One, two, three, eleven.

You may or may not be familiar with the works of The Swiss.  If you are, then the video above will - hopefully - bring a nostalgic smile to your deranged features.  The tippy-toed dance of Don't Meditate In Such a Way was the band's hallmark.  They would labour for hours over some of the most intense, uncompromising and mildly irritating music that could be created, unleash it on an unsuspecting public and, coup de grace delivered, would stand back and gauge the punters' reaction.

"I like the funny dance you do in that funny song", was far and away the most common comment on our work.

Ho hum.

We (for it was a band comprising Stewart Ford, Nigel Savage, Gareth Hamer and me) didn't mind though.  The band was envisaged as an antidote to the shoe gazing, self-important and largely humourless music scene we'd all had more than our fair share of.  We were serious about our music but had problems taking ourselves seriously.  You've got to enjoy yourself haven't you?

The Swiss, alas, are no more.  Or are they?  You can never tell with The Swiss; often no gigs happen for years at a stretch, and then, for reasons that are unknowable, suddenly a couple will come along at once.  However, Stew Ford, the main song writing force of the band is so utterly and unstoppably prolific that it is not long before more of his musical world leaks out into the open.  He has recently released a record of his own songs entitled Silence Is Golden.  It is a brilliantly intricate work that is very different from the apocalyptic sound of The Swiss; guitars are bell-like rather than guttural, rhythms dance rather than stampede.  You can recognise the Stewness though: guitar and bass parts woven together that, if untwined, would make no sense on their own, time signatures that are so devilishly complicated it's best not to think about them too hard.

Though think about them I must.  Stew is playing some of the songs off Silence Is Golden, and despite his immense, multi-instrumental talents, needs people to play the bits he hasn't got enough hands for.  So he asked some old Swissmen and Robin Mitchell - a trusted friend of the band and massively talented musician in his own right - to help him out.  This means that I've been doing a lot of counting to eleven recently...

Tightrope.mp3 by Stewart Ford

...and trying to replicate the mid-range growl of a Ford bassline. Not easy, I can tell you.  But refreshing to play music that challenges and makes me think.

The gig is at St. Paul's church, Coronation Road in Bedminster on Saturday 18th September. I think it starts at 6.30pm. Do come and help me count to eleven.

And, following the ancient Swiss custom when departing, I leave you with this:

Jake Hess and Turkey

A recent tweet and blog by journalist Johann Hari (follow him on Twitter: @johannhari101) alerted me of the plight of the journalist Jake Hess in Turkey.  He has been arrested and imprisoned for reporting on the situation of the Kurds at the hands of Turkey and Iran.  Having just been to Turkey and enjoyed it very much -- it truly is an astoundingly beautiful and evocative place -- the story resonated with me.  It seems crazy that we still have this situation in the 21st century, a situation where government interest and political gumpf take precedence over human needs and rights and the freedom to tell the truth about what is happening.  Although Turkey felt a modern and vibrant place to be, there are some draconian laws surrounding freedom of speech and some startlingly lax approaches to protecting the rights of their fellow human beings. You cannot criticise Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey; you can't use YouTube because it is censored by the authorities. This seems very much at odds to me with the image that Turkey wants to present to the world.


At the prompting of Mr Hari via Twitter, I decided to write the Turkish government a letter.  Please do the same if you feel stirred in the same way that I did.  I have copied my effort below.  The address to write to is contact@turkishembassy.org. 


Dear Sir/Madam,

Having recently returned from a holiday in your fabulously beautiful country, having experienced the warmth, generosity and hospitality of the Turkish people at first hand and loved every moment of it, I was shocked to read of the situation in which the respected American journalist Jake Hess finds himself in.  I cannot believe that a modern and respected country like yours would imprison a journalist merely for reporting about the situations of real people in real places.  Objectivity in journalism is not the same as supporting or sympathising with terrorism.  A journalist's job is to report on the situations that real people encounter and telling others about them.  Mr Hess is a freelance journalist and telling the stories of people in various situations and finding out more about them is what he does for a living.  Whether you like it or not, the world is aware of the plight of the Kurds and we all, as fellow human beings, have the right to learn more about it and offer support or criticism to them or to governments as we see fit.  It is for this reason that the work of journalists like Jake Hess is vital.  It may not always suit your country's wishes, but that's the way it goes sometimes; human interest should always trump political and ideological interest.

