Wars of the Diadochoi

The death of one-man mob Brian Haw leaves a bloke-shaped gap at his unilateral peace camp opposite Parliament. All sorts of unsavoury types, ranging from Brian's supporters to HM Government, are eager to fill it.

That is why we in the Cymru Rouge, who enjoyed his protest on a variety of levels, are launching the Brian Haw Succession Prize to ensure that his absence is well-spent.

We will accept submissions to take Brian's place from all-comers - rather like the empty plinth on Trafalgar Square, but with even more of a transgressive thrill for Britain's progressives.

Four nominations have arrived already and passed the selection criteria. They are:

1. Dr Mabuse. This wild-eyed, cadaverous German thinker looks the part and is down on Capitalism and democracy. He proposes to replace Brian's graphic banners with something altogether more Expressionist - black-on-white posters screaming "SCHIKSAL!" and "ANGST!", all underlit in flaring phosphorous.

Counting against him is his un-Havian silence, and being a doctor means he may get irritated with Brian's supporters asking him about homeopathy and Big Pharma all the time.

We imagine him gesticulating in an angular fashion atop a period Packard, as Independent readers make sympathetic noises about Dresden.



2. Nataliya Vitrenko. Little-known outside her native Ukraine and generally ignored within it, Ms Vitrenko makes up in volume, stridency and spray-can anti-Americanism what she lacks in presence.

She speaks vulnerable English, which will endear her to people who share their lives with cats, and has a catholic selection of banners that combine swastikas with the Stars and Stripes in the approved student manner.

She does have a hill to climb, though. A five-foot scold like the mop-faced women who sell you dried fish in Soviet underpasses, Nataliya cannot match Brian's praying-mantis prowl. Nor does she favour hats - an unusual omission, given the knitted berets sported by her onion-breathed matronly supporters.

On the plus side she likes Lyndon LaRouche, a grim American conspiracy freakshow who fancies HM The Queen as head of an international cocaine cartel. This turbo lunacy would let Vitrenko outflank the 9/11 nutters on Parliament Square who pretend to Brian's pitch.


3. The BBC Question Time audience. We give you 50-odd people - the racial, social and age spectrum of modern Britain in all its lurid diversity - and they think exactly alike.

It's a literally left-field candidacy, granted. Their collective coziness contrasts with Brian's stark vigil, and it's only too easy to imagine squabbles over the crèche rota and gluten issues.

Their sickly pall of patchouli and antihistamine spray could never match Brian's manly musk, and barely would their reedy, am-dram voices buzz above the backbench belches.

But, for all that, these were his people, bound together by the same thought that they had once had. Perhaps a little corner of Whitehall should always be a "Not In Our Name" installation.


4. Jesus Christ. Brian Haw was a religious man. He trained as a carpenter. He spoke out against violence and the powerful of the land. Few disciples joined him on his lonely journey, and most of his followers misunderstood his message.

With the Archbishop of Canterbury not even trying anymore, and Westminster Abbey a short donkey ride away, Our Lord and Saviour's time has come. Again.

He may want to keep quiet about being Jewish, though.

All other nominations sceptically received.





A oes heddwch?

Huw Samphan, Brawd Rhif Un
Adjudicator
Brian Haw Succession Prize
Cymru Rouge

damnatio ad bestias

The BBC's looking for new programme ideas again. They've yet to accept any of my previous offerings, so I've modelled this bid on something they already like and given it a modish political angle.

Along the lines of BBC3's worthy "Snog, Marry, Avoid", I'd like to propose "Shelter, Shag, Shunt".

Exclusively nubile asylum seekers are assessed by a panel of sandpapery newspaper columnists, loathesome hipsters and Radio 4 official comedians to decide whether to:

• house them for free in the attic of the North London mews you share with your dreary Quaker-lite family;
  


• employ them as, er, nannies;
  


• or/and denounce them to Immigration.
  

nominations for panelists below, please.

If the Beeb's not interested I may try Sky, or the Home Office.

Wretched Dionysus

A concealed vegetable laid me low, so I missed out on much of L'affaire Giggs. The Cymru Rouge Fact Reduction Department got to work immediately, and reported the good news - Giggs had returned to his undying roots by bedding a Welsh brunette who looks like she lives in an InterCity buffet car.

We duly promoted him to the status of Martyr and, because there is no higher award than that of the Order of the Charred Lung of Llwchwr (Third Class), we gave him another one.

The endurance of the Welsh People into modern times has long mystified and annoyed our neighbours. The Picts, Gauls, Jutes and Deserving Poor have all gone, yet we persist.

The answer is Unnatural Selection. While the English and lesser races with too much law pursue leggy, beaming, ethereal blondes, we prefer dumpy, bad-tempered brunettes who go like a Young Farmer in a Hillman Imp. This breeds a swart, vinegar-fisted people, able to dwell undetected in woods, caves and Labour Exchanges, sustained by fermented herbs and fungi.

My own Iberian preference once won me the admiration of a purse of academic feminists - "won", rather than "earned", as there was no question of any effort on my part. Indeed, in this case my back was my best friend.

Just as Europe languished between Rome and Renaissance in a Dark Age of Lothars and Lombards, so did I wallow between Wales and undemanding public service in the brackish waters of post-graduate penury.

It seemed a good idea at the time. I had an excellent degree from an unknown university and aspired to more than being a goatish librarian in some Northern town. "Try for a doctorate," yawned my mentor, the splendid Prof Pethybridge. "Ivy League, Oxbridge, that sort of thing. Gowns and gals. Believe me. Just steer clear of London. Grubby Benthamites. You have been warned."

But I bumped into an old mate, Mike the Monk, who'd baled out of his Benedictine Monastery in protest at the lack of weekend disco passes. He'd found refuge in the City, where the Big Bang had opened the doors of the Stock Exchange to plausible young men who could shout a lot while remembering whose stripey blazer they were wearing.

"No fyccing idea what's going on, but. Got a Lamborghini and a flat in Dulwich, mind. Bit lonely, though. Not enough Welshes. You coming?"

I went. Four years of ligging, gigging, snorting, boffing, biffing, tooting, becking, belting and "manic fries" followed, leaving me with no hair, a mystifying reputation for diabolism, a rumble of Limehouse guttersnipes who've always seen me right, and about one chapter (since lost) of a PhD on homosexuality in Russian imperial student Burschenschaften that one peer reviewer called "gamey".

There were a few more tricky years of impersonating an impresario before I found my niche as a broadcast drone, but the London interregnum did remind me of the inestimable advantages of being Welsh.

My brunette moment came late one sultry morning in the summer of 1989. The postgraduate reading room at our college was a cool and airy chamber with windows designed for some phantom dictator to survey the Bloomsbury swarm.

My colleagues were the admirable Wislen, a brace of English chaps called Jonathan, a disgraced Iranian diplomat, Will the rangy New Yorker, a white Rasta who really shouldn't have been there, and a pod of American bluestockings - brunette and bespectacled with Puritan promise.

The social life of the males revolved around luring these delectable scholars down the Friend in Hand, plying them with halves of "lager beer" and trying to glimpse their knees. They were charming young ladies, all studying worthy subjects like Comecon, Polish beet planning and centre-periphery relations in Shelest-era Ukraine. They treated us with a companionable bemusement born of boredom and curiosity about our teeth. We were so happy.

Then along came Angela. Five foot eleven in silken jeans and fringed rodeo jacket, she tossed her flaxen tresses from breast to breast as she trilled "Is this desk free for my tomes of Romantic Romanian poetry?" Yes, she spoke in verse, and with a Parisan "r" that ushered her Aldeburgh accent into a husky demi-monde of Ambleresque intrigue.

If an orchid could speak, it would sound like Angela.

The postgrad gents were all over her like aphids. Even Julian the Rasta briefly refrained from keening about the sorrows that Babylon had inflicted on him and his people in their Maidstone exile.

I alone was immune to her freckles, good nature and alto sighs thanks to Samuel D. Kassow's PhD thesis on the Russian student movement, which not only covered everything I had planned to write about but was also about to be published as "Students, Professors and State in Tsarist Russia".

I was perusing this exquisite text on a microfiche reader, a piece of Kubrick technology that owed more to A Clockwork Orange than A Space Odyssey. It meant plunging my head inside a sensory deprivation hood and staring at flickering green letters that spelled the end of two years of dillatory research in the musty bowels of various Muscovite archives.

