2014: NEW YEAR,OLD FEARS

As a young child in the 1970s, I well recall being regularly bored and mystified by the never-ending fascination with ‘the war’.  Adults seemed to go on about it all the time, hurrah-for-our-boys black and white movies filled the TV schedules, and even sitcoms knew that jokes about Jerries or Japs were surefire substitutes for proper humour.  It was all so long ago, I remember thinking – won’t they just shut up about it?

Now I realise that the passage of thirty years is but the blink of an eye (as my recently rediscovered record collection rather disconcertingly demonstrates).  Furthermore, at the outset of 2014, the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, I think we need to look back and learn a great deal more about the 1914-45 period, because we are in grave danger of repeating its mistakes.  I say 1914-45, as we need to take the whole period bookended by the two world wars, for the twenty year lull between them was very much unfinished business that reached its grim, almost inevitable conclusion in Hitler and the Holocaust.

It is a horrible irony that 2014 is likely to be a year in which people soberly commemorate the centenary of the Great War, while simultaneously voting in droves for various shades of tub-thumping bigotry in May’s European elections.  Across the whole continent and beyond, such sentiment is gaining ground, fuelled by idiot politicians and a craven or timid media.

Birkenau extermination camp, Poland

In the run-up to Christmas, I was fortunate to have two trips abroad, one to Berlin and one to Kraków in Poland.  Both hammered home the dangers that we seem to be sleep-walking back into, especially on the latter trip which included a day at the Auschwitz and Birkenau Nazi concentration camps.  Nothing can prepare you for the experience, and the sheer numbers who died there.  We reeled from there back to Kraków, where I picked up a copy of the local English language newspaper.  It told me that Nick Griffin, leader of what’s left of the BNP, had recently been in town and warned a rally that “powerful Zionists want to destroy us.  We, the nationalists, must stand together to fight for a white, nationalist and radical Europe”.  Was it 2013 or 1943 outside?

We can mercifully dismiss Griffin as a truly crap (and fading) demagogue, but the rally at which he spoke was an offshoot of another organised by Poland’s Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), who hold about a quarter of the seats in parliament and form the official opposition.  Griffin’s rally was mainly a showcase for a belligerent fringe movement called the National Rebirth of Poland (Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski), whose slogans include the ever-catchy “gas the queers” and “there will be a baton for each queer face”.

The Holocaust did not emerge fully-formed from thin air.  People had to be broken down into submission to a political ideology that turned them into acquiescent murderers.  The key part of that process is always the same: others have to be comprehensively dehumanised.  And it is always the same ‘others’ – gypsies, gays, Jews, people with disabilities – that get picked off first.  It was then, and it is now (with Muslims latterly added as the scapegoat group recycled from even earlier times).

It might seem crass to place on this gruesome spectrum the beer’n’fags populism of UKIP, the Groundhog Day hysteria of the Mail and the Express or even the default media inflation of daft young lads into holy warriors and terrorists.  I believe that they all belong there, however.  When researching my last book, I was gobsmacked to see how close the parallels were between now and the 1930s, even here in Britain.  Not just in the obvious rise of fascist thuggery and quisling politicians, but in the prevailing mainstream, which chose to wish away the warnings and faff around instead with its new gadgets, its folksy pastimes and its obsession with home’n’hearth.  Today, as then, we seem addicted to the soft poison of nostalgia.

Same shit, different day

This is, by the way, another reason I’m a candidate for Plaid Cymru.  Those who know little of the party might assume it’s a Welsh UKIP, but that’s very far from the truth.  Plaid has always been a firmly internationalist outfit, rooted in Welsh radical and pacifist traditions.  Its first MP, Gwynfor Evans, was a lone voice in the 1960s House of Commons against Britain arming the Nigerian government in Biafra; his vocal opposition to the Vietnam war was informed by going there to find out for himself.  Its MEP since 1999, Jill Evans, leads the European Free Alliance (EFA), who are in a joint block with the Greens in Brussels.

I’m sorry to those many now dead relatives to whom I moaned when yet another war film flickered on to our telly all those years ago.  Now that we’ve lost nearly all of them, the generation who knew wartime as young adults, it feels to me that we have lost something anchoring us to the bitter reality of its first-hand experience.  And as our anchor slips away, the danger is that we will once again career off into the same blind alleys that brought such terror to our continent. 

The EU is far from perfect, but its creation as a response to the horrors of two wars is something we should never lose sight of.  We must make it work for us all.  As the famous George Santayana quotation has it on the wall of one of the blocks in Auschwitz, “the one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again”.  Let 2014 be a year when we learn once again our common history, and make an iron resolution not to repeat it.

Auschwitz

MP MP?

Slightly unexpectedly, I’m in the running to be adopted as the Plaid Cymru candidate for Ceredigion at the next UK general election.  This might seem like a strange career move, but it is something I am deeply committed to, and even quite excited about.

