Monday 12 November 2012

One For Warsi

In Britain, with our pointless celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday, public holidays do not apply to people who are too public in anything other than the schooling sense of the word. Nowhere else on earth is like that, because everywhere else has proper holidays, celebrating specific things that really matter.

Keep Christmas and Easter. And New Year (or Heathmas, as it sometimes called), if you must, although the Epiphany would be better. Bring back the real Whit Monday, making an even stronger case for abolishing Heathmas by also having abolished Wilsontide, and making it easier to get on with reading and teaching Philip Larkin without having to explain what the title of his best collection means.

Get rid of all of the others and replace them with Saint George's Day, Saint Andrew's Day, Saint David's Day and Saint Patrick's Day.

A heavy concentration in this Islands' incomparable Spring and early Summer. Something distinctive about each of them: Guinness, leeks, haggis, whatever, although I admit that it is difficult to think what the English one might be. A self-interested basis for popular Unionism in perpetuity. One on 30th November, before which nothing related to Christmas would intrude, just as it does not before Thanksgiving in the United States.

And no excuse for making the common people work on these days anyway because, after all, they do not really mean anything. Each of these really would mean something.

Baroness Warsi, over to you.

No comments:

Post a Comment