As he adjusts the blinds in the study of his south London home, Elis James is in a good mood.
"I feel fantastic," he says, as he tames the sunlight that had streamed in through the shutters, fixes his glasses and reflects on an eventful and, by his own admission, quite surreal weekend.
I'm speaking to the Haverfordwest-born comedian, podcast and radio host the day after he completed a 90km cycle ride from the home of his beloved Swansea City to Newport County's Rodney Parade, alongside Swans legend Lee Trundle. Anyone would expect him - a keen but by no means expert cyclist - to be feeling exhausted, even a little saddle-sore. Instead, he feels energised.
"It was one of the most edifying things I've ever done," a smiling James explains. "I did London to Brighton in support of the British Heart Foundation last year which was one of the best days of my life, but I don't think that route can compare with Swansea to Newport in terms of landscape. It was beautiful.
"If you'd told me 20 years ago I'd be cycling that distance alongside Lee Trundle - the most significant Swansea signing in my lifetime - I'd be gobsmacked. But he was just fantastic company, he is one of the great anecdotalists of our time and just so positive. Even when he got a puncture in Pontypridd, the man was never down.
"We ended up cycling more than the allotted 60 miles because neither of us wanted to navigate and I kept taking Lee in the wrong direction," he laughs. "But, despite that, I didn't feel particularly sore the morning after, so I'm now beginning to suspect that I'm the great undiscovered talent in Welsh cycling. Geraint Thomas should be quaking in his boots."
This wasn't just an opportunity for James to test his physical endurance or map reading, however, with the pair donning their Lycra shorts for an important cause. Together, they cycled part of the Sky Bet EFL Every Minute Matters Relay, a 4,000-mile charity relay that forms part of Sky Bet and the British Heart Foundation's campaign to encourage football fans across the country to start learning CPR.
"It's an amazing campaign," he said. "BHF are not asking for your money, they're asking for your time, for everyone, to do the RevivR course on their website, which teaches you how to do CPR and how to use a defibrillator. I did it on the weekend and you can do the whole thing in under 15 minutes."
From heart matters to matters of the heart - I couldn't speak to James without discussing his burning love for Welsh football. It's something he admits nearly derailed his big ride, having only returned from watching Wales snatch a dramatic late draw away to North Macedonia a few days earlier.
"It wasn't ideal training," he says. "I'm not sure any of the world's greatest cyclists go on the p*** for three days in Skopje before their big defining bike ride, anyway."
You needn't look too far across the 44-year-old's body of work - from his acclaimed stand-up to his radio show and podcast with best friend John Robins and another hit podcast, The Socially Distant Sports Bar - to see his love of Welsh football shining through. That's without mentioning his own BBC podcast Elis James' Feast of Football , which is dedicated to the subject, and his character in the former BBC Three sitcom Josh having a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes about Robbie Savage and the like up his sleeve.
Comedy is his passion, Wales away is his addiction. It's one that started more recently than you might think - while he attended his first home game in 1993 ("2-0 against Belgium"), 20 years would pass before he discovered the magic of the Welsh away day. Walking into the away end at Hampden Park in Glasgow, he was instantly hooked.
"There were around 2,500 of us and I just remember walking into the stands and feeling like I had found my tribe," James says. "These were my people.
"From that point on, regardless of results, it becomes very addictive. You're always going to new places - apart from Belgium who we play every two weeks - and they're often places you would never usually go to. I wouldn't have gone to places like Skopje without Wales away, or Chisinau in Moldova, or Jonova - where I went to watch the under-21s once - which is sort of like a Lithuanian Carmarthen.
"In Skopje I bumped into people I had met through Wales away from all over Wales, just in the section of the stand I was in. The group of six friends of mine, most of whom I was in primary school with, was surrounded by groups of people we had met through Wales away, and that's just really cool, isn't it?"
Over 30 years of supporting Wales, James has experienced the full range of emotions. There have been huge disappointments ("losing the Euro 2004 play-off to Russia... I just thought Welsh football was cursed") but when it comes to high points, there is one obvious choice.
"It's very rare when you're in your mid-30s to know that you're having the best time of your life as you're having it," he says as he reflects on that magical summer of 2016, when Wales stunned Europe to make it all the way through to the semi-finals of their first major tournament in 58 years.
"I remember walking to the ground in Bordeaux before the first game against Slovakia and thought, 'even if we lose, this will be one of the best days of my life'. For so long, it just seemed like the world had been having a party that we were never invited to and suddenly we had our invitations and they had to let us in.
