"O Captain! My Captain!"

Josh Navidi is captaining Wales against Ireland today in the Rugby World Cup warm up game. His father, Hedy, is from Iran and came over to Wales aged 18 to study civil engineering in Bangor where he met his wife, Euros, who is from Anglesey.

The USA is always telling us that the Iranians are a bunch of lunatics and I think that this workaday fact is a good corrective.

I only found out last week, for example, that Iran - which was neutral - was invaded by the UK and the Soviet Union during the second world war in 1941 with the objective of securing Iranian oil fields and ensuring Allied supply lines for the USSR, fighting against Axis forces on the Eastern Front.

The 1953 Iranian coup d'état, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d'état (Persian: کودتای ۲۸ مرداد‎), was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project[5] or "Operation Ajax") and the United Kingdom (under the name "Operation Boot"). It was the first covert action of the United States to overthrow a foreign government during peacetime.

Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas, that was shot down on 3 July 1988 by an SM-2MR surface-to-air missile fired from USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser of the United States Navy. The aircraft, an Airbus A300, was destroyed and all 290 people on board, including 66 children, were killed.

You're not paranoid if they are really out to get you.