As I whispered "bugger, bugger, bugger" over and over with my back to the room, I missed the Arrival of the Queen of Suffolk along the carpet of rolled-out tongues. I was brought to by our resident Iranian calling out "Boyo - lunch in Diseases!", this being the standard invitation to partake of pie at the adjacent School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

I shuffled out of the room behind the rest, lost in thoughts of how I could salvage my doctorate from the unfair advantage Kassow had of having done the work earlier and with greater dispatch. Again I missed all sight of Angela, and so was not expecting to be flanked by two of the American MA gals.

"Boyo, you're the only real man in that room!" whined the taller brunette warmly, her woollen dress brushing those fleshy knees seductively.

"Threesome!" I thought.

My reputation among these sunless social scientists remained in the ascendant over lunch, where I had little to say to the unalloyed Angela and her leggy, blonde enjambement. I take my women like my lemons - bitter, jaundiced and unwaxed. We exchanged a few pleasantries, then I left her to gargle Eminescu to the sound of half a dozen trouser seams bursting.

"A thought, once uttered, is untrue," confirmed Russian poet and anagram Fiodor Tyutchev, and it didn't take long to establish that my flat-heeled colleagues were impressed more by the Boyo sang froid that the prospect of my using them as a sort of Tantric climbing frame.

This came as a mild relief, as a close study of Kingsley Amis's "The Green Man" had sown mighty oaks of doubt about my ability to compete with the natural attraction that the two smouldering sophomores would with any luck harbour for one another.

Lunch ended and we trailed back to our desks, some to thumb through indices of freight derailments by drunken bears in 1970s Bulgaria, others to comb the Zhakhiv district party secretary lists, and one to stretch her dappled arms across jasmine-scented editions of Ştefănescu Delavrancea and dream of the sea.

But, as Angela unfurled before us like a fondant fern between the banks of bowing Jonathans, the taller brunette showed why she and her tawny tribe are always the better bet, and certainly the greater fun.

"Perhaps I should befriend her," she wondered. "Get her to cut her hair".

Tercio de muerte

Nick Clegg, the leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat junior partners in the Coalition of Evil with the Conservative Party, has threatened us all with "muscular liberalism" over the coming year.

I can't avoid the image of a skinny man in a white t-shirt and 501s edging daintily around the sweaty dance-floor at Amsterdam's celebrated "Love Girder" club on "Tower of Power" night. Whatever happens, he's going to get hurt and it'll be available on the Internet.

It's really not good enough. Once you could vote for the Liberal Democrats and thrill a little at the frisson of cost-free rebellion. Now they're in government, hobbling along on their knees with Mr Cameron's crop and ashtray balanced on their heads.

Who's to blame for this? Now, I don't want to sound like one of the lipless witchfinders who populate The Guardian's online comment site, but personally I blame The Guardian.

That newspaper has an impeccably liberal tradition of lecturing voters on their vulgar failings between elections before inching its slack, exfoliated buttocks onto the Fence Post of Indecision come polling day.

But the General Election of May 2010 was different. On 30 April the paper's editorial "enthusiastically" and at great length endorsed the Liberal Democrats under the banner "The Liberal Moment Has Come".

Foreign readers, most Britons and, as they realized with a corretto jolt on 10 May 2010, loyal Liberal Democrat voters, had no idea what this panto-horse party stands for.

The Liberal Democrats are like an episode of the moreish "X-Files" spin-off "The Lone Gunmen", but without the sexy lady. Imagine a windowless rabbit run filled with trolls, gabbling geeks who've never met a barber, and sad-eyed men with peppery beards, jackets made of car rugs and no friends, and you have a vision of the Lib-Dems' annual conference.

It is a grim statement about the Conservatives and Labour that literally millions of otherwise sane Britons prefer to vote for these Airfix models and "Internet researchers" than for the grown-up parties.

It is an even grimmer statement about The Guardian that it chose the 2010 election, the only one seriously flagged up to produce a hung parliament, to back these sagging wifeswappers as the Queen's Champions.

It is the grimmest statement of all that no one noticed the near-Ickean truth about the Liberal Democrats, namely that above the human spam of their membership there rules a caste of reptilian posh people. The Astors, Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe and Nick Clegg - they may have had their shortcomings, but their socks are clean and they've never had to buy a pair themselves.

Furthermore, a glance at the parliamentary constituencies the Lib-Dems represent - shrill suburbs, offal-mulching Celtic counties, Liverpool - would suggest that, manifesto pledges apart, they're not much bothered about people who enjoy ITV or work for a living in places without water-coolers.

It should not require excessive analysis to conclude that, given a choice between the cleft-scratching Labour frontbench and the languid Tories with their toothsome Mrs May, Mr Clegg would opt for people who don't buy their suits off costermongers.

The Tories and their Liberal Democrat appendix are like Stalin, but in a good way. Back in the 1930s Stalin decided that he wanted to make the Soviet Union a powerful force for wrong in the world, and that he would need flinty engineers, massive tanks, and strong-jawed men to fire both.

What he did not need was tens of thousands of wispy-bearded feuilletonistes in peasant smocks, lippy lorgnette-dipping bluestockings, bolshy trade unionists, pitchfork-wielding mobs, cleverclog Israelites, trainee Napoleons and people who had known him at the seminary.

The problem was that much of the Soviet Communist Party and ruling class was made up of precisely these groups. The ferocity of the purge in which they were subsequently purged was such that the word "purge" doesn't really convey it. Imagine pigbreathed men wandering blindfolded through the crowd at a Coldplay concert, swinging chainsaws, flamethrowers and yetis about in a random but deadly fashion, and you're getting close.

Those who survived were a red-eyed phalanx of psychos who snorted vodka, smoked trees, dammed rivers with human heads, played Poland like an accordion and parked their tanks on top of Hitler's house. Not pretty, but more effective at getting rid of Nazis than Futurist poetry, innovative camera techniques and endless speccy speeches.

On the other front of the class war, the Tories and Liberal Democrat leaders now face a similar problem. They ache to turn Britain into a country fit for Baroness Thatcher to die in, but have to overcome two groups - the core Liberal Democrat membership, and the people who voted for them in May 2010 after reading that Guardian editorial.

The methods at the disposal of Mssrs Cameron and Clegg lack Stalin's plebeian vigour and, thanks to Baroness Thatcher's economic policies, industrial machinery, but they found their way:

1. The slow, gleeful tearing up, non-acidic recyclable page by page, of the Liberal Democrat manifesto over the course of a whole year has deprived the most mole-like party activist and low-wattage Guardian reader of any grounds to believe that anything they think or do has any meaning.

2. The appointment to visible but powerless ministerial posts of preachy MPs from the Lib-Dems' ample, dun-clad array. Chris Huhne accepted the post of Secretary of State for the Environment, knowing full well that Tories think the environment is what they drive their Jags over at 120mph on the way home from regular acts of drunken indiscretion.

3. Giving a few competent Liberal Democrats impossible jobs like restraining the flashing blade of Chancellor George Osborne or deputising for men who would think nothing of cuckolding them and their sons-in-law, at the same time if possible.

But the estocada that felled the stumbling Lib-Dem oxen was the Alternative Vote campaign. This dispelled any doubts about their leaders' determination to slip the bonds of surly supporters and touch the sac of power.

1. Electoral-reform martyr Roy Jenkins himself described AV as "vile stuff, sort of thing they sell in boxes in supermarkets", and the Liberal Democrats' sole identifiable policy for 40 years has been to call for Proportional Representation, so this was bound to dismay the besandled masses.

2. The "face" of the campaign was comedian Eddie Izzard, whose previous achievements included promoting the euro, portraying a German, and speaking French in public. In particular, he looks better in a frock than most voters' wives. A poor choice to win over bluff patriots.

3. With Daily Mail and Telegraph readers it's best to say everything twice, so the campaign made sure AV was put to a referendum. Referenda are intrinsically European and suspect, being associated with Napoleon III (not even the proper Napoleon), Hitler, the Common Market and the Swiss.

4. What makes Britain worth living in, apart from Bettany Hughes, is that fabled sense of fair play. There's an altruism that neither state dependency nor Mrs Thatcher could banish, and when it looks at AV it sees benefits for one party alone - the dastardly Liberal Democrats. Pipes are tapped out and wirelesses retuned to the cricket.

5. Finally, the Celtic nations of Britain held elections about the same time under a form of real proportional representation. The referendum might as well have said "We Liberal Democrats think you English are dimmer than a Manxman. Would you like to keep us in power forever?"