On my trip, I attended the Istanbul Modern art gallery.  I was inspired at the radical creativity and passion for life and art that I saw there.  If I'm honest, it took me by surprise to see the freedom and vigour with which the artists of your country expressed themselves, both women and men.  It challenged the preconceptions and stereotypes that live within me and in all human beings.  I cannot emphasise enough how sad I feel to have this feeling of inspiration and enlightenment crushed by the disappointment and frustration of the situation involving your government and Mr Hess.  Surely, you want to show the world that you are an open, progressive country that supports the ideas of truth and justice?

The idea that a respected and esteemed American journalist is involved with terrorism is a ludicrous one -- I believe he is being held at the Diyarbakir Anti-Terrorism Branch -- and your government should, if it has any semblance of the self-respect and integrity that I witnessed in many of its citizens in my recent trip, release Mr Hess immediately.

Yours faithfully,

Liam Owen.

Dear Internet using person,

May I begin with a warning? This post is the result of an uncharacteristic bout of insomnia, doubtless brought about from an orgy of sleep last night that was definitely brought about by a day spent vomiting after eating a dodgy burger the night before that. Strange how seemingly insignificant decisions come back to haunt you, isn't it? As a result of all of this sleep dysfunction, I've been thinking. Something that I am not particularly used to doing when I am normally sleeping. And I've been thinking about serious things. Not the usual wow-isn't-this-almost-quite-interesting, don't-you-hate-it-when, I-think-this-you-should-think-it-too, internet waffle that my fellow bloggers and I love to wallow in, but actual genuine key issues in my life. So if this all seems sanctimonious, self-indulgent and extraneous to your life, I can only apologise. Feel free to turn over whenever you lose interest. However, in the interests of getting this out of my head and hopefully being able to sleep at some point tonight (it's 2am), I am going to treat this post as a purely selfish cathartic exercise. There's nothing like getting naked in front of the entire potential readership of the World Wide Web for getting things into the open.

You may, perhaps, be familiar with the situation that my wife and I find ourselves in. A while back, my wife suffered abdominal pains that we dismissed at first. However, those pains didn't go away and eventually we trundled to see the doctor, who looked a bit solemn and said that we ought to go and get an ultrasound scan to see what was happening.  Yeah, whatever, we thought as we again trundled down to the BRI, indulging in some window shopping on the way.  We sat in the waiting room of the ultrasound place for ages, watching the throngs of teenage girls and pissed-off looking grandparents-to-be file in and out of the mysteriously out of sight room.  Eventually, our turn came and my wife disappeared off for her scan.  I must admit that at this point, I was actually a bit excited: what if she was pregnant?  We hadn't exactly been officially going for a family at this point - we hadn't got the stopwatches, thermometers and line graphs out yet if you know what I mean - but it was on the cards and we had abandoned all the traditional obstacles one places in the path of this possibility becoming a reality.  Perhaps this was the cause of the discomfort in my wife's belly?  After a few minutes, my wife came out of the scanning room clutching an unmarked envelope containing a letter, the contents of which were a mystery to us.  All we'd been told was that we had to take the note to ward 6.

Ward 6 was deep down the labyrinthine warren of BRI corridors.  We handed the note to a medically official looking person.  The atmosphere changed.  Suddenly, the people handling us where serious and efficient.  Killing time in a waiting room with everyone else was no longer on the agenda: we were shown to a hospital bed, and despite not knowing what was going on, my wife was invited to occupy it.  We were confused: if you're going into hospital you pack your pyjamas and your toothbrush.  You don't just turn up in the clothes you're standing in, completely materially and mentally unprepared for the whole ordeal.  However, being good British subjects, we obeyed without complaint.  My wife sat up on the bed and I sat on one of those plastic covered NHS chairs that positively suck the joy out of life.  Soon, a doctor arrived, full of calming reassurance and knowledge.  She told us that they thought there could be a problem and could she have a sample of urine to do a test on please.  My wife obliged and off it went to be tested.  Later, a nurse asked her if she knew she was pregnant.  No, we didn't.  Eventually, when they were sure, the doctors came and told us that there was a 'mass' in my wife's fallopian tube.  This was almost certainly an ectopic pregnancy, where a fertilized egg gets lodged and begins to develop in the wrong part of the body.  The only course of action was surgery as there was a good chance that the tube could rupture; a life threatening state of affairs.

