Grand Slammin'

Good day to be Welsh, today. In case you've managed to avoid the demented harmonies emanating from pretty much the whole country, the Welsh rugby team kicked some hard-won French arse (it's like British arse, but with an accent over the a) today, to take not only the "Six Nations" championship, but something we call the Grand Slam - winning every single game they played in the tournament.

What's more, this is the third time they've done it in the space of seven years, putting them in a league that Welsh rugby hasn't seen since its previous glory days in the 1970s.

For reasons I've always been at a loss to explain, things like this are phenomenally important to the Welsh.
Traditionally, or stereotypically at least, we care about:
Cheese,
Singing
Sheep (to a positively lustful degree if you listen to the English)
Coal (as our economy depended on it...Well, it and steel)
Socialism (first Socialist MP in Britain was elected for my home town, Merthyr Tydfil)...
...and rugby.

Now, I've always been a cheese-fan, and as you know by now, I'm more than happy to sing, in public, in private, at the slightest provocation and indeed at none. Socialism has always been a logical idea ot me not because I grew up in such a famously Socialist environment, but because my folks, while living in this famously Socialist environment, were leading figures in the local Tory party (Translation function: Tory=Republican, for my American friends), and I rebelled against the ideas they espoused. Given the Socialistic outlook of most of the rest of the town, it was hardly a Grand Rebellion, but still...
Sheep, I've rarely given a toss about (so to speak), coal...works well if you're freezing to death, but is generally more work than the worth of it, and rugby...meh.

To me, the allure of rugby was killed stone dead at an early age by actually having to play it. At my school, it consisted mainly of poorly choreographed carnage, in the pissing-down rain and the bollock-freezing mud, played with people who would happily, joyfully...even casually cause you life-threatening and permanent injury given half a chance, and who, when you jammed your bodies together in a scrum, you couldn't help but notice, smelled impossibly strongly of body odour and the kind of grease that had long become a character trait.

So you'll have to forgive me when I tell you that I've never particularly cared about rugby, or the whole nationalistic schtick that comes with it here in Wales. There are specific songs, there are costumes, there's the whole sense of noisy superiority that goes with the game, in which Wales appears to take itself altogether too seriously for my liking, and which has made it impossible for me to get behind.

Since I've been back home though...

It began with d, actually. d, who of course is used to American Football - a lot of impossibly hefty men running around and often through each other, with an oval ball - became more than a little captivated by the game early in this Six Nations season. "There's such an elegance to it. Elegance and brutality, but still..."
I looked at the screen.
"Really?" I asked. "Which of them strikes you as more elegant, dear, the guy bleeding freely from his forehead, or the one spitting out his own teeth?"
But the more I watched with her, the more the nationalistic lure of the game sank its claws into me. When Ma, one Saturday, asked if I was going to watch The Game, it was weird - there was a sort of unspoken acceptance that this was A Man Thing, and that (and this is not something I often feel, or feel the lack of) I clearly now qualified to enjoy this sort of thing. So yeah, I sat and watched The Game.
Since then I've caught all but one of the matches in the season, and d and I sat and watched the finale today...
Well, I say we watched it. Actually, I watched it; d, for all the 'elegance' of the game, fell asleep, which is fair enough.

Now, I should confess - it would probably strike many of my friends in Wales as even more spectacularly nauseating than my disregard for Most Things Welsh, if, now I've returned, I suddenly became a scarf-wearing, cuddly-dragon-waving, rugby-song-singing Taff. But this year has seen a lot of changes in me, and enjoyment of rugby (at least as a spectator) would appear to be another addition to the increasingly long list of my hypocrisies. So good on you, Welshfolk of the team.

Buggerall Welsh about my day apart from that. Pizza for lunch (we had a voucher), followed by spaghetti and meatballs this evening. This wasn't some sort of subconscious tribute to Italy's only success in the tournament by the way...it was a perfectly conscious tribute to the fact that Italian food is bloody glorious. Did a little desultory pedalling on the bike inbetween meals in a faintly pathetic attempt to mitigate the overall Italianate theme of the day, but I know I'm fooling nobody today, not even my arteries.

Still, could have been worse - I could have been celebrating an Italian rugby triumph by eating all Welsh food; all cockles and seaweed and mutton, oh my...

In BizarroWorld, maybe!