麻豆约拍

From the Reverend Richard Coles:

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鈥淒o you fancy accompanying some old crooner who鈥檚 coming on the programme?鈥� asked a radio producer the other week. Why not? I said, and agreed. And so I found myself, live last Saturday morning, sitting at a keyboard poised to play for Sir Bryn Terfel, perhaps the greatest operatic bass-baritone in the world today.

To add to my discomfiture, as you may have deduced from his name, he is Welsh - a Welsh-speaking Welsh farmer鈥檚 son from the Welsh heartland of Carnarfonshire - and you don鈥檛 get more Welsh than that (although your line up this morning isn鈥檛 far off, Chris).

The problem is when I hear Welsh voices singing, I lose my composure. A Male Voice Choir - blub. Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer at a funeral - blub. I was once watching the rugby on telly, fifty thousand people singing Calon Lan, and they cut to a close up of a little girl dressed as a leek - heaving, heaving sobs

I don鈥檛 know why. Does it mean I have some lost Welsh heritage, ancestors up a black hill or down a green valley, a string of DNA that vibrates with hiraeth? But no, I鈥檓 English, through and through.

So sing your own songs, you may say; stick a rose in your cassock and three lions on your shirt.

I hesitate. Not because I don鈥檛 love my country - I do, deeply - and there鈥檚 nothing more English than a country parson in a Morris Minor cabriolet, driving very slowly down cow-parsley fringed back roads, with a quarter mile tail back behind him of people trying to get home for the kick off. No, it鈥檚 just that too often our flags and songs have been used not to celebrate us, but to denigrate others.

One of the reasons I love the World Cup is that it can get round that, and we can fly the cross of St George, and pronounce Engerland with three syllables, and feel that we鈥檙e coming together rather than falling apart.

鈥業 vow to thee my country all earthly things above鈥� - not quite Calon Lan, but it's not bad - actually takes us somewhere else, another country, where her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace. Wouldn鈥檛 mind some of that coming home.