When I've told people that my new book examines the turbulent history of English attitudes to Wales and all things Welsh, the reaction tends to be a sharp little intake of breath and a comment along the lines of, "Well, that's a brave choice of topic. Are you ready for the flak?"

Well, yes, I am.

As an Englishman who has fallen head over heels in love with this fierce, fantastic little country, who has been writing about it (as co-author of the Rough Guide to Wales amongst other things) for the past 15 years and who has lived here for seven years, the topic seems to me an obvious - and an absolutely fascinating - one.

Wales, it is often said, was England's first colony and is fairly likely to be its last.

The people who write this kind of tosh usually think that they are the first to come up with such a pithy put-down - you can practically hear them howling with laughter at their own originality and wit Mike Parker on English attacks on Wales

Global forces, of large, expansionist cultures slap next to small, vulnerable ones are crystallised perfectly in this ancient relationship, one that has been rumbling along ever since Offa's Dyke - that 8th Century equivalent of quick-growing leylandii trees between squabbling neighbours - was built.

The idea for the book came when I was reading some snide aside about the Welsh language in one of the London Sunday broadsheet newspapers, something along the lines of: "Welsh has no vowels and sounds like someone spitting".

It dawned on me that I'd read such comments many times before, when researching Welsh history, and that the same tired old cliches were passed down from generation to generation, like a particularly tiresome game of Chinese whispers.

MIKE PARKER'S LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR TOUR 14 Feb: London Welsh Centre 15 Feb: Waterstones, Cardiff 22 Feb: Palas Print, Caernarfon 2 Mar: National Library, Aberystwyth

Unfortunately, the people who write this kind of tosh usually think that they are the first to come up with such a pithy put-down; you can practically hear them howling with laughter at their own originality and wit.

Writing this book has been my way of showing them for the intellectual retards that they generally are: inheritors of a long line of blatant racism, rather than the purveyors of anything particularly useful, original or illuminating.

To that end, I've taken a variety of subject areas and attempted to dig deep into the well of comments made about them over the centuries.

Is more than the Severn Bridge needed to unite the nations?

There are obvious flashpoints, such as the Welsh language (dismissed regularly as ugly, dead or the secret tongue of extremists) and the Welsh character (shifty, verbose, unentrepreneurial and oversexed!), but there are many less flagrant examples too.

Even the Welsh landscape, something marketed these days as the perfect antidote to urban English stresses, has, over the years, been on the sharp end of many withering put-downs from across the border, especially when it has given commentators an opportunity to conflate its perceived shortcomings with those of the Welsh people as a whole.

The book isn't one long rant, however. As is so often the case, the best response to ignorance and bullying is humour, and there's much that's really very funny about this ancient grumble.

I've tried to include a wide cross-section of source material, from cartoons in the Fleet Street papers, my own experiences on the stand-up comedy circuit, from 18th Century "Tours of the Picturesque" to the novels of Niall Griffiths and the contemporary property and tourism industries.

It's been an absolute revelation (and a huge amount of fun) researching and writing this book; I hope that it will be so too for its readers.