A question remains as to why The Guardian decided to boost the Liberal Democrats at the 2010 election, leading as it did to a Conservative government, the comic emasculation of the Liberal Democrats themselves, and an end to hopes for proportional representation.

Readers of this web blog will be familiar with the long struggle of Wales to destroy anything that looks like giving England a break. So, were the Learned Elders of Capel Seion behind it?

As with "Operation Clark County", there is little evidence of Cambrian cupidity in this case. Instead I'm reminded of those cosy Catholic apologists who reach their mid-fifties and suddenly run off with the chambermaid. Glimpsing America surge past into the heroic age of Obama, The Guardian abruptly spat out the snaffle and raced for the finishing line, only to fall flat on its face. Both of them.

What next for the Liberal Democrats? Mr Clegg is a student of German politics, and hopes his frumpish footsoldiers will squelch off stage left to give Labour a hard time. This will allow him to fashion a British version of the Free Democrats - people with expensive cars and even dearer doctorates, undemanding constituents and the occasional foray into the Privy Council.

But we Welsh haven't finished with the Liberal Democrats yet. As I wrote back in October 2008:

"The Liberal Democrats have not been doing badly of late, but that's largely because we've transferred our Silurian attentions to the major parties. Watch out for adopted Welsh Lembit Öpik, though. He's bidding to be President of the party, and owes us one after the way he treated the lovely Siân Lloyd."

The Montgomeryshire Candidate need only relax with a game of Romanian strip poker for the Lib-Dems' true nightmare to begin. Not merely a nightmare, but a Nightmare of Horror.

Sous les pavés la peste

A public address by Huw Samphan, Cymru Rouge shadow commissar of demographic realignment, on the occasion of the Welsh Assembly Elections:

Put her down and listen!

Today you, the people of Wales, and those English who've somehow evaded capture, will chose which mangy hyena hirelings will lick the suppurating sores of Anglo-Scotch Capital for the next four years in the Temple of Onan they call the co-called Welsh Assembly.

You, the militant Sons of Glyndŵrism, have as one bruised knuckle of vengeance awaited guidance from the Cymru Rouge about who or what to do.

Now. in keeping with our proud Maoist heritage, we tend totally and utterly to boycott elections on the following grounds:

1. Voting requires the rudiments of literacy, numeracy (Wales employs a form of proportional representation deemed too complex for the ruddy, roastbeef fingers of the English), and in some cases the donning of spectacles.

All of this runs counter to Cymru Rouge edjucation policy, founded as it is on the correct application of mattocks and child labourers' cheerily chanting narrow nationalist slogans in the cocklefields of Penclawdd.

2. Ballot forms are a precious waste of slate - the Grey Gold from which your hovels, furniture, contraceptive barriers and choicest garnishes are fashioned.

3. What with the global economic turndown, Y2K, the Millennium and the sheer expense of running Charlotte Church, Wales simply cannot afford to waste our limited supplies of air and gravity on public debate.

The resultant atmospheric imbalance might have a negative impact on Catherine Zeta Jones, our sole export earner and Execution Squad sweetheart.

4. Analysis by our Department for the Promotion of Harmony has revealed that many Assembly candidates espouse a range of non-Marxist and objectively anti-Welsh policies, including "healthcare", machinery, banking and sunshine.

Some recall how pseudo-Marxist Georgi Plekhanov criticised Lenin's farsighted policy of killing the few economically useful Russians with the scornful phrase "The worse it is, the better it is".

Recent research has suggested that Plekhanov was in fact commenting on Lenin's marriage to the ill-favoured Nadezhda Krupskaya. Nonetheless, we Rouges have decided that, in the specific instance of the Welsh Assembly, his advice is apposite.

The election of Labour, Plaid Cymru, Liberal Democrat and Conservative members can only serve to remind the boiling masses of the literal bankruptcy of representative democracy, incapable as it is of turning Wales into a net rice exporter and indifferent as it remains to the struggle of our Maoist comrades in India, Nepal and the student unions of former polytechnics in the London penumbra.

The Prif Sasiwn of the Cymru Rouge therefore endorses all parties standing in the Assembly elections, and urges the struggling workers, peasants, scarecrows and benefit champions to cast their vote for whichever candidate looks the least appealing.

Cymru Rouge cadres, of course, will be expected to maintain their corpse-like discipline and shun the ballot box. Instead we recommend the policy of Papist pedant and stationary Reichsheer target Charles Péguy, who once wrote that "Example is not simply a way of influencing others, it is the only way".

Cadres will position themselves outside polling stations, dressed in their best black pyjamas and red bandanas, and engage in wholesome Marxist-Glyndŵrist activities in order to show voters that there is another, more violent way. We recommend:

1. Reading aloud from the Red Book of Hergest and the Black Book of Carmarthen (but not the White Book of Eifionydd), to the accompaniment of small arms fire. NB the readings must be from memory, as books disempower our semi-literate constituency of Young Farmers, cider-swigging car thieves and Valleys opiate connoisseurs.

2. Socialist folk dancing. This requires a harp, 15 clogs and ill-fitting trousers. Displays of skill are to be judged fairly, and those found guilty will be transported to the Martyr Cerys Matthews Submarine Sports Facility off the coast of Holyhead.

3. Friendly fighting. In the days of the Princes, the Welsh resolved their disputes not by hustings and committees but by fraternal exchanges of blows - whether by sickle, tree or righteously-engorged glans. So step forward and help the misguided Dyfed-Powys Police overcome their false consciousness.

4. Drinking. Walking to and from polling stations, concentrating on what to mark with your green crayon, is an egregious bourgeois ploy to divert proletarians and collectivist artisans from the traditional brewing and consumption of nutty ale and fermented potato potations. Intersperse your shooting, brawling, yelling and cavorting with generous draughts from room-temperature cans of Wrexham Lager.

5. Above all, ensure that our are well-supplied with Cymru Rouge political pamphlets. Copies of the party anthem ("We are Rouge, We are Strong, Come Swing on This You Saxon"), the 2011 manifesto ("Schools into Silos, Saxons into Silage"), and the official programme ("Wales will be Free, from the Orkneys to the Lea!") are available from Gwasg Gwallgo on demand.

Any members of the public seen reading the printed material will of course be deported on grounds of spying or wanton display of intellectual curiosity - back to Wales, if necessary.

¡Ystalyfera siempre!

Cymru Rouge
Rhiwbeunos Aires

The Wales

The Ring of Hwyl

A communication from the Cymru Rouge Department of Inter-Faith Dai-alogue and Forced Labour Camp Quotas:

The electricity-based mediums of the radio and television have announced the death of the al-Qaeda leader, prodigal plutocrat and Greenmantle Pimpernel, Osama Bin Laden.

We, the Cymru Rouge, rejoice in the death of pretty much anyone, but are also aware of allegations that this comprador clerical reactionary and occasional Guardian columnist was a Welsh.

As the auto-selected vanguard of the Welsh Senate and People, we have established a committee of eisteddfod adjudicators, Paris-edjucated intellectuals and shrieking, hemp-clad child soldiers to investigate the matter.

Here are our interim findings. In common with the Welsh people, Bin Laden:

1. Liked caves, and the things you find in caves.

2. Spoke poor English and less Welsh.

3. Passed for Pakistani in the eyes of the Pakistani and US military and the Cambridge Footlights casualties who lurk in the 6:30 pm weekday trainee-comedian slot on Radio 4.

4. Thought C60 cassettes were new-fangled, and never quite got the hang of video (pronounced "vie-joe").

5. Liked dressing up in white robes and prancing around hillsides.

6. Supported an English Premier League (Association) football team

This is more convincing evidence than most of the guilty face before their fair tribunal and execution at the Cymru Rouge people's sheepdog trials, but there is more.

We are ecumenical in accepting damning proof from all sources, and so gratefully acknowledge the help of the Bernsteinian ameliorationists of Welsh Labour in uncovering the following links between Osama Bin Laden and the poujadiste bourgeois nationalists of Plaid Cymru.

In common with Plaid Cymru, Bin Laden:

1. Did not like low-flying US aircraft.

2. Was suspicious of Nato, the European Union and Capitalism.

3. Curried the support of the powerful hill-farming lobby.

5. Wasn't keen on Israel.

6. Had links to organised crime families.

The Cymru Rouge Department for the Identification and Eradication of Religion has further noted that Bin Laden, like Welsh Baptists, seemed to enjoy public piety without heeding the basic message of their respective creeds' founders.

