Happy St George's Day!
Happy St George's Day. How has it been for you? Are you in commemoration mode?
Celebrating Shakespeare's birthday, perhaps? Or lamenting the tragic lack of contemporary dragons to slay?
I must confess I hadn't noticed the significance of the date at all until I caught up with Commons questions to the Secretary of State for Scotland.
Such neglect, I suspect, I share with most Scots and, according to surveys, most people in England too where the pugnacious saint's national day is little known or noted.
Des Browne, it seems, feels this should be redressed. Having wished compliments of the day to fellow MPs, he pondered aloud why the good and sensible people of England didn't make more of Shakespeare's birthday.
One reason could be that the Bard of Avon is also reckoned to have died on the 23rd of April.
Perhaps, like T.S. Eliot, in very different circumstances, they have seen both birth and death but had thought they should be different.
Over-exercised
Perhaps, more probably, there remains confusion in England about English/British nationality which transmits itself to the National Day.
Of course, the SNP piled in. Angus MacNeil, MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, wished the chamber a "Happy St George's Day".
His colleague, Angus Robertson, the party's Commons leader, made the matter more explicit still. Marking the day, he looked forward, he said, to England's independence.
Maybe it's me but I can't get over-exercised about saintly days, including Andrew despite my fondness for the town and university to which he lends his name.
Burns' Night, yes. Never happier than when consuming haggis or memorialising, immortally.
And I yield to those nations, such as Ireland, which happily mark their sanctified day. Just not sure you can extrapolate that easily.
I'm 
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