I grew up in Shropshire, but I was born in Wales. There was a hospital seven miles away, but my dad drove 45 miles over the Welsh border so I could play rugby for Wales. But as a skinny asthmatic, I was only ever good at swimming.
I've always felt very proud of Wales and being Welsh. People are a bit surprised when I say I'm Welsh. I was born in Wales, went to school in Wales and my mother was Welsh. I'm Welsh. It's my place of birth, my country.
Everyone I know is fervently proud to be Welsh but you try not to be preachy about it. It's difficult at times. But when I go home to north Wales, or to somewhere I've never been in south Wales, I still feel at home because I'm in Wales. It's hard to explain.
I see myself as a different sort of Welsh. Because we are from Cardiff, we see Wales as Cardiff. This is Wales; outside Cardiff is beyond. It's a strange one. You are really Welsh, but you're not, if you know what I mean.
You can drive 1,000 miles across America and find yourself, whereas if you drive a few miles from Slough you're in London anyway, or you hit Wales and you're in another country! Also, wherever you are in England it's still raining.
I was born in Wales but I'm not Welsh - I'm English.
We've sent a man to the moon and that's 29,000 miles away. The center of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away. You could drive that in a week but for some reason nobody's ever done it.
There was never a question of who I was going to play for. The English showed a bit of interest, but I was born in Wales raised in Wales so there was never any doubt about that.
People can be really famous in Wales for rugby, but outside of Wales nobody really has a clue who you are or what you've done.
every seven miles, in America, there is at least one McDonald's. Not a hospital, mind you, or a police station, but a McDonald's, every seven miles. I mean, that's sort of scary, if you think about it.
I can be a friend from a million miles away. I can play basketball in China. The only thing I can't do is be a father. I missed my kids' first basketball game. I missed birthdays. I can talk to you from a million miles away, but I was missing the dad part of life.
When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research 'Here Be Dragons,' I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe.
It's funny because when you're a Welshman living in England, you always get the mickey taken out of you for being Welsh, and then when you go to Wales with an English accent because you were born in Bristol and grew up in Birmingham, they say you're English. You can never win.
It was a proof of Welsh good nature: so long as I had a friend that knew and could introduce me, the whole Welsh people would do anything to entertain, and would even neglect their business to do so. But as a stranger in Wales, it is difficult to break through their suspicion and mistrust.
When I was 2, we moved into an imposing country mansion 8 miles west of Cardiff, Wales.
When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.
There's one part of the forest in Wales, it's like a natural bowl, and when we drove into it last time, it was getting dark. And as you came over the hill you could see fireworks being set off, the whole place was lit up and you could see this huge crowd all jumping up and down and cheering.