Insufficiently Welsh by Griff Rhys Jones Page B

as a teenager and finally chasing his own children across the sand as a grown man. But getting hold of the cottage had required the sort of foresight that only comes with a doggedly approaching significant date. Me, I never like to queue. Or book. This was my only chance to see inside the cottage.
    After my inspection, to my surprise, I was told by one of the charming guardians that, for the first time she could remember, there were booking gaps later this very year.
    â€œI imagine it must be the recession,” I suggested.
    She thought it might be the reputation for “unbookability” itself. People like me, believing that they couldn’t ever get hold of it, were put off trying.
    Tudor had another opinion. “When we took it there were broken blinds and knife handles missing.” He said. “Quite honestly, the place was disappointing.”
    There’s always a missing knife handle in paradise.
    â€“ GIDDY UP –
    I took to a horse for the next stage of my journey.
    This was at a pony-trekking centre. I have done this sort of thing before. I trekked in Colorado up a mountain at a dude ranch owned by a Californian millionaire family, where I made polite conversation with what I took to be an idiot hillbilly until I discovered he was a professor of astrophysics at Berkeley. They always gave me the gentle horse. That’s fine. It means you amble along in a line watching the arse ahead for several hours. In my case the arse was an accountant from New York.
    Freddy, my mount in Gower, was canny enough to know that with me on board he could do what he wanted. Theoretically, I knew which bit to pull to stop him doing what he wanted. I knew I had to firmly grasp his back in my thighs. I knew that my light touch could be suddenly turned into a sharp tug. Freddy knew that too, but because I was not really competent he decided, like a twelve-year-old delinquent with a new teacher, to see how much he could provoke me.
    Off we shuffled. The stables were set in a valley. We had approached it through a tree-lined drive. But as we ambled on we quickly broke through onto the uplands of the Gower and the wild moorland that runs along the top of the peninsula.
    I chatted with Helen, who was riding with me. Like Ruth in the Beacons, she had been a schoolteacher and travelled the world, but had now come back to her childhood home, drawn to the beauty that now lay spread out all around her. I needed to quiz her about Llanelli. We could see it, way across the bay to the north. If I turned I could see the south shore too and knew that somewhere down there was Swansea.
    Both were industrial towns. Llanelli was “tin city”. Swansea was “copper metropolis” (and once home to the biggest copper smelting works in the world). Both had rugby teams that inspired passionate loyalty. Helen now supported the Scarlets. Llanelli had worn a red “first strip” since a famous game against an Irish team in 1884.
    We paused. (She stopped. Freddy walked round and round in circles.) We shared memories of our early years when we gathered with our respective families around the black-and-white television to watch Rugby Internationals. Freddy fretted.
    â€œHe wants to catch up with the others,” Helen explained. The rest of the pony-trekking group had gone on up the sandy track. “He’s just a herd animal and he doesn’t like being separated.”
    Llanelli Rugby Club had enjoyed huge successes in the early seventies and nineties when they had been called the “Cup Kings of Wales”. The game changed to become a regional affair in 2003, but the town team had always provided top players of international quality. I would certainly be able to find a rugby hero in the area, and if not from the Scarlets then from the Whites, the original Swansea team, which was also founded in the early 1870s, and which would later come to form part of the “Ospreys” when they amalgamated with