"You were never pregnant," the consultant assured us.  "This is a mass of cells that could never have developed into being a baby".

This all happened in the space of maybe three hours.  Surgery - miraculous keyhole surgery at that - happened the next morning, successfully saving my wife's life and removing the 'mass' and the irreparably damaged fallopian tube it occupied.  In that moment, it felt like any other routine potentially life threatening medical situation - appendicitis perhaps.  The aftermath, however, has been pretty devastating.

Losing a fallopian tube seriously decreases your chances of getting pregnant naturally.  As a result of the scare, suddenly pregnancy became an issue in our relationship.  We saw doctors and I had to undergo the exciting experience of issuing a sperm sample to be tested for motility, vigour and general manliness.  The results weren't good.  In a crushing blow that no man can truly appreciate until he's encountered it, it became apparent that my sperm was laced with an antibody that attacked the sperms as though they were an invading agent, killing lots of them and further reducing the chances of natural conception.  The combination of fallopian tube shortages and sperm self-annihilation meant that our chances of getting pregnant without the assistance of science were now slim.  Our life was not what we presumed it to be.

When you're getting married, doing a job, buying a house and building a home, why are you doing it?  I have lots of friends that are following a 'calling' or path through life that doesn't involve procreation, but I'd have to say that the majority of people I know have starting a family at the back of their mind as they are doing their thing.  Unconsciously, my wife and I were following a path that we'd set out for ourselves.  We talked about families and joked about the stupid names we could call our kids and how I could take them to football and brainwash them into supporting Liverpool FC, teach them Welsh words, all that young couple nonsense.  It did not occur to us for one second that that may not be possible.  Looking back, I think we assumed we had a right to it.  It was a given.  It was certain.  In the space of a few hours, that assumption was blown into smithereens, liquidised before our very eyes.  It was no longer a given.  It was no longer our right.

But I realise now that it never was.  We in the Western world have a tendency to regard lots of things as being our right.  The right to free speech; the right to choose our leaders; the right to watch TV; the right to own stuff we want.  The truth is that this is a delusion.  Probably the most fundamental right I have is to exist, but no one can guarantee that I will continue to do so by the time I finish typing this sentence, let alone the post or the end of a fruitful and long life.  Nothing in this world can be guaranteed, a bald, bare-faced fact that we're not used to looking in the eye.  However, events like the one I described above force you to look that motherfucker right in the eye, and in so doing you have a choice:  You can either sink into self pity and build an elaborate cathedral of cosmic unfairness to hide yourself in, or you can get a grip, sort yourself out and face up to the reality of what one is entitled to in life.  I believe that there is only one thing that we can take for granted in this world: the love of God.  It's the only thing that everyone, every single person that has walked, is walking and will walk the face of this planet is guaranteed whether the like it, see it, feel it or not.  Be they good, bad, Christian, Muslim, straight or gay, I believe that to be true.  I happen to be a Christian, as does my wife, but the theology of God's love for Man tells me that that is almost irrelevant, because He'd love me just as much if I were an atheist.  God even loves Richard Dawkins, which must be difficult given the nasty things he's said about Him.  Despite the horrible stories of bigotry, intolerance and judgementalism you may hear about Christians, the idea that God loves every human equally is a cornerstone of our faith.  It's in the Bible, especially the bits with Jesus in.  Go and read it if you don't believe me.  John 3:16 is a good place to start.  (By the way, I'm not saying that you have to believe or agree with it, I'm just trying to explain what Christianity is all about as an antidote to the media poison that is liberally placed before us).