Furthermore, the Welsh appreciated the teetotal tedium of Methodism but found it lacking a certain edge, and so tempered it in the fires of Calvinism.

Likewise Bin Laden thought regular Saudi Islam deficient in finger-wagging threats of sky-sanctioned violence, concentrating its venom as it did on non-Muslims. His embrace of the Takfiri Option, which considers most other Muslims to be little better than Rabbi Julia Neuberger, has the authentic Revivalist ring of hwyl about it.

The Department for the Abolition of Elections therefore urges Cymru Rouge cadres to carry out searching altruistic criticism sessions of all political opponents until the usual suspicions are confirmed.

Please note that a professed love of folk music is almost certainly a cover for fanatical hatred of melody, harmony and correct tuning, especially if accompanied by beards.

Henffych!

Brawd Rhif Un - Paul Pot

Brawd Rhif Dau - Huw Samphan

Brawd Rhif Tri - Ta Mock Tudor

Brawd Rhif Ankh - Hwsni Mwbarac

The Longest Weekend

Dear Mr Cameron,

I trust that this letter finds you and Mr Clegg in good health.

Mr Brown, your predecessor and a fellow Scotchman, albeit of the more common truculent variety, used to collect suggestions for national celebrations on the Downing St website.

We now appreciate that he ought to have been scolding bankers and pretending to admire Mr Obama instead of reading block-capital demands that he should resign in favour of various motoring correspondents.

Especially as his staff of grammar-school bullies rejected one of the few ideas that might have given the public a hearty dose of British spunk and rebuffed the Muslim Menace, namely my proposal for Fenella Fielding Day.

This Great Coalition of Yours has so far chosen to disregard our various Cymru Rouge offers of political footsie, and has not even had the nous to steal our cruel but fair policies. So perhaps the time has come to appeal to your unthinking conservatism.

Evelyn Waugh, the off-the-peg Papist with bespoke reactionary views, lamented that Tory governments never turn the clock back. Your readiness to anger your own Highland clansmen by literally turning the winter clock back encourages me to think that you might accept my proposal to drag Britain, pimp-rolling and glottalising, into the 1940s.

"Why the 1940s?" you drawl. I have carried out audience research among the usurers, recovering lepers and mad-haired women who constitute my Facebook followers, and they all agree that the 1940s made the best war films.

You and I know that the 1940s made the best war, while the films belong to later decades. But my Morlocks have a point. Britain's current economic, social and political conditions are moving steadily towards the 1937 indicators, and your Coalition echoes the lion-eats-lamb Biblical balance of Mr Baldwin's National Government. So the 1940s are indeed something to aspire to.

These Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers are a shower, although that's an improvement on their voters - who simply need a shower. You laugh. See? That's traditional 1940s humour, usually delivered before some Limehouse stage props by a man in a five-piece suit to an audience of pickpockets and costermongers. I think the Nation is ready.

I propose that the government reorganise public life along the lines of our best war films. I don't mean pacifist nonsense like either Paths or Tunes of Glory, but rather those evergreen paeans to Britons' licking Hitler and other undesirables through impromptu ingenuity, feudal fealty, speaking very fast and putting the Poles to good use.

I have in mind "Sink the Bismarck!", "Went the Day Well", "Mrs Miniver", "Ill Met By Moonlight", "Brief Encounter", "The Goose Steps Out", "In Which We Serve" and all those Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone.

British life will be based on the Kitchener morality, breakneck diction, blithe prejudices, smoking endurance records, eerie cuisine and occasional personal hygiene of these films.

The most important lesson, as ever, concerns class. Britain is a scarecrow sown from many cloths - the Harris tweed of Scotland, Irish lace, English houndstooth and Welsh stonewashed denim - and its seams can only run true if everyone knows which side to dress to.

War films reinforce the wholesome order reflected in your own Government, Mr Cameron, with their officer corps of effete English aristos, dour but dependable Scotch NCOs, brave, bantering cockney corporals, incoherent, expendable Welsh sappers, Irish fifth-columnists and fesity terriers with vaguely racialist names.

"But how will our more recent Muslim, Hindu, Afro-Caribbean, Roma and Geordie citizens fit in this cosy communal hierarchy?" you may ask, glancing nervously over your shoulder.

The question is appropriate. In the 1940s Britain hosted only two significant immigrant communities - the anti-fascist Italian miners of Wales and Scotland, and the German Jewish refugees of most public libraries in North London.

It was in some ways unfortunate that our chief antagonists in the 1939-1945 War were precisely Italy and Germany, as this meant that these noble, sad-eyed people with their waistcoats and drooping moustaches spent the war locked up on the Isle of Man with dozens of Mosleyite pederasts and, for all I know, Rudolf Hess.

As such they feature little in our war film catalogue, and provide far from reassuring role models for our bearded, multi-armed and roofless minorities.

The answer is thick-ankled Thatcherite laisser choisir, which lets our newer compatriots decide for themselves which silver-screen nationality to emulate.

Your Liberal Democrat colleagues' historic pandering to communal interests in local government will ensure that this process is not carried out in a messy personal manner, but rather through the agency of religious and gang leaders, whose ethnic and faith groups will convert en masse to Celtdom, Cocknicity or what have you.

The social workers and librarians who once voted Liberal Democrat find themselves politically and soon literally homeless. They will be given a stake in the Big Society by retraining our minorities in their ethnos of choice.

For example, if Sikhs decide to become Scotchmen they will need to acquire the keys to the Treasury and a mystifying sense of grievance. The newly-English Hindus will have to channel their energy into random football commentary and freestyle drinking, while the Welsh Gypsies will need watching very, very carefully.

Anyone wanting to be German will be taken aside for a quiet word, and the whole world eagerly awaits the advent of the Muslim Ulstermen.

Other aspects of our war-film culture will help to make Britain a breezier place:

• Speaking very fast without opening your mouth much will confound the lip-readers of foreign intelligence services and reduce the amount of time needed for TV and radio broadcasts.




• Double-fisted smoking and abstinence from central heating will save on NHS bills, while most medical treatments will be replaced by alcoholic GPs' bellowing "stuff and nonsense!", cross-country running for the highly-strung, and the application of wire wool and Dettol to persistent wounds.




• Foreign policy will change little, amounting as it already does to sponging off the Americans, eyeing "Ivan" warily, alternately ignoring and shooting at Continentals, and pointless badgering about in the Near East.

There are many other benefits to the 1940s, such as a deluded optimism on the Left about their ability to make the world, and indeed Britain itself, a better place.

You, Mr Cameron, will be able to exploit this by welcoming the bluff fellows of the Labour Party into government as less annoying coalition partners, just like Mr Churchill did.

Labour will be buoyed by the belief that an electoral landslide is just around the corner. And the whole nation will enjoy watching the Liberals retreat to the Marches and Rievers where they belong, there to judge sheepdog trials and give Celtic drunks a party to play with.

Here's how!

Yours etc,

Huw Samphan, chief adjudicator (external affairs and fighting)
The Cymru Rouge

Salem's Knot

Fifty years ago the All-Union League of Mad Scientists stuffed a peasant inside a giant ball-bearing and fired it at the Moon.

The sphere, equipped with a camera, tape recorder and vodka chiller, fell to Earth in a Urals corn field, thereby halving the Soviet Union's grain harvest for 1961.

Hunger was a price worth paying, however, as it showed the Americans that it was possible to steal German rocket technology without giving war criminals citizenship and vast amounts of loot.

The Glorious Soviet Union considered self-deprecation, self-doubt, The Self and indeed self- anything to be bourgeois deformations of the well-engineered soul, so mocking official bombast became an underground phenomenon.

You'd marvel at a Moscow metro station, only for some hornrimmed drip in Estonian denim to remark that "of course it was built by German prisoners-of-war" - a good decade before Stalin had finally made up his mind on the correct use of Krauts.

Even Yuri Gagarin fell foul of this corrosive carping. The potato-headed human projectile may have had his faults, but on balance he seemed a decent fellow who died young in pursuit of Socialist science and national defence.

Or rather in pursuit of Socialist skirt and unintentional defenestration, if you believe the Soviet rumour-processing plant, which held that he had plunged to his death from the window of a nurses' dormitory in Minsk while attempting the ambitious triple-daisy entry manoeuvre.

