1 Welsh valley villages are only found in Wales… although there is rumoured to be a little-known community called Cwmbackhome in the French Pyrenees thought to be populated by Welsh football fans who failed to return home from the 2016 Euros. (Reports of Welsh villages in Patagonia are elaborate lies made up by S4C film crews anxious to jet off on a jolly to South America to make fictional documentaries).
2 Welsh valley villages are generally found on the side of mountains, although there are several special ‘pretend’ villages in our cities for people who are posh and don’t like walking up hills.
3 Welsh valley villages were invented by Gren and populated entirely by cartoon characters and sheep.
4 A Welsh valley village must have a boarded-up pub, rugby pitch and clubhouse, Spar, drug dealer, a chapel converted to flats, a school under threat of closure and several houses joined together.
5 Tribalism is very important and every valleys village has two sworn enemies… the villages either side of it.
6 A true Welsh valley village has at least 3 streets with gradients of 1 in 10 where wheelie bins have to be parked at 90 degrees angles to the kerb to prevent them from rolling away.
7 Every Welsh valley village has someone whose grandmother once snogged Tom Jones behind the social club.
Welsh cultural historian Dai Yesterday told Walesoncraic, ‘The first Welsh valley villages were built ages ago, before the council stuck their noses into planning, so they are all to fuck.
‘They decided to build them on hillsides so that all the shit would roll away into the river below; that’s why you always have the big posh houses on the top of the village.
‘They have enjoyed a boom of late thanks to the media flocking to them to report on how crap life is there. This has resulted in an influx in earnings thanks to the ransom money paid for their safe return. This only backfired once when one local gang, The Terry Cobner Terrace Crew, had to pay the Western Mail a fiver to take their reporter, Tefion Typo, back.’