The political tectonic plates are shifting fast these days, and at every level: global, European, British, English, Scottish and Welsh.  Yet the level of debate in this country about these seismic shifts is derisory.  Politicians and media alike seem content to stir the disenchantment, while offering neither useful analysis nor any real alternative.  Unsurprisingly, this is leaving people thoroughly exasperated and with a growing sense of rage – the ‘plague on all your houses’ response, a.k.a. ‘politicians are all the bloody same’.

But they are not.  Really, they’re not.  There are genuinely decent, honest people in almost every party (some more than others), but it is in Plaid Cymru that I’ve found by far the greatest concentration.  Ever since I first encountered Plaid, as a member of the NUS national executive twenty-five years ago, I’ve been impressed by the vision, erudition and commitment of its members, and their ambition for Wales – and the world beyond.  Although lazily derided as “the nationalists” by opponents, Plaid is firmly internationalist, progressive and co-operative in its outlook.  When I moved to mid Wales thirteen years ago, I joined Plaid immediately, and have worked on their behalf, with varying degrees of success, at every election since.

Aberystwyth Mon Amour

When Leanne Wood was elected as Plaid leader just over a year ago, it was clear that there were some exciting times ahead.  I’ve known Leanne for years, and have always been inspired by her passion, her integrity, her absolute commitment to social and economic justice and – rare indeed in a politician – her utter lack of ego.  To her, the idea of a self-governing Wales is not an end in itself.  It is a beginning; the much-needed chance for Wales to work out its own priorities, on its own terms, and to go for them. 

After twenty years of writing and broadcasting about Wales, and of studying in depth its history and culture, it is impossible to come to any other conclusion than that no Westminster government, of any political persuasion, is going to look out for us.  Wales will always be an adjunct or an afterthought.  Policies designed for the overheated economy of south-east England are never going to succeed here.

This logjam has to be broken.  Here in Wales, we have all three of the UK main parties in power: the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in Westminster, Labour in Cardiff Bay.  As they bicker and squabble amongst themselves, egged on by a breathless, blinkered media, it is hard to see much difference between any of them.   And as they do so, our economy totters, our high streets start to look like rows of rotten teeth, cuts scythe through our cultural landscape, our hard-won health service lurches from one crisis to another, and our communities feel increasingly beleaguered.

I’m keen to be part of building Plaid Cymru towards becoming the government in our devolved Senedd.  We so desperately need that to happen.  So why am I taking a tilt at a seat in Westminster? 

Well, that’s because one of the ingrained problems facing Plaid is getting any attention on the other side of Offa’s Dyke.  Despite having been represented in parliament since 1966, and despite having three MPs (i.e. three more than UKIP!), you’d barely know of their existence from the London media.  And yet, with the Scottish referendum next year and the ongoing Euro-ructions, the constitution of our country is facing changes bigger than anyone alive has ever witnessed.  We need to start having grown-up conversations about this, and Plaid is keen to play its part. 

Cei Newydd / New Quay last summer, when I walked the Ceredigion Coast Path

To that end, I think that I could be a good ambassador for Plaid, and for Wales, in Westminster.  I want to help take on the kneejerk assumption, routinely heard in every debate on, for instance, the Scottish referendum, that to be an advocate of a different constitutional settlement, you have therefore to be inherently ‘anti-English’ in some way.  My life and my writing both give lie to that one.  It is perfectly possible to love both England and Wales, love them with a passion, but also to believe that an eighteenth century structure, one created explicitly for gung-ho imperialism, is not the best way of running either. 

Although I’ve settled just outside the constituency near Machynlleth, Ceredigion feels very much like the right place for me to try this.  It’s where I first moved to when I came to mid Wales thirteen years ago, where I first joined Plaid and where I learned Cymraeg.  Like all mid-Walians, I rely on Ceredigion for healthcare, leisure, shopping, education, research, culture and recreation.  It has the one of the highest proportions of self-employed people of any constituency in the country, is home to two universities and the National Library, and has always been a cauldron of entrepreneurship, quiet radicalism and profound cultural expression.  

Of the dozens of TV travelogues I made for HTV, many of the best were in Ceredigion, from a noson lawen in Tregaron to a night camping with my dog by the lonely Teifi Pools; from a tootle along the coast road in that beautiful 1950s bus you see parked in Llanon to sailing into Aberaeron on a wooden Edwardian ketch.  The thought of representing this very special part of the world excites me enormously.

Filming Great Welsh Roads, with my late, lamented co-presenter Patsy, at Llyn Brianne

It’s going to be a tough fight though.  Ceredigion provided the most sensational result of the 1992 general election (and a rare flicker of joy on such a depressing night), when Cynog Dafis went from fourth place to win it for an alliance of Plaid Cymru and the Green Party.  When Cynog went instead to the infant National Assembly, Simon Thomas won the ensuing by-election for Plaid, and held it in the 2001 election.  The LibDems (it had been a Liberal seat since 1974 before Cynog) nicked it back by a few hundred votes in 2005, but then in 2010 upped their majority to a meaty 8,324. 

