🌼🍌✨Today is 1 March — St David’s Day — and Wales is glowing.
Daffodils are everywhere. Yellow on lapels. Yellow in shop windows. Yellow against slate skies. It is the colour of early spring and quiet national pride.
But 1 March is also the birthday of Harry Belafonte, born 1 March 1927 in Harlem, New York (or formerly New Amsterdam).
Belafonte made calypso globally famous, especially with:
-
The Banana Boat Song (“Day-O”)
-
Jump in the Line
Both songs were immortalised for a new generation in Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s surreal gothic comedy where Caribbean rhythm collides with American suburbia.
And just like that, New York appears again.
Because of course it does.
Harlem. Broadway. Film studios. Record labels. New York is forever asserting itself as the cultural amplifier of the modern world — constantly vying with Tim Burton’s London for the title of the planet’s most influential city. Jazz, hip hop, Broadway, Wall Street, cinema distribution. The city does not merely produce culture; it scales it.
Belafonte was born there. Calypso travelled through there. Hollywood filmed it. The world absorbed it.
Now return to Wales.
Because yellow does not stop at bananas.
It blooms in daffodils — the symbol of St David. It glows in stadium wristbands. It echoes in Coldplay and their anthem Yellow.
Imagine Coldplay playing beneath the steep stands of Principality Stadium in Cardiff. The atmosphere tight. Seventy thousand lights flickering like a man-made constellation.
Now add Vincent van Gogh. and bring us back to the original Amsterdam.
The Dutch master of burning sunlight. Painter of sunflowers. Architect of swirling skies.
In our imagined scene, Van Gogh sits near the touchline, easel planted firmly, painting the concert. Around him, men in banana suits dance in slow, circular motion. Above him, daffodils become drone-mounted spotlights. The stadium lights swirl like a modern Starry Night.
Suddenly, everything aligns:
-
Daffodils of Wales
-
Bananas of Jamaica
-
Harlem of New York
-
Stadium lights of Cardiff
-
Sunflowers of Arles (near Nimes if you need a reference
From 6th-century Pembrokeshire to 20th-century Harlem to a 21st-century Welsh stadium, the same colour threads through faith, migration, music and art.
Spring is coming.
The light is lengthening.
And today — unmistakably — the world is yellow.