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How can you tell what makes us love Wales in 140 Characters?

Taken from - http:///www.cerddcymru.com/

"Cerys Matthews, is curating the WOMEX Opening Concert on 23 October. This will be a journey through some 30,000 years of Wales’s story, from Paviland to the present, tracing our music roots and musical traditions. She is leading the campaign to get the Nation asking ‘What is Wales’.
"I think it’s time to ask the people of Wales to tell us what they think are the things that set us apart, that make this amazing country of ours unique. Distilling such a big question into 140 characters is a tall order I know, but challenging and interesting none the less."
Please add your comments below in our comments section in up to 140 characters, or join the Twitter conversation using #whatiswales or #bedicymru for Welsh tweets".

Well just the heading to this article took 60 characters to form so I would not get anything in 140 characters.

The reason for the brevity is because of Twitter- the sister of Facebook and the fact that our lives are now processed by a machine. Machines that could destroy everything I love about Wales.

We are now being brought down to bite size pieces – bytes in fact – so that the computer can handle us proficiently and make no mistakes.

You see I am Welsh, I am a Celt and because of that I am a thinker.

What I love about Wales is that you can look out on the mountains and the valleys from strategic points and think you are the only person on earth. Our vistas are second to none and those who live here or away from here and feel the ‘hiraeth’ know exactly what I mean. It is a call for the land of your birth, a calling from the rolling valleys and hills which gave you your life’s blood and the people in it who gave you their time.

The man I spoke to on the bus and the one I spoke to on the train did not cut me short after 140 characters, they gave to me their precious time which is what I love about Wales.

There is a legend which to me epitomizes the Welsh identity or shall we call it ego and I relate it here for your perusal.

When the Norman Kings took over this island King Henry 11 rode into Wales to seize the spoils. The Welsh people assembled, hundreds of them, to see the strangers. But the Norman King wished to speak to the leaders, the Kings and Princes, not the rabble. The motley crowd of Welshmen stood in front of the Norman contingent, who were resplendent in their armor and fancy clothing and war horses. King Henry 11 scoured the plainly dressed hordes confronting him and called his aide to his side to give him instructions. The aide called out, all those with royal blood in their veins please stand to the left. The whole horde moved across to the left. No! No! He blustered then shouted out again, all those with royal blood in their veins stand to the right. The whole horde moved back to the right and one small woman stood to the front of the crowd looked up at the king and said, “ just because my cows are not as fat as yours does not mean I have no royal blood in my veins.

This is the difference between the Norman and the Celt, materialism.

Your Celt is your dreamer, your poet, your vagabond, he is your inventor, your artist, your inspiration and your lover, but he is not your underling and materialism does not drive him.

A Scottish friend once told me, and he might be right, that the Scots are far more fierce than the Welsh because their hills are far more rugged and severe, like the people. Here in Wales, like the Irish we have gentler hills, and perhaps gentler ways.

One hundred of the best tweets will be put up for the WOMEX event in Cardiff, One hundred times one hundred and forty characters or less which will be a maximum of fourteen thousand characters. When you realize that so far on this page I have used close to five thousand characters, there is not much room to say what Wales means to 3 million people.

No the last thing the Celt would enter into would be a curtailment of his excesses, a putting him in a box of 140 characters, he would prefer to stay in his hills, make his own music and look at his country, the land of his birth and hope that his fellow countrymen would listen to the wandering minstrel tell his stories at their hearth for a bowl of the finest Welsh cawl which would set him up for another day.

You cannot do that in 140 characters.