In other words, God loves his creation, his children.  I have no right to anything other than that love.

For various reasons - ethical and practical - we will not undergo IVF treatment.  We decided together that we didn't want to force the issue that much, that we wanted to come to terms with the situation and admit that certain things are out of our control.  This is, believe me, not an easy decision to make.  In times gone by, the pressure to have families was huge.  Look at the lengths Henry VIII went to, for goodness' sake. Nowadays, that pressure is subtler but still there.  We have more choice over what to do with our lives, but in the age of social networking and iPads, we're more exposed to what people are doing with theirs.  It's really hard to look at something like Facebook and see all your friends, family and colleagues having kids and sharing the experience when you, in all likelihood, cannot.  One feels great joy and genuine excitement for them, but seeing yet another murky ultrasound scan (remember that waiting room?) portraying a burgeoning foetus used as an avatar is a bitter pill to swallow.  It is painful, hurtful and above all, humbling.  I would never, ever stop people from telling us about their triumphs and happiness as new or expectant parents, but it is inevitable and healthy that we grieve our loss and circumstance.  And it makes you realise again that having a family is not a given, that nothing is certain.

Recently, we've been talking about adopting a family.  Man, that's difficult.  Will we qualify?  Will we cope? Will we bond with it?  Will it feel like second prize? It's a can of worms that we never expected to prize the lid off of.  Even thinking about adopting is painful because it makes us realise that there are unwanted, uncared for children in the world.  How messed up is that?  Especially when we and many other people really want to have children.  Hang on a minute...

Perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps we do have a right that should insist on in this world aside from the unquestioning, unwavering love of God.  We have a right to be parented, to be guided into the world and shown how to work it as best we can despite it and us being a bit broken and unpredictable.  Children should have the right to have parents; children should be able to depend on adults to guide them.  As a result, we as adults have a responsibility to provide that right to them.  It is our duty, just as God sees it as His duty to love us despite everything we get up to down here.  Maybe realising that was the point of this journey; in the hammer blows that have reigned down on us in these super-heated events, maybe that's the little pure bit of metal we're trying to separate from all the cak.

Coming from good Liverpudlian stock, I like to sabotage my own earnestness with banality at every opportunity. In keeping with that tradition, I'll finish by quoting the Rolling Stones on this topic:


No, you can't always get what you want.
You can't always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes,
You just might find,
You get what you need.



Oh yes.  Woo.

Time for bed.

Zulu - Men of Harlech

What could be down there..?

View Larger Map

See that track? Try and peer through the trees.  Is this the way to Narnia? A mysterious glade perhaps, shrouded with myth and legend?

Sort of.

I used to live there when I was a kid, from about 1983 to 1997.  Down there is Felin Fforest, a small house by a derelict mill in a forest, as the name explains perfectly if you understand a bit of Welsh.  The mill was pretty much a pile of stones, but I found a stone that had 'J. Owen, 1905' engraved on it.  Whoever J. Owen was, he had the same initial and surname as my mum.

When I was a little kid, Felin Fforest was the best place in the universe.  No end of adventures could be had here.

In the seemingly endless woods, one could build swings and eco-friendly model villages out of twigs and moss, although the sheep will invariably eat the village and it's villagers, creating Sheepzilla mayhem.

The stream beneath the bridge you're standing on is the Pibwr, a tributary of the Cothi river so insignificant that most maps don't bother to show it.  This is a stream you can swim in, jump in, race sticks in, wee in, do whatever little boys want to do when they see a river.

Behind the house beyond these trees, the hills are absolutely flawless sledging surfaces in the unfailingly snowy winters and in summer they provide no end of opportunity for wargames and hide and seek.

Felin Fforest was a self-contained utopia for a 10 year old boy and his mates.

However, for a teenager it was not so idyllic.  I desperately wanted to be playing and hearing new music, meeting girls, finding out about the world and this was not the place to be doing any of that.  All there was were sheep, trees, water, moss.  I couldn't wait to get out and seek my fortune in a properly concreted over place.  Like everyone I knew, I passed my driving test at the first possible moment and bought a cheap car to escape to the bright lights of Carmarthen - a forty minute drive away - whenever I wished to.  The urban, golden paved potential of Swansea was the stuff of dreams, a Shangri-La impossible to hold in one's imagination...