That’s a lot of votes to overcome.  But Plaid did it before; when they first won the seat in 1992, they’d taken just 16% the previous time.  In 2010, Plaid won 28.3%.  More to the point, we’ve had the sorry sight of the LibDems in government, so we are all too familiar now with what their smooth words look like in practice.  It’s not pretty.  If I win the nomination (to be decided over the next month), then I will relish taking them on their appalling record as part of this hollow, cynical shambles of a government.  I cannot wait.

HEFIN ON EARTH

I don’t know whether either would thank me for the comparison, but an afternoon spent interviewing John Hefin and David Meredith reminded me most of trying to referee Statler and Waldorf, the two cantankerous old gits in the balcony on The Muppets.  It didn’t help that we were holed up in a ghostly pub in Ponterwyd, the proper boondocks of inland Ceredigion.

The interview was for one of my ITV Wales travelogues, Great Welsh Roads.  This edition was filming the A44 route into Aberystwyth, and I was keen to do an item about the Elvis rock, that infamous landmark at the county border.  Over the years, there have been several Elvis rocks, but the original dated from spring 1962 and the Montgomeryshire by-election, following the death of the area’s Liberal MP since 1929, Clem Davies.  Plaid Cymru, never yet elected anywhere, had put up that fine specimen of Welsh literary priesthood, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, as their candidate.  Down in Aberystwyth, that distant seaside gap in the hills, two ardent young nationalists had an idea…

“We borrowed David's father’s car, smuggled a couple of pots of paint and a brush into its boot, and then crept out of town after the pubs had shut and up to Eisteddfa Gurig”, John told me.  This was the border with Montgomeryshire, and the Aber Two thought that if they painted a big slogan somewhere to fire up the Rev Ffowc Elis’ chances, he would be practically lowering his backside onto the green benches of San Steffan.  “We went back home that night, so cocky and excited.  We were absolutely convinced that we’d done all that was needed.  He was as good as home.”  Not quite how it turned out.  As has been the case on most occasions since in the mwynder Maldwyn, Plaid limped in fourth.

The provenance of the Elvis rock had been a bit of a mystery – legend even – for decades, and I was thrilled that John and David had finally agreed to fess up after so many years.  The original intention had been to film the interview by the rock itself, but it’s a cheerless, inhospitable place at the best of times, and that cold October day was far from that.  So we’d decide to film footage of the rock and the road, and then retire to the George Borrow Hotel in Ponterwyd for the interview.  We were all freezing; coffees and brandys were quickly downed.  I thank the brandy for the appearance of Statler and Waldorf, for John and David, as soon as they sat down and relaxed, mateamorphosed into one of the funniest, and most natural, double acts.  It still stands out as my favourite ever interview, though I doubt that my editor, who had the impossible task of slicing down the rambling hilarity into broadcastable bite-sized chunks, would have felt quite the same.

Like all good comic duos, there was the jester and the straight guy.  David, in all his lugubrious magnificence, was the erudite clown, mugging to me and acting out the absurdity of painting a slogan on a lonely rock in the middle of the night.  When he had raised himself to near crescendo, John would quietly cut in with a contrary memory or an arch observation, which had us all in fits of laughter.  They riffed so beautifully off each other, and could affectionately bicker for Cymru.

The punchline to the story was all John’s.  “Well, you see, I was a good grammar school boy, brought up in the Queen’s English, so when it came to painting ELIS on the rock, it never occurred to me that it didn’t have two Ls.”  ELLIS it was, until some time shortly after when the middle L was deftly overpainted into a V, and the Elvis rock was born.

Like every encounter I ever had with John, I remember it with pinpoint precision.  My boyfriend, who met him separately on three or four occasions, said the same just now.  That was John.  He had such a luminous presence about him that you savoured every moment in his company, knowing that it would continue to nourish you long after you’d said goodbye.  He was genuinely interested in seemingly everything, and just as genuinely modest about his own multiple achievements.  To a zealous convert like me, John Hefin was the embodiment of all that made me fall in love with Wales: wit, wisdom, warmth, passion, a depth of culture and breadth of thinking, and an apparently bottomless pit of creativity.

I last saw John at the Hay Festival in early June this year.  He was obviously not so well, but he was still so full of life that it did nothing to dent my hope and belief that he’d go on for ever.  Elin and he were spending a couple of days at Hay, “going to everything.  It feeds me for the whole year,” he said, grinning with boyish delight.  As we parted, we shook hands, and held it for ages.  “Come and see us sometime soon, won’t you?” he said.  Yes, of course, I said.  I am so very sorry that I didn’t.

