HE looked at me in astonishment when I told him.

"What!" he said disbelievingly, "They watch England?"

"Yes."

"But… England?"

As I helped scoop up Cristobal's jaw off the floor, his reaction cast my mind back to my travels through Latin America when – as I increasingly mastered Spanish – I would tell the Latinos about my land, my patria, my 'country'.

And just as I had told my student Cristobal about how hordes of Welshmen – particularly south Walians – prefer to watch England play international football than watch their own Wales, it always got the same shocked reaction.

Yes, I said, there are even people who throw their support behind Liverpool and Manchester United before batting an eyelid at their own city's team slogging away in a lower division.

This has on many occasions caused me to think that we must be the only race of people on earth with this questionable trait.

Could you imagine Australians willing Kiwis on to victory? The French chanting for the good of the English? The Russians saluting a fine German performance with a straight vodka, a revolver and a bullet? The Mexicans doing a wave for their North American cousins? Chileans cheering on the Argentineans in a World Cup semi-final?

Never!

It's this dual-personality disorder, this 'us' and 'them' jokey manner, this 'we' when it suits us Welshness that I find bizarre and confusing. Why in one breath we show the world we are British and wear our Liverpool and Chelsea shirts with pride, but in the next we are hanging a dragon towel from a crummy Benidorm apartment or mopping up our tears when we defeat those the other side of Offa's Dyke?

And when I mention the language issue – which history and the Union has a lot to answer for – it also gets the disbelieving looks I have become accustomed to.

I freely admit to my students that I am ashamed that I cannot speak Welsh (but I am now learning my mother tongue across the distance thanks to the internet; and by God, dw i'n hoffi dysgu Cymraeg!).

I go a shade of red as I stand up before them explaining myself like a naughty school boy.

Some sympathise because local languages have declined in South America too.

But Welsh isn't a just a local language; it was once the fabric that bound our forefathers.

The students and Chileans I meet have so many questions that I can't clearly answer without recourse to history books, fact-finding on the internet or heavy soul searching.

Why isn't Wales independent? Don't the people care? Why don't they speak their own language? How do the people really feel about living under another country's government? Do they teach Welsh history in the schools? (That would change things! they say) Why isn't Wales on the Union flag? Aren't you a real country, then? Surely, the people must care?

These inquisitive people live in third world countries, sometimes small and under-developed to the point of bare feet and shack houses.

They haven't got our stadiums, our Ipods, our Olympic pools, our two holidays-a-year.

But you'll never find them lacking in national pride; never lacking in a desire to rise up from their problems and say who they are; never lacking in a knowledge of their country's history; never lacking in an awareness of their historical and contemporary identity. And certainly never lacking in a will to change the here and now of their national politics – their future as a country, a real country.

And they don't need a tattoo to show it.

Their questions have caused me to question my existing beliefs many times. And more the thankful I am for it. But the painful truth is that we are not a country – more of a region, a principality, an infrequent holiday home to centuries of Princes who cared little for the place or people.

The EU map makers wiped us off their books completely just a few years ago.

Even from a good Scottish friend of mine – an ardent Celtic supporter and fellow English teacher (there's a joke in there somewhere) – I get bemused looks when I tell him of how at Swansea's ground you will hear anti-English chants and then look around to see a few Union flags amongst the multitude of Welshmen and women.

''Yer canny be serious, Jamie?'' he says.

But I am.

And it is something I cannot explain.

I still have far more questions than answers.