Disgraceful, but not as bad as the hilarity occasioned in unpatriotic, colour-coordinating quarters by the inclusion of Gagarin's overcoat in the permanent display at Moscow's Krasnaya Presnya Museum.

Rumour had it that he was also a flasher, adding up to a remarkable tally of parallel peccadilloes for one so young and high-profile.

Other attempts at character assassination showed the survival of snobbery under Socialism, as rotten liberals with fancy clocks in their Peredelkino summer houses claimed that Cosmonaut German Titov was passed over for the orbital honour because he was too classy and refined.

A simpler explanation, surely, is that the Politburo vetoed the poor lad because his first name was "German" and his surname sounded too much like that of the despised Yugoslav president and notorious Titoist, Josip Tito.

It would have been like the Americans ditching Neil Armstrong in favour of someone called Fidel Tojo, or Ho Chi Trudeau, entertaining though that would have been for the rest of us.

The Gagarin-as-flasher story extended to the alleged nixing of one planned statue to the little fellow in Omsk, the base of which was deemed to look too much like a dirty mac.

Now, the otherwise welcome abolition of religion had some unfortunate side effects on Soviet society. One was the sublimination of the urge to see Blessed Virgins in copses, Names of Allah in aubergines and Golems in Aunty Roza's kippering cupboard.

This manifested itself in fevered visions of The Other in the artistic rendering of garments.

(NB: "Fevered Visions of The Other in the Artistic Rendering of Garments" is the working title of my PhD thesis. So no filching, please. Moreover, "Fevered Visions of The Other in the Artful Rending of Garments" is an erotic novel I'm working on in case the PhD doesn't win me the Chair in Semiotics at Uppsala University that I crave. So no felching, please.)

One such vision plagued Vera Mukhina's monumental dual statue of Worker and Collective Farm Dollybird, which represented for Russia at the 1937 Paris Expo and has since served as a windbreak for tramps near the mystifying Soviet Economic Achievements theme park in Moscow.

It can be seen in all its twirling glory in the opening credits of all MosFilm studio productions:

This Art Deco Stalinist mash-up was examined, section after section, by assorted Torquemadas from the People's Commissariat of Public Occlusion before being put on public display, and all because of the rumoured outline of Trotsky's features in the peasant girl's impenetrable skirts.

Stalin himself paid the statue a midnight visit to ensure that no pedantic pince-nez peered back at him.

Soviet Russia was not alone in entertaining such Salem-lite antics. We in Wales never got over the loss of Catholicism, which satisfied our desire for subsidies from a world empire while accommodating our fondness for setting fire to things we don't like.

The cattle-grid collision of Calvinism and Methodism that makes up our national religion is firmly against everything, even displays of piety, so our unquenchable Celtic exhibitionism and love of lying must out once in a while.

This makes Wales a favourite location for the haunted-toolshed reality TV programmes that fill non-BBC channels, on my television at least. It also accounts for sightings of Old Nick in the folds of the Welsh lady's shawl in Curnow Vosper's painting "Salem" at the top of this page.

All clerics are by definition deluded, but there's nothing like the temptation of turning some prodigals to drive them into the depths of Dunce. The dialogues between eager Catholic modernists and patient, predatory Marxists in the 1960s make diverting reading for the armchair sadist, especially as both have since shrivelled in the searing light of bigotry.

But what if the Soviet Union had taken the gaitered bait and raised the chalice of Orthodox Christianity to the parched lip-service it paid to social justice? The cult of the embalmed miracle-worker Lenin had already paved the Via Ponderosa to such a grisly Hegelian synthesis of unreason.

Osip Mandelstam, Soviet poet and imperial pain in the arse, once wrote that only in Russia is poetry respected, as only there does it get poets killed. Perhaps that is because Stalin, the ex-seminarian and ultimate autodidact, worshipped classical literature and deemed Modernist movements like Mandelstam's Acmeism to be little less than heresy.

We owe a greater debt than ever to the bucketheaded Nikita Khrushchev, who announced that there was no God because Gagarin had seen no trace of Him in the Heavens. St Yuri might otherwise have touched the Countenance Divine and returned to endow the Soviet cause with Holy Sanction.

The Politsynod, having later canonised Martyr Yuri Gagarin, would have given the imprimatur of both faith and science to reports of his beery features beaming out of beetroots from Bryansk to Borodino. Modernism, not liberalism, would have been anathema, and only the truly devoted would have risked an auto-da-fé for the sake of a few laughs.

There would be enough strips found of Gagarin's overcoat to rival the fragments of the Holy Cross and the wandering limbs of the Caliph Ali. Woven together in a mighty banner, perhaps by the Ust'-Kamenogorsk Experimental Textile Plant, they would have been borne by the conquering armies and fleet of the Third Rome across Europe and into the mouth of the Thames.

Perhaps interpretation of Lenin would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumscribed people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Marx.

As if.

Exile on Friar St.

As a feminist, I've no time for practical jokers. Messing with a chap's mind is what women are for.

I don't like to generalise, but pranksters are all social inadequates. When not humiliating pensioners or decent, upstanding purchasers of pornography, they "research" serial killers or nod slowly as they read UKIP election pamphlets. I've dismissed them in a previous post.

I enjoy spontaneous fun at other people's expense, but distrust these failed, bearded minor public school bullies. Humour, like sudden wealth, should be effortless and leave the innocent unharmed.

I once skewered that Golden Section while lunching down the Tethered Goat many years ago. The third pint of Champion's Speckled Johnson was in prospect as a work colleague stomped in and stumped up.

"Cheers," I greeted him.

"Bloody Keith!" he snapped through a head of hoppy spume.

He referred to another colleague and quintessential English type - the Gentleman of Science. I wrote recently against the English cult of DIY, and Keith represented the Fellowship of the Computer Tinkerer.

Our company was run by alumni of Leeds University English Dept thanks to the sort of conspiracy that would keep Independent letter writers busy for a summer. They had to put someone in charge of adapting software to our recondite needs. They could of course have hired an IT specialist.

On the other hand, there was a genial, muttering sort somewhere in the editorial team who could be seen playing steering-wheels with a copy of Home Computer down by the ornamental pond.

"Fetch Keith!" commanded The Director.

On the plus side, we saved money and didn't have to tolerate some t-shirted tubster droning on about rams and other such computer nonsense. On the down side we had to use Keith's macros.

Keith's oblique approach to streamlining the business involved the keyboard equivalent of the Monty Python title sequence, complete with brass band effects. I ought to mention that Keith, when not destroying our ability to type peace unto nation, played one of the ugly duckling instruments in a wind band.

Trumpets and cornets are noble instruments, and what lady can resist the virile lunge of the trombone? But Keith parped and trilled away on a piece of plumbing that looked as if it had been designed to gather rain water in an Edwardian garden.

Anyway, my lunchtime partner had just spent an hour with other monitor martyrs watching Keith chuckle at crabbed glyphs on a white board while their fingers fused over his suggested strokes.

"Useless, cardie-clad cockring!" grunted my neighbour, who went on to describe how Keith's preferred musical instrument could best be uncoiled and used on its owner, first as a marital aid and then as a stake.

Then I had an epiphany. "Hidden depths has old Keith, y'know," I drawled.

"Oh?"

"Yup. He was in the Rolling Stones."

"-?!"

"Well, the band before they became the Stones. They were a skiffle outfit then, with the late, great Deryck Guyler on washboard. Keith played his euphoricum. Those were the glory days, when the skirl of skiffle stirred the air waves. Lonnie Donegan had made 'The Cumberland Gap' an anthem for groomed youth and not just an euphemism for Egyptian practices.

"There was nothing to hold Keith back. A US tour beckoned, with the promise of the Appalachian high life and all the snaggle-toothed groupies you could twang your banjo at.

"But it was not to be. The rest of the band had decided to rip off the blues, and besides there were more than creative tensions - Keith Richards didn't like the fact that our hero, being a Reading boy, was a little too close to Marianne Faithfull.

"''Ere, there's ownly room for one Keef in this band, ow right!' declared Jagger one turbid autumn day, and our lad packed his duffel bag and hitched back up the Thames.

"He doesn't talk about it, but that random-haired wreck has a nobility others can only dream of - for he stepped aside from the life and the woman he loved to make way for History."

"What about Deryck Guyler?" asked my chastened audience.

"The blues thing was his idea, I gather. The skiffle crowd never forgave him, like when Dylan went electric. Stones soon dropped him too, as he never managed the switch from washboard to drumkit. Ended up being a comedy turn on the telly. Cruel but fair, I'd say. Another?"

