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There is nothing as strong as blood. London's Welsh community may have lost much contact with its homeland but even a half Welshman such as I am must feel a patriotic surge when Wales beats England at rugby or when a Welsh star is born. For both to occur in the same week is thrilling.
Duffy's remarkable voice already qualifies her as heir to Wales's Shirley Bassey. Her success in the Brit awards is a moment to savour, and wonder if Wales might just, after decades of self-deprecation, lay aside its victim culture and be recognised as a proud component of the United Kingdom.
To be Welsh in London has been to belong to a lost tribe. As a boy I was taken by my father to dark London Welsh chapels where I would sit uncomprehending through interminable sermons as he tried hopelessly to drill some roots into me. If this was Welshness, I wanted none of it.
In return, London regarded the tribe as composed of dairymen, teachers and dodgy politicians. While the Scots and the Irish had real countries to fall back on, and a noble sense of historical grievance, the Welsh had only rain-soaked misery and Dylan Thomas. As a result, they were in a perpetual sense of origin-denial.
While a Scots performer would never dare miss a date back home, it was said that if a Welshman kept a date in Cardiff, his friends would frown and say: "What's the trouble, Dai, things not going too well in London?"
Now the sun is shining on the valleys. Wales has recently produced a torrent of sporting and performing talent. Its rugby team, with antipodean help, has for the past two years been reinventing the tactics of the great game and sweeping all before it. The climactic career of Swansea's Joe Calzaghe left him as the only British boxing champion never to have been beaten.
From Bryn Terfel and Katherine Jenkins to Super Furry Animals, Charlotte Church and now Duffy, Welsh musicians no longer shed their Welshness and become British. Like Gavin and Stacey and the Llandewi sketch in Little Britain, they present their background as foreground. They sing in Welsh, adopt Welsh themes and perform in Wales. Duffy emerged from that most improbable of ethnic ghettos, Welsh channel 4.
Any visitor to modern Cardiff will attest that devolution, while nowhere near Scotland's state of detachment, has given the principality a sense of its own identity for the first time since union in 1536. Neil Kinnock might be its only recent contribution to national politics, meagre fare against the cohorts of Scots who poured south to seek their fortune under New Labour. But what Wales has lacked politically it is making up in its distinctive culture.
If only it could sell itself to the rest of Britain as other than an oppressed province, clinging to its financial dependency on Westminster and burying its identity in an obsession with bilingualism. This even has Welsh Monopoly with Mayfair as Cardiff Bay and Oxford Street, hilariously, as the Llyn peninsula.
To write a book on Wales as I have done is to feel the weight of resentment that an outsider should presume to do such a thing. Wales desperately needs the Scottish confidence that makes Edinburgh a great European capital and would not think of ruining the Highlands with turbines, as Wales is ruining the Cambrian mountains to win subsidy from an English parliament.
But with triumphs such as Duffy's, that day may come.
* Simon Jenkins's Wales is published by Penguin.
Reader views (5)
Keith Price, I think you mean Kiki Dee don't you? Elkie Brooks was in a band with Robert Palmer.
- Ruth, Hampton, 24/02/2009 14:15
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Always love a nice article about the Welsh, but surely Michael Howard (Llanelli) is/was a more impressive politician than Kinnock and Stereophonics deserved a mention.
- Ed, London, 21/02/2009 10:02
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Dull pub singer more like, Wales you can keep her......"
Don't call Elkie Brooks a dull pub singer, please. She once had a hit as Elton John's other half
- Keith Price, Luton, England, 20/02/2009 22:11
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Dull pub singer more like, Wales you can keep her......
- Andy, london, 20/02/2009 18:27
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Elkie Brooks would blow this singer out of the water.....
- Dave, london u.k, 20/02/2009 17:21
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