"I just wanted to hear the anthem and for us to score a goal, that was the extent of my ambitions - so what happened.... yeah, it was incredibly special. It just felt like an awful lot of bad luck from the last 60 years was being extinguished in one golden month."
With Craig Bellamy's side now chasing another World Cup qualification spot after the disappointment of Qatar three years ago, James is optimistic. Not just about what will come on the pitch, but what is happening off it.
"There's been something cool developing in the stands with Wales supporters for the last 15 years," he says. "The work Tim Williams has done with Spirit of '58 has played a big part, and we've got a sort of uniform now, with the bucket hats and the vintage Adidas trainers.
"Our songs are different too and it feels very distinctly Welsh, we don't feel like a diluted version of another culture. I think the players feed off it too. Even if the team was doing badly, I think this unique culture that has emerged means Wales fans will always have fun and continue to support the team home and away."
Such is James' passion for Welsh football, it takes us a while to move on to his day job. It becomes clear, however, that there is an addictive side to his love of comedy too, having been bitten by the stand-up bug after a childhood spent dreaming a dream that seemed impossible for someone growing up in Carmarthen.
"I used to use comedy as my method of communication," he said. "It was the way I tried to make friends, the way I tried to keep friends. I obsessively, religiously taped comedy off the TV. But these comedians just seemed like mythical creatures and comedy was this magical, inaccessible thing that was made by these geniuses I loved, but I couldn't work out how to get a job like them."
After a chance meeting with a TV joke writer while working in a pub in Cardiff, however, James was encouraged to give stand-up a try and an open mic night in the city soon changed everything.
"I would hate to watch it back because I'm sure that it was a very, very ropey performance, but I did get a couple of laughs," he adds. "I remember not sleeping at all that night because my eyeballs felt like they were burning with adrenaline.
"I just thought 'I have made 15 strangers laugh once or twice, that has to mean something'. At that gig, it was explained to me that there were gigs all over Britain and that being a stand-up comedian could be my job. I had no idea that this world existed, but once I knew that it did, I was desperate to be a part of it."
From that night, James never looked back and, after driving obscene miles to play in front of sometimes single-figure crowds in the early days, has now been a professional comedian for more than 16 years. It's a career that he admits he still "can't quite believe" he has, and one that has given him almost everything he has, having met his wife - Peep Show star Isy Suttie at a gig in Barnstaple in 2009.
As he explains, he made quite a first impression.
"Having seen her on Peep Show, I was really looking forward to meeting her," he says. "I thought she was fantastic. But I'd spilt a lot of Ribena on myself as I was driving to a show. I was trying to drink and drive, not alcohol - I was hoping to improve my Vitamin C consumption.
"Extraordinarily, I managed to turn a Ribena-soaked cagoule to my advantage - she seemed to like it. We've been together ever since and now have two children together - so I'm very grateful to the comedy gods that we were both put on the bill that night."
On how his wife feels about the other love in his life, James adds: "Isy understands and accepts that I get an enormous amount of joy from football. She just has a complete inability to understand the machinations of any sport.
"When I say something like 'this is the most important Wales game for years', she'll say 'but you said that last time'. It's different! It's not something we are able to discuss at the dinner table, to be honest."
Talk turns to the future and James is gearing up for another Euros summer, with his entire family heading to Switzerland to cheer on Wales Women in July. "It's going to be really amazing," he adds. "My daughter in particular is so excited. It's really great there is so much coverage of the women's games now, compared to when my sisters were young."
It's not just women's football that has come on leaps and bounds, with James recently wrapping up a Welsh language stand-up tour, a decade after doing it for the first time in very different circumstances.
"The first Welsh language tour I did, there were no venues," he says. "I did one show in a shop, one in the committee room of a social club, but now this time around, I was lucky enough to do theatres and I had an amazing choice of support acts. The standard is so high.
"Welsh comedy and Welsh football - the two things I love the most - are both in a good place," he adds. "For someone like me, it doesn't get much better than this."
It is set to get better still however, with James and Robins taking their show 'That Feels Significant' on tour in September and October and playing Swansea, Cardiff and Llandudno as well as a sold-out Hammersmith Apollo, a huge gig for any comic. But with the possibility of a World Cup in the USA always on his mind, the Welshman has no plans to extend the tour into next summer.
"I don't want to put any undue pressure on the players," he says. "But my June and July 2026 are currently free."
Elis James was taking part in the Every Minute Matters Campaign. Launched in May 2024 by Sky Bet in partnership with the British Heart Foundation, the groundbreaking campaign set out to raise £3 million for the BHF and recruit 270,000 people to learn CPR - a target it smashed earlier this week. You can learn CPR in 15 minutes using the BHF's online Revivr tool here.
