Georgia, Wales and Europe

[fpb]

This is something that occurred to me a few years ago, when Russia shamefully assaulted Georgia. Georgia is a small, distant country, with its own alphabet and its own church, and a language that nobody else in the world can understand. And yet, from everything I could see of it on the screen, I knew that I felt at home there. And I realized that there are certain things - the villages in green valleys, clustered around their own church with a spire to tower over them - that say "Europe", and that say "home", to me, as much as if they bore the brand. Europe is an enormous thing made of little, stubborn things, small countries and scattered towns and a dense network of villages and churches and town halls and farmhouses; but these things are the same, from Lisbon to the Caucasus and from Malta to Norway. They speak the same language, and welcome a traveller in the same way. I feel that any right-thinking European should love little lands and local loyalties, villages draped across valleys and cities full of churches and steeples, just because they all are, in a fundamental way, his own. And so it is, and may it for ever be, with the green mountains and white chapels of Wales; not just for its own sake, but because it enlarges, ennobles and enriches that whole culture that is our real home on this earth.