Well, not quite.  Looking at it now though, I'm more inclined to side with the 10 year old me than the 16 year old me.  Now I live in a city, can see and do whatever I like whenever I like, I'd quite like to go back to Felin Fforest and build a model village and wait 'til the sheep come and unleash a ruminant apocalypse.  It beats litter and queuing and dust and black bogeys.

As I'm sure those very same sheep would tell us, the grass is always greener wherever and whenever we are not.

Do feel free to explore using the quite remarkable Google street view thingy. Brechfa is about a mile up the road to the South West.  If you fancy a pint or a bit of mountain biking, Abergorlech, three miles in the opposite direction, is the place for you.  Alternatively, you could look for Gwernogle and Llanfihangel-Rhos-Y-Corn to the north for some really wild living.  (I had a friend up there who's track to the house from the tiny road was about two miles in length).  Hwyl!

Square peg? Meet the round hole.

Ever tried to eat soup with a fork? Or perhaps eat peas with a knife?   Some musical instruments aren't designed to be played in certain ways.  My instruments, the electric bass and the double bass, define how they could be played by their size, shape and sound.  The bass has a very specific role in most music and doesn't often stray too far from it, especially the double bass, usually because of the ergonomic issues that come rolled into the bass package.  However, there sometimes comes along a player that shows scant regard for such issues and choose to play their instrument any darned way they like, flying in the face of received wisdom and tradition.  The chap in the video above is a great example of this pioneering attitude.  I've previously posted on the mind boggling complexity of Giant Steps as written and performed by John Coltrane.  Obviously, Coltrane was thinking of the tenor saxophone when he wrote the tune.  At least I'd imagine he was; he may have been writing at the piano or another similar instrument.  I am sure, though, that he was not thinking of the pedal steel.  Without a doubt, the pedal steel was not an instrument Coltrane was thinking about.  Playing Giant Steps on the pedal steel is just silly.  But this man is Dave Easley and he decided not to worry about such trivialities and give it a whirl.  Go Dave.


And while I'm thinking about instruments being forced, kicking and screaming, into realms for which they are ill-equipped to survive, check out Joe Pass and Neils Henning Orsted Pederson playing Donna Lee by Charlie Parker.  It is mental.  This represents a truly astonishing piece of virtuoso playing from both musicians, but for me the prize for ridiculously triumphing over ergonomic adversity must go to Neils Henning Orsted Pederson.  For him to be playing this melody on the big 'ol bull fiddle can perhaps be compared to winning the Olympic gold medal for horse dressage on an elephant.  The only hope I have of emulating NHOP's playing is by nuturing a whispy beard and a 70s distant look of being on the edge of enlightenment.  I shall now retire chastened into my box of musical conformity...

Bend me, shake me, anyway you want me...

In the hit parade of the most spoken languages on Earth, English comes in at number 2 with a whopping 328 million speakers. Mandarin Chinese is sitting pretty in the number 1 spot with the smug air of Bryan Adams humming 'Everything I Do', or whatever it was called. And, when you have 845 million speakers, more than double that of English, you can afford to be somewhat smug. English, however, is locked in a bitter tussle with Spanish to retain the number 2 spot. It seems that the figures are debatable in the extreme, as I am sure is true of anything that is counted in such high numbers, and depending on who you believe, Spanish could be number 2 rather than the number 3 that it gets on Wikipedia. It depends on who's doing the counting. I tend to take Wikipedia as irrefutable truth - why the hell shouldn't I? - and so, for the sake of my arguments here it is the main source of information. If you think the figures are wrong, that's fine; let's not argue about a few million speakers here and there.

