The last thing I’d want to do is sentimentalise my association with Wales. I wasn’t brought up here or even visited it much during my childhood.
I was raised in a west London suburb and educated at what could be described as a progressive Anglocentric school. Yet Wales was always there at the back of everything.
My dad was from Pembrokeshire and went to Fishguard Grammar School, where one of the teachers was DJ Williams, a member of the Welsh nationalist trio that included the much more famous Saunders Lewis who were jailed for their symbolic arson attack on an RAF site in north Wales.
It wasn’t something my father mentioned when I was a child and I found out about Penyberth much later. He was a quiet man who didn’t say much about his own past. I’m pretty sure he was bullied by his father.
He did, however, have a fine singing voice and gave expression to his Welshness by singing songs in the language he claimed not to be able to speak. Occasionally there was a glimmer of more national pride when he taught me during my primary school years the meaning of “Cymru am byth”. But it was done quite lightly, almost as a throwaway.
My dad had done his period of national service in the Welsh Guards, meeting my Essex-born mother and staying in London to resume his career with Barclays Bank, eventually becoming a manager. Visits to see family members in Wales were few and far between and there were clearly undefined hostilities whose cause was never explained to me, even by my mother who was always much more talkative than my father.
Nevertheless, I sensed an affinity with Wales as a place in my background that I didn’t really understand - and probably because of that. Wales became a material entity for me when I came to Cardiff for the postgraduate journalism diploma course (as it was then) in 1976.
At that time, though, and for a long time after, it seemed to me that Cardiff mostly thought of itself as purely Cardiff, and while it may have been accorded the title “capital of Wales”, it didn’t seem to take that role too seriously. Such a view was confirmed by the decision of the city’s voters to reject devolution in the referendums of both 1979 and 1997.
It could have happened the first time round, but I remember being in a taxi in the city centre a few days before the second referendum. As we drove past some noisy Yes campaigners with a megaphone, the grumpy Cairdiff taxi driver said: “I wish we could build a wall round the city and keep all those Welshies out!”
I’d encountered racism before, but this home-grown self-hating variety was new on me. At the time, however, I was too preoccupied with my course and social life to dwell too deeply on the significance of it.
I got a job on a daily paper in the north east of England, where I spent my first six months on strike - an experience that turned me into a lifelong NUJ activist. I was lured back to Cardiff at the end of 1994 by the then acting editor of Wales on Sunday Yvonne Ridley, with whom I’d done journalism training and who subsequently became famous after being captured by the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Yvonne’s view of Wales was, shall we say, minimalist, even by Cardiff standards. Her domain was the office in the city centre, her flat in nearby Westgate Street and the Queen’s Vaults pub across the road, with occasional forays around the corner to a bar-restaurant called Champers.
While I was not immune to the allure of the city’s drinking establishments, which I visited with colleagues, I realised it was time to deepen my knowledge of Welsh politics and culture more generally. I very quickly established a rapport with several politicians, most notably with Rhodri Morgan, who in those pre-devolution times was on the opposition front bench at Westminster.
Even before moving back to Cardiff, I’d tried to keep up with Welsh politics, such as it was, but I arrived at the right time as Labour under John Smith revived plans for a Welsh Assembly. Thanks to Rhodri and some new friends in Plaid Cymru, I had something of a ringside seat as the devolution story unfolded.
In 1998, with the second referendum won but the Assembly not yet up and running, I bought the terraced house in Riverside where I still live. I became a frequent passenger on the 17 and 18 bus route that plies between the city centre and Ely via Canton.
The nature of my work has forced me to take an interest in the minutiae of political developments in Wales. It’s fair to say that there’s more political navel gazing in Wales than in most other countries. This can lead to slow motion politics, but as someone who has for many years made a living out of navel gazing I’m in no position to criticise or complain. Travelling on that 17 and 18 bus route does, however, act as a brake on any tendency towards self-indulgent political fantasy.
However many reports, books and speeches I read about the intricacies of Welsh politics - and it’s fair to say that too much of it is speculative - I am brought down to earth by mixing with real people on the bus, talking to those I know and more frequently overhearing the concerns of others as they talk among themselves.
I don’t for a minute diminish the importance of what some dismiss as constitutional hot air, but we must never lose sight of the fact that Wales is the poorest of the four UK nations and that political agendas should focus on improving our nation’s - and especially our people’s - prosperity.
It’s a subject that is far too important to be trivialised. Cymru am byth!
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