Shortly afterwards I fell out with elements of the Chechen separatist government and Armenian secret service, so chose to spend a few years sampling the assisted baths of Samarkand.

I found my eventual return to work a little trying, and wandered down The Goat again for a late-morning restorative. One bar prop was hissing abuse at his lager.

"Anything wrong?" I inquired.

"Bloody Keith and his Macro Magic Show! An hour watching him hitch up his Millets jeans and point at what looks like Japanese sewing-machine instructions while my monitor melts down! Monkey plunger!"

"Not changed then, has he?" I sighed.

"Too right. Mind you, I heard he was in the Rolling Stones once. What do you reckon?" asked the imbiber.

"Keith? Well, he's musical all right, and grew up in Reading the same time as Marianne Faithfull. Still waters, eh?" I returned to my pint.

Keith got the respect he was due, impatient youth learned wisdom, and I had the pleasure of seeing the seed I'd sown years ago sprout and soar into the skies above Serendip.

A legend was born.

As for the Skiffling Stones, there's a clip of Maestro Guyler with Eric & Ernie below, at 7'30". What might have been:

One Day in the Life of Isaac Danilovich

Nothing rounds off an afternoon stroll along Odessa's coastal path than early supper at Dacha.

This restaurant is set in a country house generously bequeathed to whoever was passing at the time by its owner, the cautious Mr Peretz, who decided not to give Soviet power the benefit of the doubt and fled to France in a flurry of fur coats and floozies in 1919.

Dacha offers a zesty selection of soups, savouries, sweets and, of course, sinus-snapping spirits. I can recommend the okroshka, salo, kambala, Chernihiv unfiltered beer and horse-radish horilka.

The last of these prompts a fecund stirring of the loins and a variety of unusual admissions at Accident & Emergency unless congress is achieved within two hours of consumption - not usually a problem in Slack-Drawered Odessa.

Madame Boyo and I were relaxing at a garden table, after an arduous afternoon on the Otrada beach, when a neo-Chekhovian tableau commenced nearby.

An Odessite businessman in his mid-50s - let us call him Isaac Danilovich - trailed into the garden behind his overstuffed wife and 20-something daughter. Isaac is typical of a certain type of entrepreneur in the eastern Slavosphere:

• Not venal, but has plenty of venal people on his speed-dial;
• Uxurious, even though he could have traded in his wife for a waxed blonde shop-hopper long ago; and
• Drinks with his partners and rivals, but didn't make his millions by being mashed on monkey juice half the day.

So an afternoon en famille at Dacha would have been a pleasant break from wheeling deals, but Isaac looked troubled. Jowls and the corners of various features all drooped towards his tasselled loafers. Then I saw why.

One of the many horrors that Soviet Communism spared its ranks of soldiers, peasants and grade three meat-processing-plant operatives was interior designers.

Dizainer, by contrast, was a familiar Jewish surname in Odessa. A perestroika joke goes that a new-breed interior designer hired to wreck some poor sap's flat turned up at the wrong address.

"Hello, I'm a designer," said the prominently Hebrew young professional.

"Well, I can see you're not an Ivanov!" grunted the vest-clad tenant as he slammed the door.

Back at Dacha, Madame Boyo and I beheld the bane of Danilovich. Blonde hair tugged into a brisk ponytail, yoghurt-nourished curves crammed into a grey two-piece and kitten heels, Masha the Interior Designer bore down on Issac's table, brandishing her laptop like a shield before her businesslike bosom.

After a few perky greetings she perched on a chair to the left and ordered still mineral water without ice. Daughter and Mrs Danilovich were arrayed to the right, with Mr D arraigned between them.

Masha unfurled the laptop, fanned out some brochures and began bobbing her ponytail in time with mother and daughter as they pored over her plans. Danilich, to use the familiar contraction, briefly caught my eye. "Help me!" blinked his haggard orbs.

For a moment I considered a discreet flick of forefinger to throat, the wordless Soviet invitiation to share a half-litre of red-eye behind a missile silo. He would have muttered an excuse and caught up with me among the silver birches to swig and forget in the silent brotherhood of the bottle.

Instead I raised my litre of Chernihiv Unfiltered and nodded with a wink towards Mrs Boyo, a woman whose idea of interior décor goes no further than the steel bookshelves and noticeboards of the drill hall where she was born. Uncle, you're on your own.

The next half hour saw Danilich lurch through the Four Stages of Life.

Of all the great religions, Hinduism has most acutely pondered the pointlessness of human endeavour. Buddhism usually earns that accolade, but rather embraces failure with Schopenhauerian smugness.

Hindus, on the other seven hands, regard our futile footling with Himalayan dispassion, and seek diversion in acrobatic erotica and a pantheon that could pass an East Enders audition. And, like true country types, they've worked out that cows are best left alone.

Your Hindu divides our trudge to the municipal boneyard into four allotments of increasing disappointment, and poor Isaac Danilovich slouched sulphurous through the whole tetralogy before our blinking eyes.

1. Brahmacharya: The stage when a young man learns from his elders under conditions of celibacy.

Isaac Danilovich had turned up to lunch with the intention of taking this vow, with fingers subtly crossed, having calculated that feigned interest in plaster niches and pre-aged parquet might earn him a reprieve from whatever other improving ideas his womenfolk had in mind - banning handguns from the banya, for example.

So he bowed gravely before the queasy neon of the laptop, wherein his hunting lodge was shrouded in the chandeliers and drapes of a Syrian soap-opera drawing room decorated by the last remaining Situationist.

This lasted about five minutes. A getter-up and goer, Danilich couldn't fake enthusiasm for dadoes, corniches and pergolas any more than the average husband. Before long he leaned back and pretended to read important text messages on his mobile. His wife and daughter drew closer as he moved out into the lower orbit of irrelevance.

2. Griastha: The mature stage of life in which you settle down and devote yourself to family matters.

Danilich needed to wrest control of his precarious patrimony before Masha turned his smoking terrace into a magnolia "break-out area". He began to make helpful suggestions like some domestic Schindler, desperately seeking to save a few mammoth trophies and billiard tables from the encroaching cream emulsion.

Too late. The daughter, who hadn't studied Social Technology at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy for nothing, gently batted them aside while Mother patted his hand. Masha smiled indulgently, then continued her breathless exposition.

One aspect of Griastha is Kama, or sensual gratification. Isaac Danilovich now had recourse to this by idly assessing Masha's public assets. "If I make her my mistress and buy her a flat on Richelieu Street, perhaps she'll leave my house alone," he mused.

3. Vanaprastha: The gradual abdication of wordly desire, often accompanied by a retreat from town to country.

Danilich understood that an affair with Masha, while entirely possible and, in many Ukrainian situations, almost unavoidable, would only burden his soul while not necessarily sparing his estate. The daughter would find another designer, and he'd have to spend late afternooons staring at Masha's stretched ceiling with a mouthful of Spanish fly and the sound of snapping garters in his ears.

He moved his chair back to "take a call" and the hitherto emollient Mrs Danilovich slid her seat sideways into the space, all the better to peer over her fleshy Tartar cheekbones at some new albumen abomination in glass brickwork.

Slowly, steadily, Isaac Danilovich was being eased beyond the familial Van Allen Belt into the harsh solar winds of woe.

4. Sannyasa: The final withdrawal from a world full of weeping into the contemplation of the Eternal.

The Sannyasin, legally dead, must have provided for his family before being allowed to renounce them, and this Danilich had clearly done. But some Hindu sages insist that Sannyasa is permitted only to those who have sired a son, and this clearly troubled Isaac.

A son - Boris! - would have ridden to his rescue in a pimped convertible; open-shirted, Aviator-shaded and slightly bandy from polo and penicillin. The finest waitresses would have fed them cognac and caviar canapés from their cleavages while the chef coshed and grilled all passing livestock at their table.

Masha, whom Boris would have mounted at some point before dessert, would eagerly agree that a 15ft HD wall-mounted television with extendable cocktail cabinet/barbecue is what every modern bedroom needs.

This phantom progeny seemed to urge Isaac on to an uprising against the carmine-lipped camarilla. He grabbed the laptop and jabbed at various offending features, muttering urgent pleas for domestic give-and-take. The Daughter eased the monitor from his clammy grasp.