Nos da John, a diolch am bopeth.  Cysga’n dawel.

THE JOY OF SIX

Monday morning, the head still whirling from a weekend of utter joy (amongst other intoxicants): the inaugural Festival Number 6 at Portmeirion.  Out of the corner of my eye, I kept seeing ghostly flashes of yellow stockings striding by, as Clough Williams-Ellis pounded his trompe l’oeil manor, thrilled to see it come to such exuberant life.

Take Sunday as a dipstick into my oily sump of fun.  It kicked off with a reading by Jan Morris, who fluttered as she sat down “well, I never expected to be performing at a rock festival at the age of eighty-six” before blasting a capacity audience into the stratosphere with an elegant, witty memory-monologue about Portmeirion itself, Clough, the jet set who made it their second home and the joy of Welshness.  On the same stage, tucked in by the swimming pool above the shifting sands of the Dwyryd estuary, surf rockers Y Niwl took it up a notch and glided us into the day.

A walk up into the village’s central piazza, by now cowering under curtains of rain, and to the undercover stage at the back of Castell Deudraeth.  We were after seeing Jerry Dammers do a DJ set, but arrived in time to catch a chamber quintet playing Mozart, followed by the sublime soundscapes of Rae Morris, a wild-haired elf from Blackpool, who, following a quick google, I now know to be only nineteen.  Cow.  Mr Dammers bumbled on stage next, all hat and no teeth, and cranked an aching, damp, middle-aged crowd to fever pitch with steamy dub, ska, reggae under a unexpected patina of pure camp.  A quick detour to catch comedian Marcus Brigstocke rant about Jimmy Carr, George Osborne and the Daily Mail (yay! Guardianista bullseye!), and it was time for home.  Had we been able to stay, there was plenty more, culminating in a set by New Order, that, judging from the reaction on Twitter, was actually rather good.

Ah, Twitter.  Festival Number 6 was a multiple shuddering Twittergasm.  I spent large parts of Saturday afternoon being thoroughly entertained by Grace Dent, Stuart Maconie, Andrew Weatherall, Caitlin Moran and John Niven in various conversational combinations on the main piazza, and the number of people live tweeting the references being made to tweeting fused into a perfect circle of digital onanism.  “Twitter good, Facebook bad!” we were told, and a thousand thumbs flew across virtual keyboards in silent agreement.  When, just before sunset on Saturday, the sun finally broke through to illuminate the far side of the estuary in a buttery glow and a perfect rainbow, you could barely see it for the wall of iPhones capturing the scene.  For a moment, I was worried that Instagram might explode.

A truly brilliant weekend, and a huge hats off to the organisers.  To pull off a first festival this good was a hell of an achievement.  Portmeirion was born to host it, and even in the horizontal north Wales rain, it shone like the jewel that it is.  My one caveat, and it’s one that echoes a few other festivals held in Wales, is that the Welsh content of the festival was shoehorned slightly awkwardly into the proceedings – a token off-peak stage here, a (delightful) male voice choir there.  The organisers hail from Manchester, and it showed throughout.  No criticism of that, for Manchester and the north-west of England have much to say, and it’s always good to hear.  But the joy of this festival was that it felt like all kinds of dialogue was going on – musical, political, cultural, social.  For many English visitors, it was the first time they’d come across any real Welsh culture, the stuff that barely ever crosses Offa’s Dyke.  This was a festival full of the finest people from both sides of the border; things could get really exciting with a little more exchange of views and swapping of culture, to everyone’s mutual enjoyment and benefit.  As Gruff Rhys sang from the Welshie stage on Friday night: “paratown am chwyldro, achos ni yw byd” (“get ready for a revolution, because we are the world”).  By god, I hope he’s right.  So let’s talk to each other and make it bloody happen.

(PS – my favourite Portmeirion anecdote: when filming one of my HTV travelogues, I was lucky enough to interview the late Micky Burn (1912-2010), poet, playwright, aesthete, Military Cross holder, enthusiastic bisexual and last living Colditz survivor.  Even at the age of 95, he was wonderful company.  Since the 1940s, he had lived just below Portmeirion on the estuary and become part of the glittering set that frequented it.  He recounted a tale from the early 1950s when a gold Bentley full of wealthy Londoners had got a little lost trying to find Portmeirion.  In nearby Penrhyndeudraeth – a slate-quarrying village of chapels and coal smoke – they’d spotted an old boy hobbling down the street.  They slowed down in order to ask for directions.  “Excuse me my man”, said one of them through an open window, “would you be so kind as to tell us the way to The Village?”  The old boy crouched down and peered in through the car window.  In an accent as thick as Gwynedd rain, he carefully said, “The Village is far from God”, and then shuffled off into the gloom.)