England and St George

So, how did you celebrate St George's Day yesterday?  Did you attend an English Defence League (EDL) rally?  Or perhaps you fire bombed a mosque?  Maybe you just confined yourself to shouting a few racially offensive obscenities at women wearing burquas?  All done with your face painted with the cross of St George, of course.  I mean, that's how we're meant to celebrate our national saint's day, isn't it, with displays of aggressive faux-patriotism, expressed through bigotry?  Why is it that, unlike say, St Patrick's day, when we try to celebrate St George's day in England, it seems to get hijacked by the 'Bulldog Drummond' brigade?  The Irish just go out and get drunk, hold the odd parade and wear silly hats.  It's all very genial and not shot through with the worst kind of narrow-minded nationalism.  But that's modern Britain for you - if you don't wave a Union Jack or unconditionally support 'our brave boys' in Afghanistan, (all of whom are heroes, by the way, even the Catering Corps), you are branded as some kind of pinko-liberal unpatriotic bastard who wants to flood the country with immigrant peadophiles.  In fact, you should think yourself lucky that you aren't stoned to death in the street.

Clearly, we should be grateful that St George's day isn't a national holiday in England, otherwise we would, without doubt, be subjected to military parades and the band of the Coldstream guards marching through every town.  Probably through streets lined with those idiots who turn up whenever dead servicemen are repatriated through RAF bases.  You know who I mean - despite not knowing the deceased, they stand to attention, saluting as the hearses pass by, turning what should be a solemn occasion into a bloody media circus.  Whilst some of them might well be ex-servicemen, I'm sure that the medals festooning the chests of many others are made from cardboard and tinfoil.  To be fair, this year I didn't notice any St George's day celebrations of any kind, (a few years ago I had the misfortune to stumble upon the most desultory attempt at such celebrations in a nearly empty local pub - it was very traumatic).  This year the cultural Olympiad seems to have resulted in the focus being on the fact that the 23rd of April is also Shakespeare's birthday.  Which, thankfully, didn't result in pillocks dressed in tights performing the soliloquy from Hamlet in the pub.  We should be thankful for small mercies.