Mother replaced his chair a good yard away and poured his first tumbler of vodka. Isaac Danilovich lit a Cohiba of consolation. It was all over. He'd take the yacht down to Varna for the summer, in sure and blissful hopelessness about the state of Villa Danilich on his return. Perhaps they'd leave him his shed.

Shanty, shanty, shanty.

Gumboot Diplomacy

The English language revels in its irregular verbs:

• I'm a traveller, you're a tourist, he's EasyJet ballast;
• I appreciate erotica, you watch porn, she's a former Home Secretary;

That sort of thing. One verb to savour is "I work abroad, you've gone native, he's an expat".

The British abroad are a queasy seesaw of expat and diplomat. Expats, whether metro journalist or furrowed accountant, all decompose into a septic tank of drunken suburban prejudice and low-wattage adultery.

British diplomats, whether baronets or bursary boys, rise into a Zen stratosphere of airless detachment from the life of others.

The recent turmoil in Libya has provided virtuoso displays of both. Take the expat who complained to the BBC that African migrant workers were slicking Tripoli airport with their tears when they didn't even have passports and his kitchen still needed mopping. He was grateful to Col Gaddafi's toughs for clearing his path to duty-free. Classy.

As for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, it never lets us Schadenfreunde down. Making expats show a bit of leg to every passing troop-carrier was a true crowd-pleaser. But nothing prepared even the most jaded observer for their decision to drop Terry-Thomas and The Professionals, unannounced, by helicopter into territory where the noble, trigger-happy rebels were preparing to repulse Gaddafi's air attacks.

If you ever wonder why a country like Britain maintains such an extensive diplomatic corps, there is your answer. It takes teams of tombstone-toothed tools in dandruffed suits to come up with ideas that even SOE would have rejected during the invasion of Crete, and all to maintain Britain's international reputation for endearing if sometimes deadly eccentricity.

There were many joys to life as a foreign student in the Glorious Soviet Union, but chief among them was the realisation that the entire country was run on an operational basis by drunks.

I have written about this in detail, but one aspect I failed to mention was the pleasure derived from encounters between truculent Russian drunks (Russ: пьяный мужик) and middle-class Englishmen with a misplaced sense of entitlement (Lat: vagina correcta).

In those days the British Embassy in Moscow was a Tangiers of pinstriped stupidity, where stammering consuls rubbed bulbous Adam's apples with Magdalene M.Phil.s, all in pursuit of a tennis court. An hour sat in the lobby was the best recruiting sergeant the Communist Party (Hairy-Arsed Pickaxe Faction) could have imagined.

I heard some choice tales of buffoonery over those months. A Thatcher-era cabinet minister arrived at midnight in a midwinter city somewhere beyond the Urals to attend an international beetroot symposium. He was denied access to his hotel by the usual gnarled war veteran who'd leafed through the Wehrmacht etiquette book before bayoneting its owner with a frozen wolf.

"I'm a government minister, from Britain!" the hireling of capital had wailed. "Britain? Never heard of it!" snapped ex-Gunner Yebalkin before slamming the door and returning to his bucket of vodka.

From that day on, an embassy flunkey had to fly ahead and occupy the hotel room until the visiting duffer du jour had arrived.

My own experience of a winoes vs whiners bout was less epic in scale but all the more satisfying for the small part I played on the side of the workers, peasants and revolutionary soldiery.

I had arrived back in Moscow after a pleasant fortnight delousing in London. The flight, bound for Tokyo, stopped off at Sheremetyevo Airport in the early hours, catching the aerial portal to the Soviet Union at its sepulchral best.

Sheremetyevo by day was a Führerbunker that the Reich had never got round to burying, full of cardboard uniforms, fizzing electrical circuits and huddles of leprous men in leather caps and piss-stained brown trousers.

But by night it became Czarina Anna's ice palace. Corridors of gleaming marble glided into distant darkness. The chill silence was disturbed only by the drip-drip of thawing sentries. Every surface glowed in gentle lemon neon.

Into this vacuum-cleaner's Valhalla stepped myself, half-a-dozen other slackers, and a middle-aged couple flanked by invisible barriers of disdain. He was well-tailored, lightly tanned and severely side-parted. She was brittle, like thin ice rather than cut crystal. They looked around in mild distraction.

"Passport control's over there," I offered with the random amiability that steady ingestion of advocaat can bring.

"Not for us, actually," she snapped.

They made off for the Diplomatic Channel, which differed from the workers, peasants etc line only in being unstaffed.

• There they stood as we brave few shuffled past the KGB blonde.
• Still they stood as we picked up our bags.
• Stood they yet as, having explained the use and abuse of garter belts to a bumpkin customs officer, we strode out into Socialist Paradise and followed the aroma of meths and exploding cigarettes to the taxi rank.

I loitered a little, being something of a théâtromane, to see what happened to the Rattigan Couple. The customs officer wandered over to them and gesticulated towards the KGB gorgon.

"We're British diplomats, actually," hissed the wife in an accent that spoke of shabby boarding schools, secretarial courses and matrimonial miscalculation. Her husband looked as if he'd just had his colon sandpapered.

"Go there!" barked the Shield of the Revolution. A drunk bloke had meanwhile appeared from behind a rubber flap and started hauling their bags away in a most undiplomatic manner.

"No!" squeaked Mrs Actually, clattering across the hall and straight into the rough embrace of Corporal Mordaboyko, who pointed her back to passport control.

As she trudged the ten yards of defeat, I quietly whistled the Laurel & Hardy tune. I repeated the performance after they had both submitted their passports to the blonde. Her arch comment "But these are diplomatic passports!" broke the language barrier effortlessly before she waved them through with a flick of her Kalashnikov-stripping wrist.

While my betters waited to have their passports bent out of shape, I'd busied myself with finding a taxi. There was only one driver left, and I managed to haggle him down with the inducement of the British Airways in-flight magazine, which happened to feature an underdressed actress on the cover. "English gentleman's journal, most depraved," I urged.

The Actuallies limped out onto the freezing concourse just as the driver dropped my duffel bag in the boot. "Taxi!" ventured the Second Secretary, whose official car must have displayed an impeccable sense of British justice by not turning up.

"Yes, I know," I waved cheerily as I settled into the passenger seat of the sole mobile vehicle in a 2km radius. They were still standing there as we vanished between the silver birches, bound for the bright lights and dark pleasures of Boris Galushkin Street.

Dark Side of the Rainbow

Once in a while lakes in Africa turn themselves over, releasing noxious vapours that kill all life on the shore and turn the countryside into something out of Poe.

Once in a while employers in Britain turn their staff over by getting them to reapply for their jobs, releasing noxious employees into the environment and turning the local Labour Exchange into a Cliff Richard film scripted by Kafka.

I was near alone one evening with such a colleague as he wove his way through the re-application form.

"It's just like the script for an interview, but without the interviewer," he muttered.

"So, in order to get the psychological advantage, does that mean you have to imagine yourself naked while filling it in?" I asked.

"I always imagine myself naked," he added.

Beyond the frosted window something stirred in a distant lake.

Klootzak Nation

Some time ago I found myself sitting opposite an old college lady-friend on a train. She asked me what I'd been up to since being drummed out of Wales. I outlined my career as media mercenary, following walk-ons in showbiz raiding parties and the ironic smuggling of non-contraband goods.

"And what about you?" I concluded in my best Prince Charles manner.

"I'm a dominatrix," she replied with the best smug-plug since a Belarussian mother-in-law told me she'd danced with the Tsar.

Channeling pure heir-du-trône, I ventured "How interesting, and what does that entail?"

"I kick middle managers in the pods with my Christian Louboutin slapper wellies for 200 quid an hour, and don't even have to listen to them complain about their wives."

She belonged to the dumpy, frumpy and grumpy category of Metroland gals - second daughters who end up as council leaders' PAs - so it was good to see her penetrating a profession that I lazily associated with angular Germans and Oriental ladies in catsuits.

It also explained what you do with an lower-second degree in geography.

"What about Repetitive Strain Injury?" I inquired.

"You bet they have!" she beamed.

"I meant you."

"Nah, I swap legs. It's quite aerobic."

Not sure what knackersmacking had to do with yoghurt, I asked whether she varied it with other forms of violent perversion. She provided a list of alarming gerunds, all of which seemed to involve applying kitchen implements, manual or electrical, to her client's danglers.

By now we had the carriage to ourselves, so she elaborated on her favourite practices.