If we define 'speak' as being able to convey ideas, intentions and emotions with a reasonable degree of competence and efficiency, I speak two languages: English and Welsh. English is very much my first language, my mother tongue. Welsh is my secondary language; it is not the language used in my home but I used it frequently as a child and young adult until I moved to England in the late 90s. The point of interest that has burgeoned this post was first raised in the discussion to a blog post written by Carl Morris regarding the comments of Janet Street-Porter on the Welsh language. To paraphrase, Street-Porter claimed that Welsh had 'no words for anything modern', a comment which is, of course, a load of pungent and bigoted nonsense. Anyway, Carl and the commentators cover the ridiculousness of this regrettably very common notion that Welsh is a somehow backward and antiquated language that cannot cope with the modern age and therefore has to awkwardly borrow words from its neighbour. I have many times heard the theory that Welsh simply appropriates English words to fill gaps in its vocabulary. Usually this theory is offered by monoglot English speakers which makes it ironic in the extreme. Surely no language in the history of human communication has borrowed, plundered and annexed vocabulary as English has done to suit its needs. Surely, then, a bilingual Welsh speaker is allowed to dip into English to fill a specific hole in his or her native vocabulary?

Which brings me onto the real reason I'm here. In the debate on the capability of Welsh in the modern age, I began to think about the dominance of English generally. OK, English may only be second (or third) in the big count of native speakers, but I'd be prepared to wager a great deal that if we include those that speak some English as a second or foreign language, the young, upstart bastard of a tongue from Northern Europe would easily sit atop the hit parade. It is the lingua franca of a mind numbing amount of arenas. It is the common tongue of the wide variety of peoples in the British Isles as well as the present and former colonies (most notably the USA and Australia) of the British Empire. It is the official language of worldwide air traffic control and the unofficial lingua franca of business, economics, and science. In fact, all notable scientific journals are published in English. (While I'm thinking about it, isn't the term lingua franca deliciously ironic, given the barely contained irritation of French speakers at the perceived dominance of English).

I've seen Spanish speakers communicate with German speakers using English. When I visited India this year, I very rarely had problems communicating with people of all walks of life when using English. In the same country, I was fascinated to see Tamil and Hindi speakers converse in English.

How did English come to find itself in this position? There are a number of commonly given theories:

1. Lazy English monoglots
2. The British Empire
3. The American economy and media

I am going to discount theory 1 immediately because I actually think that the idea of native English speakers generally being too lazy or ignorant to learn to communicate in other languages and therefore forcing others to use the language to speak to them is a myth. Sure, it will be true of a few individuals, but it is also true of many individuals from many countries. The Italians, for example, are particularly famous for their reluctance to learn or use other languages. And if you get to roll beautiful Italian sounds around your mouth every day, why would you bother to speak another language? Italian is not a lingua franca of anything much outside of Italy and hasn't been since it's grandad Latin fell out of favour. So, no; I don't think the lingua franca status of English is resultant of the laziness of those for whom it is the mother tongue.

Theory 2 is far more compelling an explanation for the widespread use of English. Without the British Empire's determinedly entrepreneurial and often violent expansion, would English be a global language? Well probably not, but I don't really like 'What if?' history, because we'll never really know so let's not bother wasting time thinking about it. Anyway, there have been some other pretty formidable empires in the modern era. Take the USSR. It's common language was, of course, Russian. What language would you use to do international business with a member of a former USSR country? That's right. English.

The British Empire undoubtedly brought English to the four corners of the globe and you can see its influence most keenly in India, where English unites cultures and tongues that are otherwise utterly different. However, the British Empire also, at one time, contained the New World, or, as it now more commonly known, the United States of America. Which leads us nicely onto point 3.

The effect of American culture on the rest of the world is significant to say the least. Hollywood has spread its creations across the whole world, to the point that you could probably share a knowledge of the works of Arnold Schwarzenegger with remote Mongolian tribes. However, again I am not sure that this influence is why English is so resolute a global language. While the films of Hollywood are seen around the world, most non-English speakers watch them with soundtracks dubbed into their native language. I once spoke to a Spanish lady that remembered vividly the moment she realised that Sean Connery was not Spanish. As far as I know, she is still coming to terms with Connery's famous Scottish accent. So perhaps the effect of American culture is more our experience than that of speakers of other language.

