Albeit Tuesday.
But we're gathered here today, for during this month it appears there's much flag-waving going on and we're all wondering why?
Until 1958 the UK celebrated Empire Day, when it became Commonwealth Day but not so far as most people were concerned; because having called it one thing for a half lifetime nobody was going to say any different any time soon. Thus it was that on whichever day it was, Union Jacks were available to buy at newsagents and that was great because kids like waving them around.
Adults doing so in the UK is bothersome however, because we've rarely displayed them as adults unlike younger nations; we've generally been painted as being much like a nation in its senility and long past displays of any sort. Accordingly I do find, despite hanging a Red Ensign I found some place or other on the wall at university, videos of flag-wavers or lions with painted faces vaguely embarrassing.
In fact there is a march this month by a man called Tommy Robinson apropos this kind of thing, and like all of us he has interesting points to make and some less so... the quality of debate something dying faster than democracy in our online world.
He's on record ~ whilst not using his real name but then nor does Sting ~ for saying how the Luton of his childhood had two mosques and now it has another forty. The counter-argument is that should the English have had a similar number of churches then and only two now, you could ask the question, "What is Englishness anyway?".
PM John Major said that fifty years from now (viz. 1943) ours would still be a place of long shadows over cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs and dog-lovers... tho' will it still be a place of traditional places of worship, I ask like Alan Partridge?
I zoomed into the maps to see. Which is ironic, because at that same university I was tasked with a dissertation and couldn't think of one to save my life. In the end and lukewarmly-inspired by a lecture, I decided to see if trees really did shrink in stature the further up a slope you got out in the dales. This involved measuring the depth of soil with an auger, a pastime to tedious and difficult in semi-frozen earth that my colleague and I went for a pub-lunch and fabricated the data instead.
As I failed anyhow, in retrospect I don't see this being held against me at heaven's gate... which brings us back to our scrutiny of Luton.
Cutting to the chase, back in 1963 there were some three dozen PoWs or places of worship in my lexicon in Luton and its surrounds. By 2025 there were only half the number if you consider the Orthodox Church of Romania was unlikely to have been there before the EU and its free-border experiment with all its joys and birth-pangs.
Nonetheless all English life is there on Google's map: the Grove Theatre, Tesco Express, the trampoline park and airport encapsulating all totems and beliefs that make our lives worth living. Note that the M1 motorway appears back in 1963, being completed in 1959. It connected the capitol with Crick in Northamptonshire. Why?
Bizarrely Google Maps do not count mosques as places of worship per se, but using the word itself it produces around the same number in Luton as the above places of worship.
What we could conclude is that were places of worship glaciers they may disappear in the next sixty years; or that the number of mosques may match their number as it was in 1963 when the Robinsons were considering off-spring. It may however merely reflect the fact that it was harder to get permission to build a mosque in 1963, and that traditional places of worship were already there, and had been for practically a century.
It is hard though to separate Englishness from Christianity, so that frankly requiring immigrants to convert to it in order to prove their authenticity is bizarre in a state where (unlike the US), most people only vaguely associate with its tenets.
We'd be better accustoming them to driving to retail parks on a Saturday evening to drink lager, go ten-pin bowling, eat curry afterward and then watch Love Island on catch-up on 86-inch TVs.
Only then could you claim to be at home among our merry Anglo-Saxon throng.
I forwarded this to Sheffield University by way of replacement: give me an honorary degree, you miserable bastards (Ed. and three Hail Mary's or five burpees for you).
