Letter from the i editor: We’re all Welsh now!

I walked in to a remarkably jolly i office yesterday, exchanged the usual Sunday pleasantries, sat down to open the i email in-boxes, and all hell broke loose.

First, the good news: almost 200 of you entered each of our recent competitions: Cartoonist Idol and the quest for student columnists. Leaving aside those immediately excluded for disregarding the rules, that’s about 300 columns and 150 sets of cartoons to plough through. The first of our writers, Natalie Cox, is on p16 filling in for our former editor, Simon Kelner, who’s having a lie down this week. We will run a selection of winners over the course of the next couple of weeks, and invite feedback on whether they should write again.

Look out too for cartoons we’ll be featuring a couple of days this week. We will seek your views on those too. We can only marvel at the effort some of you have put in, and will make sure that we look at each entry with great care.

Entries are now closed, but if we get late entrants from Wales we may have to discriminate and let them in, such is the trouble we’ve landed ourselves in — innocently — in the Principality.

On Saturday we did not run a preview of the Wales v Ireland rugby match on the very logical grounds that by the time any fan would be able to buy i, the game would be over. Like most papers, we have done this for all the early kick-offs, whoever has played. But Wales fans weren’t mollified, although i’s own Rhodri Jones, (whose Facebook profile picture is the Welsh crest) understood. If it helps, I bought my i copy AFTER England’s later flop, only to read how certain victory over France was. Luckily, future games begin at 9am. And we’re all Welsh now!