"People talk about BDSM, but there's a world of difference between S&M aficionados and the adepts of bondage. I much prefer the former. They are usually well-born, bohemian or members of the higher professions, and mess not about.

"'Good afternoon, Mistress Cadwaladr! After my opaque summation, the jury will be out for at least two hours. Kindly belabour my buttocks with whatever pieces of Javanese furniture you might have to hand, then disparage me in your choicest fishwife demotic.' And then off they go, happy as hogs.

"Bondage bores are another matter. Teachers, social workers and reformed clerics in the main, they sport facial hair, broadsheet newspapers and inky little diagrams of precisely how they want to be suspended from my rafters.

"They insist on using Japanese technical terms, which they mispronounce, and once they're up there all you get it 'Ooh, mistress, if you don't mind, I think the 股縄 may be slipping out of the 海老責め! Could you twist it up a notch?'

"Then they hang around for ages doing nothing, just moaning loud enough to drown out my iPod. And once it's all over they email me 'feedback' on the session. Needledicks!"

I don't think Lord Tebbit himself could have coined a pithier metaphor for the public sector.

The Boy Scout devotion to knots shown by Mistress C's trussing companions confirmed my conviction that DIY is the true vice anglais. It poisons the whole of English life, from Fred West and his patio tombs to Mr Cameron's Big Society, via the have-a-go-hero on his way to Casualty in two separate ambulances.

And this taint spreads from the lower-middle classes:

• Aristocrats wear ancient clothes and drive decrepit jalopies around decayed estates, heralded by explosive plumbing and overcooked food.
• Working people make things for sale in the marketplace, and undergo years of training in the correct use of tools.
• Professional types hire artisans from a guild of nations to primp their pergolas, appease their boilers and entertain their children.

Only the petite bourgeoisie tamper with motor engines, venture into drains, wrong-end soldering irons and lose rabbits in ersatz top hats before rooms of tearful tots.

On a global scale I'd hitherto always associated the Japanese with the Scots:

• They like tartan, whisky, golf and rewriting history;
• They owe everything to their mighty neighbours, and never show the slightest gratitude;
• They've more than their fair share of islands; and
• Their cooks do frightful things with fish.

But, on reflection, perhaps the true kinsmen of the Japanese are the English:

• They share a belligerent attitude to their continental cousins;
• Their simple language is let down by an absurd writing system;
• Their closest former colonies - Ireland and Korea - are sods of incomprehensible souses split into an eccentric south and truculent north; and
• They like naval fleets, public drunkenness and below-par royalty, whom they invest with religious significance.

The Japanese also mirror the English class system, and I bet their salarymen like being mortally coiled too.

There are vital differences, of course. Japanese cars work, and the country has no equivalent of the Welsh. The Hairy Ainu match most of the roles performed by the Scots, although the Japanese are careful never to let them rule the country.

But the most common weal of England and Japan is decline. While we dismantle the Welfare State, Japan slips behind China among the mercantile nations.

Perhaps the road to recovery lies in abandoning the cult of DIY. I assume the Japanese are prey to this too, given the prevalence of paper houses in their rice-bound realm.

Aspirants to public office could be asked what, in their view, is the correct use of hemp. If they reply that it involves enhanced smoking, they may proceed.

If they mumble something about resentful redbrick lady graduates brandishing the I-Spy Book of Knots, the Switchfinder-General should do everyone a favour and belt them up.

Night Coracle to Cairo

I pay the BBC licence fee so that I don't have to waste time listening to opinions on other wirelesses, so when a chap called Leyne assured me that both the argy and the bargy in Tunisia would go no further I was happy to switch back to the Third Programme for some soothing Xenakis.

I was not pleased to wake up two week later to discover the Copts, Ankhs and other denizens of Durrell's feverish novels getting their Hannibal on in the teeming streets of Egypt.

"What's wrong with you? Arabs have the right to elect useless sods instead of just inheriting them, as you pointed out in your last post!" a reader might rile.

Indeed, and I like everyone else totally and utterly support the revolting Egyptians in all ways but the ones that might do them some good. The cause of my chagrin is, as ever, purely personal and national:

"So, you Welshes have screwed up another perfectly decent holiday resort. Thanks a lot, I was looking forward to a spot of shark-punching down Sharm el-Sheikh, now I'll be lucky to get a week in a bucket dangling from a Somerset gibbet."

Yes, the conspiracy theorists who are my colleagues have worked it out. The cause of Mr Mubarak's downfall is once again The Welsh Connection.

When the moderate, non-violent Islamic Jihad gunned down President Anwar Sadat at a military parade in 1981, BBC Wales's flagship news pit-pony "Wales Today" was quick to spot that the new president had a Welsh wife, Suzanne.

Wales was a land of austerity in the early 1980s, and even news was scarce. As a result, smouldering Gail Foley, random sports bloke David Parry-Jones and the other news colossi of "Wales Today" spent much of their time finding Welsh angles to other countries' stories in order to pad out a bulletin otherwise devoted to rugby disasters, werewolves, and firemen shrugging in front of charred holiday cottages.

A particular low point was the Jeremy Thorpe trial. This tale of former Liberal leaders, by-the-hour inversion, velvet collars, Great Danes and, for reasons that escape me, former King Constantine of the Hellenes attempted to grip a nation already being thoroughly gripped by the newly-elected steel claws of Lady Thatcher.

It received lavish daily coverage on the BBC national news, and Welsh viewers had to sit through it all again on "Wales Today" just because the caddish Mr Thorpe's co-defendants were a spit-roast of Welsh businessmen.

The Mubarak succession was a gift to "Wales Today". They yanked a cub reporter off his permament pitch outside a rainy steelworks, gave him a Fodor guide to Luxor and the bus fare to the Mubarak in-laws' council house in Pontypridd.

What reporters are meant to do in such circumstances is ask about Mrs Mubarak's early life, her forgetting the words of "Y Wiwer" at the school eisteddfod, and other things they might know about, not demand instant analysis of the Middle East like some Radio 4 harridan.

The Ponty Mubaraks, like most of the Welsh population, conversed by constantly rearranging the words "Duw", "fuck" and "aye" in overlapping patterns like an early Steve Reich piece, so the ensuing doorstep interview was a masterclass in the clueless leading the scabrous:

[Shiny reporter] "Do you think your relative Mr Mubarak will be a stronger leader than the dead Mr Sadat is?"

[Unshaven man in vest] "Well, he won't let hisself gets killed so easy though but and."

It didn't get any better, as question after leading question produced ever-more baffled responses from a group of people who, come to think of it, were quite possibly not even related to Mrs Mubarak at all. It's not an uncommon name along the Rhondda Riviera.

I like to think Suzanne's ghastly relatives all descended on Cairo in 1981, like secretaries on a cake trolley, in pursuit of cockle concessions and anything they could carry off.

The Egyptians are used to being ruled by other people - Hyskos, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Albanians, the English, Israelis (parts only), and giant Sun-rolling beetles if you go back far enough - so Welsh administration was likely to be relatively benign.

After all, we Welsh have long-cherished fictional links with the Ancient Egyptian people, largely thanks to Prof Sir John Morris-Jones's article "Pre-Aryan Syntax in Insular Celtic" - an ambitious attempt to bypass England via a Welsh-Berber linguistic bridge across the Bay of Biscay, unfortunately based on occult loon Prof Wallis Budge's ouija-board guesswork about Ancient Egyptian grammar.

But enough is enough, or "Kifaya!" as they say in Ponty. Seething increased in recent months when it became clear that Mubarak intended to transfer power to his idiot son Goronwy (known as "Gamal" in Egypt, owing to the absence of typically Welsh sounds and animal shapes in hieroglyphics).

But the final straw in the brick of Nilotic anger was the news that the Mubarak clan had handed over maintenance of the pyramids to some Welsh cowboys.

The prospect of these tombs emerging from the Griffiths Bros, Builders & Decorators tarpaulin either studded with pebbledash and satellite dishes or brownly glossed into a Toblerone theme park (children and Free Wales Army veterans, half-price), was too much for the Coptic back to bear, and so another country collapses into Cambrian-created chaos.

Borges once wrote a story in which Thoth, the baboon lord of the Nile, joins other ancient deities in an attempted coup against The Academy. But he, like his fellow putschists, can no longer speak, only howl like a beast.

We Welsh may not be much more articulate, so I'd give it a couple of weeks before sending a camera crew back to Pontypridd to ask the newly-arrived Mubaraks how they like the view.