Of course, all of these three points were and are very important when one thinks about the spread of the English language beyond the borders of England. Indeed, without any one of them, perhaps English would not be a global language. But, for me at least, English would not have been adopted as a ligua franca for anything if it didn't do the job very well. The fact of the matter is that English can cope with a mind-bendingly diverse range of situations. The bastard, mongrel nature of its conception 1500 years ago means that it was born adaptive and agile. It emerged as a lingua franca for the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes that were terrorising the slightly less agressive, slightly more curmudgeonly Celts on the island of Britain in the 5th century or thereabouts. Their tongues were similar enough to share information about how to get rid of Celts most efficiently and they quickly melded into a distinct dialect.

(It is notable how little influence the Celtic languages had on early English, something that seems to point to how total and effective the Scandinavian ethnic cleansing of what was to become England was. Like all things Dark Ages Britain, this is hotly debated and disputed but it seems to make sense to me; if the invaders settled and integrated peacefully, surely more words with Brythonic origins would exist in English today).

This new language of English existed happily enough in a North Sea focused culture alongside their Scandinavian parents until 1066 and all that. Ironically, the invaders were themselves Scandinavian, although their language had merged with that of the Franks. They were, of course, the Normans and they also brought with them an unparalleled mastery of the arts of aggressive territorial expansion, with an emphasis on the word aggressive. Their particular brand of French/Norse was immediately installed as the official language of governance and aristocracy, and the totalitarian nature of this new ruling class meant that English in its oldest form could not survive as it was. Within a few hundred years, English was again melding with other languages to form a new distinct language.

For the last 4 or 500 years, the vocabulary of the old bastard language has expanded exponentially. From the Elizabethan era onwards, words have been loaned, borrowed and coined with a relish almost totally unique to English. The OED now estimates there to be more than 600,000 words, with an estimated 25,000 words being added to the language every year. That's not too many less words than the entire vocabulary of French added to the language every year (the best guess I can find was that French had about 35,000 words at its disposal). This, then, is truly a language that can flex, bend and adapt to any circumstance. It can incorporate new words and grammar rules into itself with the ruthless efficiency of the Borg assimilating a culture into the hive. As a result, English is a language that you can bend a long way in lots of directions without it breaking. You can mutilate and distort it and still be understood where other languages would break under the strain. This also makes it an easy language to learn, but an incredibly frustrating and difficutl language to master. Teaching 10 year olds to get a grip on their mother tongue is an infinitely difficult job, believe me. Our spelling system is, quite simply, nuts. You try to explain why trough, through, and plough all share -ough but don't rhyme. Or indeed have any of the sounds you'd expect with those letters involved. Or why we say that there are 5 vowels which are a, e, i, o and u and that all words have vowels in them and then give out sky, by. and try as our weekly spelling test words. English is a conglomeration language that is constantly enforcing grammatical rules and spelling systems from at least five different ancient languages. The only good thing about all of this is that it's hard to be utterly wrong when you speak English; even educated native speakers can argue for hours about definitive uses of English and still not be able to agree. My pathetically puny endevours to speak Croat when travelling through the Balkans were met with absolute bemusement until I realised that I had a word order wrong and an accent stressed incorectly. English would have no problem with this; Croatian imploded into a meaningless string of utterances.

The fact is that I can listen to an English learner absolutely murder my native tongue and break pretty much every rule they thought they knew, and yet still be able to glean their meaning. English is the language equivalent of a green sapling in a storm: it will bend without breaking when more rigid, brittle saplings snap. Surely this is why it is the pre-eminent global language? If it didn't work, the world wouldn't have bothered using it and found something else. We're just lucky that we already know it; what a privilege that is.

Returning to the hit parade of languages, Welsh, my other language comes in at number 266, just behind Ancash Quechua and just ahead of Songe. This means that in linguistic terms, the Welsh are slightly less influential than they are in global football terms, which is pretty bad to be honest. I like the dual state of being able to speak a global language and a language so obscure to the rest of the world it was used as a code to guard sensitive information in the Second World War. A language so prevalent I can chat happily to a beggar in Mumbai in it and another so rare that the Ewoks use snippets of it in Return of the Jedi and no one notices. I enjoy that!