I had a novel experience watching the 2007 Rugby World Cup a few months ago. For the first time ever I wasn't supporting ATBE (any team but England). Whilst I didn't rush out to buy a Cross of Saint George flag, I'd go as far as saying that I would have been quite glad had the English retained the Webb Ellis Trophy.
I've traditionally taken the ATBE position not through anti-English xenophobia but for political reasons. Were I, and thousands of other Welsh people to support England, the media and political class wouldn't applaud us for our cultural generosity but would see the equation; the Welsh support England, ergo, the Welsh are essentially English. Not supporting England is an easy-to-read way of making the point, 'we're Welsh, don't take us for granted'.

So the headline of the Sun of Wales - if such existed -might justifiably have shrieked on a sunny day in September this year, when, as an embittered former employee of the Allied Steel and Wire plant in Cardiff in 2002, was cast on a communal Welsh scrapheap as the direct result of New Labour's neglect and obduracy, my system received a welcome boost.
Erstwhile Labour leader and 'socialist peer' Lord Kinnock, the sometime Neil Kinnock, had a highly embarrassing run-in with semi-clothed pensions campaigners from Wales on a Bournemouth beach during the recent Labour Party Conference.
The campaigners, most wearing bathing trunks to emphasise the impoverished condition in which they find themselves as a result of the government's pathetically weak response to their plight, were confronted by the snappily-dressed 'people's aristocrat' looking for an individual who, his lordship felt, had 'been telling lies' about him.