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It's the day after St. David’s Day so, really speaking, we should be waking with a headache after a night of celebrations for our teetotal, vegan patron saint.

“Gwnewch y pethau bychain” (do the little things) as the great man said.

Aside from the odd concert and parade in Cardiff and other towns as well as events in Wales Week in London, that’s exactly what most Welsh people will do to celebrate our national day - very little, beyond pinning the obligatory daffodil or leek to their lapel.

St. David’s Day is still not a Bank Holiday of course, and this year, it’s compounded by it falling during half term (last year it was wiped out by the Beast from the East!), so we haven’t even had the pleasure of the school eisteddfod with our kids dressing up in traditional costumes (I’m slightly ashamed to confess to a childish satisfaction to see the FAW shirts outnumber the WRU ones, at least in my daughter’s school).

But seriously, if we were Irish, there would be a whole calendar of craic planned for this weekend. Pubs and bars would be crammed with domestic and overseas tourists flocking to Swansea, Cardifff, Wrexham and Bangor to be part of the hwyl.

But they’re not, so it’s a good time to think about Wales’s existential crisis... again. I think I might have mentioned that before but no apologies, for this is desperate stuff.

If we’re not careful, Wales is in danger of transmogrifying into a runt nation, united by far less than that which divides us - geography, demography, transport infrastructure, economics, never mind politics, Brexit and language - and poorly served by a tired political class of public servants apologetic about ambition and lacking the hunger and drive to make us better.

I was thinking this week about the old Western Mail St. David’s Day essay competition for school pupils. We were always encouraged to enter and in some years, I did drag myself away from smashing a football against the garage door to scribble an underwhelming competition entry. My older sister was not just a better writer, but altogether more focused and imaginative and came away with a few “highly commendeds”, I recall.

My own innocently idealistic attempts to imagine a future Wales were uniformly positive and all about sport - Wales winning the World Cup (football, of course) or hosting an Olympics. As a young girl in Bridgend, I saw nothing fanciful about those futuristic dreams. This was not some exotic Shangri-La, a fantasy place never to be reached; it was an expectation that Wales would one day take its place on the world stage as a self-confident, successful nation.

Benedict Anderson talks about nations being imagined communities, and sport has certainly done its bit to assist with that caricature of Wales. A cruel analysis would say that Wales and us, its people, are an enduring contradiction.

Witness the celebrations last weekend after that tremendous victory over England in the Six Nations rugby. There is no lack of confidence of being a small (relatively) nation going toe-to-toe with a massive, wealthy neighbour, no shyness or trepidation about shouting from the treetops about our independent sporting identity.

The language, the imagery, the expectations, the hyperbole, the sense of history are all normal expressions of nationhood. But the thing is, we only seem to manage to popularise and legitimise it in rugby (and occasionally football).

After a week in which the chair of the Assembly’s External Affairs committee said that the strategic approach to Wales’s relationship with the rest of the world had “all too often” been “patchy and incoherent”, perhaps it’s time to resurrect a new grown-ups’ writing competition for next St. David’s Day, asking people to sketch their own images of a future Wales. The only conditions are that we agree some first principles of how Wales might be more comfortable in its own skin.

So, in the spirit of putting your money where your mouth is, here’s my future Wales:

We are one Wales, not north and south Wales (big or little ‘n’ or ‘s’), or west and east Wales. These are distinct regions of our diverse country.

Healthy regionalism and rivalry are a positive for any nation, but scorn and schism most definitely not.

Local governance in Wales is revamped, successful and internationally revered. The local tier is where many talented politicians now wish to ply their trade. Devolution didn’t stop at Cardiff; there’s been a real injection of authority for councils close to their citizens.

Power is diffused upwards and downwards simultaneously, with proper funds attached to ensure that important services like social care, libraries and sports centres are delivered according to the public’s high expectations.

Wales is a pluralistic nation. JS Mill argued that denying even false opinions was wrong because knowledge comes from the “collision [of truth] with error”. We respect everyone’s views here, even when we disagree vehemently with them.

That was one of the reasons that we changed our voting system to a proper system of Proportional Representation to elect Senedd members (it took us a ridiculous 20 years to acknowledge this institution as our national parliament, but at least it now has the nomenclature it deserves).

Using Single Transferable Vote with proper, legislative gender quotas built in, and including 16 and 17 year olds on the electoral roll means that all citizens and all views are properly heard.

UKIP and The Abolish the Assembly party were represented in the Senedd for a while, but their representatives lost their seats as the public tired of being told Wales was the only nation in the world which didn’t deserve its own parliament. There is now a mature discussion on the relative merits of independence versus devo max, and plenty engage with this debate, less from tribalism and more using hard evidence.

Wales is a feminist nation. Less of the old political rhetoric which was high on ambition and low on action. No, this is proper Nordic-style structural stuff.

Women (and some feminist men) are in control of the key finance offices, driving gender equality by borrowing from these European pioneers. Mainstreaming has ensured a gender perspective to all decision-making in Wales and, mindful of the centrality of women’s economic status as a driver for change, every policy is properly equality impact assessed and progress measured not by process, but by outcomes and improvements.

Wales is a self-confident nation with two official languages with equal status - both ancient, historic ones, with the potential to connect and unite but which, historically, had been manipulated by those scared to be different to divide and rule.

Our education system is truly bilingual and all citizens are helped to speak both languages. Over time, modern bilingualism has become the platform for enhanced skills and employability, for third and fourth language learning, whilst generating a significant boost in creativity and tourism.

Following the ambitious and pioneering legislation to protect the well-being of future generations back in the day, sustainable, equitable growth is at the heart of all we do.

We don’t let big business and lobbyists shortcut that commitment with the promise of short-term jobs or quick economic fixes. Attempts to undermine this principle are consistently called out by both the public and politicians.

Wales is now a nation of cyclists and walkers, urban spaces are redesigned and public transport journeys outnumber those by cars, even in rural areas.

We remain the proud sporting nation we always have been but, alongside the crazy, joyful celebrations when our national women’s and men’s football and rugby teams win on the world stage, there is serious investment in the physical literacy journey of our children, from pre-school into adulthood, meaning it is exceptional for citizens to be inactive or sedentary.

Our sporting role models are expected to help cascade their success (largely funded by the state after all), to demonstrate that size doesn’t matter; positivity, confidence and self-belief have no minimum dimensions.

Wales is now internationally lauded as an entrepreneurial, start-up location. The lifecycle of traditional over-dominance by the public sector has come to a natural end.

Small enterprises flourish in the micro-economies of rural Wales, mainly around green, adventure and cultural tourism, and organic food and drink; meanwhile, in the urban hubs, new micro-businesses in music, sport and the creative industries thrive.

Now that just might be the Wales we want.