For those of you who don’t know me or know much about me, I’m Welsh and speak Cymraeg – as best I can – though that doesn’t make me anymore ‘authentically’ Welsh than the majority who don’t.
Most Welsh people, like you my loyal reader, are broad-minded, well-travelled, well-educated, well-read, insightful and intelligent.
They can never be accused, as the Welsh occasionally are, of being insular, parochial and having a chip on their shoulders about ‘England’ as if it were still some sinister medieval fortress designed to keep us out.
Numerous rail and road links having been taking us back and forth for decades.
All over the world, Welsh people are working and often innovating in business, science, education, IT, manufacturing and the media.
Likewise, thousands of talented, industrious people from outside Wales have settled here from other parts of the UK and further afield.
That’s how it should be – otherwise we’d end up marrying our own cousins. And as pleasant a bloke as my cousin Stan is, I wouldn’t want to share a bathroom with him.
All that said, I might be poking a stick into the proverbial ‘hornet’s nest’ by telling you about a recent BBC Radio Wales news bulletin which I thought contained a hidden message that some Welsh people are ignorant about the other side of Offa’s Dyke.
Most listeners probably didn’t pick-up on it, but ‘Old Radar Ears Evans’ was astonished when the newsreader said “The lockdown has not yet been lifted…in the English town of Preston!”
Oh! You mean as opposed to the Transylvanian town of Preston?
Give me strength!
The previous hourly bulletin had simply referred to Preston. What happened during those intervening 60 minutes?
Did the Radio Wales News bods suddenly panic that we uneducated plebs might not know where Preston was located ?
Or had they not considered the possibility that many of us venture outside Wales sometimes – and may have visited the Lancashire town?
Call me over-sensitive…
“Phil! You’re over-sensitive, mate!”
…but as I don’t like being talked down to by local radio news, I now only listen to the BBC national news broadcast from London.
You know. The one in England.
Phil Evans
News At Ten
Ammanford