If it feels slightly ridiculous, good.
So is believing.
So is hope.
About
UnofficIal Cymru
Johnny and his world is from a dream, the kind you wake up mourning, then spend the next night trying to return to. It is for the people who still feel the old electricity in Welsh rugby, even when the table says otherwise. For the ones who know the game is bigger than a result in Cardiff, bigger than a season, bigger than whoever’s currently in charge. What you wear when the anthem catches in your throat and you do not quite know why. It’s a quiet conspiracy. A signal. A bit of cloth that says: I remember what this can be. If it feels ridiculous, good. Because remember, the best of life is.
Ridiculous means you’re close to the living bit. The joy that can’t be optimised. The love that ignores shame. The ideas that run before they walk.
Ridiculous is life.
And how lucky are we to get the chance to be part of it.
The things that don’t make sense, that feel embarrassing, or risky. That’s life. That’s the door creaking open.
Johnny Wyn Williams
The sort of name that turns up halfway through a story in a pub, and nobody argues with it.
Cardi boy. Ex-international. A No. 8 who kicked penalties, because he felt like it. A forward with a boot like a church bell and the nerve to use it. He did not play the game “properly”, which is why people still talk about him. He made the pitch feel a bit haunted.
Then he hung up his boots. Not in a grand announcement. More like a someone leaving a room when the music changes.
These days, Johnny makes things. Marks. Symbols. Shirts. Bits of armour for ordinary life. He designs like he’s trying to remember something important and drag it back into the light.
Some people reckon he never existed.
That’s fine. The feeling did.
Johnny’s World
Wales is a country of nests.
Every pitch is a dragon’s nest, from the smallest muddy touchline behind a school in Llangwm, to a sell out Llandovery. Some nests are small and fierce, the kind that bite before they breathe. Some are big and heavy with history, built from old songs, old bruises, tough winters.
And above them all is the heart-nest in Cardiff: the Principality, the great bowl of stone and thunder. That is where the main dragon sleeps.
Right now, the dragon is unmotivated. Unprovoked. Uninspired.
The system is restructuring. The fan base is torn. Generations are shifting. But in Johnny’s world, the answer is not to stare harder at Cardiff and hope. The answer is to light the beacons everywhere else.
Because the Cardiff dragon does not wake on its own. It wakes when the smaller dragons wake first. When villages and towns feed their nests. When clubs become proud again. When supporters do not only celebrate the try in Cardiff, but tend the fire in their own ground, their own community, their own terrace.
When other nations come, they should not arrive thinking “What an honour.” They should arrive thinking, “This place is sacred.”
Not in cruelty. In seriousness. To play here should feel like entering a sacred dojo. Dark, lit by oil lamps and candles. Staff and stewards like shards of the dragon’s armour. The whole place making one statement: you are in our nest now.
And above the pitch, in the mind’s eye, the dragons of Wales hover over Cardiff like storm clouds with wings.
That is the dream. That is the dare.
Contributors
Printed in Llandysul by 23Ink
Screen printers in Llandysul rooted in community projects, run by Richard Sterry. Rich uses waterbased inks and aims for the ethical decisions, locally and globally.
Sewing by Mandy Tucker
The first person to basejump from the Eiffel tower.
Once a pilot for planes holding 40+ skydivers.
A seamstress repairing motorcycle leathers for racers like herself.
Now returned home to west wales and helping us create the relics.
Mandy is real.