A weekly column reproduced from the Bristol Evening Post

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To Cardiff, to watch a game of Association Football. It was raining. It had been raining for three days. It looked like it had been raining for three years. People were starting to build arks in their back gardens.

The match was a trifle unusual, in that the team in red appeared to have two goalkeepers, but I’m sure the referee knew what he was doing.

Saturday night in the city center was, erm, interesting. The natives were clearly restless and a bus-load of Valley boys were busy re-enacting the Battle of Offa’s Dyke with some Northerners outside a pub on St Mary’s Street. The English won on points. And on pints.

As I trudged through the broken glass and riot police, I was accosted by a drunken beggar asking for money. He wasn’t very good. He didn’t sing, dance, or have a three-legged lurcher on a piece of string.

When I declined his invitation, he roundly abused me for being mean, for being ugly, but mostly for being English. Marvellous stuff! I promptly bought him a can of cider. Perhaps I should have reported him to the Commission for Racial Equality, as was the fate which befell two other Welsh “nationalists” at the weekend.

John Elfed Jones and the laughably unpronounceable Gwilym ab Ioan (I think it means “cheese on toast”) have been grassed up for, amongst other things, comparing the movement of English people into rural Wales with foot and mouth disease and complaining that their homeland was becoming a dumping ground for our “oddballs, social misfits and drop-outs.”

Now to be fair, I know a few oddballs, social misfits and drop-outs who have upped sticks and moved to Wales. They tend to be the kind of lentil-eating, middle-class hippies who just find the everyday pace of life (you know, getting a job, paying taxes) “too much man.” They usually end up living halfway up a mountain with just a goat, a few dozen cannabis plants and a two-year-old copy of The Guardian for company. But that’s no reason to go burning down their cottages.

There’s more…