Cry God for Harry, England and St George

In London, St Patrick’s day is a big event…mostly because Guinness see it as a way to shift even more of the black stuff than usual and drinkers have another excuse to binge with the legitimate expectation that their vomit will have a white head on it. St George’s Day is less of a big deal, because lots of people wearing St George’s crosses usually means there’s an England match on or a race riot is in progress.

Not so in the provinces. I was in Gloucestershire at the weekend and things are taken a little more seriously there. Standing in the high street of a town I was charmed to hear the massed kazoos of the local scouts/cubs as they paraded down the high street, led by a brass band. Stirring stuff.

This, surely, was all that was right and proper and true about England, fine martial music, paramilitary youths, banners and so on. The cubs sported a fine selection of badges too. I’ve always thought that the first badge they should go for is the ‘sewing on badges’ badge, followed by ‘not choking when you tighten your toggle’ and then straight to ‘running faster than your pervert troop leader’ via ‘knots’.

The parade was passing through Tewkesbury, a gorgeous little market town and a stopping-off point for many a family holiday when we used to take the boat up the Avon to Stratford. It was quite a pleasure to actually see some of the town, as we’d normally arrive quite late and spend the evening on the boat itself - at that time in my life I was obviously much keener on the pleasures of pie and beans than sampling the delights of the many, many pubs that I spotted this time round.

The nostalgia of the visit extended to popping into an old-fashioned sweet shop, by which I mean they had a set of scales, a till and hundreds of jars of old-fashioned sweets! I succumbed to temptation and picked up a few of the chews of my youth but stopped short at the ‘sweet tobacco’. As a child, I thought that this delicacy was the ultimate delight - a sugar strand that came in a paper pouch with a picture of a pirate on the front of it. Tempted as I was, I knew that my palate had changed - after all, the man that now likes cauliflower cannot be expected to have the same tastes as the boy who once munched the stuff with abandon. I had a rush of common sense and realised that the reaction to gleefully stuffing a handful of the stuff into my mouth would probably be the urge to spit a mouthful of sickly sweet sugary stuff out, quickly followed by a mild heart attack as the sugar hit my system.
Better off with a pint really.