 954-1066 and 1649-1660, England has largely weltered under Norman, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, German, Belgian and again Scottish rule.

High taxation has kept the mass of the population impoverished, with potential leaders subsumed into the ruling elites through the enticement of civil service pensions. Anyone else with any sense has moved to a cottage in Wales.

Politics

All major parties are either run by Scots or soon will be. The Barnett Formula requires 2/3 of each cabinet to be made up of Scots of various types.

Welshmen were given their own country by the Here You Are Boys Act of 1998, but campaigns to let the English have one as well have been vetoed by the Labour government under the Parliament Act (Retention of Majority) of 2006.

Economy

Major English exports include all clever people and the Armed Forces. England has an extensive foreign investment programme, with franchises of drunk louts and plain, shouty women in the beach resorts of most Mediterranean countries. Imports include contraband toxins and child brides.

England has an extensive and influential European diaspora centred on the criminal community of Valencia, adulterous City commuters in Normandy and newspaper columnists in central Italy.

Culture

Britain transferred all rights to the English language over to the United States under the Lend-Lease Programme during the Second World War. This requires all English pop groups to sing with American accents with the exception of XTC, The Fall and other regional comedy acts.

English classical musicians are also required to have daft girly voices like Peter Pears or to look like dils (see Nigel Kennedy).

This has left the English with football and beer, both of which are consumed lukewarm according to the national taste.

In recent years cricket has been outsourced to South Asia, but rugby has acquired popularity among women who drive Range Rovers.

Health

The replacement of lard and cigarettes with Scotch bonnet peppers and crack has made the English diet more vibrant and diverse. Life expectancy and general cheeriness nonetheless remain stubbornly high, but forthcoming budgets are expected to address this.

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